Did all that thinking. Might as well preach it.

I pulled together various parts of my posts on the meaning of being born again and wove them into a sermon I delivered the Sunday before New Year 2014. Here it is in all its glory--or whatever.

US BORN-AGINNERS

Olivet Church, New Westminster BC

Dec. 29, 2013

I had recently moved to Illinois to attend Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. Having reached a fairly wooly state about the ears, I paid a trip to a hairdressing establishment in the small town in which we were now residing. My barber, having determined my reason for moving to the area, immediately placed me in a pigeonhole of his choosing. He began to speak of 'us born-aginners'.

While I would not have employed the term in quite that way (particularly with the connotations it carries in the U.S. of the Religious Right), I did not object in principle to the notion that he and I shared a certain religious experience. I had long ago memorized scriptural passages emphasizing the need for some kind of birth from above in order to enter the kingdom of God. The best known involves the conversation between Jesus and a prominent Jewish teacher named Nicodemus that Don read moments ago.

John 3:3-7 

³ Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” 

⁴ “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. ⁷ You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’

That lovely Christmas carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing clearly emphasizes that this is the whole point of why we celebrate Christmas:

v. 3. Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace,
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness.
Light and life to all He brings,
Risen with healing in His Wings.
Mild He lays His Glory by,
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

Now as a card-carrying member of the Protestant wing of Christianity, and for most of my life as part of the evangelical expression of that faith, I was pretty sure I knew what the term ‘born again’ meant. But recently I have been deliberately exploring familiar biblical concepts while attempting to keep my life-long, if fairly unexamined, beliefs at arm’s length to ensure that I am not reading into the biblical text teaching that is not really there. Regrettably, I've lost contact with that barber--in fact, I rarely need one now--so I’ve had to go it alone.

As most of you probably know, the New Testament of the Bible, including our passage this morning from the Gospel of St. John, was written in the Greek language of the 1^st century A.D. The word translated ‘again’ in the term ‘born again’ is actually much more accurately translated as ‘born from above’. In other words, it’s not timing that is the emphasis here—I was born once, and then I was born again at some later point—but the source of the re-birth. One is born on earth of human agency—a Dad and a Mom--but one must also be born from above, which can have only a divine agency—God. Source, not timing.

Purely human birth puts us on the track to living a life to a large extent dictated by whatever country and culture we happen to grow up in; taking our values, opinions, and goals from those groups that have the most influence on us, with whatever resources we are fortunate enough to have, or unfortunate enough not to have; stumbling along in life as best we can; aging; and eventually going the way of all flesh.

As I mentioned in my last sermon here at Olivet, about pouring new wine into old wineskins, we live lives largely informed by our culture. While we may have a small number of goals or opinions that are uniquely from our faith, most of us are pretty much good old hockey-loving Canadians with a dash of British Columbia thrown in to separate us from the Newfoundlanders. Our worldview has a particular shape that is the product of our upbringing in this country and this culture as opposed to another. We are unaware of our blind spots. They are part and parcel of our upbringing, our heritage, even our patriotism, and have sunk to a pretty sub-conscious level.

Of course, that was exactly the problem with the lukewarm 1st century Laodicean Christians in Revelation chap. 3. They were so indistinguishable for the most part from their fellow citizens that God was ready to write them off as a neither hot nor cold, but merely tepid. There was nothing that could remotely be called “value added” that characterized their professed faith. God’s language was colourful and pretty scary: I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

But being born from above allows us, quoting St. Paul, to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. It gives us the means to take a bird’s eye look at our prevailing culture—via the scriptures, the Holy Spirit and the church—rather than being immersed in our culture (more of a worm’s eye view). We can determine what is genuinely helpful and what is a hindrance to living the fruitful, giving, principled, intentional life that God would have us live; to be the agents for change that God intends for us to be. We can know the real difference between right and wrong, not what our culture says is right and wrong. We can even rise to the biblical challenge to Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Mt. 5:44). That we don’t take advantage of this great privilege is, of course, the number one problem for the Christian church and for individual Christians in being a significant force for change in our needy world.

Now, if we accept that being born-aginners (sorry, I mean born-from-abovers) is a desirable thing—and Jesus certainly thinks that it is—we are still left with the challenge of figuring out how it occurs. While there may be a consensus on that issue here in this congregation, there are very different views held by equally fair-minded fellow Christians all over this community, not to mention this country and the world at large.

While a bit of a caricature, a Catholic web page I consulted recently summarizes the typical evangelical view fairly well:

For an Evangelical, becoming "born again" often happens like this: He goes to a crusade or a revival where a minister delivers a sermon telling him of his need to be "born again." 

 

"If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and believe he died for your sins, you’ll be born again!" says the preacher. So the gentleman makes "a decision for Christ" and at the altar call goes forward to be led in "the sinner’s prayer" by the minister. Then the minister tells all who prayed the sinner’s prayer that they have been saved—"born again."

In fact, this was very similar to my own experience. May 4, 1958, Lorne Ave, Gospel Hall in Trenton ON. The biblical text was Is. 53:5-6, a passage that I love to this day.

But that same source (It’s called “are-catholics-born-again”) went on to outline the position that would be taken by Time Magazine’s 2013 person of the year, the admirable Pope Francis:

When a Catholic says that he has been "born again," he refers to the transformation that God’s grace accomplished in him during baptism.

In the vast majority of cases this would be infant baptism.

How significant is this rite in the Catholic faith? Consider the response of the priest who gave Mafia mobster Vito Rizzuto a full Catholic funeral (National Post, January 7, 2014):

Monsignor Igino Incantalupo, who conducted the service for Mr. Rizzuto and a similar funeral in 2010 for Mr. Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo, also a Mafia boss when he was shot dead, defended his stance.
“He was a Christian and he had the right to have a funeral in the church. Now, I know that everyone is not in agreement with that but the church cannot refuse a baptized person. We don’t have to judge so that is why we make the funeral of that guy and to make the funeral of his father two years ago and of his son more years ago,” he said.

Catholics and many Protestants believe that the biblical references to being baptized by water as well as the Spirit (as in John 3:5) mean the rite of baptism; i.e., that a person is born again, born from above, or spiritually regenerated by being baptized, presumably by some suitably credentialed church official.

The Orthodox Church does not stop at baptism. It must be their baptism.

The Orthodox Church makes no judgment concerning the efficacy or validity of baptisms performed by other denominations, as regards people who are members of those respective denominations. The precise status and significance of such baptisms has not been revealed by God to the Orthodox Church; however, as a practical matter, they are treated as non-efficacious (that means theydidn’t take!) unless and until the person joins the Orthodox Church (see http://orthodoxwiki.org/Baptism).

Now you can decide for yourself whether God would insist on something as cumbersome and arbitrary as a religious rite, widely unavailable in many parts of the world, as his method of conferring his love, forgiveness, acceptance and empowerment.

But the best way to decide this is to return to our passage in John chap. 3 and mine its content further. This leads me to giving you the following advice: When in doubt about the meaning of the Gospels, ask a Jew.

It came as a considerable surprise to me that I had a breakthrough in my wrestling match with the concept of being born again through an encounter (admittedly via podcast) with a Jew. He was being interviewed in my son's church in Ontario. With respect to the concept of being born again, he mentioned that to Jews of Jesus' time, the notion was well established and had specific meanings. This led me to much fruitful research.

I have to remind myself from time to time that Jesus was immersed almost entirely in the Jewish thought world. His encounters with non-Jews were few. His audiences would have been almost 100% Jewish. When he spoke, he used metaphors and parables that could easily be identified by his audience as typical of their experience. When he referred to backup material, it was always the Jewish scriptures. No wonder that his disciple Peter balked at having to do something completely at odds with Old Testament teaching when commanded to eat ritually "unclean" food (Acts 10:9-16). Jesus' brother James and other early Christian church leaders of Jewish origin were similarly scrupulous about following Jewish traditions (Acts 11:1-3), greatly resisting St. Paul’s attempts to remove their blind spots.

So what did it mean to a Jew--and a very high-ranking one at that--when Jesus said to Nicodumus, "You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again."

Just before I give you the list of what ‘born again’ meant to a Jew--one observation about being born the first time. According to the Jewish sources I've consulted, "born of water", referred to in John 3:5, was simply a Jewish idiom for physical birth (a reference to amniotic fluid), and had nothing to do with baptism. Whatever those of the baptismal regeneration school of thought think of the matter today, to Nicodemus and his fellow Jews Jesus' use of the term ‘born of water’ would have simply meant the physical birth of a baby.

To a Jew of that day, the term born again was commonly applied to a variety of events, rituals, and achievements, such as:

• The conversion of a non-Jew (or Gentile) to Judaism.
• Coming of age, the bar mitzvah celebrated when Jewish boys turn 13. The equivalent celebration for Jewish girls is called the bat mitzvah.
• Getting married.
• Repentance. For a pious man like Nicodemus repentance was probably a regular practice, but every observant Jew would repent of his/her sins at least yearly at Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
• Baptism. Jewish people were very concerned about ritual cleanliness, so there were many immersions in Rabbinic Judaism. When they came out of the water they were ritually clean, and thus able to participate in religious rites. Remember how the Pharisees baptized not only themselves but even their dishes and their beds (Mark 7:1-4). 
• Ordination to become a rabbi, which Nicodemus, "a teacher of Israel", certainly was.
• Being crowned king. 

All of these events were described as being born again. 

Keep in mind that the Israelites of the Old Testament, and the Jews of the New, had made the mistake of thinking that God's love and providential care applied only to them. Rather than seeing their status as God's people as a means to God's objective of blessing the whole world, they somehow concluded that they deserved that special status as theirs and theirs alone, and that there was nothing more to be discussed.

So I can just imagine Nicodemus running down the list as Jesus was telling him, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

"What the heck is Rabbi Jesus talking about (however a pious 1st century Jew might phrase it)? We both know exactly what born again means, yet he’s telling me that I haven’t had the experience. I'm certainly here, so I was physically born once. I'm a Jew so there's no need for conversion. I'm well past 13. I'm married. I repent routinely. I practice ritual immersions as any good Pharisee would. I'm a rabbi myself. What's left--that I become the next king of Israel?"

Rather than answering in a confused fashion, Nicodemus might simply have been humouring Jesus when he replied, "How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

Jesus took no offense, but reiterated, "No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water (physical birth) and the Spirit (birth from above). Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit."

Jesus made clear to Nicodemus that being safe in God's grace (Filled with his goodness, lost in his love, as hymn-writer Fanny Crosby so beautifully put it) has nothing to do with birthright, ethnic derivation, religious affiliation, human attainments, or rituals—all of the items that Nicodemus might have listed as evidence that he was indeed born from above. That’s all water-birth, flesh-birth.

Birth from above—spirit-birth--is all God's work, and his alone. In fact, it is as it has always been with God's people from the earliest passages of the Old Testament: God made a covenant, took all the initiative in doing so, was constantly faithful in keeping it, and made it clear that the covenantal people had two choices: stay in or opt out. But there was nothing that could make God opt out. Therefore, St. Paul could say confidently, Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Now we could spend a most interesting study time on just how one becomes a born-from-abover. Calvinists and Lutherans suggest that God arbitrarily picks a relatively small number of the world’s population for salvation and leaves the rest of the world’s inhabitants to their own devices. They call this grace.

Universalists have absolutely everyone making it. Herr Hitler, meet Rev. Bonhoeffer and Rabbi Shlomo, with hugs and handshakes all round.

Catholics and most evangelicals come somewhere in between those two extremes, but traditional evangelicals believe that one must have specific knowledge of the Christian message to be born from above, except perhaps for children.

Emergent Christians believe that all God’s creatures begin life as both water- and spirit-born—in other words being born from above is God’s gift to all—not just theoretically or potentially, but in actuality--through the death of his son—but that some will choose to reject this gift as they make conscious moral and spiritual choices in their lives.

But this is not the point of today’s message. What is? Well, two things:

1.     You can’t improve on God’s gift of birth from above. There is nothing to add to it. No rituals or behaviours or affiliations can make one whit of difference to what is God’s free gift to you. You are not stuck merely with human birth, water birth, drowning in a culture or subculture that completely forms who you are and what you do. That’s why we born-from-abovers should see ourselves as citizens of the kingdom of God, not of New Westminster, Abbotsford, the Lower Mainland, Canada, America, anywhere. That’s why anyone in need, no matter where they live, is my neighbour, as the parable of the Good Samaritan taught.

2.     We can’t improve on this gift, but we can take fuller advantage of it. Nicodemus was so loaded up with assumptions that he completely missed the point of God’s gracious gift. He saw his spiritual life as an ever-more-moral, ever-more-accomplished Tower of Babel—you had to keep building up merit, keep being born again, as if one could never fully earn God’s full gift of renewed life.

Take the time to read through the passage I referred to earlier with respect to the Laodicean Christians, Revelation chaps. 2 & 3. There you see loveless Christians, fearful Christians, confused Christians, over-indulgent Christians, spiritually dead Christians, cowardly Christians, and completely self-satisfied Christians. But God did not reject them, or threaten them with the withdrawal of their status as his children. Rather, in every case he urged them to shed their culturally induced arbitrary restraints and to take full advantage of the privilege, power, and responsibility that come with being a spirit-born person.  “See, he said to them—and to us—I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut.” A door into the fullness of born-from-above living.

Now there’s a New Year’s resolution worth keeping. Walk through that door.

So what've we got?

T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That's how I feel about the concept of being 'born again' (or better, 'born from above' as I explored in an earlier post).

Jesus made clear to Nicodemus that being safe in God's grace (Filled with his goodness, lost in his love, as hymn-writer Fanny Crosby so beautifully put it) has nothing to do with birthright, ethnic derivation, human attainments--it is all God's work, and his alone. In fact, it is as it has always been with God's people from the earliest passages of the Old Testament: God made a covenant, took all the initiative in doing so, was constantly faithful in keeping it, and made it clear that the covenantal people had two choices: stay in or opt out. But there was nothing that could make God opt out. St. Paul said confidently, Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

[A study of Old Testament covenants would be useful here. I'll leave this to your research.]

The Israelites of the Old Testament, and the Jews of the New, had made the mistake of thinking that God's love and providential care applied only to them. Rather than seeing their status as God's people as a means to God's end (see Galatians chap. 3, especially verses 8-9: Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.), they somehow concluded that they deserved that special status as theirs and theirs alone, and that there was nothing more to be discussed (see my last post regarding complacency and Jesus' rather decisive negation of that notion). 

Being born from above is what God does in addressing the gap ("the great gulf fixed" of Luke 16) between God's glorious being and standards, and our human condition. Were it not for God's mending of our tattered spirits, we would be left completely to our own devices--not a good place to be.

Becoming a Christian is a whole other matter. We aren't born Christians, but rather as members of God's kingdom. Christianity is a religion, a belief system. It requires a conscious choice in my view (my baptismal regeneration and Calvinist friends' beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding). It's a choice that I have made. I have posted elsewhere that Christianity (for all the unfortunate baggage associated with that name) is the clearest expression of God's nature, will, and ways that we have. I would press my faith upon anyone. There's no better way to understand and to appreciate God, learn how and what to do right, and to protect oneself from "opting out" than to become a follower of Christ. It is a privilege without parallel. But it's not the same as being born again.

Now if I can just figure out who the elect are!

Locked and loaded

We're back from a wonderful month-long vacation to Ontario. We drove some 12,000 kms., traversing five provinces and six states. Our single most unique experience was to stumble across a virtually abandoned townsite called Ingomar, Montana. Twelve citizens are left from what was at one time a thriving little town with a major sheep-raising industry. We ate a delicious bean soup lunch in the restaurant, called the Jersey Lily, and had a great time chatting with the cook/server, Pam, and one of the customers, an outspoken old cowboy I'll call Wyatt.

Wyatt and another gentleman, wearing the obligatory stetsons, were having an intense time looking at a newspaper and discussing "g-dd-m cowardly sissies", which I gather referred to certain government folk, in very loud voices. A disparaging reference to former President Carter led me to ask if people in these parts were Republicans. "No, Wyatt replied, we're conservatives." At that point, I discarded any thought of raising gun control issues with him as a point of conversation.

My mind has gone back to that remarkable two hours in Ingomar many times in the days since we returned to beautiful British Columbia. My fundamentalist upbringing, which will always be a part of my makeup no matter how hard I try to shake it, made me want to dismiss the customers at the cafe as having any particular spiritual sensitivities, particularly given the language employed. I can just imagine what they might have said had I asked them if they were born again!

[As Ned Flanders' wife, Maude, said to Bart Simpson, "I went to bible camp to learn to be more judgmental."]

But I am trying to retain the good of my early Christian training (high view of Scripture, gratitude to God for his provision of salvation, a life of purpose and ethical/moral decision-making) with my newer conviction that one is a member of God's kingdom unless one ultimately chooses otherwise. In what way would someone for whom God's name is a convenient curse be born from above? Would he truly be a child of God in every sense that I like to think that I am?

That's what I have been struggling with for these last several posts. It would be a lot easier if I just bought into some established school of thought about who's in and who's out but, as I've indicated in earlier posts, I believe that would place God in a nice, tidy box that pretends to tie up all the loose ends while turning Him into a contradictory and arbitrary deity. British theologian J.B. Phillips penned the title Your God is Too Small for his best-selling book. I believe that he wrote better than he knew.

At any rate, we lumber on. My son was good enough to direct me to certain Jewish sources that might be of some help in sorting out what being born from above means. Let's see where they lead.

Perhaps I've fallen into a trap

Perhaps I've fallen into a trap....of my own making. When I hear the term 'born again' (which is probably better translated 'born from above'), particularly when it is compared in some fashion with natural birth (see the New Testament gospel of John 3:3-6), I think of a once for all experience.

One is only born once in the natural way. From there on the process of growth and development occurs in the usual fashions until one dies--all laid out in a timeline that we are all used to. It is our entree into the human race.

But if the term 'born again' is meant to be more metaphoric than we usually think, we get a new sense of the full import of the term.

For those who link being born again with being baptized, whether as an infant or at some later time in life, then being born again is a once forever event. I am not aware of any of the baptismal regeneration folks allowing for people to show up routinely to be re-baptized. There may be other aspects to spiritual growth (confirmation, communion, confession, penance, re-committal, etc.), but the baptism itself happens once, as far as I know.

For traditional evangelicals, being born again means accepting Christ as Saviour, confessing one's sins that stand between the person and God's forgiveness, and becoming a new creation--again a one-time experience. After that, evangelicals switch from terms like being born again, being redeemed, being justified, etc., and move on to a new set of experiences called by names such as sanctification, and so on. I don't think that even the Arminian Christians, some of whom believe that a person could fall from grace and then be restored (others don't accept the restored part) call the restoration a new birth.

What I'm trying to say is that the idea of being born again is understood pretty literally, whether linked to baptism or to repentance, whether infant or adult, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. That is not to say that growth in one's faith and practice is not expected, but the birth itself happens once, just like human birth. It is the way one becomes a Christian, and by extension, represents one's entree into the kingdom of God.

Could it be understood in a different way without doing violence to the biblical text? That's what I want to explore next. Just as soon as I can lift off this blasted trap.

Tortoise theology

You know that story about the tortoise and the hare, with its famous ending--slow and steady wins the race? Forget it. I'd kill to be that hare!

It's great to be disciplined and to compensate for one's inherent challenges with perseverance. That's how I do theology--I plod.

Look at that blasted rabbit. All he needed was just the slightest bit of self-regulation, a little tamping down on the cocksureness, maybe a dram of Ritalin, and he had it made. Talent, lightening speed, and Bob's your uncle. The job is done with lots of time left for the Blue Jays game. 

It's never that way with me. I see this problem and that obstacle. I fret. I sweat. And worst of all, I bore everyone to sleep with my methodical, dry, academic approach. I'm nodding off as I type this.

If you don't like it--I don't either. So go read someone else's blog. 

Still hanging in there? Thanks Mom. Here's what I'm labouring with as regards this born from above business. Keep in mind my fundamental conviction that all of humankind is, by default, part of the Kingdom of God unless an individual decides to opt out of the relationship. I've explored this at length in earlier posts. But can I hold to that position with integrity as I study certain key biblical passages about spiritual re-birth?

In some cases, it sounds like being born from above (or born again) is meant only for those who make the decision to request it, such as we saw in Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus in John 3:  

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. ² He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.” ³ Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” ⁴ “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” ⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. ⁷ You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’.......¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. ¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Sounds like a conscious decision, doesn't it. So does this from John 1:

¹⁰ [Jesus] was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

On the other hand, you get a very different take, by the same biblical author, in 1 John 4:7:   
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Everyone who loves. Unless St. John means that only Christians are capable of loving, this passage has a much wider application that just those who have made a conscious decision to believe something.

All very confusing to this tortoise. Much more mulling needed.

Born again means---ahh--hmmm.

I grew up with a pretty strong belief in what it means to be born again. While a bit of a caricature, a Catholic web page I consulted recently summarizes it reasonably well:

For an Evangelical, becoming "born again" often happens like this: He goes to a crusade or a revival where a minister delivers a sermon telling him of his need to be "born again." 

 

"If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and believe he died for your sins, you’ll be born again!" says the preacher. So the gentleman makes "a decision for Christ" and at the altar call goes forward to be led in "the sinner’s prayer" by the minister. Then the minister tells all who prayed the sinner’s prayer that they have been saved—"born again."

That same source (http://www.catholic.com/tracts/are-catholics-born-again) then gives a very different explanation from the Roman Catholic point of view:

When a Catholic says that he has been "born again," he refers to the transformation that God’s grace accomplished in him during baptism. 

Why am I concerned about this? Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again. Nic was understandably disconcerted. As a leading member of the Pharisaic brotherhood, and a pious Jew, he doubtless assumed that his good standing before God was rooted in his heritage in the 'seed of Abraham'. Getting back into his mother's womb and starting over again seemed a bit over the top. 

He may have been amused at the suggestion, angry at having his time wasted by this strange preacher, or just plain bewildered at what Jesus could possibly mean. Jesus didn't elaborate on the subject but merely reiterated its importance (see the New Testament gospel of John 3:3-7).

So let's delve into this further. Its meaning is pretty important apparently. We can't see the kingdom of God without going through the process, as I noted in my previous post.

As is often the case, my first recourse is to that excellent resource Wikipedia. A quite comprehensive study of the term 'born again' can be found under 'Born again (Christianity)'. Of course, it does nothing to establish the exact meaning of the term, because there is a wide understanding of what being born again implies. But it is noted here (and elsewhere) that the original Greek word 'again' is better translated as 'from above'.

Jesus Christ used the "birth" analogy in tracing spiritual newness of life to a divine beginning. Contemporary Christian theologians have provided explanations for "born from above" being a more accurate translation of the original Greek word transliterated anōthen. Theologian Frank Stagg cites two reasons why the newer translation is significant:

1. The emphasis "from above" (implying "from Heaven") calls attention to the source of the "newness of life." Stagg writes that the word "again" does not include the source of the new kind of beginning
2. More than personal improvement is needed. "...a new destiny requires a new origin, and the new origin must be from God."

This is a good beginning. Whatever else it means, this experience originates with God alone and has to do with something new that is different from our physical start in life. And it certainly accords with related passages such as:

John 1:12-13 - Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. 

1 John 4:7 - Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 

1 Peter 1:22-23 - Now that you’ve cleaned up your lives by following the truth, love one another as if your lives depended on it. Your new life is not like your old life. Your old birth came from mortal sperm; your new birth comes from God’s living Word. Just think: a life conceived by God himself!

Not just a fresh start, then. Not even an overhaul. It's what St. Paul called a new creation (Galatians 6:15). It doesn't come from being born into the right crowd, as Nicodemus believed. In fact, it has nothing to do with human birth at all, other than that we have to exist in order to be eligible. It can't be earned (Ephesians 2:8-9) or purchased (Acts 8:20), as the Bible makes clear again and again. It's a free gift from God. 

What else is it?