Metanoia and Pistis vs. Repent and Believe
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Bob Henry
May 4, 2025
Good morning Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. This week our supportive scripture text is from Romans 12:2 from the New Revised Standard Version,
Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
I spent some time this week trying to map where I have been in my spiritual journey and how I have come to the current place and understanding I have today. I think reading Elaine Pagels new book had me contemplating this deeply after Easter and on our down-time at the pastor’s retreat last week.
Most of my formative years I was inundated by a faith community that wanted me to do two things – REPENT and BELIEVE. Those two words were like bookends to my early spiritual life. Whether it was the churches, Christian schools, youth gatherings, Christian concerts, all of them helped raise me in a bubble of beliefs that told me that my personal sin and how and what I believed was of utmost importance – even a matter of life and death.
Those two words, repent and believe, shaped my life trajectory in significant ways. They surrounded me with a specific group of friends, mentors, and teachers, all in what I thought was a safe faith community. Today, I am able to see the mandatory uniform beliefs, the gatekeeping, and how they tried to keep me from straying or entering what they called “a slippery slope.”
I find it interesting and kind of sad that 30+ years later, most of those friendships and teachers are no longer in my life – because of my spiritual journey. I am no longer in those faith communities and greatly disagree with much of their indoctrination, Christian Nationalism, and cultish behaviors that I am now able to see.
Sure, I still wrestle with how much time I spent drinking their Kool-Aid, trusting those people, and even defending their beliefs without taking time to really think or be transformed. When I finally decided to turn and go in a different direction, my own best man warned me that I would most likely lose his friendship (which I did) over me choosing to live on a slippery slope.
In my Easter message this year, I began by talking about the importance that Paul put on life-transformation over people simply knowing what he was preaching. That was me. I was all about knowing the answers of my pastors and denomination but not allowing it to transform me for the betterment of myself and my world. Some of it, I don’t think could actually do that.
It was Paul who said,
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
Much of organized religion today is about conforming to this world or at least to their way of understanding this world. Questions are bad. Questioning is worse. Disagreeing is all out wrong. And believing differently both remove you from the fold and possibly damn you for all eternity.
And we wonder how people get caught up in cults.
Paul’s idea of transformation was tweaked from Jesus’ teachings, who also called on people to change. Not just a little, but dramatically – it too was a transformational change. Mark’s gospel reports that Jesus began his ministry with these words:
Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time is fulfilled,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”
Oh no! There are those two words again – repent and believe! But there is also another set of words that Jesus uses – The Kingdom of God.
Author, conscientious objector, and founder of Mustard Seed School of Theology, Kurt Struckmeyer, helped me understand what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. He says,
The ‘kingdom of God’ is the term Jesus used to express his vision of a profound transformation of human beings and human institutions—social, political, economic and religious—to fully express the character and nature of God—a God of love. To accomplish this vision, Jesus worked toward the creation of a new kind of community dedicated to values of compassion, generosity, peace, and justice. He was creating a movement for change, a people engaged in a vast conspiracy of love.
Since Jesus’ day, many have tried to articulate or further develop this idea of the “Kingdom of God.” It has been expressed by many cultures and movements. Some have called it the Beloved Community, some tikkun olam (The Hebrew concept of preparing the world), familia justicia (family justice) in Latin-X communities, and even us Quakers summarize it in our Testimonies or S.P.I.C.E.S. and in our theology of “That of God in all people.”
But before we get to those well thought out concepts and expanded understandings of the Kingdom of God. We have to return to Jesus and look at what he called us to do – repent, and believe.
This is where these two words, depending on how they are translated can bring hope or cause a lot of confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, even pain.
So, let’s start with Repent.
Kurt Struckmeyer says,
To our ears, repentance usually conveys a sense of guilt and regret [as it often did for me]. It is commonly understood as a feeling of remorse, and that is precisely how the church has conventionally used the term.
But ‘repent’ doesn’t capture the true meaning of the Greek word…used in the gospels. The noun metanoia (met-an’-oy-ah) is the more familiar term for many people, meaning a fundamental shift or
movement (meta) of the mind (noia).
It is a movement that takes us beyond the mindset of our cultural conformity—our conventional wisdom—into a new way of perceiving and thinking about the world around us.
The repentance that Jesus speaks of is a transformative movement, a fundamental change of life that is deeper, more basic, and more far-reaching than our common understanding of the word ‘repentance.’
It is not about being sorry for the past. It is about thinking differently and changing the direction of our lives for the future.
Metanoia essentially means to turn around, to change the form, to take on a whole new identity. It involves a change of orientation, direction, or character that is so pronounced and dramatic that the very form and purpose of a life is decisively altered and reshaped. It means to begin the journey of walking away from the old to the new.
I wonder if this is why so many Christians are threatened by trans and non-binary people. They want them to repent, but, in reality, I think they may be able to teach us a lot about metanoia.
Instead of embracing the metanoia in my earlier years, I simply walked away from the old, but not to something new. Most of the time I returned to a cycle of repentance and guilt that was designed to keep me in-line and to conform – ultimately to be accepted or approved by my peers and the leaders in the church.
It didn’t take too much time before I would long for NEW LIFE – a personal metanoia. I wanted to think differently and change the direction of my life for the future and the betterment of myself and my neighbors. This was bigger than me.
So how did we get from metanoia to repent?
The translation of metanoia as ‘repent’ began when the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin sometime around 384 CE by St. Jerome. The Vulgate translation used the phrase which meant to “Go, and do penance” (a voluntary self-punishment).
This error was compounded by the reformer Martin Luther when he translated the New Testament into vernacular German in 1522. Luther worked from a 1519 Greek text compiled by Erasmus.
Luther translated metanoia as büssen (boo′sen) in German, which means to atone, to redress, to do penance. So, from the end of the sixteenth century on, Roman Catholics and many Protestants believed that Jesus was talking about regret, sorrow, remorse, or performing acts of contrition, instead of a radical change in thinking and living.
WOW! Talk about getting off course and having serious consequences. I can say this has literally affected my life, the lives of many people I care for, and I believe it now even has a huge detrimental impact on our politics in the United States.
Scholars call this an “utter mistranslation,” or as one said, “the worst translation in the New Testament.”
To Jesus, metanoia was a change so dramatic that it implied starting over again through a metaphorical second birth. Jesus declared,
“I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”
Oh no! Two more words that have had dire consequences for the church and our world, today. I know tension arises in many of you in this room around being “born again.”
But folks, please understand Jesus’ declaration is not to be confused with what is commonly known as “born-again Christianity.” That is a completely different monster that has evolved greatly over time.
Kurt says,
The rebirth of metanoia is not about inviting the resurrected presence of the Christ to enter our hearts while remaining firmly rooted in cultural conformity. Jesus was certainly not discussing speaking in tongues or other charismatic gifts often associated with born-again Christians.
He was articulating an invitation to a new quality of life in the midst of the old… (Let me repeat that)
He was articulating an invitation to a new quality of life in the midst of the old…
…It is a fundamental transformation that enables us to begin the journey of a new life. It is like being reborn with a radically new perspective on the meaning of life and matters of ultimate concern.
I think this is why it is so easy for Quakers not to tie being born again to water baptism as many churches do. Even though I was baptized as child, it has been the times when I chose to be transformed by a new journey of life that had the deepest meaning for me. And it has not been a one-time event, but multiple times that have continued to shape, form and transform me. This is what I consider my ongoing spiritual formation and journey.
It is as Kurt says,
The deep-seated change of metanoia that Jesus describes happens through a process of learning and growing. It involves learning a completely new way of thinking about life, being instructed in a new way of seeing reality. It means discarding conventional wisdom and traditional common sense for an unconventional wisdom and a transformed sense of purpose. Start by turning around and going the other way, Jesus says to us. You are a captive of your culture and, although you may not be able to see it, you are headed in the wrong direction. You are living in darkness, mired in confusion.
He then offers us this parable.
For instance, in America our cultural view of reality is one of climbing an economic ladder. As we climb, we tend to keep our eyes on the rung above, towards those who have more than we do. Because a few are incredibly wealthy, we tend to think of ourselves as poorer than we really are. When we turn around, as Jesus calls us to do, we look back down the ladder. Then we are able to see the vast majority of people who have far less than we do, and we begin to understand how incredibly wealthy we really are. It is a change of perspective, a shift of the mind, a whole new way of thinking. If embraced, one’s life becomes transformed; it becomes fundamentally altered.
Personally, I have had to move from looking at this entire process as part of my religion or faith and more as a movement or better, a way of life. No wonder I found Quakers on my transformational journey. That is also what we believe – we are a religious society of Friends, a movement not a religion, denomination, or even church for that matter.
This transformation is a movement from greed to giving, from selfishness to servanthood, from social conformity to insurrection against the status quo. We do it through silence and listening to the Sprit.
Also, I believe Jesus was talking about shifting allegiances and values away from a mainstream culture of power, domination, and violence to the kingdom values of selfless love, compassion, humility, equality, generosity, forgiveness, justice, peace, service, and inclusive community.
That sounds a lot like our Quaker testimonies and S.P.I.C.E.S. Doesn’t it? And let’s be honest, we are in need of metanoia in the United States much like the people of Jesus’ day.
So, let’s briefly look at believe (in the good news) as Jesus says. Not just believe, but believe in the good news.
Kurt says,
The verb ‘believe’ is a translation of the Greek [word] which can mean ‘to believe,’ but more accurately means ‘to trust’ or ‘to have faith in.’ It is based on the noun pistis, which means faith, belief, trust, confidence, and faithfulness.
Normally, belief has the connotation of an intellectual acceptance of a proposition—a certainty that something is true, even in the absence of empirical evidence. Faith, likewise, implies great confidence in an idea.
But faith is often a visible and outward expression of what is believed to be true in one’s head. Further, faith is a trust in something to the extent that one would be willing to bet one’s life on it.
To be faithful within the context of any culture is to be seized by and devoted to whatever is believed to matter most in one’s life.
Belief is a psychological state, while faith is a way of living. We often speak of this visible expression as a faith walk or faith journey.
This is where I have come to see this important teaching of metanoia and pistis to be vital to me, to us, to our world today. We must trust, bet our life on, and ultimately live into the good news that is transforming our lives and the lives of those around us.
The good news that Jesus proclaimed was a radical message of hope for people at the bottom of his society—the peasants and fishermen of Galilee. Jesus called on his followers to trust that the way of life he was teaching and modeling had the capability of transforming their lives and ultimately could change the world. He invited them to transform their old ways of thinking, and to shed their culture’s conventional wisdom in order to follow him.
It is clear that metanoia and pistis involve a committed change in us — a revolution in our way of thinking and perceiving, and a life dedicated to that new reality, trusting that this is the right thing to do, that this is the most important thing to do, and that this new way is worth risking everything one has, including one’s life.
Instead of wallowing in our sins and feeling guilty for the sake of conformity, Jesus and Paul had a different plan – TO USE US TO TRANSFORM THIS WORLD.
When put this way, it makes it seem a lot more life giving, more hopeful, more about really doing something to change our world.
We must remember that the mission of Jesus was twofold: the transformation of people into agents of love and the transformation of human societies into communities of compassion, equality, and justice. Our personal transformation was intended to be a catalyst for societal transformation.
I wonder how different the world would be today, if the church in America actually spent its time seeking transformation and being a catalyst for societal transformation, instead of pointing fingers, demanding repentance, and trying to get people to believe a certain way? That is what Jesus modeled for us.
As you ponder all of this, let’s quiet our hearts and center down into waiting worship. Here are a few queries to ponder.
In what area(s) of my life, do I need to make a change of direction and become an agent of love?
What is the right thing for me to do, today?
How might my personal transformation be a catalyst for societal change?