This post is the second in a series of building blocks. The first building block was focused on Sin and how the origins of that word show a meaning of separation, particularly from God. I also establish the framework that sin is a positional stance based off a decision that mankind made at the very beginning. In this post, we will look at the meaning of repentance, how that is tied to the literal separation established by sin, and what it really means when someone repents. Lastly, we will show why repentance is a onetime event per individual and not a repeating cycle.

There is a lot of variation around the term repentance in both Christian and secular culture. When you look the word up, you get a lot of definitions that focus on sorrow and shame. Oxford Languages say it this way, “To feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one’s wrongdoing or sin”. But “feeling bad” was not the original intention of the word. In fact, it has very little to do with our feelings. So how did we come to this meaning over time? It all starts with the Latin Vulgate.

I am assuming some of you do not know what the Vulgate is or when/why it was created so I will attempt to give a brief explanation. The language of the day during the first century, when the New Testament was written, had been predominantly Greek. As time progressed, Greek was superseded by Latin, and then Latin was eventually replaced by several families of languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, etc. Toward the end of the fourth century, a man by the name of Jerome was commissioned by the current Pope of the church to create a Biblia Vulgata, a “Book of the Common Speech”. In doing so, Jerome translated a collection of texts written in Greek and Vetus Latina (Old Latin) into modern Latin.

In translating the Greek New Testament into Latin, Jerome chose a word that would shape the belief systems of people to this very day. The Latin word chosen was “Paenitentiam”. This word means to be sorry for an offense committed and comes from the Latin Paeniteo, to suffer or endure (which also is the root of Penitence, a religious framework used by some branches of religion within Christianity). This Latin word would eventually move into Old French and add the Old French prefix of “re” to it (meaning to express intensive force) giving us Repentir. This would move on to Middle English as Repent; the form that we see it in today.

The Greek word that Jerome was translating was Metanoia. This Greek word is broken into two parts, Meta and Noein. Meta means “to change” and Noein means to have mental perception. In other words, it is the changing of one’s mind or way of thinking (note that the way we use meta today has shifted overtime taking on different meaning during the early 1900’s). This changing of one’s mind is the real base meaning of “Repentance”, and we will get to how that relates to sin and the physical framework that God has established in a bit.

I cannot be sure why Jerome chose the word he did as it shifts the meaning of the original Greek to a feeling rather than a logical framework. It would not have been just him, as he would have been reflecting the mindset of the church at that time. But how did the church develop this mindset? I believe it has to do with a misunderstanding of 2 Corinthians 7:9-10 which says, “As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. (ESV)”

On the surface, it looks like the belief that was established was an understanding that a feeling of grief is required in order to have metanoia (change of mind/repentance). But this is a logical fallacy called “Affirming the Consequent” which means you assume the truth (necessary occurrence) of a conditional statement based off the truth (occurrence) of the resultant. It is ok to see that godly grief (grief that comes from seeing how you have been separated from God) can lead someone to metanoia, but it is not ok to assume that grief must happen in order to produce metanoia. The thought that you must feel sorrow in order to be really repentant has been cemented into modern understanding of repentance through the Latin word choice of Jerome and this has muddied what it really means to have repentance.

For us to have a clean definition of metanoia, we need to understand what we are changing our mind from and what we are changing it to. To use a Christianized phrase, “we turn away from our sins.” From our definition of Sin, we established that sin was a separation from God, and we personally sin when we choose something other than God. Whether you admit it to yourself or not, we are all sinners prior to repentance, for all humanity falls short of the perfection that God establishes. There is a Christian doctrine called “Original Sin” (which maybe we will dig into some day) that pulls together the ideology that, no matter what, you are born sinful and establishes its premise based on Psalm 51:5 and Romans 5:12-21. But, to make it simpler, if you look at what we said happened when sin entered the word, you realize that humanity is missing its spirit (its connection to God) and the creation itself in all it’s physicality has been put into a state of sub-perfection.

Since we were born and live in a sub-perfect world that is separated from God and there is nothing we can do on our side to reinstate the perfection God intended, we must turn toward God and allow Him to be the one that brings his creation back into perfection. So, when we repent, we are changing our mind (metanoia) to no longer pursue ourselves and what we deem to be good and evil, but rather to realign ourselves with God and his intended purpose. When God’s creation was established, it was established with a purpose and in perfection. He has not changed what his original purpose for man was (a topic for another time but in short Genesis 1:26-28) and he will eventually return all of his creation to perfection. This means that we our metanoia is to fall inline with his original purpose and look forward to the reestablishment of his perfect creation.

Something to keep in mind is that when we refer to the things created by God and God himself, we can speak in absolutes. This means that when we choose repentance to God, we are doing it in a way that is absolute. This strong tone of language also comes from how the term was used prior to it being implemented into the Christian vernacular. The term was originally used as a military term that is equivalent to our modern day “about-face” command. With this, when we repent, we are essentially saying that we are taking allegiance to God.

Knowing that the term repentance is dealing in the absolutes of God, we can also establish that repentance is a onetime event in a Christians life. This is a really hard point for some because they have rooted their definition of sin and repentance in the false ideology that sinning is doing something that God has said not to do and then repenting for that said thing by feeling bad about it. They will keep on going through this cycle over and over because our human body and this world are still established in a system that has been altered away from perfection. And, because we can consider repentance an absolute, if you believe you have to repent over and over then you may have never truly metanoia’ed and changed allegiances in the first place but rather have only been convicted of your short comings to the perfection of God.

The cycle of repenting over and over is also barrowed from the generational view of the Jewish people’s timeline. They had their ups and downs from generation to generation and even person to person. But the sacrificial system of getting right with God was established for the Jewish people only (and those who repented toward Judaism). This is not the framework that Christianity operates within. The call to repentance for a Christian is not just realigning with God but also placing Faith (the word we will look at in our next building block) in Jesus as well.

In conclusion, when we repent, we are acknowledging that God is perfect in Himself and what He intended for his creation. We acknowledge that we are currently living in a deviated form of that perfection due to the choice that man had made, separating him from God. And finally, we are saying that we will continue to move forward with our focus on the perfection of God and no longer pursue for ourselves the things that we deem to be good and evil. But… all of this still falls to futility if we do not also have faith, which we will cover next time.

• Building Block 1: We Overcomplicate Sin
• Building Block 2: Repentance, It’s Not About Feeling Bad
• Building Block 3: The Realignment of Faith
• Building Block 4: How Then Shall We Live
• Building Block 5: In The End, We Begin