renewal: the thorough making new of a person, a change for the better worked by God's Spirit
The word names a making new. It shows up only twice in the New Testament, and both times it is something God does to a person: the steady remaking of how a Christian thinks, and the fresh start the Holy Spirit gives when that life begins. The person is always on the receiving end.
Greek already had ordinary words for renewing, at home in repairing a building, restoring a monument, or renewing a treaty. This one seems to be different. It turns up nowhere in the Greek that survives from before Paul, which is why many scholars think the first Christians made it, along with the matching verb (ἀνακαινόω), to name something they had no ready word for. The older and well used verb for renewing (ἀνακαινίζω) was available, and Hebrews does reach for it once, but for this idea a fresh word was minted.
Two impulses pull against each other inside the word, and most scholars keep both:
- It restores what was spoiled, since the New Testament ties this remaking to the image of God a person was made to bear.
- It also makes something genuinely new, so the result is not the old self patched up but a person belonging to a new order of things.
Its closest partner is the word for new birth (παλιγγενεσία), which stands beside it in Titus 3:5. New birth names the moment of starting over; this word names the making new itself, whether at that starting point or right through the years that follow.
Nuances
In Titus 3:5, whether the washing of rebirth and the renewal of the Holy Spirit name one reality or two, and whether the renewal is confined to the decisive beginning of the Christian life or reaches beyond it.
- majorityOne reality described in several ways. A single preposition governs both nouns, so the washing, the rebirth and the renewal are one Spirit-wrought event, read from the Fathers onward as baptism.; John Chrysostom, Homilies on Titus, Homily 5; I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1999), on Titus 3:5
- minorityTwo related but distinct realities: the once-for-all new birth, and a renewal that goes forward gradually through the Christian's life.; R. C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, §xviii
- minorityThe washing pictures the new birth and renewal rather than bringing them about, so the verse does not make the rite the means of the Spirit's work.; A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, vol. 4 (Broadman, 1931), on Titus 3:5; George W. Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1992), on Titus 3:5
Disputed
Whether the renewal this word names is chiefly the inward transformation of an individual believer or that person's incorporation into God's remaking of the whole created order.
- contestedIt is the inward, personal side of salvation: God remaking the individual soul, so that renewal belongs with regeneration and sanctification.; B. B. Warfield, "On the Biblical Notion of Renewal," in Biblical and Theological Studies (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952)
- contestedIt belongs to a larger frame in which God is invading and remaking the world, so the renewed mind is the believer's share in a new age and a new humanity rather than a private improvement.; Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1980), on Romans 12:1-2; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013)