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u-turn signAt one time a constant visitor to my last church was an evangelist and his young family, when he did not have a speaking engagement. He was what we called in the Salvation Army a “real trophy of grace.” I had read his life story of crime, including armed robbery from state-owned betting shops. After being incarcerated for a time, he found the Lord and became a well-known evangelist in Australia.

He said me after one service that I made it hard for an evangelist to reap a harvest of souls, because I didn’t leave the people with a sense of conviction. And he was right, as John 16:8 tells me that the the work of the Holy Spirit, not me, is “to reprove the world of sin,” and in addition, I don’t subscribe to the common theology of repentance.

I had known, probably even before my ministerial training, that the word so often translated “repentance” is the Greek word “metanoia,” being a combination of “meta,” after, and “noia,” the mind. This is no secret revelation to the evangelical world.

In Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon (1885) it is defined as “to change one’s mind.” In the Keyword Concordance it is given as “simply a mental change.” Vine’s Expository Dictionary (1940) says the verb from means “literally to perceive afterwards,” that is, upon reflection to change your thinking; to reconsider is part of the process. Tertullian, an early church scholar, wrote in 198 A.D. that “In Greek, metanoia is not a confession of sin, but a change of mind.”

The problem in translation is to find the right English word, and the one most commonly used is the word “repent” which comes through Old French and Middle English to a Latin root “poen” meaning “penance.” In the introduction to the Mirror Bible, Francois du Toit states, “Then they added the ‘re’ to get even more mileage out of sin consciousness: Re-penance. This gross deception led to the perverted doctrines of indulgences, where naive, ignorant people were led to believe that they needed to purchase favor from an angry god. Most cathedrals as well as many ministries were funded with this guilt money.

“But despite this the Latin fathers begin to translate the word as ‘do penance’ following the Roman Catholic teaching on doing penance in order to win God’s favor. In 1430, Lorenzo Valla, a Catholic theologian, began a critical study of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and Valla pointed out many mistakes that Jerome had made.  Sadly, the ‘Vulgate-Only’ crowd of Valla’s day forced him to renounce many of the changes that he noted needed changing in the Vulgate including the poor translation of metanoia. The business of religion desperately needs paying and returning customers. Jesus was crucified for this reason; the entire system of keeping people dependent on their hierarchy was challenged and condemned by him” (Mirror Bible).

Paul before King Agrippa in Acts 26:20 declares, “I started preaching this life-change –this radical turn to God and everything it meant in everyday life — right there in Damascus, went on to Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside, and from there to the whole world” (Message Bible). “The full biblical definition of repentance is a change of mind that results in a change of action” (S. Michael Houdmann, gotquestions.org). Both Luther and Calvin wished to remove the concept of penance from the meaning of repentance.

It is hard to find an English translation that does not use the word “repent.” One is known simply as God’s Word and gives this paraphrase of Acts 26:20 — “Both groups were expected to change the way they thought and acted and to turn to God. I told them to do things that prove they had changed their lives.”

Those who do not know Jesus as their Savior should make a start in the right direction by reconsidering their thinking about him, but it needs the second step of turning to God before it meets the Word’s standard on becoming a New Creation.

Those who are born again also need to reconsider what they think about Jesus. For the apostle Paul, it took a revelation from God before he changed his thinking. “The gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of

[from] Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:11a,12 ESV). — Peter Wade