the shaping of a person by someone responsible for them: teaching and correction together, aimed at forming character
This word names the whole business of bringing a child up. In ordinary Greek it covered a young person's entire education and the settled character that came out of it. The Bible keeps that breadth, and adds a weight of its own: the correcting a parent does is treated as part of the same work as the teaching, not as its opposite. That is why English versions swing between "training" and "chastening" for one and the same word.
The two sides of it are one thing seen from different angles. When Paul tells fathers to bring children up in it (Ephesians 6:4), or says Scripture is useful for it (2 Timothy 3:16), the forming is in view. When Hebrews 12 uses it four times over, quoting a line from Proverbs about a father's correction, the hard and unwelcome side is in view. Neither use excludes the other, which is exactly what makes the word hard to render.
Three neighbouring words each pick up one strand of it:
- Admonition (νουθεσία) is the warning spoken to someone who has gone wrong.
- Teaching (διδασκαλία) is the body of instruction that gets handed on.
- Correction (ἐπανόρθωσις) is the single act of setting something straight.
This word names the long process all three belong to. It also assumes a relationship: Hebrews 12:8 argues that someone who never receives it is not a son at all, which only works because the word describes what a father does for his own children rather than what any authority does to anyone under it.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the New Testament sense is governed by the Greek ideal of education and cultivated character, or by the Old Testament picture of a father's corrective discipline.
- majoritySeptuagint usage decisively reshaped the word: because it renders the Hebrew vocabulary of fatherly correction, chastisement rather than general education carries the sense in biblical Greek.; Georg Bertram, "παιδεύω, παιδεία," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5; BDAG, s.v. παιδεία
- minorityThe educational sense remains primary, and the suffering in Hebrews 12 is formative rather than retributive: it trains a son and does not requite particular sins.; N. Clayton Croy, Endurance in Suffering: Hebrews 12:1-13 in its Rhetorical, Religious, and Philosophical Context, SNTSMS 98 (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1989), on Hebrews 12:5-11