Conclusions

As we have seen throughout this work, from the beginning of the Christian era, believers unanimously understood that God brings about the new birth through the sacrament of baptism. It was mainly after the Protestant Reformation and the advent of private interpretation of the Bible that different and even contradictory understandings began to emerge.

Could it be that all of Christendom misunderstood Jesus’ words for sixteen centuries? Or did Protestantism manage to grasp something that had been hidden from its predecessors in faith?

Personally, I believe that Christ established an infallible Church, the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Timothy 3:15), the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13). A Church likened to a mustard seed (Matthew 13:31), to yeast (Matthew 13:33), prophesied to be a light to the nations and tasked with bringing salvation to the ends of the earth (Isaiah 49:6; Acts 13:46-48). I believe in a Church to which Christ promised the Holy Spirit to guide it into all truth (John 16:13), one against which the gates of hell would not prevail (Matthew 16:19), and to which God declared He would never remove the words from its mouth, nor from the mouths of its children, now and forever (Isaiah 59:20-21).

I cannot believe in a Christ who is powerless, founding a Church that starts to corrupt the next day and fails to maintain the integrity of its message, leaving the world in darkness for 1,500 years, only to rely on a man who would elevate his own doctrine above that of the apostles, resulting in the greatest division ever seen among Christians.

The understanding of the New Birth is just one of countless topics on which Protestantism has been unable to reach agreement because it contains within itself the seed of all errors and heresies. I stand by the faith of the Church, the Catholic faith.