Unless One Is Born of Water and Spirit

Wow–Jack, author of Intregri­ty blog made sev­er­al com­ments back-to-back in response to my ear­li­er post­ing about bap­tism.

I’ll have to wait to address his length­i­er com­ment, but I’ll tack­le his short­er ques­tion right now: To make my ques­tion more explic­it: what I don’t under­stand is how you rec­on­cile this “phys­i­cal birth” inter­pre­ta­tion in the con­text of Jesus stat­ing the con­di­tions of entry into the King­dom. Are you sug­gest­ing that it read as, “Tru­ly, tru­ly, I say to you, unless one is phys­i­cal­ly born and spir­i­tu­al­ly born, he can­not enter the king­dom of God.” Does­n’t seem odd to cite phys­i­cal birth — some­thing we all have expe­ri­enced by the virtue of our exis­tence — as a con­di­tion to entry into Heav­en? Does­n’t that inter­pre­ta­tion ren­der the “of water” part of the phrase a moot point? After all, who has­n’t been phys­i­cal­ly born?

Thanks–I was wor­ried that I was­n’t clear enough in my pre­vi­ous post­ing. I now know that I was pos­i­tive­ly mud­dy!

Here’s the flow of con­ver­sa­tion between Jesus and Nicode­mus in the NET Bible trans­la­tion of John 3.5–7:

Jesus replied, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a per­son is born from above [anoth­en], he can­not see the king­dom of God.”

In this snip­pet of dia­log, Jesus explains the whole she­bang: you must be born from above. The word anoth­en is ambi­gious in Greek. In this con­text, it might either mean “from above” or “again”. Recent schol­ar­ly trans­la­tions come down on the side of “from above,” which makes the most sense of the con­ver­sa­tion (NET and NRSV are two of the trans­la­tions: check them out).

Nicode­mus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? He can­not enter his mother’s womb and be born a sec­ond time, can he?”

Nicode­mus does­n’t under­stand what Jesus is say­ing. Being born from above does­n’t make any sense to him, but nei­ther does being born again. Evi­dent­ly, he thinks being born again is the more like­ly mean­ing, so he asks Jesus the above ques­tion based on that mis­tak­en under­stand­ing.

Why would Nicode­mus assume that Jesus was talk­ing about phys­i­cal birth? Because Nicode­mus thought his own phys­i­cal birth was salvif­ic. Nicode­mus was trust­ing in his sta­tus as a bio­log­i­cal mem­ber of God’s cho­sen peole to assure him of cit­i­zen­ship in God’s King­dom.

Jesus answered, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a per­son is born of water and spir­it, he can­not enter the king­dom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spir­it is spir­it. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must all be born from above.’ ” (John 3.3–7, NET Bible)

Jesus is now try­ing to help Nicode­mus under­stand his real point–that every­one must be born from above. To that end, he draws a con­trast between the phys­i­cal birth that Nicode­mus thinks Jesus is talk­ing about and the spir­i­tu­al birth that Jesus is dri­ving at.

What evi­dence is there for this point of view?

1) It makes sense of the flow of con­ver­sa­tion. Jesus talks about spir­i­tu­al birth, Nicode­mus thinks he’s talk­ing about phys­i­cal birth, so Jesus bridges from phys­i­cal birth back to spir­i­tu­al birth.

2) “Born of water” is clear­ly a metaphor for some­thing. Phys­i­cal birth is the top­ic being dis­cussed when the metaphor is used, and the metaphor fits.

3) The par­al­lelism in the text itself. The unclear term “born of water” is in par­al­lel con­struc­tion with “born of flesh”. Using the clear to inter­pret the unclear, we see that “born of water” means the same thing as “born of flesh.” In oth­er words, being born.

4) It does jus­tice to Nicode­mus’ like­ly frame of mind. Nicode­mus thought he was guar­an­teed access to the King­dom of God based pure­ly on the acci­dent of his birth as a Jew­ish per­son.

I hope that helps.

There are oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions out there: just do a search on Google for “born from above.”