New Birth
The new birth is not an internal, psychological experience.
UPDATE: New Birth does not happen in baptism -- baptism is new birth.
UPDATE 2: Internal dispositions are important, nay, indispensable to the life of faith -- but they should not be conflated with new birth.
UPDATE 3: New birth is more like becoming a citizen of country than having an internal affective experience.
UPDATE 4: I'm serious.
4 comments:
Re UPDATE 3. Agreed, but some people still get excited when they move to a different country. There is that period of new discoveries that is kind of exciting, and then come the responsibilities and the priviledges of being a citizen of that countr, especially if the King is pretty darn good! :-)
On UPDATE 3, doesn't the new testament offer many ways of describing the new birth. Certainly citizenship is a central and often neglected theme. In Romans 8, however, doesn't Paul talk about the spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are childern of God? (Sounds very internal to me) Though admittedly that one at times has been over used as well.
But scripture doesn't indicate that an affective experience is conversion. Jesus is a movement, not a religious experience.
I love your theory, boss, but, can you prove it? (I'm not asking you this because I want to attack the notion of baptism as new birth but rather I kind of want to know where in the Scriptures/Fathers you can find evidence for that view?)
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