beaten with brains: The Eschatology of Being “Born Again”.

Of course, the link shows that there is an Evangelical who takes it seriously, but I mean Evangelical “intellectual leaders” who seem to suffer remarkably like Nicodemus when reading John 3.

Baptism is all over the early part of John’s Gospel. John “the Baptist” [!] is baptizing both before and after, demanding that people come to the Jordan and re-enter (as it were) the Promised Land crossing the same border that Joshua originally crossed.  It is not enough to be a member of the old Israel. Israel is dead. A new Israel is needed. A new birth.

How many Evangelicals act like baptism is completely alien to the context of Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus?

And why not acknowledge that Jesus was confronting a certain people at a certain time?  Did David need to be born again? Did Simeon or Anna?  To treat Jesus’ discussion as a lecture on a point in Jesus’ “ordo salutis” is just painful.  There is no justification for it, but it is simply taken for granted.

Everyone says their theology comes from Scripture, but it commonly turns out that one’s theology are simply a list of demands about what certain passages must mean. John 3 and Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus is one of the worst cases for Evangelicals.  One can only pray for the day when we let the text speak to us, rather than demand it conform to what we want to say.