Yes, but they’re both still WRONG! 
(And ABSOLUTELY. ; - )
I don’t know when I became a Christian.
Requires?
That implies dictation or at least coercion. Neither of which sits well
You seem obsessed with salvation. If sins are forgiven there is nothing to be saved from. The sins are no more.
Richard
Nonsense. Love requires choice. Coercion has nothing to do with it – quite the opposite. To say it requires choice means coercion doesn’t work. If it is coercion then it isn’t love.
When I say God requires a choice… I am not talking about some choice of religion, belief or dogma. I am talking about that surrender referred to by @St.Roymond above. It is about being willing to give up your sins and to change.
That is a definition of sin which I do not believe in. Sounds like the idea that sin is an offense against God, because in that case, forgiveness is all that is required. But I see no reason to believe in any of that imaginary claptrap invented by religions for their self-justification.
Self-destructive habits, however, are real. There is nothing imaginary about the damage they do. The impossibility of a heavenly world with such habits is obvious. But Christians have as much or more of these bad habits as anybody else in the world. I and I do not believe in any abracadabra to get rid of such habits. All the evidence point to their removal being very difficult to the point of success being miraculous.
What has that to do with anything? Knowing that only requires a precise and measurable definition of the word “Christian” to distinguish this religion from other religions.
Are you talking about knowing when you were “saved” – i.e. got some entitlement to entrance into heaven? Yeah… I don’t believe in that.
It does have to do with something of which you are apparently unaware. Some think the so-called choice is so important and it has to be conscious, so if you do not know the when and where of it then your Christianity is suspect.
Yes, we know about your entitlement fixation and the horrors of illogic and violation of biblical principles you imagine.
Then we have nothing more to say.
That is the defiition of sin that I understand.
That is because you misunderstand/misrepresent what is meant.
Richard
I do not think the choice God requires has to be conscious or deliberative. Most of the choices we make are not. That is the problem with that experiment showing we mostly make a choice before we are even aware of making the choice and people taking that to mean that we are not even making choices at all. It doesn’t mean any such thing.
The choice to identify ourselves as Christian is more likely to be a conscious deliberative choice, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with the choice God requires.
The choice God requires is continuous glad submission once he has raised you from being spiritually dead, and you had no choice whatsoever in that! That was a work of the Holy Spirit at the beginning, working on changing your affections, perhaps.
When we are forming habits they are though (and habits of the mind), and as we grow, hopefully the good ones become more instinctual and the bad ones remain conscious when we are tempted so we can identify them and choose otherwise.
We can agree there. 
On the other hand…
“We have to believe in free will, we have no choice.” I.B. Singer
Yes the choice God requires is a submission… accepting the gift of grace. And that gift of grace is not by our choice. Perhaps you can call this being raised from the spiritually dead if you like, but I prefer to be more specific in saying God liberates our free will enough to make the choice He requires and gives us some motivation to make the right choice.
But you speak as if God is being selective and that is where I disagree. I don’t know if you think God chose you randomly or because you are special somehow. But I believe this grace is the offer of salvation to all. Or perhaps you mean God chooses when. But I think that is a silly way of putting as if this were an arbitrary matter. It is just that the work of God to do these things take a different amount of time and circumstance for each person.
In this you can only speak for yourself. This sounds preferable, but I doubt this is always the case. In fact this is one of the reasons bad habits tend to multiply. Bad habits diminish awareness and make it easier to adopt other bad habits without as much conscious thought.
Or as a Christian comedian put it maybe forty years ago, you don’t have to get cleaned up before you take a bath, or as an Australian Lutheran theologian noted, you don’t have to get cured before going to surgery.
At root, yes, but working out our salvation is the process of achieving our own goodness so that we become like Him.
“Perfect” is a poor translation these days; the word is τέλειοι (TEH-;ei-oi) from τελέω (teh-LE-oh) (or τελεόω {teh-le-AH-oh}, an older form), which is better rendered as “complete”, with a view towards being in working order. “Perfect” tends to suggest a moral status whereas “complete” is more widely encompassing of spiritual virtues, e.g. the fruit of the Spirit.
Indeed completeness can be seen as closely related to the Old Testament שָׁלוֹם (sha-loam) which is generally rendered as “peace” but entails a lot more than the absence of conflict; shalom is wellness, wholeness, soundness, completeness, well-being. It is something that doesn’t come from ticking off attributes or accomplishments on a checklist but from being in right relationship to everything around you via imitation of those who exhibit wholeness (which is why Paul could tell Christians to imitate him, and in fact the original idea behind designating someone as a saint; it meant that they were people whom others could become more like Christ by imitating them).
I expect the environment to be so awesome that if we could see it directly right now we’d die of heart attacks.
No, because the choice isn’t a positive one, as in us evaluating and selecting, it’s a negative one: the choice to stop resisting, to stop exalting ourselves, to give up and let go and “let God”. It isn’t the choice as in a treaty, it is the choice of unconditional surrender.
We are dead in trespasses and sins, but in a way we are actually “undead”, having enough vitality to fight to remain dead; the choice isn’t to do something but to stop doing that fighting.
Since our being spiritually dead is not a static condition but an active one – we are actively dead! – then we dead do make a choice, the choice to give up, to let ourselves be passively dead.
So those with any pride in their “decision” have not understood grace and have not understood the death of sin: we are not cadavers who lack any ability to act, we are zombies working hard at being dead. The decision is not an agreement we make, it is abject surrender.
He requires what can be called “negative faith”, the faith that stops squirming and fighting. Positive faith, i.e. trust in His goodness, is a gift; it is not of ourselves. In fact the faith that is required is very much like what Jesus did in coming down for us; it is an emptying, a letting go, a relinquishing of anything we are clinging to.
I would say it is about being willing to give up self and to be changed; the spiritually dead cannot change and that is not a choice we can make until after surrender. Mary is our example: “Let it be to me according to Your will”.
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This is one reason I incline more and more towards Orthodoxy: they recognize that we have habits that define us and must be replaced with heavenly habits.
That said, I have seen a few people who on being baptized changed drastically, with a whole array of things that had defined them suddenly not even being tempting any longer. One was interesting, though; he was a thoroughgoing thief, but after baptism he could not bring himself to steal from people or even from small businesses, but only from large corporate stores where the items available had no emotional value to the owners or employees. Another was a drug user whose desire for mind-altering chemicals just vanished, to the extent that he wouldn’t even drink coffee or eat lots of sugar, let alone touch heroin or any other illicit drug.
My view is that God provides such examples to show the rest of us that such things can be conquered, but sometimes – perhaps more often than I could see – those miraculous changes aren’t for the benefit of the person but for others around them. In the case of the thief, his attitude of not stealing things that might have emotional attachments for others turned out to be contagious such that friends who had also been thieves changed their ways; the same was true of the drug user – and in both cases those who “caught” the change altered their lives in ways that saved marriages and families, and as a consequence some of those people also became Christians.
Which was an interesting cause and effect: we usually expect that once someone becomes a Christian, that’s when changes happen, but in these cases some people whose religious beliefs were something of a smorgasbord of eastern and native beliefs found themselves changing and due to knowing why their friend who had become a Christian had changed decided to turn to Christ themselves.
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I know when I was saved: 1,990 year ago at about three in the afternoon when the cry, “τετέλεσται!” (teh-TEH-les-tai) went up and the Adversary collapsed in despair.
Those also tend to be people who take pride in their “decision”.
This is only true if you regard the initial “choice” as a positive act as though there was a level playing field on which there was freedom of action. But we do make a negative choice, the choice to just plain give up, not a choice to do anything but one to stop doing. In a way it’s a matter of recognizing being dead and to stop pretending to be alive.
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It has nothing to do with what I like except for liking truth and reality, the truth and reality of what the Apostle Paul says.
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.
Ephesians 2:1
Then you disagree with Jesus in John 17.
Good trick. I’m not convinced.
Agreed, but we could not even not sin if it were up to our goodness to begin to start. (It seems like I recall seeing a verse from Ephesians to that effect recently, about being dead. ; - )
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We make “old man” choices all the time, which means we’re not dead as in corpses, more dead like zombies – we can do things, but they all lead the wrong way. And every sin is something that would make us dead if we weren’t already – thus “actively dead”; we’re by nature dead and working hard to stay that way.
Yes, but that is after we have been raised from being totally dead spiritually. There are enough examples of the latter walking around and talking there should be no question!
No, that’s our natural state: we are born as “old man” and can only be “old man” up until we run into grace. The old man is like someone inside a black hole, where all paths lead to the singularity, but he can choose which path to take deeper into the dark.
If the old man weren’t actively dead, he couldn’t even commit additional sins. Every sin is an act of death.
You are mixing two metaphors, ‘spiritually dead’ and ‘old man’.
The point is, it takes a miracle, a miracle of the Spirit’s work in our hearts and minds to become a true Christian. It is not something we can accomplish by mere choice.
- So there phases?
- Signs of life, but actively dead;
- Temporary absence of signs of life, and revivification, as in “Near Death Experience”;
- Insufficient signs of life, and “soul sleep” until “the Day of Judgement” or nothing, if you;re an atheist,
- followed by heaven, purgatory, hell, or annihilation?