Conversion

“Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.”

— Acts 3:19 (ESV)

Conversion is the sinner’s turning from sin to God: the first exercise of the new nature the Holy Spirit implants in regeneration, worked out through faith in Christ and repentance from sin.¹ It names the same turning that Scripture’s own words for it describe from two angles: an inward change of mind and the outward turning that follows from it. Reformed theology distinguishes a believer’s first, all-encompassing conversion at the start of the Christian life from the continuing, daily conversion that marks its whole course.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled “conversion.” It states the same reality under headings it shares, in both number and near-identical wording, with the wider Reformed confessional family: the Westminster Confession’s own chapter 15, “Of Repentance unto Life,” opens by calling repentance “an evangelical grace,”² language the 1689’s parallel chapter repeats almost word for word.³

The confession first addresses conversion under Free Will, stating that fallen man cannot bring it about himself: “a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.” It then states the reality positively: “When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, he freeth him from his natural bondage under sin, and by his grace alone enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good.”⁴

Effectual Calling describes the Spirit’s own work in this turning:

Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, he is pleased in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.⁵

This call “is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature, being wholly passive therein” until quickened by the Spirit.⁵

Repentance Unto Life and Salvation states the human-ward side of the same turning:

Such of the elect as are converted at riper years… God in their effectual calling giveth them repentance unto life… This saving repentance is an evangelical grace, whereby a person, being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, doth, by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency, praying for pardon and strength of grace, with a purpose and endeavour, by supplies of the Spirit, to walk before God unto all well-pleasing in all things.³

The same chapter adds that “repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives” and that “it is every man’s duty to repent of his particular known sins particularly.”³

Biblical Basis

Scripture’s own vocabulary supplies the two Hebrew words and two Greek words that dogmatics groups under “conversion.” In the Old Testament, שׁוּב (shub, to turn, turn back) describes Israel turning from sin, iniquity, or wickedness, and נָחַם (nacham, to be sorry, to repent) is used especially of God’s own relenting.¹ The prophets sharpened שׁוּב into a religious-ethical demand: a “broken and contrite heart” (Ps. 51:17), “a conversion of the whole heart” (Joel 2:12), a change God both demands and, in the new covenant, promises to grant (Jer. 31:31ff.; Ezek. 36:25ff.).¹ In the New Testament, μετανοια (metanoia, change of mind) names the internal turning John the Baptist and Jesus both demanded, and ἐπιστροφη (epistrophē) the outward turning that results from it.¹

Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be “born again” (John 3:3, 5, 8), and the apostolic preaching in Acts calls its hearers, Jew and gentile alike, to repent and turn: Peter at Pentecost (“Repent, and be baptized every one of you,” Acts 2:38), before the Jerusalem church (“Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life,” Acts 11:18 KJV), and Paul before Agrippa, summarizing his own preaching as a call “that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance” (Acts 26:20 KJV). Gentile converts are described as those who “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9).

Paul distinguishes “godly sorrow,” which “worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of,” from “the sorrow of the world,” which “worketh death” (2 Cor. 7:10 KJV), a distinction Scripture illustrates in its own examples of temporary, false starts that do not hold (Matt. 13:20-21; 1 Tim. 1:19-20; 1 John 2:19; 2 Pet. 2:1).¹

Historical Development

The early church and medieval penance

The early church treated baptism itself as the sign and seal of conversion for converts from paganism or Judaism, which raised the question of how to treat sin committed afterward. Some early rigorist movements refused restoration to believers who lapsed into serious sin; by the second century a more lenient view had prevailed, allowing at least one further post-baptismal conversion.¹

Out of this grew the medieval penitential system, developed especially by monks such as Cassian and popes such as Gregory the Great, distinguishing venial from mortal sins and requiring confession, priestly absolution, and works of satisfaction.¹ The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made annual confession to one’s own priest obligatory for all believers who had reached the age of discretion.¹ The Council of Trent, responding to the Reformation, made penance one of the church’s seven sacraments and defended the practice of indulgences as “most salutary for Christian people,” while condemning the abuses that had grown up around their sale.⁶

The Reformation and Reformed orthodoxy

Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses opened by insisting that Christ willed “the whole life of believers to be one of repentance,” rejecting the reduction of conversion to a priest-administered sacrament of penance.¹ Calvin, working from Romans 6, defined conversion as a twofold, lifelong action of dying to self (“mortification”) and rising to Christ (“vivification”): “this restoration is not accomplished in a moment or in a day or a year; but through continual and sometimes even slow advances, God wipes out in his elect the corruptions of the flesh… that they may practice repentance throughout their lives and know that this warfare will end only at death,” a formulation later Reformed theologians such as Ursinus followed.⁷ Lutheran theology instead structured conversion in three parts (contrition, faith, and good works), a scheme that, in Bavinck’s judgment, leaves the connection between the parts unclear.¹

The controversy with the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort sharpened a further Reformed distinction, between the habitus (disposition) of conversion infused in regeneration and the actus (act) of conversion by which the regenerate person exercises that disposition in believing and loving: “the grace of conversion is twofold: habitual and actual. The former is that by which a human is regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit… The latter is that by which the already-regenerate person, with the aid of God’s Word and Spirit, exercises these powers in the activity of believing and loving.”¹

Puritan precisionism and American revivalism

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English Puritan and Dutch Nadere Reformatie (“Further Reformation”) preachers such as Willem Teellinck, Herman Witsius, and Jodocus van Lodenstein reacted against nominal, undated faith in the established churches.¹ Some later writers in this stream hardened the reaction into a demand that every true convert pass through a datable “penitential struggle” and “breakthrough,” a period of dread followed by a sudden assurance of peace.¹

American revivalism carried a related shift into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Edwards preached conversion as a movement from dread of God’s wrath to comfort and peace, while carefully distinguishing spiritual affections from mere excitement of the imagination.¹ Charles Finney (1792-1875), by contrast, addressed sinners as voluntary agents and pressed them to decide, in the moment, to give their hearts to God, a pattern later evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody continued.¹

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism administers conversion through the sacrament of penance: contrition or, more commonly following Trent, “attrition” (imperfect contrition arising from fear of punishment), private confession to a priest, and priestly absolution, with temporal punishment for sin discharged through works of satisfaction or indulgences drawn from the church’s treasury of merit.¹

Arminian and Remonstrant theology treats conversion, in its exercised or “actual” sense, as a synergistic product of grace cooperating with human free will, reversing the Reformed order in which the disposition to convert is infused, not chosen, in regeneration.¹

A revised evangelical ordering places conversion before regeneration rather than after it. Millard Erickson, followed by Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest, reads passages such as Acts 2:38 and Acts 16:31 as making the sinner’s own repentance and belief precede the new birth, proposing the order special calling, conversion, regeneration. On this view the “special calling” that enables the sinner’s repentance and faith is limited to the elect and works infallibly, but stops short of the complete transformation that constitutes regeneration itself, leaving room for conversion to occur between the two.⁸ Bavinck states the classical Reformed order Erickson revises: “Whenever regeneration takes place, before or during the hearing of the Word, logically it always precedes the act of really believing… ‘For no one can hear the word of God salvifically unless he is regenerate.’”¹

Objections and Responses

Requiring a datable conversion crisis pressures children raised in the church into manufacturing one, or doubting a salvation that never produced one. Bavinck, writing from within the Reformed tradition that gave rise to some of this pressure, answers that Scripture “only requires that sorrow for sin be genuine and that a person wholeheartedly seek God’s favor. One does not need to know the exact hour of one’s conversion.” Children born into the covenant are to be “regarded and treated as heirs of the promise until the contrary is clearly demonstrated by their ‘talk’ and ‘walk.’”¹

If regeneration must precede conversion, how can Scripture command sinners who are still dead in sin to repent and believe, as though this lay within their own power? The confession’s answer is that the call effects what it commands: God, “enlightening their minds… renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good,” draws the sinner to Christ “yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.”⁵ The command does not presuppose an unaided natural ability to obey it; it is the means the Spirit uses to produce, effectually, the very response it commands.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 19, “Faith and Conversion.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 15, “Of Repentance unto Life,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 15, “Of Repentance Unto Life and Salvation,” paras. 1, 3-4. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” paras. 3-4. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” paras. 1-2. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Council of Trent, sess. 25, “Decretum de indulgentiis” (1563), quoted in Bavinck, chap. 19. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted in Bavinck, chap. 19. ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Tertium Quid: The Failure of Recent Attempts at a Via Media,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 356-389. ↩