Twice-Born versus Born Again

When Dr Pennington came to class, he described that the first three levels of the caste system are higher because the people in those castes have been “twice born”. This immediately spiked my interest because of the connection between his word choice and the Christian tradition of baptism in which one is “born again”. In the Hindu tradition, being in the second stage of life means that one is more pure and comes with permission to be involved in certain activities. We learned in class that in ancient Christian tradition, people who had not been baptized were not allowed into the church and were not allowed to know the rituals of the church. This seems to parallel the Hindu tradition. When we learned about the St Thomas tradition in India, we learned that those Christians were part of the Brahman caste. I wonder whether they had reached this state of purity due to the idea that they too had been born again, if baptism was part of that tradition. I also wonder whether the Hindu idea of being born again may have been influenced by Christian baptism rites. It also stands to reason, in my mind at least, that there would then be conflict when lower caste people claim to be born again as a Christian. This would mean that a person can choose spiritual death and birth during one physical life instead of waiting on physical death for a spiritual second birth. This also comes into conflict with the idea of jati. Christian baptism rites do not require the whole family to convert. In order for a person to change the level of their jati, the change has to occur within the whole group and therefore the whole jati would have to convert to Christianity. While these two terms may seem related, the contextualization based on rite and culture reveal conflict between equating the terms.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Twice-born