In the early seventies, the Watergate scandal shocked the nation. One of the men involved was Chuck Colson, who later pled guilty and served time in federal prison. During this season, Colson came to faith in Jesus and converted to evangelical Christianity. In 1976, Colson published Born Again, which chronicles the events leading to his conversion and explains his radical life change. The book was an instant bestseller, making Colson one of the most influential evangelical leaders of his era.

Also in 1976, a dark-horse candidate from Georgia named Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination, and then narrowly won the general election. Carter was barely known nationally, so his victory garnered even more attention. During his campaign, Carter professed to be a “born-again Christian.” Most political pundits and media outlets had no idea what that meant.

As the phrase grew in the public consciousness, many Americans assumed that born-again Christianity was a new Christian sect. However, as the media and pollsters investigated, they discovered the phrase “born again” was simply used by ordinary evangelical Christians to describe the supernatural transformation that people experience when they convert to Christianity.

Evangelical Christianity was certainly not new, but when the phrase entered mainstream America, it boosted evangelicalism’s profile. Evangelicalism’s enhanced notoriety and influence prompted Newsweek magazine to proclaim that 1976 was “the year of the evangelical.” The next year, world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham published How to Be Born Again. The book helped to reinforce the credibility of the phrase “born again” and, more importantly, it sent the message that genuine biblical Christianity was synonymous with “born-again Christianity.”

Modern or Ancient?

Some commentators asserted that the emphasis on born-again Christianity was an invention of the modern era. They claimed that the evangelical emphasis on the new birth was absent from most of church history. Evangelicals responded with Scripture.

Jesus said, “I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The born-again experience is also known as regeneration. The apostle Peter asserts that this experience is made possible by the work of Christ (1 Peter 1:3). The apostle Paul also associates the new birth with salvation and the forgiveness of sins (Titus 3:4–7). Passages like these inspire an important question: How could detractors claim that born-again Christianity was a product of the modern era when the concept of the new birth so clearly comes from Scripture?

Most detractors would certainly agree that the concept of the new birth is indeed in the Bible, but they would also assert that the Christians of previous eras had a different understanding of the new birth than modern evangelicals do. They would argue that, for the bulk of church history, the moment of new birth was associated with infant baptism. In contrast, evangelicals associate the new birth with repentance and personal faith in Christ. Evangelicals believe that people are born again when they are converted to Christ.

New Birth in Church History

It’s true that new birth was associated with infant baptism for much of history. It’s not true, however, that everyone in the early church taught the new birth that way.

In fact, several influential early-church writers believed that the born-again experience was associated with repentance, confession, and salvific faith. This includes the Epistle of Barnabas, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and Hilary of Poitiers (see Gregg Allison, Historical Theology, 649–67). However, as infant baptism grew in popularity during the third and fourth centuries, the vital association between regeneration and faith was greatly de-emphasized. Many Christians during the Middle Ages presumed that they had already experienced regeneration as infants at their baptisms. Therefore, it seemed unnecessary to preach about the new birth in adulthood.

REFORMATION

The Protestant Reformation brought a renewed focus on individual people believing the gospel, not merely participating in religious duties. The German equivalent of the term evangelical was coined by Martin Luther to describe the Protestant churches that exhorted their congregants to exhibit genuine faith in the evangel (the gospel).

The evangelical emphasis upon the new birth was later greatly promoted by Johann Arndt, a Lutheran theologian who studied under Philip Melanchthon. In the early 1600s, Arndt penned True Christianity, which greatly emphasized the new birth and piety. The book was circulated across Europe extensively for more than a hundred years and was tremendously influential on many future preachers, including John Wesley and George Whitefield.

GREAT AWAKENINGS

In the mid-eighteenth century, a series of powerful revivals swept through America, led by the preaching of men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Their preaching emphasized the new birth and called people to repentance. These revivals gave birth to American evangelicalism, which would be an influential force in American society throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, a fracture emerged among professing evangelicals between modernists and fundamentalists. The modernists denied Christian orthodoxy and sought to reinvent Christianity in the light of modern science. The fundamentalists intensified their commitment to Christian orthodoxy, but they also developed a militant posture toward culture. By the 1920s, these two groups were worlds apart.

Birth of a Label

After the modernist-fundamentalist break, the modernists repudiated the evangelical emphasis on the born-again experience, but many fundamentalists doubled down on its importance. They began describing themselves as “born-again Christians.” While the phrase would not enter the mainstream for several more decades, it gained momentum within some conservative Protestant circles during the thirties and forties.

In the 1950s, a young evangelist named Bill Bright founded Campus Crusade for Christ, which became the most influential campus evangelism ministry in the nation. Bright embraced the label “born-again Christian,” and by the early sixties, the new converts in his ministry were embracing the label too.

Another notable segment of evangelicals that embraced the label were the young adults being converted to Christ as part of the Jesus People movement of the late sixties. Then, Billy Graham began using the phrase “born again” extensively. Graham had been preaching since the 1940s, and he would occasionally use the phrase, but in the 1960s the born-again vernacular became much more prominent in Graham’s ministry. The events of the sixties put the phrase “born again” on the radar of nearly every American Christian. And the events of 1976 then put the phrase on the radar of every American.

Born-Again Appropriation

Another interesting phrase that entered the lexicon, in time, was “born-again Catholic.” Being born again had typically been a marker of evangelical Protestantism, but soon even Catholics began reporting born-again experiences.

For various reasons, however, these people wanted to remain within their Catholic tradition. The number of self-proclaimed “born-again Catholics” has been modest since the 1960s, but the number nearly doubled from 2004 to 2016 (see Samuel Perry and Cyrus Schleifer’s “Understanding the Rise of Born-Again Catholics in the United States”). While it may appear that a genuinely born-again person can remain a devout member of the Catholic Church, there are some serious warnings to consider.

Also, by the late 1970s, the phrase “born-again” was being used (and misused) by Americans to describe any transformational experience, even if the experience was not directly related to Christ and Christianity. The phrase was so frequently used that when Bob Dylan described his own conversion to evangelical Christianity, he was reluctant to use the phrase “born again” because it was so “overused” (“John Lennon’s Born-Again Phase”). One prominent example of this was John Lennon calling himself a “born-again pagan.”

Fading Label, Crucial Doctrine

What, then, is a born-again Christian? Born-again Christians are those who believe the gospel, and so put faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, and have experienced the supernatural transformation often called regeneration. They have experienced a conversion from spiritual death to spiritual life. John Wesley described this experience as the “thorough change of heart and life from sin to holiness” (quoted in Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical?, 4).

This doctrine of the new birth took center stage in preaching among evangelicals and conservative Protestants in the modern era. This emphasis was not merely semantics. It inspired many to make the new birth essential in their lives and ministries, which in turn profoundly shaped the trajectory of American evangelicalism as it moved into the twenty-first century.

Over the last twenty years, the phrase has faded in popularity somewhat, but the doctrine of the new birth remains a crucial element of American evangelicalism’s history and legacy. Extra labels will come and go, but the doctrine — and more importantly, the experience, if genuine — will remain.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14991835/can-imperfect-christians-please-the-lord

As discussion about women in the church lingers online and in the minds of congregants, I wonder if some sisters today feel that their churches debate their proper callings more than they delight in them as one of God’s best gifts. The conversations about what women can and cannot do in the context of the church are poignant in this particular moment. Can they preach, teach, or lead a co-ed Bible study? These conversations matter because the Scriptures speak to them. Yet the church’s public discourse about women, when healthy, is marked most of all by celebrations of women as faithful saints.

Women across continents and denominations report their local-church participation often leaves them feeling overlooked and undervalued. What a sad reality that our mothers and daughters often feel that Christ’s very own bride holds them at arm’s length, even if unintentionally.

We are right to aim for theological precision in all matters, including the callings of men and women in the church. But we would also do well to ask, Does the way we talk about women reflect the way the Scriptures celebrate them?

Introducing Eve

Recall man’s first words in Scripture. After God created the world and everything in it, the narrative sings with the rhythm, “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). But then suddenly, God declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). And so, God makes the woman — the helper fit for the man. And as a father would usher the bride to her expectant husband, so God “brought [the woman] to the man” (Genesis 2:22).

“Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.”

What follows are the first recorded sentences from human lips in Scripture. Upon seeing the woman, Adam explodes with delight: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.

At that moment, the woman hadn’t yet done anything except exist by the power of God. Yet her very existence leads Adam to rejoice. Without any further instruction, he understands that the woman is an extraordinary gift to him. He had known life in God’s world apart from her, and, once with her, he immediately loves her and knows how essential she is to God’s mandate that humans should take dominion and multiply (Genesis 1:28).

Without Eve, Adam cannot fulfill God’s calling. Without the woman, the story stops. In the very good beginning, God puts his wisdom on magnificent display in her creation. And as the story of the world progresses, God puts front and center the essential part women will play in his redemptive plan.

Book of Heroines

The Scriptures brim with narratives that underscore the essential and exalted place women hold in God’s economy. From Rebekah, whose Abraham-like faith compelled her to leave her home for a place and people she did not know (Genesis 24), to Ruth the Moabite widow, whose conversion to Yahweh led her to become part of the Messianic line, the Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.

In the ancient world, women were far more vulnerable than today, in part because they did not enjoy the same legal rights as men. Yet in that very context, Scripture celebrates women by repeatedly placing them in the stream of God’s redemptive plan, where their fidelity to God often throws into relief the disobedience of fallen men. We know many of their names: Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Esther, Elizabeth, and Priscilla. Four women even appear in Christ’s genealogy, including Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary (Matthew 1:5–16).

“The Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.”

Yet there are many others whose names are known only to God: women who received back their dead by resurrection (Hebrews 11:35); the widow of Zarepath, whose son was raised (1 Kings 17:17–24); the industrious godly woman extolled in Proverbs 31; the widow who offered everything (Mark 12:41–44); the sinful woman whose lavish care for Jesus in washing his feet with tears exposed the hypocrisy of the religious elite (Luke 7:36–50); and the Canaanite woman whose faith was answered with her daughter’s healing (Matthew 15:21–28).

Great Commission Women

Unbridled faith in God marks all of these accounts, and continues to encourage believers today. You can’t read your Bible without discerning the honored role God assigns women at every point in his story. Just as God gave Adam a mandate to multiply on the earth, so God gave the church a mission to multiply disciples. And so, just as Adam marveled at God’s creation of the woman, so the Bible teaches us to glorify God for the incredible gift of women who are in Christ.

Our sisters have been wonderfully indispensable to the church’s work of bearing witness to Christ and making disciples. God used Priscilla to sharpen and instruct the preacher Apollos in the way of God (Acts 18:24–26). Apart from the fervent prayers and godly life of Monica, the church may not enjoy the treasures of her son, Augustine.

Who can know how much eternal fruit the sacrificial labors of Lottie Moon and Gladys Aylward bore through their long ministries in China? Or through Amy Carmichael’s lifelong ministry in India?

Of course, we don’t just praise the Christian sisters whom we know by name. There are countless names we have not yet heard whom we will honor in the age to come. They are steadfast mothers and wives who pray down heaven while giving themselves to their family from dawn to dusk and even through the darkest nights. They are single women who joyfully content themselves in God while the world constantly tempts them to believe their faith is folly. My own experience living overseas testifies to the truth that far more young unmarried women cross oceans and borders for the sake of the gospel than men.

Honoring the Women Among Us

In the church, as in the garden, it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In a day in which popular culture has muddled the lines between men and women, Christian men today have an opportunity to give fresh evidence for how much we admire women and value womanhood. Created in God’s wisdom and by his power, the church’s mothers and daughters are not second-class citizens in the church.

God presented the first woman to the first man as a gift, and he continues giving women as blessings to his church today. And just as the woman knew the man’s joy in her immediately, so too it would be fitting for Christian women to regularly hear how much of an asset they are to the church, both locally and globally. Adam could not multiply and take dominion without the woman (Genesis 1:28). And without Christian women, we the church will not be able to fulfill our mission to bear witness and make disciples (Matthew 28:18–20). The whole of the Scriptures and church history bear witness to this fact.

Every day, women advance the mission of the church by demonstrating the matchless worth of Christ. We cannot afford to overlook these sisters in Christ — neither the God of history nor God-in-the-flesh overlooks them.