p. 3 | The New Birth

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Mar 15, 1906

The New Birth

No plainer words were ever spoken by the Author of our Christianity than those which he addressed to Nicodemus on the occasion of that night interview: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God. . . . Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

A new birth—newness of life—a new creature—all things must become new to him who either sees or enters the kingdom of God. And this experience is fundamental and absolutely essential. Nothing can take the place of it. There is no exception to it. The king on his throne and the humblest peasant over whom he rules must enter the kingdom of God by the same door. The wisest philosopher and the Hottentot must have the same experience of regeneration in order to gain admission to the heavenly kingdom. Worldly rank does not rise so high as to bridge the distance between the earthly and the heavenly. Education can not develop the new life. Wealth can not purchase spiritual faculties. Except a man be born again, he can neither see nor enter the kingdom of God.

In its pride of self-sufficiency the human heart dislikes to acknowledge these truths, and seeks some way to avoid them. Speculative science and human philosophy have busied themselves in devising some other way into the kingdom, and the evolutionary conception of the universe as applied to religion is the result. That scientific explanation of the origin of things which denies special creation and substitutes development for it, thus seeking in the natural world to obliterate any line of demarcation between the different kingdoms, and especially the different orders of being in the animal kingdom, has now been applied to connect the natural and the spiritual so that a natural man can become a spiritual man by the process of development. Thus, according to this modern theory of transformation, we are not dependent upon a special act of the creative power of God by which we are translated “into the kingdom of his dear Son,” and the plain teaching of Jesus is set aside as unfitted to this advanced age.

Nevertheless it is a truth which should be widely emphasized that he who would see or enter the kingdom of God must be born again. And nature, when rightly interpreted, adds her testimony to the soundness of this teaching. The impassable barrier which has been established between the inorganic and organic kingdoms, so that there is no power in the inorganic of itself to cross this line of demarcation, is constantly proclaiming the fact that an equally impassable barrier exists between the natural and the spiritual realm, so that there is no power in the natural of itself to lift itself into the sphere of the spiritual. This has been well stated by an able writer from whose chapter upon this subject we quote the following paragraphs:—

Translating from the language of science into that of religion, the theory of spontaneous generation is simply that a man may become gradually better and better until, in course of the process, he reaches that quantity of religious nature

known as spiritual life. This life is not something added ab extra to the natural man; it is the normal and appropriate development of the natural man. Biogenesis opposes to this the whole doctrine of regeneration. The spiritual life is the gift of the living Spirit. The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man. He is a new creation born from above. As we well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living until, in course of the process, it reaches vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain the eternal life . . . .

Of the multitudes who confess Christianity at this hour, how many have clear in their minds the cardinal distinction established by its Founder between “born of the flesh” and “born of the Spirit”? By how many teachers of Christianity even is not this fundamental postulate persistently ignored? A thousand modern pulpits every seventh day are preaching the doctrine of spontaneous generation. The finest and best of recent poetry is colored with this same error. Spontaneous generation is the leading theology of the modern religious or irreligious novel; and much of the most serious and cultured writing of the day devotes itself to earnest preaching of this impossible gospel. The current conception of the Christian religion, in short,—the conception which is held not only popularly, but by men of culture,—is founded upon a view of its origin which, if it were true, would render the whole scheme abortive.

Let us first place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two great kingdoms of nature, the inorganic and organic, as these now stand in the light of the law of biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there is no spontaneous generation of life?—It is meant that the passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal is hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked off from the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of life. Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality; without this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere forever. It is a very mysterious law which guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in nature more worth pondering for its strangeness, it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the law of biogenesis, and denied forever the possibility of resurrection within itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in nature, that science has long and urgently sought to obliterate it. Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of evolution with such stern persistency that the assaults upon this law for number and thoroughness have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test. Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical laws may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for the development of the organic. But of the point where they meet, of that strange borderland between the dead and the living, science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands of nature, but reserved a point at the genesis of life for his direct appearing.

The power of the analogy, for which we are laying the foundations, to seize and impress the mind, will largely depend on the vividness with which one realizes the gulf which nature places between the living and the dead. . . . If, as Pascal says, nature is an image of grace; if the things that are seen are in any sense the images of the unseen, there must lie in this great gulf fixed, this most unique and startling of all natural phenomena, a meaning of peculiar moment.

Where now in the spiritual spheres shall we meet a companion phenomenon to this? What in the unseen shall be likened to this dividing line? or where in human experience is another barrier which never can be crossed?

There is such a barrier. In the dim but not inadequate vision of the spiritual world presented in the Word of God, the first thing that strikes the eye is a great gulf fixed. The passage from the natural world to the spiritual world is hermetically sealed on the natural side. The door from the inorganic to the organic is shut, no mineral can open it; so the door from the natural to the spiritual is shut, and no man can open it. This world of natural men is staked off from the spiritual world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No organic change, no modification of environment, no mental energy, no moral effort, no evolution of character, no progress of civilization, can endow any single human soul with the attribute of spiritual life. The spiritual world is guarded from the world next in order beneath it by a law of biogenesis—except a man be born again . . . except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter the kingdom of God.

It is not said, in this enunciation of the law, that if the condition be not fulfilled, the natural man will not enter the kingdom of God. The word is can not. For the exclusion of the spiritually inorganic from the kingdom of the spiritually organic is not arbitrary. Nor is the natural man refused admission on unexplained grounds. His admission is a scientific impossibility. Except a mineral be born ‘from above’—from the kingdom just above it—it can not enter the kingdom just above it. And except a man be born ‘from above,’ by the same law, he can not enter the kingdom just above him. There being no passage from one kingdom to another, whether from inorganic to organic or from organic to spiritual, the intervention of life is a scientific necessity if a stone or a plant or an animal or a man is to pass from a lower to a higher sphere. The plant stretches down to the dead world beneath it, touches its minerals and gases with its mystery of life, and brings them up ennobled and transformed to the living sphere. The breath of God, blowing where it listeth, touches with its mystery of life the dead souls of men, bears them across the bridgeless gulf between the natural and the spiritual, between the spiritually in- organic and the spiritually organic, endows them with its own high qualities, and develops within them these new and secret faculties, by which those who are born again are said to see the kingdom of God. . . .

The difference between the spiritual man and the natural man is not a difference of development, but of generation. It is a distinction of quality, not of quantity. A man can not rise by any natural development from “morality touched by emotion,” to “morality touched by life.” . . . It is an old-fashioned theology which divides the world in this way—which speaks of men as living and dead, lost and saved—a stern theology all but fallen into disuse. This difference between the living and the dead in souls is so unproved by casual observation, so impalpable in itself, so startling as a doctrine, that schools of culture have ridiculed or denied the grim distinction. Nevertheless the grim distinction must be retained.

Evolutionary religion is contrary to both revelation and nature. Those who refuse the blessing of the new birth will never see the kingdom of God. ‘Ye must be born again.’