Today’s questions:
What is your understanding of what regeneration, being born again, and the new birth mean in Scripture? And how do common contemporary Christian understandings align or deviate from what Scripture means by these things?
And:
Really quick follow-up, I missed your earlier video on Baptism, possibly, but I’m wondering if you wanted to fill in your view of the role of the Spirit in both the objective and subjective dimensions to baptism you talk about here. In other words, what is the connection between the Baptized and the Regenerate, or the agent of Regeneration and the act of Baptism. Another way of putting it is, what do we make of the baptism of the Spirit in Paul?
See my earlier video on the notion of being born again here.
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Well, the fact that people dichotomize objective and subjective in marriage (“it’s only a piece of paper”) may reflect the way we approach objectivity, and law, in general. A positive law concept of marriage guts the fact that common-law marriage has been more normal than not for most people across the world. It becomes only a phenomenon that occurs *after* a legal body recognizes them, rather than the objective reality of, say, moving into a home within a communal setting (i.e. people know what’s going on, even if there is no ritual recognition), and then doing marital type things. While the church ought to be part of the supervision of this process, the rite of marriage is still the husband and wife marrying each-other (“with this ring, I thee wed”), which the minister may oversee in the presence of the congregation.
So perhaps the fact that peoples no longer have a shared mode of life may reflect a far deeper phenomenon. Even in terms of baptism, the rite is individualized theologically in the flip-sides of Roman Catholic and Baptist theology, where it becomes an individual act, grounded in either a white-magick or a self-conscious voluntary act. In marriage terms, it’s why the obsence standards of the ideal Victorian wedding ceremony have been trickle-downed to peoples who believe marriage is now something that comes far later in life, usually a sign of having made it, a display of wealth which, for many, requires a saving up for years.
I hope this short video on the new birth will be a blessing to you: https://youtu.be/CGMZNKtCoTI