Charles Brammall
There are words that begin as lightning and only later reveal they were once furniture. Repent is one of them.
Let’s wander momentarily back into etymology and ancient languages- and return, rather sheepishly, to the word itself. Once, repent was a perfectly ordinary word, the sort one might use about changing one’s mind regarding walking face-first into a cobweb- one stops, turns around, does a U-turn, and changes direction- heads off in the opposite way. “Repent” was used regarding the purchase of a horse, or reversing a regrettable opinion about hats. It did not tremble. It did not glow. It certainly did not follow one into the small hours of the night like an unpaid debt.
It simply meant: to think again, change one’s mind, do a U-turn.
The English word repent wanders in from the Old French repentir, which in turn leans on the Latin paenitere – to feel regret, to be sorry, to reconsider. No thunder. No incense. No stained glass. A shopkeeper might repent of a bad investment. A General might repent of a poor strategy. It was, in short, a secular shrug with a slightly furrowed brow…
So once upon a time, the word “repent” was humdrum, everyday, and domestic. Commercial. Not a whisker of theology in sight.
And then the NT seized it.
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It is worth noting – with a faint sense of irritation – that the modern world has begun to rediscover repentance using machines, scanners, ethics committees, and papers whose titles sound like they were assembled by committees and defended under fluorescent lighting.
Recent neuroscience, ethics, and medical research, peering with polite intensity into the human person, have mapped what Scripture has long assumed: that guilt, regret, moral responsibility, and transformation are not airy abstractions, but embodied, relational, and socially consequential realities.
A 2025 study by Ruida Zhu in eLife (Dec 9, 2025; involving research teams from Beijing Normal University) examined what they called the “neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt- and shame-driven behaviour.”
Using fMRI and computational modelling, they demonstrated that guilt and shame arise from different cognitive inputs – harm versus responsibility – and recruit distinct neural systems. Crucially, guilt more reliably produced compensatory, reparative behaviour, while shame tended toward avoidance and cognitive control strategies.
Which is to say: the brain itself appears to prefer repentance to self-condemnation.
A 2024 study by Hyeman Choi at Gachon University, in Behavioral Sciences (June 3, 2024), explored how guilt and shame integrate into the self-concept. Participants were significantly more likely to integrate guilt constructively when they believed future change was possible, whereas shame resisted integration and tended to fragment identity.
Translation: repentance requires hope.
Without the possibility of change, the soul does not reform; it fractures.
Meanwhile, physiological research like the 2023 study “The Psychophysiology of Guilt in Healthy Adults”(Springer Nature, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience) demonstrated that guilt produces measurable bodily changes – shifts in heart rate, electrodermal activity, even gastric rhythms.
Repentance, it turns out, is not just spiritual. It is somatic.
The body keeps the moral score.
A 2024 Scientific Reports paper by Chloe A. Stewart demonstrated that guilt functions socially through nonverbal signals – posture, expression, behavioural cues – that communicate remorse and intent to repair even before words are spoken.
Repentance is not merely inward. It is visible. It leaks.
Ethics research complicates matters further. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that even “false-positive guilt” can increase perceived moral character because it signals empathy and concern.
Which is both fascinating and slightly alarming.
It suggests that humans are not merely moral creatures, but moral performers – tempted to simulate repentance when genuine repentance is inconvenient.
Medical research adds a darker note. A 2026 study by David P. Cenkner, in Journal of Clinical Psychology, found that among frontline nurses, guilt significantly mediated the relationship between moral distress and later suicidal ideation.
Which is a sentence that should be read slowly.
Guilt can heal.
But mismanaged guilt can also wound.
Ethics and medicine converge, then, on a delicate truth: moral awareness is necessary for flourishing, but without resolution, it becomes corrosive.
Repentance must go somewhere.
Philosophically, contemporary moral cognition research continues to affirm that moral judgment is an integration of emotional and rational processes. Not merely feeling, not merely thinking, but a layered synthesis of both, embedded in social reality and future anticipation.
Which begins to sound suspiciously like: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
We feel the need to do something.
Which is precisely where the Jesus’ Death/Resurrection gospel interrupts.
Because while modern research observes the machinery with admirable precision – neural circuits, physiological responses, behavioural adaptations, ethical signalling – it cannot quite manufacture mercy.
It can describe the engine of repentance.
It cannot provide the fuel.
– – – –
So the NT seized the “repentance” word.
Or rather, it seized another word – the Greek metanoia – and in doing so, quietly detonated the furniture.
Meta (after, beyond) and nous (mind): a going beyond the mind you currently possess; a reconfiguration of perception; not merely remorse, but renovation. Not simply “I wish I hadn’t,” but “I am no longer who I was when I wished it.”
As C. S. Lewis once put it, with his usual disarming clarity: “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”
Which is already rather less like adjusting your opinion about hats.
And Scripture, in its more neglected corners, presses the point with unnerving specificity: Ezekiel 18:30–31: “Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions… and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.”
Jeremiah 4:3–4: “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns… Circumcise yourselves to the LORD; remove the foreskin of your hearts.”
Agricultural. Surgical. Slightly alarming.
The 1st Repentance: Surrender (the collapse of a small kingdom)
- Reference Paul Kelly’s song “Little Kings”.
The first repentance is catastrophic.
Not emotionally, necessarily. Sometimes it is quiet, almost administrative. A line drawn. A signature added. A door closed with surprising gentleness. But metaphysically, if one may be allowed a large word, it is the end of a regime.
It is the moment one ceases to trust oneself for rescue.
The scandal of Christianity is not merely that we are flawed, but that we are self-rescuing creatures who cannot rescue ourselves. We do not merely slip; we insist on catching ourselves, and in doing so, fall more creatively.
As Luther wrote in the first of his Ninety-Five Theses (1517): “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
But Luther himself discovered – much to his irritation – that repentance begins not with effort, but with surrender. He recounts in his Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans how he hated the phrase “the righteousness of God,” until he realised it was not a demand but a gift: “Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith.”
The first repentance, then, is not: I will do better.
It is: I cannot do better – and I will trust Another to do for me what I cannot do for myself.
Or, in the language of the NT, it is turning from self-trust to Christ-trust; from self-salvation to received salvation; from clutching to being carried.
Augustine of Hippo tells a story in his Confessions that has been quoted so often it risks becoming polite. It is not polite. “I was bound not with another’s irons, but by my own iron will… The enemy held my will, and of it he had made a chain… and I was held fast.”
And then, famously: “Give me chastity and continence– but not yet.”
Which is, if we are honest, the most recognisable prayer ever prayed.
His conversion is not him becoming impressive. It is him collapsing. Hearing a child’s voice – tolle lege(“take and read”)- he opens Scripture, reads, and finds himself undone: “No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly… all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”
The first repentance is precisely that vanishing- not of sin (alas), but of the illusion that we can outgrow our need for rescue. It is the moment we stop presenting God with our résumé and instead hand Him our bankruptcy papers.
And the prophets, less politely than we might prefer, agree:
Hosea 14:1–2: “Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity… say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity; accept what is good.’”
Zechariah 1:3: “Return to me, says the LORD of hosts, and I will return to you.”
From Lamentations 5:21: “Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored.”
Which quietly implies that even our repentance requires divine initiative. Even the turning is given.
Thus repentance 1, my becoming a believer, surrendering all to Jesus, is the model for my initial marriage vows:
“I promise to love you, comfort you, honour and protect you, submit to you, and forsaking ALL others, be faithful to YOU as long as we both shall live.
N, I take you, N, to be my wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death us do part.
In the presence of God, I make this vow.”
That is, in my marriage vows, I make a one-off, initial, whole-hearted promise to the LORD, which I genuinely intend and expect to keep for all time.
The Second Repentance: Reorientation (gratitude learns to walk)
Repentance, the 2nd. is less dramatic and more dangerous.
Having been saved freely – “not by works, so that no one may boast”- I forget grace, and am, over time, tempted to improve the arrangement. To become, subtly, my own saviour again, but this time in religious clothing.
This is why the NT insists, with almost suspicious repetition, that good works are both absolutely necessary and utterly useless for justification.
A contradiction only if one is determined to be confused.
As Calvin writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: “It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.”
Or, more bluntly, as Bonhoeffer warns: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.”
The second repentance is the ongoing daily, hourly, minutely, secondly reorientation of life away from self-pleasing and toward Christ-pleasing – not in order to be saved, but because I already am.
Gratitude, if it is real, acquires legs. You might say: the first repentance changes our status; the second changes our direction.
And here Scripture becomes almost relentlessly practical, especially in its quieter corners:
From Isaiah 1:16–17: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds… learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression.”
Micah 6:8:“What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
From Titus 2:11–12:“The grace of God has appeared… training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions.”
Grace trains. Which is a slightly unnerving sentence if one has assumed grace merely excuses.
2 Timothy 2:25: “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.”
Even here, repentance is not manufactured. It is granted.
And again, from Proverbs 28:13: “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
Confession. Forsaking. Mercy. The sequence matters.
And here, modern research – uninvited but not unwelcome – quietly nods.
Because the neuroscientists inform us that behavioural change occurs through repeated neural reinforcement. Pathways strengthen with use. Habits become embodied- after about six weeks. Patterns of thought, rehearsed, become easier to access.
Repentance, then, is not merely a turning once, but a turning again, and again, and again – until the turning itself becomes, if not effortless, then at least familiar, and maybe SLIGHTLY less taxing?
And yet the gospel refuses to let this become a technique.
Because psychology observes that humans instinctively attempt moral cleansing, performing actions to restore a damaged sense of self.
We try to balance the scales.
However, the second repentance insists there are no scales. There is only grace – and the life that grows from it.
From 1 Corinthians 10:13: “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear… he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”
Which means, astonishingly, that for the first time, we are ABLE, NOT to sin.
Before conversion: unable not to sin. After conversion: able not to sin. Not because we have become impressive, but because we are no longer alone.
And yet, maddeningly, we still sin.
The brain, the soul, the will – all learning slowly.
That is, my second repentance is like staying married, and acting like I’m married, every minute of every day. You see, as a God-rebel, I will wrong my spouse multiple times daily. And each time I do, at that point, I have the privilege of a being involved in a vow renewal ceremony, with Jesus, and my spouse. I repent, again, again and again, after my initial, one-off, big repentance.
The Third Repentance: Glory (the end of repenting)
The third repentance is not, strictly speaking, a repentance at all, but more of an a-repentance.
That is, the need for repentance’s final abolition. (And no, I don’t mean “sinless perfectionism”, as has crept into a Sydney university’s AFES group’s eldership several times in the past, or Bill Bright’s 2-stage Christianity- “Carnal” and “Spiritual”).
In the new heavens-and-earth (one of favourite Bible hendyadies) there will be nothing to turn from, and therefore no need to turn. The very category expires.
Jonathan Edwards imagines this not as static perfection but as ever-increasing joy: “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied…”
And Scripture, in its apocalyptic understatement, gestures toward a world where repentance has become obsolete, viz Zephaniah 3:13: “They shall do no injustice and speak no lies, nor shall there be found in their mouth a deceitful tongue.”
And From Jeremiah 31:34: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Isaiah 60:21: “Your people shall all be righteous.”
Not improved. But Righteous.
And from Ezekiel 36:27: “I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.”
Cause.
Which suggests that in glory, obedience is no longer contested terrain.
And, if one rummages in the less-frequented corners still:
From Nahum 1:9: “He will make a complete end; trouble will not rise up a second time.”
Habbakuk 2:14: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
No remainder. No relapse. The Biblical data is overwhelming, undeniable, and thrilling.
And here, even neuroscience – quite against its will – provides an echo.
For if now we must labour to override destructive impulses, recruiting higher reasoning to restrain and redirect, then glory is the condition in which no such labour is required.
Desire itself is healed.
Not coerced. Not constrained. But made whole.
I often imagine freedom as the ability to choose anything, including ruin. But the deeper freedom is the inability to desire ruin at all. A train is not free if it chooses to jump off the rails.
The saints in glory will not refrain from sin the way a dieter refrains from cake, with strained heroism and quiet resentment. They will refrain from sin the way a sane person refrains from drinking bleach.
Effortlessly. Gladly. Permanently.
The three freedoms arrive, as it were, out of order, like luggage at a poorly managed airport.
First, at the first repentance, freedom from the POWER of sin over me. The tyrant is deposed, though still noisy.
Second, in the second repentance, freedom from the CONSEQUENCE of sin. There is now no condemnation.
As Karl Barth writes: “In the cross of Jesus Christ God pronounces judgment on all human sin, and at the same time reveals His mercy.”
Third, in the third repentance, freedom from the VERY EXISTENCE of sin.
Not managed. Not mitigated. Gone.
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There is a story – possibly apocryphal, which only improves it – about G. K. Chesterton being asked what was wrong with the world. He replied:
“Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours, G. K. Chesterton.”
Which is either the beginning of repentance, or the end of all denial.
Modern neuroscience, ethics, and medicine agree on at least this much: something in us recognises harm, assigns responsibility, feels guilt, and seeks restoration. When healthy, it moves outward in repair. When distorted, it collapses inward in shame.
The gospel names both conditions.
And then does something none of them can quite manage.
It forgives.
The three repentances, then, restored, enlarged, and now thick with Scripture: The first repentance: I cannot save myself – and I will trust Christ. The second repentance: I will no longer live for myself – and I will follow Christ. The third repentance: I will no longer even be able to turn from Him, and I will enjoy Christ.
Or, if one prefers fewer words and more honesty: Collapse. Reorientation. Glory.
And the curious thing is this: the word that once meant merely “to think again” turns out, in the hands of the NT, to mean “to become someone else entirely” – and, eventually, to become the person you were meant to be before you ever thought of rescuing yourself.
Please give thanks with me for God’s juggernaut of grace:
Gracious and ever-merciful Father, when my repentance falters and my resolve fades, remind me that your mercy is deeper than my sin; let your grace outrun my failure and draw me home, and fill my heart with grateful wonder. Amen.
Lord Jesus, patient Shepherd of the weary,
When I turn back, meet me not with measure but with abundance; clothe me in your righteousness and restore my joy, that I may overflow with thankful love. Amen.
Holy and life-giving King,
When I am dry and ashamed, assure me that your grace is freely given; lift me, restore me, and keep me in your freedom, my heart rising in ceaseless gratitude. Amen