{"id":72,"date":"2002-09-01T20:28:40","date_gmt":"2002-09-02T04:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2002\/09\/01\/thoughts-on-baptism-and-following-jesus\/"},"modified":"2002-09-01T20:28:40","modified_gmt":"2002-09-02T04:28:40","slug":"thoughts-on-baptism-and-following-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/09\/01\/thoughts-on-baptism-and-following-jesus","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Baptism and Following Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing dialog I\u2019m having with Sean Gallagher at his Bene Diction<\/i> blog<\/a>. Right now we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Sean believes that one becomes a Christian upon being baptized<\/a>. In his own words,<\/p>\n

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\u2026 Once a person has been baptized, at any age, this ability is never taken away\u2026 even if a person totally refuses to work with that grace <\/i>[of baptism], that person is still a follower of Jesus.<\/i><\/p>\n

Wow. It took us exactly one round of replies to get to core Catholic\/Protestant differences. <\/p>\n

One of the crucial texts here is John 3.3\u20137<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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 mothers womb and be born a second time, can he? Jesus answered, \u201cI 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, \u2018You must all be born from above.\u2019 \u201d<\/i> (John 3.3\u20137, NET Bible<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In this passage, Jesus tells Nicodemus that everyone must be born anothen<\/a>. The word anothen<\/i> is ambigious in Greek. It can either mean \u201cagain\u201d or \u201cfrom above.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicodemus thinks Jesus is saying \u201cyou must be born again\u201d (hence his question, \u201cHow can a man be reborn? He can\u2019t enter his mother\u2019s womb again, can he?\u201d) Nicodemus has misunderstood Jesus, and that is the context for what follows!<\/b><\/p>\n

Jesus answers, \u201cNo, I\u2019m 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.\u201d (please note the use of parallelism here\u2013it\u2019s essential for interpreting the passage properly: \u2018flesh\u2019 parallels \u2018water\u2019 and \u2018from above\u2019 parallels \u2018spirit\u2019.)<\/i><\/p>\n

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).<\/b> He goes on to explain exactly what that means later in the same conversation:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/i> (John 3.16\u201318, NET Bible<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In other words, we are made alive spiritually by placing our faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure there are other references that Sean takes to support salvific baptism, and I\u2019m eager to dialog about them. I\u2019m also curious to see what people think about the \u201cborn again\/born from above\u201d interpretative issue. I find that the wording is one of those sacred cows in the evangelical world even though it\u2019s an untenable translation.<\/p>\n

P.S. The NET Bible<\/a> is one of my favorite translations, but I can\u2019t find a way to directly link to a reference them. Hence my links are to the NIV at http:\/\/bible.gospelcom.net<\/a> 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which I discourse on why we need to be \u201cborn from above\u201d instead of \u201cborn again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-of-random-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-1a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}