Born Again

I was reminded again of a tiny bit of thought that has been essential to my understanding of Christian faith but is so tiny and taken for granted that I forget to say it. It’s tiny, but I find I have to do some explaining before I can just say it out loud.
     When a person comes to faith or is “born again” or whatever it’s called where you live, that event is made evident to us around that person—indeed, that it has happened is proved to us—by that person carrying out certain actions that they have learned from the Christian community are what they’re supposed to do in that circumstance. That set of actions might be responding to an altar call, with, in some places, appropriate amounts of weeping or shouting, or it might be making (and keeping) a one-on-one appointment with a pastor, or saying certain more-or-less set phrases in the right context, or whatever it is where you are. The problem is that we can all confuse whatever sort of evidence we believe in with the actual event of being born by the Spirit, of, that is, beginning to live by faith in Jesus. I remember seeing in a movie, not in person (not ever having been in the particular kind of community it was about), someone’s experience of faith being denied on the basis of insufficient shouting: “She ain’t got nothing. She’s too quiet.” The evidence looked for in that community was lacking, so, it was concluded, there had been no real experience of the Spirit of Christ.
     The tiny bit of thought is this: we have to go through the critical distinguishing of faith from community expectations, the de-confusing of reality and ritual, in order even to begin to understand faith in Jesus. If we don’t do that, then we will continue to underestimate both what that faith demands and what it accomplishes. The ritual can embody the movement of Spirit (and spirit), but it also limits that movement (or domesticates it—pick your favorite metaphor).
     The reminder came from a thirty-year-old article by David Bartlett. He describes briefly how the ambiguity of the word in John 3:3 we translate as “again” or as “from above” plays a role in the story of Nicodemus in the Gospel of John. Then:

The linguistic and historical insights help reclaim a text that is in danger of being captured by bumper stickers. Being born again is not so much a matter of walking down the aisle at the altar call as it is a matter of receiving God’s gift. Being born again is not a matter of adding religion to all our other perquisites and properties. It is a matter of giving up all perquisites and properties if that is what the gospel requires.

     I distrust any thought that seems to be mine alone, so I’m glad to see at least the bottom line of this one stated by many other people. It is not so much that people have expressed the need for that critical distinguishing, as I have here, and then responded by carrying out the task. Rather, their places in the streams of historical change have made that sort of distinguishing their (perhaps unintended or even unconscious) experience—perhaps, for instance, moving to a different city (something Americans do a lot) and a new church and finding that the at-home ways of doing things and understanding things don’t apply everywhere. Which is good.

• David L. Bartlett, “Story and History: Narratives and Claims,” Interpretation 45.3 (July, 1991) 229–40, available here.
• I remember hearing an old guy saying “I’ve reached that age when everything reminds me of something else.” Uh-oh. It’s happening to me.