In his latest book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg writes of seeing the Christian life as a relational and transformational vision that includes both the individual-spiritual-personal and the communal-social-political. In this regard, being born again “is at the very center of the New Testament and the Christian life.” He defines being born again in terms of dying and rising. “It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity – a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in Spirit, in Christ, in God.”

In describing the need of new birth, he tells a story about a three-year-old girl. “She was the firstborn and only child in her family, but now her mother was pregnant again, and the little girl was very excited about having a new brother or sister. Within a few hours of the parents bringing a new baby boy home from the hospital, the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut made her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they realized they could let their daughter do this, and if they heard the slightest indication that anything strange was happening, they could be in the baby’s room in an instant.

“So they let the little girl go into the baby’s room, shut the door, and raced to the intercom listening station. They heard their daughter’s footsteps moving across the baby’s room, imagined her standing over the baby’s crib, and then they heard her saying to her three-day-old brother, ‘Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten.’”

Dr. Borg interprets the story in the light of his understanding of God as the encompassing Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being, as Paul affirms in Acts 17:28. He writes, “The story is both haunting and evocative, for it suggest that we come from God and that when we are very young, we still remember this, still know this. But the process of growing up, of learning about this world, is a process of increasingly forgetting the one from whom we came and in whom we live. The birth and intensification of self-consciousness, of self-awareness, involves a separation from God. The birth of self-consciousness is the birth of the separated self. When this happens, the natural and inevitable result is self-concern. The two go together: the separated self and the self-centered self.”

“Thus, we need to be born again,” he says. “It is the road of return from our exile, the way to recover our true self, the path to beginning to live our lives from the inside out rather than from the outside in, the exodus from our individual and collective selfishness. To be born again involves dying to the false self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to be born into an identity centered in the Spirit, in Christ, in God. It is the process of internal redefinition of the self whereby a real person is born within us.”