What does it mean to be “born again”, to be “born from above”? If you’re an Evangelical or Baptist, you may have already answered that for yourself. However, if you’re a Catholic or a mainline Protestant then the phrase probably isn’t a normal part of your spiritual vocabulary and, indeed, might connote for you a biblical fundamentalism which confuses you.
What does it mean to be “born again”? The expression appears in John’s Gospel in a conversation Jesus has with a man named Nicodemus. Jesus tells him that he “must be born again from above”. Nicodemus takes this literally and protests that it’s impossible for a grown man to re-enter his mother’s womb so as to be born a second time. So Jesus recasts the phrase metaphorically, telling Nicodemus that one’s second birth, unlike the first, is not from the flesh, but “from water and the Spirit”. Well … that doesn’t clarify things much for Nicodemus, or for us.
