Born of Water and Spirit (2)

This is the second post in a series on the doctrine of regeneration and its relation to Christian experience.

Historical and cultural influences

Before delving into the theological minutia of the doctrine of regeneration, it may be helpful to reflect on the problem we’re interested in from a historical and cultural perspective. At least two streams of influence bear on our thinking about these issues today. The first is historical. We (by which I mean mainly the tribe I am a part of — evangelical Sydney Anglicanism) are the heirs not just of the Reformation proper, but also of Puritanism, Pietism, and the Evangelical Awakening, part of which was Methodism. At least one of the things that holds these movements together is an emphasis on personal authenticity. Puritanism was distinguished by its “enthusiasm”, its desire for people to take faith seriously for themselves. Within the context of “Christendom”, this led to a strong emphasis on conversion. This emphasis has never gone away from our tradition, and it is the basis for the Evangelical emphasis on “conversionism” that David Bebbington has described as central to the movement (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 1989).

On its own, this stream of influence is sufficient to generate some of the worries we have today. But another, cultural stream, historically intertwined with the first, also bears on this issue. Modern western culture places an astonishingly high value on the ideal of authenticity. As Charles Taylor describes it, “self-responsible freedom” is one of the key “life-goods” of western culture, that is, an ideal that pretty much everyone agrees on today (Sources of the Self, 1989). Self-responsible freedom is part of what we see as constituting a good life. These influences combine to produce a strong emphasis on personal decision. There is much in this that Christians will want to affirm. The ideas of authenticity and responsible freedom are by no means anathema to the gospel, which addresses each individual and calls her to make a response. Yet there are difficulties here too. For the Bible’s assumptions about what freedom and authenticity require may be somewhat different. What are we to think, for example, of the passages in Acts where “whole households” are baptised? More importantly, though, a conception of conversion as a free decision will make it difficult for us to understand the Bible’s judgment that regeneration is first and foremost something that happens to us. God, as James puts it, “chose to birth us” (James 1:18).

Let’s not be silly about the historical character of the Gospels

When I talk to people about the Gospels, I constantly have to have conversations about what it actually means for anything to be “historical”. Many people’s ideas of what “history” involves are not reflective enough. Explaining “what happened” is by no means straightforward. Moreover, as soon as you engage in the enterprise of communicating “what happened”, you are inescapably involved in a work of interpretation and signification.

I was pleased to find all this very helpfully summed up some time ago in an article by R. North called “Prophecy to Apocalyptic via Zechariah” (VT Supps 22, 1971):

“Today no historian subscribes to the view attributed perhaps unfairly to von Ranke, that the ideal of written history is to express objectively “what really happened”. History is some man’s expression of what really happened to man. No man writes a history unless he has enough strong and personal conviction about the significance of what happened. The most slanted and dangerous histories are those which pretend to give the reader ‘only the facts, without any admixture of the writer’s personal judgment’. To this extent we have dared to say that the best modern definitions of history and prophecy coincide. Each means ‘the known facts told in such a way as to indicate the line of action which the author thinks they dictate for today’. Thus too in a sense vanishes the debate about whether the Gospels are ‘real history’: they give us not ‘what really happened’ but the convictions of some men about what really happened; yet so does every ‘real history’; to that extent every written history is a ‘gospel’.” (p.68)