Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a parallel universe from others. I wrote this article months ago, but had not yet scheduled it for publication. Then, just yesterday, I read Bruce Charlton’s “Necessity does not obviate the requirement for repentance” and I once again got that weird feeling. He wrote:

As we will see below, what is especially disorienting about this is that Charlton’s theology is deeply based on the 4th Gospel, the Gospel of John. You’ll see why it is so disorienting shortly.

In our 13-part series “On Forgiveness” earlier this year, we discussed how faith—not repentance—led to forgiveness. But I wanted to discuss repentance in more detail, but many Christians are simply unaware how the Bible treats the topic compared to what they have learned about in their churches and from other Christians. Even non-traditional Christians—like Charlton—are still writing about repentance!

The New Testament uses two words to refer to repentance in the New Testament, the verb metanoeó (μετανοέω) and the noun metanoia (μετάνοια). Here I will introduce the idea of repentance in the New Testament.

I had originally wanted make a series out of this topic by examining the each use of the words in their contexts, but I no longer want to hold up this post. I may, in the future, revisit this topic. Let me know in the comments if a follow-up series would interest you.

Review

It’s been a while, so before we begin, let’s have a quick review of the last time we discussed repentance in “On Forgiveness, Part 12.”

Consider rereading Part 5, which adds substantial context to what follows.

Usage

In the New Testament, the verb form of repentance is used 34 times and the noun form is used 22 times, for a total of 56 total references to repentance. This may seem like a lot, but it really isn’t. We will illustrate this in five different ways.

First, let’s look at the distribution for how repentance is used.

Here is a histogram of that same data:

Were you aware that 17 books of the New Testament don’t even mention repentance at all, including one of the Gospels (the 4th one)? In his letters, Paul only mentions repentance once in Romans, three times in 2 Corinthians, and once in 2 Timothy. The only authors who seem to be highly concerned with repentance are Luke (in Luke and Acts) and John the Revelator (in Revelation).

Second, let’s compare this to the three main words for faith (that is, belief and trust):

• faith, noun — pistis — 243 times
• believe, verb — pisteuó — 244 times
• faithful, adjective — pistos — 67 times

That’s a total of 554 references to faith, an astounding ten times greater number of references compared with repentance. And, unlike repentance, faith is mentioned in nearly every book of the New Testament. It is a core theme of many of them, especially the 4th gospel, the Gospel of John:

The difference in emphasis between faith and repentance is stark:

Third, in the Old Testament the word for repentance is shuwb (שׁוּב). It is mentioned a total of 1,056 times. But the primary words for faith in Hebrew (emuwnah and aman) occur less than 200 times.

Fourth, the Greek words for repentance in the New Testament were used only once in the Greek Septuagint. When the New Testament writers wanted to talk about repentance, they did so in a way that differed from the Greek Old Testament. The Septuagint used the Greek word epistrephó instead, a word used only 36 times in the New Testament, and often to describe physically turning around or returning. Of these…

…only a few could possibly be translated as repent, although this rarely occurs in English translations. The bulk of these are, again, restricted to Luke (in Luke and Acts). For example, here is what happens if you translate it as repent alongside the other word for repent:

This makes the irony even more intense.

Fifth, none of the New Testament letters known for sure to be written after 70AD and the fall of Jerusalem (marking the end of the Old Covenant) mention repentance. The only oddity in the New Testament is Matthew, which discusses repentance yet was written after 70AD. But, of course, everything recounted there is a retelling of what took place before 70AD.

If the date of publication is a valid indication, the apostles were no longer talking about repentance after the fall of Jerusalem (not that they were discussing it all that much prior).

A Point of Emphasis

In the Old Testament, repentance is very important, much more important than faith. The opposite is true of the New Testament. An examination of all 56 references to repentance in the New Testament will show that with Jesus, something very important had changed. As we saw in “On Forgiveness, Part 12,” repentance was the central feature of the Old Covenant, while faith is the central feature of the New Covenant.

The point of all of this is not to say that repentance is unimportant or irrelevant. It is not the claim that repentance is optional either. Rather, it is observation that repentance was the only thing available for temporary and conditional forgiveness under the Old Covenant, but that Jesus brought something greater that provided permanent and unconditional forgiveness under a New Covenant.

The writers of the New Testament didn’t have to spend time talking about repentance, because they knew that true faith in Christ produced the fruit of repentance. The proof of faith in Christ is displayed by the changes and outputs of the way one live’s their life. Repentance is the result of faith, not its cause.

Thus did almost all of the New Testament writers focus primarily on faith. In some cases, they did so to the complete exclusion of repentance. Indeed, I would suggest that the New Testament concept of sanctification has subsumed—and thus replaced—repentance. Repentance didn’t go away, exactly, it just became something else, something greater and more effective.