Month: September 2002

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.”

This post is part of an ongo­ing dia­log I’m hav­ing with Sean Gal­lagher at his Bene Dic­tion blog. Right now we’re dis­cussing what it means to fol­low Jesus, and the cur­rent subtopic is how bap­tism relates to that. This post will be con­cise because of the blog medi­um, so please let me know if any­thing is unclear.

Sean believes that one becomes a Chris­t­ian upon being bap­tized. In his own words,

As a Catholic, I believe that a fol­low­er of Jesus is one who is “born of water and Spir­it” (Jn 3:5), that is, one who has been bap­tized… Once a per­son has been bap­tized, at any age, this abil­i­ty is nev­er tak­en away… even if a per­son total­ly refus­es to work with that grace [of bap­tism], that per­son is still a fol­low­er of Jesus.

Wow. It took us exact­ly one round of replies to get to core Catholic/Protestant dif­fer­ences.

One of the cru­cial texts here is John 3.3–7:

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

In this pas­sage, Jesus tells Nicode­mus that every­one must be born anoth­en. The word anoth­en is ambi­gious in Greek. It can either mean “again” or “from above.”

Nicode­mus thinks Jesus is say­ing “you must be born again” (hence his ques­tion, “How can a man be reborn? He can’t enter his moth­er’s womb again, can he?”) Nicode­mus has mis­un­der­stood Jesus, and that is the con­text for what fol­lows!

Jesus answers, “No, I’m not telling you to be born twice in a phys­i­cal sense. You have to be both phys­i­cal­ly born [born of water] and spir­i­tu­al­ly born [born from above]. What is pro­duced by flesh is flesh, but what is pro­duced by Spir­it is spir­it.” (please note the use of par­al­lelism here–it’s essen­tial for inter­pret­ing the pas­sage prop­er­ly: ‘flesh’ par­al­lels ‘water’ and ‘from above’ par­al­lels ‘spir­it’.)

In oth­er words, nei­ther per­son is dis­cussing bap­tism. Jesus says that we are giv­en phys­i­cal life in our first birth (a birth of water), and that now we must have spir­i­tu­al life plant­ed in us (a birth of spir­it). He goes on to explain exact­ly what that means lat­er in the same con­ver­sa­tion:

“For this is the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that every­one who believes in him should not per­ish but have eter­nal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to con­demn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. The one who believes in him is not con­demned. The one who does not believe has been con­demned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.” (John 3.16–18, NET Bible)

In oth­er words, we are made alive spir­i­tu­al­ly by plac­ing our faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I’m sure there are oth­er ref­er­ences that Sean takes to sup­port salvif­ic bap­tism, and I’m eager to dia­log about them. I’m also curi­ous to see what peo­ple think about the “born again/born from above” inter­pre­ta­tive issue. I find that the word­ing is one of those sacred cows in the evan­gel­i­cal world even though it’s an unten­able trans­la­tion.

P.S. The NET Bible is one of my favorite trans­la­tions, but I can’t find a way to direct­ly link to a ref­er­ence them. Hence my links are to the NIV at http://bible.gospelcom.net even though I quote from the NET Bible! If you know how to link direct­ly to a NET Bible ref­er­ence (a spe­cif­ic chap­ter and verse), please let me know!