Sir, you have a strong constitution, incredible powers of concentration and very good vision (or screen reader).
Congratulations!
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Surrender.
Surrender.
There’s a big problem with this analogy: it is not a husband’s nature to ignore his wife and do as he pleases, but that is exactly our nature towards God!
To come to a wife, a man is an equal making a supplication. To come to God, a person is a rebel and the only option is surrender. That doesn’t apply just to “getting saved”, it applies to every moment of every day.
How does Christ live in me and I no longer live? Surrender.
How do I walk in the light as He is in the light? Surrender.
How do I lean on the everlasting arms? Surrender.
How do I pray without ceasing? Surrender.
How do I rejoice always? Surrender.
How do I repent? Surrender.
I would not characterize a child’s best relationship with its father, or Father, as being primarily being based on surrender, however. A restored relationship of a delinquent with his father may have to start with that though, surrendering to the law and its judgments, literally and figuratively.
By that measure I’d have to say I’ve never met anyone who was saved.
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I used to be able to sing along with that one, note and timing perfect. Haven’t tried that in years.
One summer when I was head aquatics guy at a summer camp as well as a counselor one week there was a kid in my cabin named Dustin. On a whim I started calling him “(the) Wind”. That became our cabin’s official song for the week.
A certain movie later I discovered that when I hike the dunes and some sand blows over a crest I always think of Socrates.
I was musically deficient for years because I had no recorder/player and couldn’t afford a tape anyway. I was too ashamed to admit why I didn’t know the words to everything on the radio when I could reel off the right answers to everything in every science class.
My summertime anthems all had to do with working at the county fair all summer to get the grounds ready for the fair, then keep things going for the fair, and then shut everything down again after.
Mornings were all “King of the Road” due to the happenstance that the first day my first summer there almost the moment we started sweeping out the main building after all the vehicles and boats stored for the winter were gone that came on the radio:
Afternoons became our own twisted version of Rhinestone Cowboy, “Dime Store Cowboy”’ we mangled the song thoroughly with our own words; the high point of that song was one lunch hour when the eight of us on the crew happened to be working on the roofs of the three building around the central courtyard; the song came on the radio we had blasting from the courtyard stage and someone pulled out a Frisbee and we started tossing it from roof to roof, singing like idiots along with the radio.
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A Christian study center where I attended university did a course one winter on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes. Of all the courses on offer, of course that was the one that wouldn’t fit my schedule!
I think the second part is unclear about the meaning of the word “belief” in the first part. But that vagueness is where the switch lies: used as is common, i.e. “Yeah, I agree with that”, then belief in God is quite often the conclusion of an argument, but used as Jesus and the New Testament use it one has to step beyond the argument into trust.
That was always an amazing thing in our informal intelligent design club, where a former atheist who due to studying science had reached the first use of “belief”, and after a journey of deciding that the Bible was the best candidate for being communication from the Designer, reached the next step of belief as trust. The truly amazing moments were when someone had reached that point without realizing it, when they suddenly recognized that they’d moved on from assent to trust quite some time earlier.
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Given the introductory comment “about factual reality”, I find that the juxtaposition of the two quotes is itself a commentary.
A blog I enjoy had a series on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes. Maybe it will help with your disappointment at missing the course:
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It’s interesting that Abraham was wrong – for the moment, anyway – because God didn’t provide a lamb, He provided a ram. The Lamb came later.
I’ve often thought that Isaac needed the greater faith anyway: Abraham couldn’t have gotten him on that altar without his cooperation.
Such is Kierkegaard. When in philosophy class we complained that the translation we had for use was obscure and clumsy, our professor responded that the translation was not the problem, it was Kierkegaard himself, that Kierkegaard’s writing reflected his thought, which was in no way straightforward regardless of the language or translation.
Since it filled as soon as registration was opened, you probably wouldn’t have gotten in anyway, and there was likely a line of hopefuls at the professor’s office trying to get permission to be added, too. 
Though how do you trust if you don’t find the case for trust convincing?
What came to mind as I pondered this comes from a modern liturgy that IIRC is common to Lutherans and Catholics:
Alleluia!
Lord, to whom shall we go;
You have the words of eternal life.
Alleluia, alleluia!
I tried to find a video with this being sung, to no avail. It expresses where I often find myself ending up: not finding anything at all convincing, not even finding anything attractive, but in a mood something not unlike despair seeing that there just aren’t any other viable options and the only course forward is surrender.
I like that, not ‘mere profession’ and consent to doctrine, not that doctrine is the dirty word some color it. How about a desire to trust even if not actually trusting, recognizing anxiety in ourselves, unworthy of our profession?
I fully agree. Belief in God is not mere intellectual assent, but a reorientation of the disposition of a person’s heart. “heart” as Bible writers use it is a metaphor for the unity of the self at the deepest level.
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This is something I have had trouble getting across to atheists: most of my science professors were Christians, and they all went into science out of a passion for Christ and for “thinking God’s thoughts after Him”. Atheists seem to have trouble of conceiving that studying science will not always rule out God but in fact can result in knowing Him better. They seem to think that the “God of the gaps” is the only God possible, and can’t grasp “the God of each moment” where there are no gaps and that encountering an apparent gap does not drive one to abandon the search and declare “God did it” but rather can – and often does – drive one to say, “Okay, God, how did You do that?” and jump the more heavily into science. I think my love of science that led me to take every science course I could in university came to a large extent from delighting in discoveries about the universe that would have been substantially less if I hadn’t viewed it as God’s universe.
An Orthodox (Antiochene, IIRC) lecturer mentioned this in an on-line video, that it is the burden of the church to teach bishops and theologians (though an Orthodox bishop is required to be a theologian, there are Orthodox theologians who are not bishops) to understand theology in the ancient languages and the contexts in which that theology was worked out, in order that the bishops might expound that theology in terms the people can understand. The theology of the church is indeed “written down precisely once and for all” but it is the task of each generation to grasp that theology on its terms that they might propound it to people today in their terms.
Making it clear is a twofold task, then: those who are to teach must understand the ancient sources clearly, and in turn make it clear to their generation. But it is also a twofold task in another way; it must be made clear to those in the church, which is far easier because those in the church are generally willing to listen and learn, but it must also be made clear to those outside the church – and that is a whole different matter!
Yet the Orthodox ultimately awards the accolade “Theologian” to those who can do all of the above and in so doing always maintain the focus on Christ. Indeed to the Orthodox much of what western Christians argue about doesn’t even qualify as theology because it isn’t talking about Jesus.
My science professors at university were also Christians. In fact, the college I attended was a private Christian school, but really only in name since its Presbyterian roots had been greatly diluted over the years. A decade or so before I attended, students were still required to attend chapel once a week. However, when I attended we were only required to attend one religious studies class (New Testament for me), and it was quite liberal in its curriculum. I also grew up in a religious household (non-denominational Protestant). Perhaps this is why I never thought science ruled out God, even as an atheist.
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I stand with James T. Kirk: there is no “no-win” scenario: You don’t make that choice; instead, you stop the trolley!
But the real lesson of such artificial conundra for Christians is that there are times, even many times, when the only choice is not whether or not to sin but which sin to choose! Such things remind me of when I was working at a church in Miami and was on time off and sitting at the pit where a large pig was being slowly roasted for Christmas. Since I was among Cubans I was doing what the Cubans did, tossing down holiday snacks followed by the occasional shot of rum, watching the pig slowly rotate and occasionally stepping up to pour a glass of wine and pour some of it on the pig, so I was hardly fit to do much more than sit at the table and chat with everyone.
Then came a phone call: a family in the church faced an emergency and they had called for the priest/pastor, but he was two and a half miles away, and I was “on deck” in case of a need from someone in the church, and I was being ordered to handle this.
So I could sin by refusing on grounds that I wasn’t fit to drive and thus leaving the family in the lurch, or I could get myself over to the family and sin by driving more than moderately inebriated – there was no one “in the hole” for me to pass this to.
That’s a pretty rare sort of situation, but it illustrates the point.
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That seems like it might be a case of mercy trumps law?
It’s a sin to lie… in most instances. There are times when it is legitimate to lie for mercy’s sake. If a Nazi SS trooper shows up at the door and asks if you are hiding any Jews, and you are, of course you say “I certainly am and I will lead you right to them”? Hopefully they’re well hidden and you can say “You may look for yourself.” Of course that wouldn’t be a lie phrased that way, just don’t slip at preface your reply with “No, …” 
But if you did ‘slip’, you certainly need not obsess about having sinned, nor would you have any sin to confess.
I met a Marine once who had been in the grenade situation. I learned about it one evening when we are all somewhere beyond happy but not yet drunk and he was lamenting the fact that phone books were disappearing from society. He and his team were in some sort of office building and he was checking out the room when the front window shattered as something flew through it. He said his brain made a connection between grenade and phone book even before he was conscious of being certain it was a grenade. Without letting his mind catch up enough to think he ripped the phone book off a desk along with the big heavy-duty desk cover/blotter and slammed them down on the grenade with himself on top. The explosion knocked him unconscious and he came to in the middle of what he said looked like gray confetti everywhere while his entire body was in pain: the grenade shattered the heavy plastic front cover of the phone book, pulverized all the page and blew the remains all across the room. shattered the heavy back cover, but when the explosion’s wave-front hit that desk blotter it had spent enough energy that the blotter served as an additional armor plate, the force of the explosion lifting it and him into the air. His teammates said he was already dropping onto the grenade with his improvised suppression gear by the time anyone else had finished yelling “Grenade!”
[Both of his hands needed almost total reconstruction, but other than that his “only” injury was that the entire front of his body from the lower thigh up was one massive bruise.]
On the other hand, as my sister-in-law the Boeing engineer likes to tell people, it’s better to have a plan charted out as a decision tree even if you end up tossing out the entire tree when decision time comes because you’ve already worked out possible actions and your brain will be that much closer to a proper response in the instance.
And as that Marine’s actions showed, if you’ve thought through multiple scenarios and come up with multiple responses, sometimes your brain will take over and you find yourself acting without conscious thought.
So those “discussions about morality which revolve around oughts” may never address a situation you ever actually face, but the practice of thinking through hypotheticals puts your brain ahead of the game when it’s crunch time – it’s one aspect of “develop[ing] . . . the capacity for judgment”.
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Whoa.
One spring choir tour during a pause in free-wheeling discussions on the bus where the topic had been meeting God “on the mountaintop” I was looking out the back of the bus at the long, sloping straight stretch behind us; I recall distinctly hearing a voice ask, “If you cannot find Me in the dark valleys, why do you think you can find Me on a mountaintop?”
Closer to the end of choir tour I got the flip side: We’d done a couple of concerts in inner-city churches (where the needs outnumbered the people in the churches) where the churches opened their doors for the concert to everyone in the neighborhood. We innocent college students made fumbling attempts to reach out to some of the obviously needy visitors, and that night as I dropped into bed I recall hearing, “If you don’t encounter me on the mountaintop, how will you bring Me to those in the dark valleys?”
That conundrum has gone 'round and 'round in my head, popping up every now and then, ever since.
Wow. I don’t know that I qualify! I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve entered heaven!
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There’s an argument I’ve heard for infant baptism: an infant hasn’t had time to build barriers against the grace of God as they inevitably will as they get older; babies are born into the enemy camp but have not yet become hardened rebels, and so there are no barriers against the Spirit’s entry via the waters of baptism and the Name that comes with them.
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Heck, one of my professors my first term of college said that decades ago! Though he added that God is bigger than any box we could build even if we’d started back when Abraham was alive, so don’t bother trying to refine our boxes, instead try to throw them away.
I can no longer hear that verse without my mind jumping immediately to Joel Osteen – that false teacher has screwed up the lives of several people I know!
I discovered long ago that most people aren’t even aware they have a worldview. It was fun to watch some in a Christian study center class studying the book Why_Should_Anyone_Believe_Anything_at_All?
[Just BTW, how hard would it be to get the option of underlining things??? I tend to cringe when giving a reference that should properly be underlined.]
He’s got another book that’s related – The_Universe_Next_Door
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I’ve been looking for underline code as well, and it seems it’s just not going to work in markdown.
We could stick with the old fashioned plain text convention:
_ My Magnum Opus _
Gotta have the spaces between the text and the underscore, however, otherwise it italicizes the text. 