Born again or Born from above
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| Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church http://www.stjohnsashfield.org.au, Ashfield, New South Wales. Illustrates Jesus' description of himself "I am the Good Shepherd" (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). This version of the image shows the detail of his face. The memorial window is also captioned: "To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of William Wright. Died 6th November, 1932. Aged 70 Yrs." (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
All this means that the phrase “born from above” (poorly translated “born again”) means to be spiritually born into God’s family (which birth must be spiritual because God is a spirit – John 4:24). I would hope readers know that entrance into God’s family centers on being in Christ, God’s son, which comes from faith in the work of Christ on the cross (or, as I’d put it prior to the cross in NT days, “loyalty to Yahweh, the God of gods, incarnate in Jesus Christ, rejecting all other gods and self merit” – a clear faith statement).
In any event, the phrase “born from above” refers to being a member of God’s family, born of heaven as it were. Without rabbit trailing, I think the sonship language is important in specific ways to communicate specific connections back into the Old Testament. Those of you who have read The Myth That is True draft will know what I mean. To be found in God’s family, of course, means escape from the second death, to pick up on the questioner’s note. His wording (to my ear) speaks to the “staying in the faith” issue (aka, “losing salvation or not” issue) which I have addressed elsewhere. In a nutshell: No one is in heaven who did not believe/was not believing (at the time of death, again for the questioner here), and no one is in hell who did/was.” This state of belief was demonstrated not by moral (behavioral) perfection, but by the heart’s loyalty to the true God / the true God incarnate. It works the same way across testaments. It had nothing to do with merit. If you aligned yourself with some other God, you were disloyal to the true God and your lack of belief/faith was evident.
(In this respect, I don’t see how one phrase or the other in the question is more “this life” than the other).
The “born from above” phrase is is but one perspective of salvation. Another (and there are more than two) is the “saved” language. I don’t see it in any way oppositional to the “born from above” language. The phrases describe the same status from different perspectives and to communicate specific ideas or threads drawn from earlier OT theology. To get a glimpse of that, we’d need to be asked “saved from what?”
In simplest terms, it referred to being saved from life apart from the true God (which was, ultimately, death), the judgment of the true God, separation from the true God, etc. The OT of course speaks in apocalyptic terms in that regard, of the Day of the Lord. I mention this because most of the “being saved” language in the NT comes from the OT. (The phrase occurs 13 times in the NT, not always in a context of spiritual salvation). This phrase has no superiority over the “born from above” language in that OT people were still in God’s family (“my people” – Israel is called “God’s son” for example in Exod 4:23). Membership in God’s family is a theological idea in the OT despite being worded differently. Those outside God’s family, doomed to destruction if they refuse loyalty to the true God, are commonly referred to as/by “the nations” (i.e., the nations other than Israel). Again, I won’t rabbit-trail to the clear divine council worldview theology that has the disinheritance of the nations at Babel (cf. Deut 32:8-9, reading with the Dead Sea Scrolls and LXX). To be “saved” from Yahweh’s judgment, one had to be part of Yahweh’s family. For the NT, the question “why are some saved?” would be, in the context of this post, “because they are members of God’s family, being in Christ, also described as being born from above by embracing Jesus as Yahweh incarnate.” Author: The Naked Bible
