Nathanael Szobody on “Faith means, not the decision to assent to a proposition, but a fundamental reorientation and redirection of life. The life of faith is the mode of existence which finds its vital source and center in God’s forgiving and renewing grace. This means further that faith includes a new possibility of decision”
John Dillenberger
Nathanael Szobody on By Paul Szobody
One of the dominating unseen forces in our modern world is the ever-constraining feeling we have, a sort of knee-jerk reactionary voice within us, that, we just don’t have time. We just simply don’t have it. We don’t have time for
Nathanael Szobody on The following has been attributed to Karl Barth:
“The law is the form of which the gospel is the content.”
To some this would rub against certain theological sensitivities. After all, the law condemns and shows us our sin, whereas the gospel brings grace. How can the law contain the gospel?
I do not know the context of the above quote, but allow me to us it for my own purposes.
We are separated from God by our sin. Even the one who has received new life from Christ, often times misses many of the blessings in Christ because of his sin. The purpose of the law is indeed to show that sin. It also is to instruct on the right path.
It is like the instructor that teaches the elementary student to read. The process is painful, and it may seem to the student that all the discipline and rules and memorization is quite a burden. Why should it matter that “I is before E except after C”? What a bore! Yet in that work itself is the gift of reading that will open up to the student so many thousands of wonders during the course of his life.
So it is with the law. True, seeing our sin drives us to grace. This is one use of the law. Another is to see that in the law itself is the gift of the gospel, that we might abide in Christ, our savoir and the lover of our souls. Jesus said that if anyone loved him he would keep his commands.
Our problem is that we think we’ve already passed the first grade, we think ourselves to be adults. No my friend, you have only just enrolled. This burden of obedience and faithfulness to the work of God’s calling to you is itself the administration of the gospel to you. To set aside the passions of human nature, the desires of human ambition, to be quietly and faithfully obedient to the simple commands of God to serve him and love your neighbor is the gift of the power of Christ and the gospel to your life, to enable the resurrected life to be lived through you and bless those around you.
Nathanael Szobody on God’s tenderness from us is often hid
Severe so seem his mercies beckoning
Our hearts to sweet repentance–sin to rid–
And reconciliation harkening
So Joseph hid affection brotherly
To bring his sinful clan on bended knee
No other course for men with hearts so hard
Than putting his own brother under guard
Demanding too beloved Benjamin
To test their conscious rife with ancient sin
No different ours before a God who knows
Our soul from birth so caringly he shows
Just what must break, that worldly thing so dear
That to his greater love we might draw near.
Nathanael Szobody on “As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
I’m just a stone; all I know is the stone to right of me and the stone on my left; they are good stones, ones I grow to love. God knows I feel the weight of the stones on top of me. But the most blessed stone is the one I feel beneath my feet, for:
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
I wish so much that I could see the blueprint, the master plan, to know why I am where I am
Nathanael Szobody on We have no greater force for the revival of the self and the encouragement of the spirit than the Christian hope.
In this life we find ourselves all too often controlled by the “wanderings of the appetite” and we wrongly think that this is hope
Nathanael Szobody on It has been said that we live according to possibilities. Nothing can be absolutely sure insofar as everything is imperfect.
The colors I see with my eyes may be a slightly different hue than the colors you see with yours. In extension of that idea, no sensory information can be proven empirically precisely because empirical data is received by the senses.
This concept is even more easily demonstrable concerning the mind and the psyche. There are all ranges of mental disorders. For those who consider themselves normal, they still dream, imagine, experience memory loss and recovery, distorted memory, and all sorts of other interpretations of reality that are continually shown to be subjectively perceived and interpreted.
Therefore we do not live according to certainties but rather strong possibilities. For though some philosophers may drive themselves to utter despair at the impossibility of absolute knowledge, the rest of us find it far easier to accept what we experience because of the high probability that it is reality. The agnostic states that nothing is impossible, only highly improbable. On the same token he says that nothing is sure, only highly probable.
In all this one recognizes that the first principle of human existence is faith. We have faith in the physical world that we depend on for our existence and contextual identity.
This leads to the question: how then can it not be the same in the realm of the spiritual?
We make observations that there is much good in humanity. We also observe that there is much corruption in humanity to the point where, historically, humanity has been bent of the destruction of one’s neighbor and self-aggrandizement. It is highly improbable that this be the intended state of affairs, or even the best evolutionary scenario (though some argue that it is the best evolutionary scenario, it is an intellectual cop-out to say that “what is, is best” for it is contrary to every human inclination). The first principle in the spiritual realm must then be faith in a ‘better’ that is not seen. This stands to reason because ‘better’ is what is desired by all humanity. There is an innate longing for a je ne sais quoi that transcends the corruption of this world. We long for a human spirituality that is both completely human and accessible and also completely spiritual and transcendent. This is Jesus.
When one believes in Jesus as the true God-made-man, then all is completed because the completeness of his life, which is transcendent, dwells in her, and this life is known to be real, because he himself was a human. Unverifiable? If you want to go there, I will show you as I did in the beginning, that the rest of your beliefs are just as unverifiable. Weigh the observed reality with the solution of Jesus against the cry of your soul, and tell me what is more possible: a good world corrupted with nothing to fill the cry of humanity for something better, or a good world corrupted longing for the very thing that it was made to long for; one of it’s own to be all in all for all.
Nathanael Szobody on What does a person possess in and of them self? There is the vestige of God’s image, though now fallen and corrupted. There is the capacity for ‘good’ insofar as this world calls good the things which are beneficial and ostensibly selfless. This good of the image of God; it is the ability to act selflessly and the ability to build up another. How then does Paul say that in him there is no good thing? But he adds “that is, in my flesh.”
The flesh never wants to do anything selfless; the flesh wants what makes the flesh feel good. So truly, in the flesh dwells no good thing. But yet in the created will of humanity there is what we call goodness. There is compassion, sacrifice, mercy, and other virtues that remain in people because of the image of God. But none of these virtues can raise anyone from the dead.
People are dead in their sins, “in the uncircumcision” of their hearts. That means that they are not ‘set apart,’ and though they do things which are good, yet the desires and inclinations of the heart are toward those things which accommodate the flesh because of the sin that is in them from the day Adam sinned and because every sin committed since their birth strengthens those fleshly inclinations. The desires which draw all people away from salvation that is offered in Christ are the ‘uncircumcision of the heart.’
It is for this reason that all must depend on grace. Grace is not a wrapped package that is given and subsequently abides in a person. No, saving grace exists solely in God, who exudes grace, if you will, giving favor upon those who have faith in the life that was bought by the blood of Christ.
Nor is this faith a wrapped gift that a person can possess of them self after it has been given. All people have some sort of faith. There are many faiths, for every individual has the propensity for faith in something beyond one’s self. The strength of faith depends in no way on the individual having faith, but rather on the strength of the object of one’s faith. If the strength of one’s faith depends on the individual, then the faith is worthless, for though it may produce good works from time to time, it ultimately depends on a person who is always burdened with the flesh, which blindly seeks not the object of faith, but one’s own pleasure.
Rather, faith that saves must be faith in the savior. Though all have some sort of faith, the only faith that saves is that which has as its object the one who has the power to kill the flesh and raise the body up again to be a glorious body. This faith conquers the flesh because it is faith in the sin- and flesh-conqueror. This faith can only be given and sustained by the one who is the author of life and salvation and who calls us out of darkness of serving ourselves in the flesh and into the light of grace, flowing from the father to all who believe.
Nathanael Szobody on From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
–C.S. Lewis
Nathanael Szobody on Thesis:
To state that “Truth is relative” is to imply that there is an absolute standard of truth.
Defense:
The statement “Truth is relative” is incomplete. ‘Relative’ takes an object; something is relative to something else. To discover the implied object in this statement let us look at how it is used.In making this statement one is attempting to accomplish two things:
1) To bring about peace and harmony in society. One observes that a given religion may hold to a certain tenant of truth in defense of which the adherents of the given religion are often willing even to kill and to die. One also observes that every religion seeks peace. Therefore one concludes that various statements of truth all seek to bring about a harmonious society, and that they apply to individuals based on their existential and social context. Because of this the mission of humanity should be to learn to understand and appreciate the value of the tenants of truth for other individuals within their context.
2) To exempt oneself from any implications of various tenants of truth of any given thought system that are inconvenient to one’s own experience and context.
In 1) we have established that truth ‘relates’ to other statements of truth, but we have not established what ‘truth’ in general is relative to. In 2) we seem to be implying that truth is relative to the individual.
At closer examination this is untenable. The term ‘is relative’ is more precise that the verb ‘relates’. To say that something is relative to an object is to also make a statement concerning the manner of relationship, namely, that various things have a commonality in the manner in which they relate, and that the commonality is, in fact, the object.
To say that A is relative to B is to state that A1, A2, and A3 share an essential governing principle, namely B. Here’s an example: Einstein’s theory of relativity states that E=MC