In his reflections for the Feast of the Epiphany, His Beatitude Metropolitan Epiphanius touches briefly upon the subject I have examined. I shall mention a passage that might be misunderstood.Thanks to the Epiphany, the true sanctification and divinisation of man becomes possible, when through grace he becomes what God is by nature – Metropolitan Epiphanius.
I quote:
The possibility of such union with God opens up for every person in a way ordained by God, namely, through a second birth, of water and the Spirit, as the Saviour Himself testified in His conversation with Nicodemus:Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above. […] No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit
(John III, 3, 5-6). For man possesses a composite nature – spiritual and bodily. Therefore, the regeneration and renewal of man occurs not only through the action of the Holy Spirit but also through a material substance – water.
End of quote.
The explanation regarding water and the spiritual-bodily nature may evince a false impression concerning the significance of water. Christ Himself says that it is the Spirit that matters for the second birth, for what is born of water is… water(?!)
, – makes no sense. Consequently, water does not hold the same significance as the Spirit; it is auxiliary. As I wrote previously in the work On the Action of Divine Grace (Ukrainian version)
, it is a symbol of the waters of creation, the waters of the Flood, the waters of the Red Sea, of death and life, a symbol of the death of Christ and His Resurrection, Resurrection with Christ, and so forth. It is also an 'agiasma'. Yet, it is not in itself the source of the new person's birth; it constitutes the circumstances
of that birth, of that new life; it is a more manifest revelation of that reality of spiritual birth from the Holy Spirit. One might say that the water in the Sacrament is a new creation
, of which Scripture says: Behold, I make all things new
. Therefore, the expression signifies the calling of every baptised person to become a new creation in Christ. Birth
indicates the inheritance of nature, a word by which Christ expresses the ineffable – the spiritual reality of renewal and salvation – but this word does not mean that we receive the nature of water or the nature of the Spirit; rather, we receive an entry into
their being – one born of the Holy Spirit may be a spiritual creation and may enter the Kingdom of God; likewise, one born of water is called to become a new creation.