Glen Davis

In a bizarre news sto­ry, a man fell into his own grave and died.

Here’s the syn­op­sis:

63 year old Gio­van­ni Gre­co was in the habit of vis­it­ing his future mau­soleum to make sure it was being built the way he want­ed it. One day he was try­ing to get a view of the roof and when he slipped, hit his head on a mar­ble step, and fell dead into his own tomb.

This just sounds like some sort of para­ble…

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!

Her­mann Bur­chard, math­e­mat­ics pro­fes­sor at Okla­homa State, has sug­gest­ed that we invent a cos­mic-sized airbag to bounce incom­ing metors away from earth.

Hmmm.…

That reminds me of what a friend of mine thinks might be the (unin­ten­tion­al) fun­ni­est line in a movie. In Armaged­don, all the sci­ence gurus at NASA are try­ing to fig­ure out how to avert the anni­hi­la­tion of all life on earth, when some­one says (rough­ly), “What we need here is the world’s best deep-core oil driller.”

On a sad side note, Boston col­lege has a leg up on Stan­ford when it comes to wash­ing machine tech­nol­o­gy.

Oh well, I guess we’ll have to con­sole our­selves with the thought that we’ve been the #1 sports school in Amer­i­ca 8 years in a row!

I’ve been mean­ing to men­tion for a while now that I’ve start­ed a blog con­ver­sa­tion with Sean Gal­lagher (a Catholic who runs a blog title Note Bene) about the rea­son Peten­costal mis­sion­ar­ies seem to tar­get Catholics.

Here’s the run­down so far: it all began when I read Sean’s August 24th post about Pen­te­costal pros­e­lytism. I made a com­ment on that post­ing explain­ing my point of view.

As a Pen­te­costal mis­sion­ary (albeit to Stan­ford and not Latin Amer­i­ca), I’d like to com­ment.

Some peo­ple who attend Catholic church­es are fol­low­ers of Jesus, and some are not. My strong impres­sion is that here in the Amer­i­c­as the major­i­ty are not.

By way of dis­claimer, I would like to add my belief that the same prob­lem exists in most denom­i­na­tions (includ­ing mine): too many peo­ple are involved because of momen­tum and not because of faith. I do think the prob­lem is par­tic­u­lar­ly acute in the RCC.

That being said, I nev­er delib­er­ate­ly seek to pros­e­ly­tize peo­ple who are faith­ful adher­ents of anoth­er Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion. In gen­er­al, if a stu­dent tells me they are a Chris­t­ian I believe them, and I try to help them grow in their faith. If I am of sig­nif­i­cant help to them, they often wind up switch­ing their adher­ence.

How­ev­er, when I meet some­one with­out a vibrant faith (such as the infa­mous East­er and Christ­mas only crowd), I try to help them either reawak­en a faith grown cold or dis­cov­er true faith for the first time. When­ev­er that hap­pens, they almost always switch their adher­ence. This is what I believe is hap­pen­ing in South Amer­i­ca.

The switch has two roots, I think: one is an emo­tion­al intu­ition that what’s work­ing for us might work for them since we were so help­ful to them, the oth­er is that we express sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent doc­tri­nal posi­tions from the RCC that if believed make a switch vir­tu­al­ly inevitable.

He thought that what I said was pret­ty inter­est­ing, and brought it to the atten­tion of his read­ers. Short­ly there­after, he post­ed a series of ques­tions for me answer

.

I answered his ques­tions via email, but for your con­ve­nience, here they are:

I’ll answer your ques­tions as best I can, just remem­ber that I’m not a spokesper­son for my denom­i­na­tion (much less for all of Pen­te­costal­ism)… I come from the strand of Pen­te­costal­ism that val­ues oth­er tra­di­tions with­out com­pro­mis­ing the integri­ty of my own (much like the founders of the Soci­ety for Pen­te­costal Stud­ies).

First, what is a fol­low­er of Jesus? I should state for the record that I am using this term syn­ony­mous­ly with Chris­t­ian. The authors of the New Tes­ta­ment seem to have been inca­pable of con­ceiv­ing of a Chris­t­ian who was not active­ly seek­ing to emu­late Jesus. Jesus’ call was (and is) to “come, fol­low me.” In fact the very label Chris­t­ian refers to the con­cept of ‘lit­tle Christs.’ Hav­ing said that, I would define a fol­low­er of Jesus as some­one who has embraced the teach­ings and exam­ple of Jesus as the foun­da­tion of their lives and has brought their lives under the influ­ence of the God (become cit­i­zens of the King­dom). The clas­sic word for this action is repent: to turn from a self-direct­ed life to a God-direct­ed life.

Sec­ond, defin­ing a faith­ful adher­ent is always tricky. I mean both faith­ful (con­sis­tent par­tic­i­pant in a local com­mu­ni­ty of Chris­t­ian faith) and faith-full (con­forms to the def­i­n­i­tion above). Allow me to demon­strate by way of coun­terex­am­ple what I’m get­ting at:

* Sup­pose that I’m in con­ver­sa­tion with a stu­dent and they dis­cov­er that I’m an ambas­sador for Christ. They make some sort of com­ment along the fol­low­ing lines, “Yeah, I was raised in church, but I just don’t find it mean­ing­ful. I stopped going when I was a teenag­er.” In my mind, they flunk both tests–they need to be intro­duced to the King and enrolled in a local com­mu­ni­ty of like-mind­ed believ­ers.

* Sup­pose that I meet a stu­dent who says, “Yeah, I love going to church–that’s where all the cute girls go!” (and upon inves­ti­ga­tion I dis­cov­er that they real­ly are that shal­low). They pass the con­sis­ten­cy test but fail the fol­low­er of Jesus test.

* Sup­pose that I meet a stu­dent who says, “Yeah–I real­ly admire Jesus. But I hate the church–they’ve real­ly let me down. I’ll nev­er set foot in a church again!” Per­haps they pass test #2 (fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion is need­ed), but they fail test #1.

I would con­sid­er all these peo­ple in des­per­ate need of God’s grace expressed through human love in the con­text of a com­mu­ni­ty earnest­ly fol­low­ing Jesus. Please note that I nev­er men­tioned a spe­cif­ic denom­i­na­tion­al back­ground for any of them–it’s irrel­e­vant to these exam­ples.

Third, how would I as a Pen­te­costal help a Catholic grow in their faith? That’s an excel­lent ques­tion! Basi­cal­ly I do it the same way I help any­one to grow in their faith: love them uncon­di­tion­al­ly, pray for them con­sis­tent­ly, encour­age them in right­eous­ness, and rebuke them in sin. Teach them the lessons of Scrip­ture (I should note that my inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture dif­fers from the Catholic under­stand­ing at points. I obvi­ous­ly teach what I believe to be true). Give rea­son­able answers to hon­est ques­tions. In addi­tion, here are a few oth­er actions I’d take with some­one from a churched back­ground:

* I’ve noticed that many col­lege-aged peo­ple engage in litur­gy by rote and fail to under­stand its sig­nif­i­cance (con­fir­ma­tion notwith­stand­ing). I’d try to help them see it with fresh eyes: as a heart­felt expres­sion of wor­ship and devo­tion to God. I’d prob­a­bly also give them a copy of some­thing like Peter Kreeft’s One Catholic to Anoth­er.

* I’ve also noticed that many stu­dents raised in church (of what­ev­er tra­di­tion) have a very juve­nile under­stand­ing of faith–their reli­gious edu­ca­tion stalled at a junior high lev­el and they’ve nev­er probed their faith at an age-appro­pri­ate lev­el. Inci­den­tal­ly, I think that’s one of the rea­sons so many col­lege stu­dents bail on the church. They’re try­ing to incor­po­rate irrec­on­cil­able world­views in their minds: one a 7th-grade under­stand­ing of the good news and the oth­er a col­lege-lev­el under­stand­ing of sec­u­lar phi­los­o­phy. Guess which one wins? To that end, I’d try to help stu­dents reframe their ques­tions and seek answers in a more sophis­ti­cat­ed man­ner.

* Anoth­er high pri­or­i­ty on my list is to help stu­dents expe­ri­ence the imme­di­ate super­nat­ur­al pow­er of the Holy Spir­it (includ­ing the charis­ma­ta). The Bible por­trays charis­mat­ic Chris­tian­i­ty as the nor­ma­tive mod­el for fol­low­ers of Jesus. We are to exhib­it not only the fruit of the Spir­it but also the gifts of the Spir­it.

Fourth, I think I’ve addressed this ques­tion in my response to ques­tions one and two. A vibrant faith is a com­bi­na­tion of belief and trust that makes a dif­fer­ence in one’s day-to-day opin­ions, feel­ings, and behav­ior.

I hope I’ve answered your ques­tions mean­ing­ful­ly. I’m sure you’ll have some com­ments in response.

So far he’s post­ed his reponse to my answer to his first ques­tion: What Defines a Fol­low­er of Jesus? I’ll try to respond as soon as I can (although my in-laws are vis­it­ing and that will make com­put­er time hard­er to come by).