3. Catholic Epistles. — We find the idea of re- generation both in James and 1 Peter. In Ja. (li^) God is the author of it, Christians its subjects, and ' the word of truth ' the instrument. We are reminded here of the parables in which the word of God — that is, the gospel — is spoken of as a seed, and of 1 Co 4i9. though in James it is the will of God and not the ministry of an Apostle to which the new birth is referred. When James contemplates Christians thus begotten as a kind of first-fruits of God's creatures, he has apparently in view the universal iroKivytveaia of ]Mt 19-^. The regenera- tion of individual men has the promise in it of new- heavens and a new eartli. There is a similar con- nexion of ideas in Ro 8-ii-. Peter, who uses twice (\^- -'■'•) the word which is exactly rendered by re- generate {avayevpav), connects the experience which
488
REGENERATION
REGENERATION
he so describes first with tlie resurrection of Christ, and then with the incorruptible seed wliicli he identifies witli the word of God — the gospel mess- age which has been delivered to his hearers. The first brings him closely into line w:ith Paul : the new life is distinctively life in the power of Christ's resurrection, a living hope which has an incor- ruptible inheritance in view (cf. 1 P P and Ro G**-). This resurrection life is, of course, ethical, because it is Divine, but its ethical character is more ex- plicitly secured by reference to the incorruptible seed from which it springs. ' Love one another from the heart fervently, having been born again,' etc. (1 P 122f-). The figure is continued in 2it-, where the readers are exhorted (precisely as in Eph 422) iQ I p^t off' all that was characteristic of their former life, and as ' newborn babes ' to desire the spiritual milk which is without guile. Another parallel to Paul (and to our Lord) in making the new life rest on death to the old is found in 4^*- ; but though the reality is the same, the figure differs.
4. Johannine writings. — It is in the Fourth Gospel and 1 Jn. that the figure of a new birth is most frequent and explicit. John does not indeed use dvayevvdw, but he says yewrjOijvai dvuidev (Jn 3^") ; he speaks nine times in the 1st Ep. of being born of God (e/c tov deoS), and twice in the Gospel and four times in the 1st Ep. of children of God {riKva deov). The fundamental passage here is that in Jn 3, in which Jesus explains the new birth to Nicodemus. No experience is described or de- manded in it which has not ah'eady come before us independently ; the new birth is only a new figure which gives vivid and suggestive expression to a truth which Jesus Himself in the Synoptic record, and the Apostles in their writings, have already ex- pressed in other forms. It may fairly be argued, when we look to the general relation of the dis- courses in the Fourth Gospel to the indisputable words of Jesus, that the real text of this discourse is Mt 18^. The Evangelist is guided by the Spirit of truth into all the truth of this apparently simple saying (Jn 16i-^) ; he universalizes it, and sets it in the various relations which bring out its meaning ; he shows the necessity of the new birth, the method of it (so far as experience enabled him to do so), and the seat of the power which produced it. But he gives no description of its contents — no analysis of it as an experience — which enables us to put more into it than we put into ' turning and becom- ing as little children,' or into ' dying to sin and living to God,' or into ' putting off the old man and putting on the new.' He does indeed put in the most general form the necessity for the new birth when he says, ' that which is born of the flesh is flesh.' This does not mean that human nature is essentially or totally depraved ; it means that that which is natural is not ipso facto spiritual ; it is not what we get from our fathers and mothers which enables us to appreciate Christ, or to enter God's Kingdom ; it is something which we can only get from God. This is the same truth which St. Paul teaches in 1 Co 15''5ff- ' That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and after- ward that which is spiritual.' The birth by which man enters into relations with the natural world has an analogue in the experience by which he enters into relations with the spiritual world. It, too, is a birth — which is variously described as a second birth, or a birth from above, a being born of God, or of tlie Spirit, or of water and spirit. It cannot be denied that in generalizing the necessity for the second birth, the Evangelist passes from the safe and intelligible moral ground of Mt 18^ into a more metaphysical region (as St. Paul also does in 1 Co ir)4-5ff-) ; but in the circumstances this is not of much consequence. What St. Paul means by t6