On Being Adopted as Children of God

Q. Why did he take our human nature?

A. The divine Son became human, so that in him human beings might be adopted as children of God, and be made heirs of God’s kingdom.

On first reading that the Catechism identifies the purpose of Christ’s incarnation with facilitating our adoption as children of God, I was struck by a sense that this was inadequate. No doubt adoption as an image for God’s work in Christ recurs throughout the New Testament (although, as Joshua Maurer and Amy Peeler point out, only in Paul’s writings ), but are there not other images that need to be brought together to describe the work of incarnation? What about New Birth, forgiveness of the just penalty of Sin, liberation from death?

Whatever the potential shortcomings of the imagery of adoption (and for Paul it is probably better to say analogy rather than image or metaphor), though, it certainly does seem to be a focus within the Anglican tradition. There are at least ten non-redundant references to God’s adopting us in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, two of which come from the Articles of Religion (17 “Of Predestination and Election” and 25 “Of Baptism”), indicating that the significance of such imagery predates the theology of the 1979 Prayer Book.

Furthermore, when one looks at how the image of adoption functioned in the first-century Greco-Roman and Jewish context, it conveys a broader range of concepts than we are likely to see in our twenty-first century American context. For us, my guess is that “adoption,” as with any sense of family belonging, carries with it primarily a sense of protection, nurture, and love—certainly not inconsequential, but also, being tied largely to the close and small nuclear family, not nearly as expansive as the idea of being brought into a whole new extended kinship network. The term we translate as “adoption” for Paul was the somewhat technical term huiothesia, “the well-documented Graeco-Roman socio-legal institution whereby a father would choose a non-biological son and confer on him all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities customarily given to a natural son” (“Sonship in the Bible,” Maurer and Peeler, 22). In a world without the concept of “natural rights” that inhered in a person by nature of their humanity, what family you belonged to, who your people were, mattered significantly for what rights and privileges (as well as responsibilities) you had in the world. The Roman world had a complex and extensive understanding of adoption, even using different terms depending on whether a child was adopted while still being under the legal authority of another father (only fathers could adopt) or was legally their own guardian. In the Roman scheme, the adoptee lost all connections, rights, and privileges of the old family and received all of those of the new; previous debts were canceled and the adoptee even renounced the previous family gods/religious obligations as they took on those of the new family (Bertholet, Jews and Their Roman Rivals, 411; Stamp, Adoption as Sons of God, 10). Roman (and Jewish) adoption was complex and powerful enough that it created a more enduring bond than natural kinship: One could, obviously, always be adopted by another family, otherwise adoption would not have existed; however, once adopted, it was almost impossible to sever ties with the adoptive family. Furthermore, Roman adoption proved a way to reshape the structure of a natural family, with the father having the power to give a son to another son as his son or to elevate a grandson to the level of a son, with all the implications for inheritance that both these circumstances implied (Bertholet, 413).

Paul, familiar with and blending both the Jewish and Roman understandings of adoption from his status as both a Jew and Roman citizen, brought several other implications to this already rich and expansive concept. There is the intimacy of a son (rather than, say, a slave) to a father in our relationship to God; there is the possibility of holiness which was both the privilege and empowerment for this status as sell as the expectation; there was the sense of both suffering and receiving glory (just as Christ did); and all of this because we are conformed to the image of Christ, a point itself related to adoption as sons because, in the Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical literature, “image” and “likeness” to someone are understood in terms of being like a son to a father (Maurer and Peeler, 22-25).

Adoption was, moreover, not some kind of “second best” option in Paul’s understanding, contra to how we, accustomed to seeing a kind of primacy to biological inheritance, may be inclined to think of it. To be crystal clear, this is not meant to be a normative statement about the way in which adoptive relationships should be seen today: It seems nonetheless true that there would not need to be so much work done to emphasize and correct the idea that adoption is a kind of “second best” or “unreal” familial relationship if we were culturally inclined to see it as equal to or even superior to biological kinship. Added to the fact that the Romans saw it as more permanent than biological kinship, Paul does not seem to have seen adoption as something merely for Gentile converts to Christianity, but rather the mode by which God always related to God’s chosen people, having understood “Israel’s privilege of ‘sonship’ in explicitly adoptive terms” (Maurer and Peeler, 22).

Thus, adoption as the children of God, as used by Paul, has a much more expansive implication for the incarnation. It meant a radical new beginning of identity, a cancelation of previous debts owed, a new relationship of loving intimacy with God, the capability and expectation of holiness, and citizenship in God’s Kingdom. It meant conformity to God’s Son by nature (Christ) as well as an expectation that we will share in his sufferings in order to receive his glory. Importantly, Paul speaks explicitly of being adopted as sons (not children, a terminological distinction that was indeed possible in his Greek), quite a radical assertion insofar as it was applied to both men and women in the Christian community. In the highly patriarchal world of the first century Mediterranean where sons retained significantly more rights than daughters and were much more likely to inherit significant amounts of property, to claim men and women attained to the status of sons was to imply an equality in status that would not have been offered had Paul used the term “children” with the implications of continued disparate status between male and female children.

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