The language of new birth has been gradually cut loose from its natural setting in the neighborhood of the coming new age of God. It thus lost its connections with the convert’s needs to see himself or herself as an agent of the kingdom of God, called by a new birth to participate in the new creation and inspired by the Holy Spirit. It has cemented into patterns of morality that often neglect the weightier matters of the law and that focus on the peccadillos of individual, personal behavior. In some hands it has been very skillfully used to undergird the fortunes of the free-market economy, the fortunes of this or that nation, and the election of conservative politicians. Born-again politics is the ultimate secularization and prostitution of this fragment of the language of Zion and a perfect example of the degeneration of the concept.
William Abaham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 122-123.
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