Comments

• jay_emm Kerygmania Host

  March 25

  Jesus and Nicodemus was definitely the first thing that came to mind.
  When I checked the verses in the NLT, it even has born again (which would have made me more likely to lock into that even I hadn't anyway).
  
  The writer rockets through his metaphors. And many of them are not unique.
  
  I guess there's 4 and a bit options:
  'Peter'* just had a similar idea
  'Peter' is echoing John consciousnessly.
  (Or even "Peter"** was first)
  Peter*** is directly thinking of the actual challenge of Jesus.
  There's an old testament or Jewish tradition all three refer to.
  
  All seem plausible to me, at first sight.
  
  *The basic principle works with the writer being Peter, and works with anonymous writer. You decide.
  ** Works better with the writer not being Peter.
  *** Works better with the writer being Peter
  
  --
  In this passage there definitely seems a theme if a new start (more so than I. John). Leaning from scratch. Craving spiritual milk.
  
  
• Gamma Gamaliel Shipmate

  March 26

  Back in my evangelical days I used to wonder how St Ignatius of Antioch could have claimed to have followed Christ for 80-odd years or however long it was.
  
  How old would he have been when he was 'born again.'
  
  It now looks to me that the early Church believed in 'baptismal regeneration'.
  
  These days, though, I tend not to get too hung up on the precise 'point' when someone is 'regenerated' or 'converted' or 'born again' or whatever term we use to describe it.
  
  'By their fruits ye shall know them.'
  
  And, 'The Lord knows who are his.'
  
  We are all work in progress.
  
  I hasten to add that I wouldn't consider Salvationists and others who don't practice baptism as not being Christians.
  
  But I think it's pretty clear from what I understand of the Patristic witness that baptism was seen as regenerative back in the early days.
• Lamb Chopped Shipmate

  March 26

  I suspect you mean Polycarp--the one who said, "Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior?" And yes, I agree that he's referring to the time since his almost certainly (infant) baptism.
• Gramps49 Shipmate

  1:01AM

  One thing that strikes me is while we modern people talk about our personal relationship with Christ, Peter is talking about how our spiritual rebirth happens in a new community.
• Gamma Gamaliel Shipmate

  1:45PM

  Lamb Chopped wrote: »

  I suspect you mean Polycarp--the one who said, "Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior?" And yes, I agree that he's referring to the time since his almost certainly (infant) baptism.

  
  Whoops! Yes, it was Polycarp I had in mind.
  
  I remember my mind doing somersaults when I first read that back in my credo-baptist days.
  
  Not that I object to credo-baptism for people who haven't already been baptised.
  
  But that's another issue and one well-worn on these boards.
  
  @Gramps49 yes, indeed although the communal aspect doesn't necessarily obviate the personal and the individual.
  
  It's another of these both/and things. We are baptised or initiated in community - in whatever way that happens in our respective traditions, but we have to 'own' our faith for ourselves.
  
  'God has no grandchildren.'
  
  
• Gramps49 Shipmate

  4:00PM

  @Gamma Gamaliel You wrote
  

  It's another of these both/and things. We are baptised or initiated in community - in whatever way that happens in our respective traditions, but we have to 'own' our faith for ourselves.

  
  This sounds balanced, but it quietly smuggles in an assumption that isn't actual in the text or in most historic Christian understandings of community.
  
  The statement implies that the goal of communal initiation is eventually to arrive at a private, self owned faith. But in 1Peter the new birth is into a people, not into a personal interior state. The community is not the starting point you grow out of--it's the ongoing habitat of faith.
  
  To me, your statement treats community as scaffolding rather than the building.
  
  Second, It assumes “owning your faith” is the mature endpoint
  This is a very modern, Western, post‑Enlightenment idea: maturity = autonomy.
  
  But biblically and historically, maturity is interdependence, not independence. Faith is something we practice together, not something we possess privately. It risks turning Christian formation into a self‑help project rather than a shared life.
  
  Third, your statement tries to be both/and, but it still frames the two as separate layers. First the community does something, then the individual must do something to make it real. But, to me, in Scripture and the early church the community's faith and the individual's faith are woven together, not sequential. It suggests that communal belonging is insufficient unless ratified by private experience — which mirrors evangelical conversionism more than Petrine theology.
  
  Maybe this is a healthier understanding:
  
  We are reborn into a community whose shared life shapes our faith, and within that community each person grows into their own mature participation.