Born Again

A conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3 is where the popular phrase "born again" originates, at least in its Christian usage.  According to Jesus, this second birth is a requirement to enter the so-called "kingdom of heaven."  The concept of this transformative experience of becoming born again actually has more aspects to be discovered than most people ever hint at realizing.  On one hand, it is an integral part of New Testament soteriology; on the other hand, at the same time, no being that cannot see into the minds of others can see how genuine their transformation is and no spiritual transformation proves that a particular religion is true or even likely to be true.

Still, this process of transformation is so thorough and so penetrating that it is as if a person has been born a second time.  Old, flawed characteristics of a person's psyche can be replaced by morally and intellectually healed characteristics.  As 2 Corinthians 5:17 describes a sincere Christian, "the old is gone, the new has come!"  The extent of this change is both of fairly high internal importance within Christianity and yet almost wholly irrelevant to assessing which parts of Christianity (actual Christianity, not what traditions and hearsay pretend like it is) are provably true or probable--except when it comes to one specific point.

What this means and does not mean might seem paradoxical at first, but the nuance of it, despite how it is misunderstood in one way or another by most people inside or outside the church, is rather simple.  Even though a personal experience of psychological and spiritual transformation could never prove the truth of any specific religion to either others or to oneself, rendering experiences like this epistemologically useless and useful for nothing at all but sheer subjective motivation to reflect on philosophy, it is nonetheless true that Christianity could not be true unless it is genuinely capable of triggering a grand change within a person.  Both of these facts are true at once.

As is the case with thorough rationalism, it is impossible for Christianity to not transform a person's life if it is sincerely embraced.  The ramifications of Christianity do not permit someone who truly commits himself or herself to remain unchanged by the worldview they profess.  Again, that someone is deeply transformed by Christianity does not mean anything other than the handful of philosophical ideas in the Bible that are logically provable and that must be true by necessity (like the basic existence of an uncaused cause) are correct, and it does not make Christianity true as a whole.  It just means that at least the parts of the Bible that describe the saved as undergoing a deep personal change are not contradicted by people's actual lives.

Only a fool would believe even after thoroughly seeking reason that any ideology is proven true in full just because someone who claims to adhere to it has displayed signs of change.  This much is true no matter what the Bible says--not that the Bible conflicts with this in the slightest way.  At the same time, there are verses in the Bible which clearly state that the ideas therein, if true, can renovate a person from the inside out, and it would also be folly to think that this kind of doctrine has no relevance to the epistemology of Christian apologetics.  It does have something to do with what would be true about genuine Christians if Christianity is indeed correct.