Your point on birth is very interesting, the relationship between humans and their origins, and how their origins can somehow change? I. e. a man can live the better half of his life in sin and be born of the devil yet convert and alter his roots. The "birth" aligns with the conversion. The man's nature resituates.
What does it say about a human when he is created with the ability to change where he comes from, so-to-speak; and to what extent can he change it? Like Dr Reynolds said, we are all created in the image of God, we all come from God and carry some spark of the divine. At the conceptual stage we are good creatures but turn rotten. And if evil is merely a perversion of good, then this rotten nature is, most simply, a perversion of man's "God-birthed" nature.
That seems a rather sad statement, that man's nature is entirely unnatural.
Does 1 John say that that "unnatural nature" can change before death? It would be lovely (and seems supported by the saint) if the human were able to be refined before his body and soul are separated. But how does divine fatherhood play into this? What of the motherhood depicted in Revelation 12 between the Mother of God/the Church, and her children?
Are we born as children of God and then, at some undetermined age, affirm or deny our parentage?
What would this teaching say about the Calvinist theory of complete depravity - that humans are, for their part, utterly incapable of doing any good meriting divine love?
And what of St John's Revelation? If we are at our births the children of God, then at what point do we become the children of the woman figure depicted in chapter 12? Are these two different processes?
Pardon me if I am scatterbrained but saints are confusing.
-Christian
