George MacDonald Issue 86 | 2005 Purchase this issue

ARTICLE TOOLS

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"Are you born again?" Bill Moyers asked me in 1976 for a television program on a term that most Americans were first learning. My answer: "Yes." When? February 26, 1928. Moyers, "You don't look old enough for that early date?" He was thinking Baptistically; I was talking about my baptism at three weeks of age. "And that does it for life?" he asked. I answered, "'Yes' and 'no.' I was also 'born again' this morning."

This plunge to the heart of Luther's theology summarizes my changed life. These lines in his Small Catechism hit me forcefully when I was in my twenties: "In the morning, as soon as you get out of bed, you are to make the sign of the holy cross and say: 'God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit watch over me. Amen." Further directions follow: say the Apostles Creed, pray the Lord's Prayer. … Then "you are to go to your work joyfully."

Those who come to baptism at the age of personal accountability will have other ways to greet each day, and can have analogous experiences as children of God. For Luther, baptism "signifies that the old creature in us … is to be drowned and die through daily … repentance, and … that daily a new person is to come forth and arise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever." Luther cited Romans 6:4, and added his own accent on daily, as I have done with italics here.

Early on, the brunt of this call by Luther to be born again daily and his citation of Romans 6 did not shake or shape me. Nurtured in a home where this way of life was taken for granted; daydreaming through an overly scholastic Lutheran pre-theological school, I later understood Luther's "tower experience" of grace from reading Paul's epistles. This came suddenly in 1947 in seminary studies under passionate "neo-Lutheran" ...