Does God Specially Create Our Desires?

The title says it well enough. I answer this question, but it takes awhile. This post is not very polished, and I didn't mean it to be, because I don't have enough time right now to reflect on and further develop these ideas. But I thought the discourse was worth posting.

Today I was reading prayer project for one of my classes, which is basically a kind of guided-prayer homework assignment. The idea behind today’s particular prayer journal is to gain a greater sense of what God’s purpose for your life might be through reflection on your strengths, desires, influences over the course of your life, passions, etc. On the directions for this prayer project, there is some interesting theology smuggled in, taking the form of an instructive for prayer, and here is a small but relevant excerpt:

We do need to pay attention or our likes, dislikes, joys, etc., as [God] created them and they may point us to His purpose for us.

The idea, then, is that God creates our desires, joys, etc.

I, for one, have two problems with this statement: 1) It is either trivially and therefore not interestingly true, and 2) If the author of the statement is shooting for more than mere triviality, then I do not know how to make sense of it, because all of the options as to how I might interpret it seem to make little sense.

Let’s examine the first of these – that the statement is trivially true. What I mean by this is that I think there is a certain obvious sense in which it is true that God has created our desires. Actually, there really are two, both of them quite trivial. The first is that God is the ultimate cause of all that exists, therefore by indirect causation he has created the desires of each of his followers – and everyone else who exists. The second sense of triviality is that God does give people new desires and new hearts when he redeems them and cleanses them through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. This is fairly obvious from 2 Cor. 5:17 and the “old man/new man” comparison of Ephesians 4. These desires may even be specific to certain ministries that God has called people to – i.e. some people enjoy public speaking because they were called to be Evangelists.

Both of these notions to me seem quite obviously true. The second one is especially obvious because God is seeking to redeem his creation, and to redeem all of it. He doesn’t want people who simply know what they should think, love, hate, do, respect, admire, enjoy, etc., he wants people who actually do think, love hate, admire, enjoy, respect, etc., in the right way. I may know that I should hate stealing, but I might also still continue in it. If I actually came to hate it, then my heart would be changed, and I would have new desires – i.e. desires to not steal in circumstances that before would have produced the opposite desire. Thus, God gives people new desires, and not simply a knowledge of what their desires should be (although I have no idea how he actually does this, it’s a bit mystical, but not too much so.)

If we move beyond triviality into something more substance, then the possibilities expand endlessly into the horizon. However, it is here that a lot confusion could be stirred up. Let’s go with the interpretation of “God creates our desires” that came to my mind immediately as I was reading in order to illustrate the confusion that I’m talking about.

Imagine, then, that God is orchestrating his plan of creation before he has actually created us. Of course this is a bit of an anthropomorphism, but I don’t think that any substantial difficulties are created by describing the process in this way. We know from Ephesians 1:4 that God has “chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” Being chosen in Christ means being a part of Christ’s body – the Church. Being a member of the Church (with a big “C” signifying the universal Christian church of all believers everywhere) means having a role to play (c.f. 1 Cor. 12 and Paul’s discussion of Spiritual gifts, and that each is a distinct role, but that all are equally important – or at least I would argue). Therefore, God gave us desire before the foundation of the world according to the roles that he would have us play. In this sense, then, God has created and instilled in us our particular desires.

I have some problems with this view. The first is that it seems to strip away the individuality of the desires – the idea that God gave someone a specific desire because that desire befitted that person in some way. If we picture God dolling out desires before the foundation of the world, then we must also imagine that he is giving them to people who as yet do not have desires. If they had desires, then this would mean that God did not create this desires. Of course we are speaking hypothetically, because the people do not exist yet, but we can construct some fictional dialogue in God’s mind in order to make my point clearer:

God thinking to himself: “Here is John Q. Preacher. As yet Mr. Preacher does not exist, but is merely a person that I plan to create at some point in time. I plan to make Mr. Preacher a preacher, therefore I will give them desires to study, to know the truth, and to communicate it effectively to others. But, surely giving someone desires is not all to their personality – I need to give him tendencies, talents, attitudes, dispositions of behavior, certain physical qualities that will shape him, etc. As of yet, however, I have not given Mr. Preacher any such characteristics. All that can be said about him is that he will be a male. I am working with a blank slate, and could just as easily give these desires to Mary. J. Mercyworker, or James D. Theologian. I could give this personality to Mr. Theologian, or I could give it to Mr. Preacher. But I have already decided to make Mr. Theologian a theologian, so I will make Mr. Preacher a preacher, even though I could have done the opposite.”

This scenario seems to make God’s giving out desires a bit arbitrary. Or at least not in any way strongly related to the person to whom the desires are given. Surely God could give Mr. Preacher his desires because God wants X number of preachers – but this has little to do with Mr. Preacher, his talents, attitudes, behavioral tendencies, etc.

I would submit that a different scenario, which doesn’t picture God as creating our desires from the foundation of the world, is actually more satisfactory and still consistent with the two trivially true affirmations of this notion. On this alternative, we could stipulate that people’s desire, attitudes, tendencies, and their personalities in general are primarily dependent upon their parents – that is, they are inherited. People primarily inherit their desires, and God does not need to specially create them for every person. In this case, it is still possible that God specially creates certain desires or other personality traits in certain individuals for the sake of a specific task (say, certain leadership qualities in David that he would not have possessed if God had not created them), but that would not be the norm.

Thus people receive from their parents certain personality traits, and the rest is shaped through developmental processes. If someone becomes a Christian, then God is able to work with that individual to change his or her heart in the ways described above: So that they learn to put off the old man, put on the new man, and become fully redeemed by loving and hating, doing and enjoying, experiencing and knowing – all appropriately.

Further, God may also give to the person some specific and specially-created desires after he or she becomes a Christian. This would be nothing short of miraculous, even if it took time to develop. Further, the desires that God develops in people would be fitting to the personalities that people had inherited from their parents – that is, the person would already be in place, and God would be creating desires in accordance with how that person is – rather than creating that person around certain desires that God wishes them to have. Thus if I inherit emotive and withdrawing tendencies from my parents, I may become a poet (no offense to any poets) or perhaps some kind of novelist (I can make these comments because I have such tendencies). Those natural desires which may not have been particularly constructive in their unaffected state, due to inheritance, can become tools and blessings for God’s kingdom as he reshapes the heart of the person towards using them, and enjoying them, in the best possible manner.

As I said, this position also allows for the trivial sense of “create” to be true – because it allows that God develops the desires of the hearts of his people. Further, I think it avoids a lot of complicated philosophical speculation not necessarily suited to a Prayer Project.