Born Again: What Does Jesus Mean?

Close reading Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus challenges a customary interpretation.

No New Testament text has held a more prominent place in my childhood religious upbringing than John 3:1-21. It recounts a conversation Jesus holds with a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus.

A high Celtic cross at Iona Abbey, Scotland.

What my childhood churches latched onto in this dialogue was what Jesus says in verse 3. (It was always read in the King James Version.)

Jesus answered, and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Jesus then repeats what he says in an expanded way in verse 5:

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

 These two verses became the proof texts for the constantly repeated claim that unless a person was born again, no one could hope to enter into heaven when one died. This conviction gave punch to many an evangelistic appeal.

Furthermore, the born-again experience was understood as denoting a conversion experience where one confessed one’s sins and accepted Jesus as one’s Lord and Savior. Only if one had undergone such a conversion could one be assured that one would be saved at the Last Judgment.

It was generally assumed that this conversion experience would also be dramatically emotional. It would provide an intense sense of relief from guilt followed by a deep assurance of peace. The words of hymnody often described the experience best: Once I was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

This kind of preaching troubled me as a youth. I had not experienced any such dramatic conversion. Did that mean I was not born again? Such questioning triggered many fears.

As a result, I have long wrestled with this text. Did my religious upbrining understand John 3:1-21 correctly? There is an element of mystery about the words Jesus speak. Could Jesus mean something different from the customary interpretation I was taught as a child?

From my wrestling with this text, I have come to believe that the customary interpretation is a shallow understanding of Jesus’ message. There is much, much more to what he is saying.

Paying Close Attention to the Words

A close reading of the text demands that we give acute attention to the exact words Jesus uses. For example, his comments concern seeing or entering the kingdom of God.* The customary interpretation assumes this phrase means heaven, the place where God, the angels, and saints live.

But that is not the primary meaning of kingdom of God in the New Testament. The English phrase translates the Greek words basileia tou theou. Basileia does not denote the land or state ruled over by a king. Rather it refers to the king’s authority or power as king. A more correct translation would be kingship. That is why many modern English translations render it reign of God.

In the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) kingdom of God is linked to God’s will being done on earth as in heaven. This parallelism is important to understanding the terminology. God’s kingdom is the reality of living harmoniously within God’s will. Certainly God’s will is fully realized in heaven. But Jesus’ message** is that the time has arrived when that will is going to be fully realized on earth as well.

The import of Jesus’ words is not about the prospect of going to heaven when one dies, but the prospect of living under God’s kingship here and now.

The next two words I note is that Jesus talks about seeing and entering the kingdom of God. Seeing is about perceiving. How can we perceive the kingship of God at work in the world and in our own lives here and now?

The general assumption of humanity is that as we look at the affairs (the often chaotic affairs) of the world in which we live, we see no evidence of God being present or at work. Rather everything usually looks out of control. How can Jesus say otherwise?

When Jesus talks about entering the kingship of God, he is talking about how we can truly experience that we are living under the beneficent rule and providence of God. How can we come to live in submissive harmony with the will of God?

Ambiguous Word

The answer Jesus gives to both questions is that we must be born anothen. Anothen is a Greek adverb that can mean both 1) again, and 2) from above. Because it can have both meanings, it is an ambiguous word. Jesus may use it because he intends both meanings. There must be a new beginning to life, but it is a new beginning coming from divine rather than human initiative.

That becomes clear from the context. Nicodemus assumes anothen means again. So he asks how a grown man can enter his mother’s womb and be born again. He assumes anothen has one and only meaning.

But verse 5 demonstrates that Jesus understands anothenprimarily as meaning from above. He does this by saying a man must be born of water and the Spirit. We are clearly dealing with a kind of spiritual birth or beginning. That becomes even clearer as Jesus then goes on to talk about the invisible wind blowing where it will. The Greek word for wind (pneuma) is also the Greek word for spirit. The critical term anothen has a dual meaning, but the spiritual meaning is primary in this discourse.

So to summarize Jesus’ statements, if one is to perceive the kingship of God in the world and to live harmoniously within it, one must undergo a spiritual initiation analogous to a natural birth.

New Birth as Spiritual Awakening

What is this new birth? I have come to believe it is a form of spiritual awakening by which a person gains the capability of perceiving God’s kingship in the world and living within it. This awakening involves a transformation in consciousness. It places within a person a kind of spiritual sense organ that allows one to perceive and enter into the world of the divine spirit.

What am I talking about? Let me turn to another analogy to explain. We now know that radio waves fill the atmosphere. They did so even before human beings came to discover them. But human beings could not tap into those radio waves and use them for communication until we developed the instruments to transmit and receive radio waves.

God’s kingship is a reality in the universe. But we do not perceive it and we do not come to live harmoniously within it until we receive the spiritual sense organ for such perception. That sense organ is the Holy Spirit dwelling within us.

The Spirit is a gift, a gift from God, not our achievement. Entering into the realm of God’s kingship is always a gift. That is the significance of using anothen with the meaning from above.

Jesus’ words also suggest that that gift has a beginning point. It is analogous to a birth. But Jesus’ words do not imply how that initiation happens, except for the ambiguous phrase of water and the Spirit(more on that in my next blog posting). Nor does the initiation confer spiritual maturity. The initiation launches us on the spiritual journey, but we must go deep into that journey to attain spiritual maturity.

So what do I end up with as I read this passage? I hear Jesus saying that in order to enter into life under the kingship of God we must be lifted up into a spiritual plane. That lifting up does not abolish our life in the flesh, but adds a more profound spiritual reality to our life. The gospel writer John will call that spiritual life eternal life.

Does what I have written mean that I’ve plumbed the mystery of this text? No. It remains a mysterious text. But that mystery also cautions me to be careful in how I read it. It will always evade a simple understanding.

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* Interestingly, these two verses are the only two places in the Gospel of John that the gospel writer uses the phrase kingdom of God. This phrase is used profusely in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but except for these two verses, it is found nowhere else on the lips of Jesus in John.

** Mark 1:15summarizes Jesus’ preaching as: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the gospe

Agnosticism About How We Are Born Again

Scripture text: John 3:1-21

In my last blog, I argued that there is no such thing as a purely objective exegesis of a Biblical text.[1] Church tradition influences what we hear in a Bible text just as much as do the non-religious cultural assumptions we bring to the reading of the Bible.

I gave several examples to illustrate my point. Most were frivolous. They do not much impact serious doctrines or the preaching of the church. However, I want to use this blog to discuss one example where church tradition does affect how we understand a crucial text in the life of the church.

The text is John 3:1-21. This is the dialogue that Jesus engages in with Nicodemus, a Jewish ruler who visits him in the night.

In the dialogue, Jesus makes the startling statement (using the King James Version wording), “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3). Then in verse 5, Jesus repeats his statement in a slightly modified version. “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

This text has been central to the work of Christian evangelism, especially the evangelism practiced by the Baptist churches in which I grew up. But what does it mean to be “born again”? Here, I want to contend, is where church tradition influences what we hear when Jesus speaks these words.

For example, popular usage is “born again.” That’s what we usually hear in evangelical churches and on a lot of TV evangelism. Because this usage has become so common, most Christians never stop to ask if it is the best translation of the Greek.

The word the King James translates as “again” is the Greek word anothen. Anothen can indeed mean “again,” with the emphasis on something repeated. But anothen has a double meaning.  It can also mean “from above.”

That meaning seems to be primary in the Johannine text. When Jesus repeats his statement in verse 5, he replaces anothen with the words “of water and Spirit.” Those words in verse 5 are clearly pointing to something spiritual, coming from God, rather than a repeated event. And so the New Revised Standard Version translates anothen in verse 3 “from above” rather than “again.”

Now one can argue that maybe Jesus meant both meanings when he used anothen. But why don’t we hear evangelists using the two phrasings interchangeably? Why the preference for the words “born again”? I think the wording of the King James Version (whose influence particularly in fundamentalist churches is paramount) influences the wording of the preaching and evangelism that one hears in such churches.

But that’s not my major beef with how this text is heard. Where church tradition affects the understanding of this text lies in the “how” we understand that being born again takes place.

When we hear evangelical Christians talk about being “born again,” generally what they have in mind is some kind of conversion experience. And the more dramatic the conversion, the more authentic it is understood. When one is born again (in these church circles), the change is so dramatic in a person’s life that one can truly say, “Once I was blind, but now I see.”

Usually the conversion experience is seen as something highly emotional, dramatically emotional, as one passes, for example, from a life of despair to a life of intense joy. And if one does not experience such a dramatic emotional reversal in one’s life, there is a tendency to be suspicious as to whether the conversion was real or not.

I would contend that such an understanding of conversion is highly influenced by church tradition, the tradition of conversion that comes out of the great revivals of the successive Awakenings in 18^th and 19^th century America. Those revivals did often produce night and day reversals in people’s spiritual lives, often accompanied by intense weeping and ecstatic joy.

And so in a lot of evangelical churches there is an assumption that such experiences are what “born again” means and looks like. We read John 3:1-21 in the light of that assumption. We read that meaning into our exegesis of the text.

But I would contend that is reading a meaning into the text that is not there. When Jesus says we must be born from above in order to enter the Kingdom of God, he is indeed speaking of the necessity of fundamental transformation of the human spirit in order to enter into life in God’s Kingdom. That transformation is fundamentally a spiritual one, as is clear in verse 6 when Jesus says that what is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Jesus, however, does not flesh out how we experience being born of the Spirit. How we understand the “how” is heavily influenced by church traditions in reading Scripture.

The revivalist tradition will link the “how” to the dramatic conversion experience I mentioned earlier. The Catholic sacramental tradition will link it to the experience of baptism. And for some Christians, I believe, the “how” is not linked to any one moment in time, but to a series of small conversion moments that go on through a person’s lifetime.

That may be indeed the experience of some Christians raised in a practicing Christian family. For such Christians, they may not be able to point to any one moment when they passed for darkness to light. That has been happening for them in small increments all through their lives. But that does not mean they are not converted or born from above. The Spirit has been at work in their lives in a quiet, gentle way, not in a dramatic, convulsive way.

Now I argue this for an important pastoral reason. We do a disservice to the people in our churches or in the outside world when we assume that God only works in one way to bring people into the experience of being born from above. We need to be humble and somewhat agnostic when we are talking about “how” God effects rebirth.

We need to be humble out of love, for we can create needless spiritual distress in people when we assume God can only act in one particular way and we so preach. I have known a number of people in the Baptist churches in which I grew up who worried excessively about their salvation because they had not had the dramatic, emotional conversion experience that preachers assumed when they talked about being “born again.”

The decisive evidence for the kind of conversion that Jesus speaks of as being “born from above” is not the character of the spiritual experience, but the results of it. The Apostle Paul talks about these as the “fruits of the Spirit.” He characterizes them as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23). If these qualities are evident in a person’s life, then one is born again, however that experience came to happen.

 

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[1] Exegesis is the technical term Bible scholars use to describe the process of a close reading of the Biblical text to determine what the author intended to say, not what we want the text to say.