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— a becoming wise again. In the New Testament, however, its meaning is deepened, and it
denotes primarily a change of mind, taking a wiser view of the past, including regret for the ill
then done, and leading to a change of life for the better. Here the element of resipiscentia is
present. Walden in his work on The Great Meaning of Metanoia comes to the conclusion that it
conveys the idea of “a general change of mind, which becomes in its fullest development an
intellectual and moral regeneration.”[p. 107.] While maintaining that the word denotes
primarily a change of mind, we should not lose sight of the fact that its meaning is not limited
to the intellectual, theoretical consciousness, but also includes the moral consciousness, the
conscience. Both the mind and the conscience are defiled, Tit. 1:15, and when a person’s nous
is changed, he not only receives new knowledge, but the direction of his conscious life, its
moral quality, is also changed. To become more particular, the change indicated by his word
has reference, (1) to the intellectual life, II Tim. 2:25, to a better knowledge of God and His
truth, and a saving acceptance of it (identical with the action of faith); (2) to the conscious
volitional life, Acts 8:22, to a turning from self to God (thus again including an action of faith);
and (3) to the emotional life, in so far as this change is accompanied with godly sorrow, II Cor.
7:10, and opens new fields of enjoyment for the sinner. In all these respects metanoia includes
a conscious opposition to the former condition. This is an essential element in it, and therefore
deserves careful attention. To be converted, is not merely to pass from one conscious direction
to another, but to do it with a clearly perceived aversion to the former direction. In other words
metanoia has not only a positive but also a negative side; it looks backward as well as forward.
The converted person becomes conscious of his ignorance and error, his wilfulness and folly.
His conversion includes both faith and repentance. Sad to say, the Church gradually lost sight of
the original meaning of metanoia. In Latin theology Lactantius rendered it “resipiscentia,” a
becoming-wise-again, as if the word were derived from meta and anoia, and denoted a return
from madness or folly. The majority of Latin writers, however, preferred to render it
“poenitentia,” a word that denotes the sorrow and regret which follows when one has made a
mistake or has committed an error of any kind. This word passed into the Vulgate as the
rendering of metanoia, and, under the influence of the Vulgate, the English translators
rendered the Greek word by “repentance,” thus stressing the emotional element and making
metanoia equivalent to metameleia. In some cases the deterioration went even farther. The
Roman Catholic Church externalized the idea of repentance in its sacrament of penance so that
the metanoeite of the Greek Testament (Matt. 3:2) became poenitentiam agite, — “do
penance,” in the Latin Version.
b. Epistrophe (verbal form, epistrepho).
This word is next in importance to metanoia. While in
the Septuagint metanoia is one of the renderings of nacham, the words epistrophe and
epistrepho serve to render the Hebrew words teshubhah and shubh. They are constantly used
in the sense of turning again, or turning back. The Greek words must be read in the light of the