It should be remarked, in passing, that John never uses nerdvoLa or o-Tpe</)eo-0ai in the moral sense (except in the quota- tion from LXX at 12'"'). and that the Svnoptists never use ' regeneration ' of tlie individual, or speak of a new birth (except by the allusion in Mt Is^) ; but it is one and the same experience which they respectively describe by these terms. When that experience is regarded from the side of God, as something due to His grace or Spirit, it is called regetieraiion. a being born again, from above, of God ; when it is regarded from the side of man, as an experience the responsibility for which lies with him, it is called repenUince. ]?ut we have no meaning or substance to put into either of these terms which does not equally belong to the other.
Perhaps another approach to the figure of re- generation (though that of re.surrection is equally obvious) may be recognized in the passages in which Jesus speaks of the sinful life as death, and of recovery from it as a return to or entrance into life. There are two of these in the Synoptics (Mt 8^2 II Lk 1524-32) ; obviously the emphasis in both is moral, not metaphysical. A change of character is in view, which, however deep and far-reaching, raises none but moral problems. More important, however, than these are the passages in which our Lord teaches that the new or higher life — the re- generate life, to call it so — can only be won through the sacrifice of a lower life. In other words, to have the life which is life indeed, we must sur- render the other ; we must die to nature in order to live CO God. We must renounce self (dirapv-nffaadai eavrbv : a new and radical ■ idea, without formal analogy in the OT) if we are to share in the life of the Kingdom. The man who refuses to do so, who cannot find it in him to do violence to nature, is incapable of discipleship and of the life which is life indeed. This is the burden of our Lord's teaching in such passages as Mt \Qfi^^- \\ 10^9 IS^f- ||, Lk I42'5ff-. It contains all that is meant by re- generation, but it does not use that figure to ex- press it. And again it is all within ethical limits.
2. Pauline Epistles. — The Book of Acts is a picture of the regenerate life in its workings in the Church, but it is not specially so conceived. At Pentecost what we see is rather a new birth than the new birth of the Apostles. The Spirit is not so much the author of regeneration as the source of the peculiar gifts and powers of believers. But the newness of Christianity is nowhere more strongly felt and expressed than in this book. It brings us directly to St. Paul. The Apostle of the Gentiles became a Christian in a way which must have impressed him profoundly with the difference between the Christian life and that of the pre- Christian state. No one could say with greater truth than he, ' I am now another man.' But in him the change took place in a way which was in the highest degree startling and abnormal ; it could not possibly suggest to him anything so natural as being born ; and it agrees with this that, though no one has a more adequate sense than St. Paul of the absolute newness of the Chris- tian life, he never uses the figure of regeneration to convey this. He speaks of the New Covenant of which he is a minister (2 Co 3^), of the new creature (KaivT) /cnVts, 2 Co 5i", GalCH) which he has become, of the new world in which he lives (2 Co 51^), of the new man who has been created accord- ing to God in righteousness and holiness of truth (Eph 42'i), and who is being renewed unto know- ledge after the image of Him that created him (Col .ji') ; he speaks also of being transformed by renewal of the mind (Ko 122), and (if Tit 3^ be his) of a renewal wrought by the Holy Spirit at bap- tism ; of walking in newness of life (Ro 6*), and serving God in newness of spirit (Ko ?•*) ; but he never speaks formally of being born again. Even when he contrasts the past and the present as death and life, the life is not conceived as coming by birth, but either by a creative act of God analogous to that by which at first He commanded light into being out of darkness (2 Co 4'^), or by an exercise of the same almighty power with which God wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places (Eph 120ff- 2^-^) : when we were dead in trespasses He quickened us together with Him. It is essentially the same change which Paul represents elsewhere as translation from the tyranny of darkness to the Kingdom of God's dear Son (Col 11^), or from the state of condemnation to that of justification, or from life after the flesh
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to life after the Spirit (Ro. Gal. passion), or, in more mystical or metaphysical fashion, from being in Adam to being in Christ : vid. esp. Ro 51---1, 1 Co 15-*"'ff-. It is not necessary here to discuss what is called Paul's psychology, as though he had such a thing in the sense of modern mental philosophy ; he has really no psychology ; he knows what he was, and he knows what he is, in the way of moral ex- periences, and he generalizes his past and his present into the conceptions of the natural and the spiritual man, the \pvxi-K6s and the irvevfiaTLKds. Every man in himself is fvx^Kds, a descendant and representa- tive of Adam ; every man has through the gospel the opportunity of becoming irvev/jiaTiKSs, a child of God and representative of Christ. But, as has been already pointed out, Paul never uses the figure of a birth to elucidate or make intelligible the process of this change. He approaches the figure indeed in two different ways. On the one hand, he speaks of himself as the father of those who receive the new life of the gospel through his ministry : ' in Christ Jesus have I begotten you through the gospel' (1 Co 4i5 ; cf. Gal. 4i9, 1 Ti 12 'my true child in the faith'). On the other, he speaks of the spirit in virtue of which men are TTveufxaTLKol, and walk in newness of life, as specific- ally the spirit of sonship (viodeaia), by which men are made to be, and are identified as, children of God. It is usually the dignity and privileges of this relation to God on which Paul lays stress, and these are suggested by vi6s ; but he has also the sense of the kinship to God which it involves, and this is expressed by t4kvov. The latter, though relatively infrequent, occurs in passages so char- icteristic that we can say that Paul was no stranger t > that intimate sense of kinship to God which is so notable in the Johannine type of Christianity (Ro8«>-2i, Eph5i).