A Theology of Love, Part VIII: Conclusions

I won't be able to defend my interpretation of what it means to be "born again" in a fully satisfactory way in the short space of this blog. But I hope that this last week I can at least address some obvious challenges.

First, my interpretation may be thought of as inherently anti-evangelical, since I am advocating for a richer understanding of Christianity than a simple adherence to a creed. But if a creed is not involved, someone might say, doesn't that discourage missions? I don’t see why that follows at all. The correct motive missions is an excitement to introduce people to the Judeo-Christian story, so that they may worship the author of their salvation. Since Christ is the only way to God, there may be many people like Abraham: they are born-again because of Christ’s redemptive work, but they just do not know the Gospel, or have heard of it, but do not understand it. It seems to me quite easy to make missions compatible with an affirmation of our ignorance about who can be born-again.

Second, I am not saying that a pure character is the cause of being born again. As if we could be 'good' enough to merit God's infinite mercy! No, my interpretation of the New Testament passages is that having a character of agape love is an indicator that someone already does know God in some deep way. I'll try to put this thought into a compound proposition: "If you love, then there is unmistakeable evidence that you are born again." Like the Scripture, I make no judgment as to why some hearts are hardened and others are not.

Third, I may be viewed as some kind of universalist, or as saying that every nice person or good parent is really a Christian. This is not my meaning at all, since people may treat each other well as a result of simply being socialized. I take being socialized and being an agape-lover as having nothing to do with each other. If anything, I would guess that a born-again person is rather rare. Jesus may help explain my point: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?...” (Matt. 5: 46-48). Nor do I believe that people who have a genuine attachment to their children or family are necessarily “born of God.” There is an evolutionary analysis that may be made here.

And finally, there is the issue that there are many passages, especially in Romans, that seem to contradict my interpretation. I will not be able to offer a lot here and now about this topic, but I will remind my skeptics of the story of Martin Luther. As the simplified story goes, Protestantism began when Luther had his perspective changed on Christianity by the Epistle to the Romans. Specifically, it was Paul’s provocative statements about faith that Luther was excited about. Although this event was historically important, for the Catholic church was corrupt in a lot of ways at the time, I regard Luther’s re-interpretation of the Christian religion as incomplete. What we have today, at least in conservative Protestant circles, is more like “Romans-ianity” than Christianity. Take a classic example: we find Luther saying things like “The Book of James should be thrown into the river,” since James says very plainly that faith is not enough. But this conflicted with Luther’s personal theology, and so he saw fit to remove James’ letter from the canon. While conservative Christians today are happy to include James in the canon, they do the same thing in effect, because they give Romans an unhealthy interpretative priority. For example, when a contemporary conservative Christian opens the book of James, she says something like, “Whatever James is talking about, it must not conflict with Romans, because we know for sure that Romans is true.” But this is to brandish Romans like a sword, slicing and dicing the rest of the Bible into pieces until it ‘fits.’ A Christian should try to synthesize all of the teachings of Scripture into one world-view.

What I have done the last eight blogs is more mature, I hope. I am trying to derive an interpretation of the phrase “born-again” that all of the New Testament writers are on board with. At least, no one can blame me for trying.

A Theology of Love, Part VII

I have argued the last two weeks that there is significant Scriptural support for my claim that faith is not a sufficient condition for being born again, nor is it a necessary condition for being born again. So I’ve described what I don’t believe, although it is perhaps more interesting to talk about what I do believe. As always, my views about Christianity are formed by the New Testament writings themselves, and there is a really interesting unity shared by many New Testament writers: the analogy of people to trees, and our characters to fruit. This analogy is hammered home, first by Jesus, then James, John and finally Paul. With the exceptions of Peter and maybe Luke, that is a list of the most influential figures in Christianity.

Jesus talks about this in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:15-20. The context is that he is giving his listeners a way to distinguish between real followers of Jesus and ‘false prophets.’ In vv. 21-23, Jesus says specifically that you will NOT be able to recognize them because of what they believe. Instead, vv. 15-20, he insists that you will only be able to recognize them by their fruits – that is, by what kind of people they are. His reasoning is in the form of a rhetorical question: “Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?”

James clearly seconds this point, when he is insisting that faith is not sufficient for being born again: “Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? (Jms 3:12). This point is explored in more depth by Paul, with his listing of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22, 23). Which brings us back to where we started, in I John 4:7-8, where the unmistakable mark of one who has been born of the Spirit is the presence of agape love. How do you spot someone who has been born again - born of the Spirit of God? As I have tried to show from Scripture, you can’t always tell by what a person believes, but by someone’s true character – as Paul, John, James, and Jesus believe. This criterion cuts across time/space, national boundaries, ethnic divisions, and yes, even religious creeds (check out what Jesus has to say in John 10:16 and Matt 7:15-23).

We are by nature creatures of survival, and thus thoroughly selfish. Whether you want to believe Darwin’s story, or whether you prefer Genesis 3 – the conclusion is the same – by nature we worship ourselves. Paul describes a natural person as endowed with “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealously, fits of anger, rivalries, dissentions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Gal 5: 19-21). So it is completely unnatural to possess, for example, agape love. That is why Jesus is so confident that we can “recognize [true Christians] by their fruits” (Matt 7:16).

I have more to say about some potential misunderstandings of my position, and so next week I will finish this series by taking up those topics.

A Theology of Love, Part VI

Last week I pointed out some passages which indicated that it was possible to be born again with having some kind of cognitive grasp and confession of the Gospel – i.e., that faith is not a necessary condition of being born again. This week, I want to go one step further and point to some passages which indicate that faith is not sufficient for being born again either.

1) In Matthew 7:21, Jesus gives a provocative prophetic description: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Verses 22 and 23 then further imply that these people knew who Jesus was, and therefore were quite surprised when Jesus did not know who they were!

2) This is also a theme of the passage that I discussed last week from Matthew 25. The sheep cried out “Lord, Lord” but Jesus sent them away. The reason? Their refusal to give economic aid to the vulnerable. These goats seemed to believe that they were sheep until Jesus gave them the bad news.

3) Probably the clearest declaration that faith is not sufficient comes from James: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?...So faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by works, is dead” (James 2:14, 17). It’s hard to think of how a statement could be more clear that faith is simply not enough. I’ve heard many interpretations of this passage from the traditional born-again crowd who try to say that this passage does not say what it seems to say, and find all of them to be, well, embarrassing and silly.

4) A little known example from Acts 8 also illustrates this point well. Verse 12 describes a group of people who experienced a conversion after they came to believe in the Gospel. But they were not yet born-again: verse 16 continues “for [the Holy Spirit] had not yet fallen on any of them.” Here were some people who came to genuine faith in the Gospel, but they did not yet have the Holy Spirit and so were not yet born again (Rom 8:9).

Next week I will begin drawing my own positive conclusions. But for now it is enough to realize that there is significant textual evidence that faith is not necessary for being born again, nor is it sufficient. That is, faith is just not enough. And obviously, this idea is not my own. I was convinced by what Jesus, Luke (the author of Acts), and James had to say about the topic.