Adoption Thesis

THESIS

Religious belief is typically driven by three main factors:

1. Experience

2. Contemplation (intellect/knowledge)

3. Social concern

Studies suggest that when even a single factor is challenged, the remaining two tend to be similarly impacted. Stories abound of those who have faced rejection from the Church, who have been challenged by an opposing worldview, or who have questioned the validity of their past experiences in the face of unanswered prayers and suffering, and thus subsequently walked away from religion and the Church altogether. It is the interest of theological discussion to dialogue with any or all of these factors from within a concern for the relationship between God and His people. Theology by nature must ask the question(s) of who God is, but also needs to ask why it matters for our human story. It should not be surprising, then, to find in the Christian scripture a great deal of attention given to these three themes:

1. Christian conversion as a transformative “Experience”

2. The function of “spirit” formed “Knowledge”

3. The Christian response to “Social isolation, marginalization and responsibility”

While there is much to say about the first two areas, and certainly one cannot speak of one without also dialoguing with the others, the interest of this paper will be to take a closer look at the area of social isolation and responsibility as a unique function of the Christian faith. More specifically, this paper will show how the pauline term “adoption”, from within its first century context, stands as our most relevant and helpful theological construct when dealing with the explicit “Christian” social concern, not simply from within the paramaters of his Jewish roots, but also in the wider gentile world.

1.     First, I will examine the theological term “adoption” from within its first century legal context.

2.     Second, I will show how Paul uses this legal context to represent a contrasting Christological focus for social concern.

3.     Lastly, I will show that it is from within the theological construct of adoption that the Christian church ultimately progressed as a religious response to a human concern for social isolation and responsibility, ultimately flowing outwards as a greater social concern for the world.

INTRODUCTION

The only person to use the term adoption in the Christian scripture is the apostle Paul. It is borrowed from the very recognizable Greco-Roman world and given a uniquely Christological center. For Paul it describes a turning point in the pages of history, a way of making sense of his personal encounter with this ‘Jesus’, who had come in to view as the definite answer to the messianic Jewish hope, the one who was expected to bring freedom and social reform to his people. Further, he also recognizes in Jesus a definitive hope for the world at large, a response to all who have been repressed and rejected in the midst of their own social context. The most immediate word for adoption in the Greek language was “huiothesa”, which emphasizes the act of “placing” an “adult son” in to either a new family name or a new family responsibility. Under Roman law and in Greek culture they traditionally adopted adults rather than babies or young children. Paul uses the word huios (adult son) as a term that Jesus claims for Himself, but does so with two other words in full view, “Brephos” (newborn baby/fetus), and the word “teknon”, which was used to define a younger son who was in the process of growing up and maturing. Before explaining the full weight of Paul’s understanding, it is important to first recognize the nature of adoption as a legal practice in its current context. 

1. ADOPTION AS A LEGAL PRACTICE IN THE FIRST CENTURY WORLD

Under Roman law adoption represented a positional advance from the limited rights of the teknon to the full rights, responsibilities and inheritance of the huios within the Roman household structure. It is interesting to note that the hierarchy of the Roman household remained as the singular sacred institution of Roman identity in what was an otherwise multi cultured and multi religious umbrella. In this structure the father was designated as the “priest” of the family and carried the responsibility of giving worship and honor to the family god while at the same time demonstrating full loyalty to the greater political empire. The institutionalization of the church was in large part indebted to this similar structure. It reflected a religious order under which the Roman interests could flourish, and adoption remained a significant piece of this puzzle.

At the point in history in which the Christian story interacts with this section of Roman history it had yet to lead to mass persecution. The Christian story emerges from the pages of its Jewish context, the product of a nation that had struggled and flourished based on the position of their temple and the eschatological anticipation of the ‘promised land’ that both precedes the first temple era and proceeds the second. In the exile that preceded (from Egypt to Babylon) and followed (from Babylon to Rome) the first temple destruction, the people of Judah/Israel were forced to adjust to living in foreign territory. There is no recognizable term for adoption in the early Jewish culture beyond allusions gained from interacting with these foreign cultures (such as Moses in Egypt). Rather, hopefulness for the future restoration of the temple and the promised land/messiah was demonstrated through the sacred protection of family bloodlines. As a response to infertility, Jewish practice encouraged the protection of family bloodlines whenever possible. If one was unable to conceive the man would sleep with another woman, or the woman (widow) would sleep with her husband’s closest living relative in order to produce an offspring or heir connected with the family name. This was the highest honor, and infertility/barrenness represented one of the highest degrees of shame.

Paul’s ministry took place during what Christian/Jewish history recognizes as the second temple era. The temple had been destroyed and was now being reconstructed under the guiding voice of Greco-Roman interests. The Jewish exiles were returning to their homeland, but were doing so under the reigning influence of the larger empire.

Regarding the practice of adoption under Roman rule of this time period, it was not out of the ordinary to see a traditional Roman household manipulating the law in order to absolve oneself of familial responsibilities for a blood born son in exchange for adopting a “new” more qualified son from a different blood line. It was also not out of the ordinary to recognize certain portions of the Jewish culture adapting to these practices themselves. The Roman understanding of adoption was not new. It followed years of dominating empires and ancient religious/secular traditions that were shaped by what historians now recognize as an “honor-shame” system. In most cases, as it was in Jewish tradition, the family was considered to be the most important religious institution and as such, much of the practice of adoption was motivated by protecting the honor of the family name. Honor was achieved typically through social, financial, military and political power and success in the eyes of the surrounding world. This is not to suggest that all adoption practices and persons followed such motivations, but it remained a defining characteristic of the political empire at large. Under an honor-shame system, anything that could humiliate the family name was seen as a negative source of shame. It is to this system that Paul’s main concerns begin to take shape.

2. ADOPTION AS THE “CHRISTIAN” RESPONSE TO A LAW BASED SYSTEM

When Paul uses the term “adoption”, he is looking to, as John Dickson writes, turn humility from a vice to a virtue. He comes from a Jewish background and recognizes a growing divide between the upper echelons of the temple, which was increasingly recognized as corrupt, and the growing marginalization of the lower and middle class, many of whom were rallying for religious reform in the name of a longstanding prophetic legacy (which included recognizable names such as Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Nehemiah). The temple leaders had long recognized the financial gain of partnering with the Roman lawmakers and leaders. Following a long exile in which they had learned to co-exist in foreign lands, it had become relatively easy to flourish in the Roman empire as an individual religious expression, so long as you recognized Caesar as Lord, payed your monetary dues, and didn’t disrupt the sacredness of the Roman household institution. The rise of Christendom brought tension to this congenial relationship, and as we shall see it is the distinct Christian approach to “familial” language that eventually isolates and distinguishes Christian converts not only from their Jewish heritage but also from the Roman world at large.

·      A new understanding of “familial” language

When Paul is making sense of his transformative experience with Jesus, he recognizes that his experience will isolate him from the world at large (as both a Jew and a Roman citizen). It is a compelling thought that he would settle on an analogy that would hit at the heart of the Jewish and Roman institution Yet he chooses the word “adoption” as the most qualified expression of the hope that Christ represents, both for him, his people (the Jewish nation) and for the world. Of utmost concern for Paul was a discussion of Jewish/Roman identity. For those who had been rejected and displaced by the reigning definition of the family system and adoptive practices, Christ represented a means and opportunity to truly “belong” to a new family despite their previous loss of identity. This would be a family structured around freedom from the social norms rather than slavery to social expectations. For Paul, this new family system had the ability to reach beyond the laws that governed the Jewish temple elite and the Roman adoptive practices, and flows out in to the Jewish/Gentile world as an inclusive and transformative experience. This is where we find the persisting tension between (Jewish) law and (Christ-led) grace that occupies much of Paul’s writing beginning to take shape. Paul’s adoptive reasoning would demand the sort of grace that could break down any barriers to “belonging” to the family of God that the law and society at large had previously set in place. This grace would come to be defined as the accomplishment of Jesus in declaring us to be in “right standing” (the root of the word “righteousness”) as sons/daughters of the family of God regardless of our background or social status. It hands us an identity that the world around us otherwise does not believe we deserve. 

·      The relationship between law and grace

It is important to note that while Paul’s intentional use of the adoption metaphor brought freedom to individuals, it created some confusion in the developing Church, particularly as the discussion of law and grace that would have flowed directly from the upper temple courts became more heated. In the opinion of a number of scholars, the letters of 1 John, 1 Peter and 2^nd Peter, and James shed light on an early forming community of believers who were attempting to come to terms with what their adoption meant and how to express their new found freedom(s) from within the still developing Pauline doctrine of grace. 2 Peter even goes on to refer to Paul’s teaching as “confusing” to say the least, and as James and 1 John appear to suggest, this teaching was difficult to balance when it came to understanding their Jewish/Gentile/Roman identity from a Christological perspective. In many ways it was easier to live out of a system that had well defined paramaters, which legal language certainly provided. And yet, it is out of the mystery of this “grace” as a theological understanding that Paul allows us to recognize the limitations of such human initiated paramaters when addressing the social concerns that their own systems were creating. It is out of this declaration of grace that we find God moving from the stories of the Jewish tradition out in to the world. It should be said that this grace was a familiar concept to the prophetic voices throughout Israel/Judah’s history, however, it was often resisted by those who benefited under the law’s ability to divide and conquer based on recognizable positions of social status and social norms. The Pauline language of adoption would persist in the tradition of this prophetic language as the letters of Paul begin to take shape. For Paul, the true vision of the Jewish prophetic legacy was one in which the trappings of worldly pursuits would be directly addressed through a new and unique social identity built on a theological approach to adoption under grace rather than law or legality. The Israelite God was a God for the world, and likewise Christ came for the sake of the world. Ephesians 1:5/1:7 let’s us know that in Paul’s view, as a spiritual term, we cannot be adopted based on our own merit. Grace necessitates the truth that we are chosen, persued, predestined (whatever term best fits your comfort level) to be sons/daughters of God. Paul also precludes that we are chosen (placed/adopted) out of slavery and fear (Romans 8:15), again terms that speak to both the Greco-Roman reality and the explicit Israelite history. Further, Romans 8:16-17 indicates a common heritage for all adopted sons of God regardless of background, while Romans 8:23 suggests that we have all the rights and privileges now, even as we wait for them to be fully revealed. Paul is convinced, and depending on how you approach the forming Old Testament world one can also recognize his approach in our own perception of Jewish history, that the heart behind the theological term “adoption” can be found all over the stories and traditions that shaped the ancient Jewish practice and tradition. God’s grace has been at work from the dawn of the created order. In fact, as Paul looks for a term to connect his teaching with the traditional Jewish God, he chooses the intimate Aramaic word “Abba” (father), a word for which there is no suitable Greek equivalent. For Paul, the Christian idea of adoption is not revolutionary but rather a revealing of what God has been up to all along. It was always intended to be a foundation of God’s covenant promise to restore the world. It begins in the story of an individual like Abraham, moves out through the communal witness of God’s people, a witness that ultimately intends to reach out to the world. It is from within the theological understanding of adoption that we find an opportunity to break down the dividing lines that can allow this to happen as a part of God’s greater purpose.

3. THE PROGRESSION OF THE CHURCH AS A RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION OF SOCIAL CONCERN

To further outline the degree to which a Christological center can shift our understanding of adoption as legal language, Paul recognizes that to be a Christ follower means that one is adopted in to a new family of God in which all previous lines between Jew and gentile are ultimately broken down. His main concern is to show that as sons/daughters of God we move from Brephos (baby) to all the rights and conditions of Jesus as huios (adult son), despite our rights, our background or social position. In doing so he removes the typical transition from teknon (young adult) to huios from view. Paul desires to speak to an isolated and displaced Jewish identity in order to expand this inherited identity as a people “of God” to the world at large. In Jewish history the people represented a “community” that was directly tied to the promise of the physical land and temple. This is how God had demonstrated His relationship with His people in their history. In a Christological view the promise now lays claim to the transformative experience of the “individual” and the spiritual renewal (regeneration) of a singular body/spirit identity that could exist for the sake of the larger physical community of the sons/daughters of God. The relationship between God and His people now takes place “within” the person rather than from outside of a community, a truth the Old Testament prophets often proclaim but again the people tend to miss. Paul desires to demonstrate that in Christ social class, ability or experience does not determine our right to be declared (placed as) sons/daughters of God (a term that indicates a shared identity/inheritance in Christ and His community). For this Gospel to work as a new vision for social reform, we must all be placed on equal level with equal right to claim our identity as a child of God and a member of His family. At the same time this “placing” indicates that we no longer need to find our identity in the power structures of the social world, Jewish or Roman. This becomes the great exchange.

There is an old adage that suggests the early Christians “learned to fit in anywhere but in a sense belonged nowhere”. We cannot speak of the experience of Christ reaching out to the world without looking first to the streets of Jerusalem. It remains a bit of a mystery as to how and why this small group of reformers eventually took to the streets willing to risk everything for the sake of their experience of meeting Jesus. Historians continue to wrestle with this reality. It is a small wonder that this group would end up soon scattered throughout Asia Minor, but it is a great wonder that the developing “church” continued to grow in the way that it did under such a grand picture of isolation and separation. By giving adoption a theological purpose Paul looks to give these early followers of “the way” (Christ followers) a recognizable identity from within their isolated context, one that would help them to grow in to the reality of this great exchange. It is an identity that declares them “now” to be adopted sons and daughters and heirs to all the rights and responsibilities of an adult son of God as represented in Christ, not just in a future inheritance but as part of a present family. Just as it was under Roman law, all previous debts would be erased and a new identity could be declared. This is where we find the unifying vision of Christ that the Church would eventually go to such great efforts to protect, and Paul uses this cultural understanding of adoption to explain the unique Christian experience to a world audience. For many this message represented something entirely new. For many it provided a way of getting out from under the pressures of worldly expectations and freedom from having to fight to belong as a Jew, a gentile or a Roman citizen. They could now exist as a son/daughter of God and lay claim to all the rights and privileges and inheritance that was given to Christ Himself.    

Jewish tradition and history is littered with this familiar story of identity crisis and reform. An empire would rise, the small Israelite community would be exiled, a prophet would rise and the nation would be called back to the sort of reform that would allow them to reclaim their identity as God’s people (family). Often this reform started with the call to live out their identity in a foreign land, and to live it out through the defining action of love and justice for both the rich and the marginalized while learning to give and receive freely within their isolated social context. By reclaiming an identity as a people of God who are “for” the world, the Israelite nation would eventually grow and redevelop, and ultimately be allowed to return to their home. This cycle would then repeat itself as the community of God would eventually (once again) become complacent, attracted to the addiction of power, success and status, and ignorant of the poor and marginalized standing outside the door of their own community, and it is only a matter of years before they are once again exiled and necessarily called back to another process of reform. This is the story of Paul’s world as much as it is the story of his people. In similar fashion we find the Jewish nation returning home only to be attracted to the notions of power and success that are coming from aligning with the growing empire of the day. All the while an isolated Jewish community continues to stare down at yet another promise of the coming destruction of their temple and the exile of their people yet again.

·      The already/not yet dichotomy

There is a reason that so much of Paul’s letter in Galatians (see 4:4) is about having shared rights, or extending shared rights to the marginalized in a foreign land. The difference that Paul sees in the ministry of Christ, a new understanding of God that is now being revealed, is the language of the already/not yet” dichotomy. Jewish tradition held a very real eschatological purpose. As prophetic language it was often looking forward. In a sense it is easier to look forward. This represented hope. What the nation of Israel/Judah often missed, and what was often that much more difficult, was the prophet’s insistence on how they were intended to respond and live in the here and now. The groundwork for reform always begins in learning how to belong in a foreign land, living in community with the foreign culture and people. This is how God’s sense of freedom worked. In Christ we are declared to be free “now”. We are declared as sons/daughters of God “now”. We are declared as a fully redeemed people “now”. At the same time we are called to live in the world wrestling and working through our given identity (salvation) as an incomplete reality. This is what it means to be adopted as a Christian metaphor. We are not left to succeed or fail at living in to a questionable future, but rather to find freedom in living out of a new identity that has already been established in a questionable present, a declaration that abolishes the trappings of popular social stigma and status that isolate and divide in the here and now." It frees us to work through our inconsistencies and failures with grace and instills a hope of living towards our future restoration. This is the sort of confidence that can free us from allusions of “slavery” and “social fears”.

The more one reads history outside of the lens of popular revisionists and politically correct versions, the more one recognizes just how much this Christian teaching of adoption overturned the dominating trends of history as a whole. As you read through the early letters, extra-biblical material and non-biblical source material, and as you look in to the gradual development and spread of the early Church communities throughout Asia Minor and beyond, you see a pressing theme of social consciousness emerge. In their influential role (as reflected from a reading by Alan Kreider) , the Church grew in to their new identity as the family of God by using their new found freedom as adopted sons/daughters to descend on the garbage dumps to rescue the discarded female babies who had no place in a male dominated culture. It was an early Christian community (that had became quickly dominated by a large female population) that slowly started to change the notions of slavery and freedom and woman’s rights that had kept others in bondage under powerful secular and religious regimes. It was this community that worked to expand the line of religious “inclusion” far out in to the reaches of the gentile world. It was this early community that dug the catacombs, a point that many often miss about these ancient ruins, so that people of all ethnic background and classes could freely bury their dead instead of being charged beyond what they could afford or denied the privilege altogether. These stories persist and echo on far past the ruins and remnants of the ancient world. The Church as an institution has had many problems and has played a part in many atrocities. We cannot overlook this fact that for every step forward we also tend to take a step back. This is a part of working out our new identity (salvation) on a daily basis. But at its core it represents a greater vision for reform, regeneration and restoration that continues to move forward regardless of the worlds failures, a vision that looks to continually challenge the way we view ourselves and interact with the world around us.

CONCLUSION

In adoption we are free to recognize the Father not as the judge but the lover. In adoption we can recognize the Son (Jesus) not simply as a judge who governs as a distant authoritarian, but rather as one who is not afraid to enter our circumstance and declare us as “righteous” (right standing) regardless of who we are and where we come from. We recognize Jesus as the one who is giving us the means to shape and form our identity every hour of every day. In adoption we recognize the popular language of freedom and grace, love and belonging. Burke writes, “there is a movement towards transformation as adopted sons and daughters of God in terms of the contextualization of faith in to culture, but if the Pauline language shows us anything, it is that humility and grace are primary as agents of change.” Again, Paul was looking to change humility from a vice to a virtue. By doing so he is sharing in the ministry of Jesus, a truth that the parable of the prodigal son does a masterful job in helping us to see.

·      The prodigal story in all of us

In the popular story of the prodigal son, many miss the emphasis of the parable as a response to a question of belonging. It is a conversation between a lawyer (with Jewish heritage) and this revolutionary they called ‘Jesus’. The question the lawyer asks is, “what must I do to be saved”. This can also read, what must I do to “belong” in the family of God. The lawyers first response is to reach out to the defining paramaters of the law: Love God and love others (a summary which had become a part of the Jewish mantra). This is one thing to say, it is quite another to accomplish, especially when one starts to weigh in the complexities of the entire Jewish legal system as a whole. So when Jesus suggests the man simply go out and “do” this, he quickly looks to lighten the load. His request to further identify (and simplify) exactly who his neighbor is reflects a direct attempt to articulate the law in practical terms, as if to suggest I “do” this (or “be” this) and I will “belong”. Jesus responds with a parable that subtly flips his question on its head. Notice how he moves the lawyer from defining “who is my neighbor” to restating the question as who “was” the neighbor in the story. This is significant for two reasons. First, if Jesus had desired to cater to the man’s misguided notion of “belonging”, he would have told a story in which he identified who the lawyer needed to help. He would have told a story in which the lawyer would be the character who helped the “Samaritan” on the side of the road (which would have been especially effective given the somewhat volatile relationship between the two groups). Instead he tells a story in which the lawyer is the one who is robbed and “found” on the side of the road by a Samaritan. This shifts the notion of belonging by “doing” to the action of “receiving” regardless of “being” (or “being placed” rather than “achieving” a position in Christ as a son/daughter of God). Secondly, by flipping the question around, Jesus directly addresses the heart of the man’s own identity crisis. By seeing himself on the side of the road he recognizes how his worldview has predestined his sense of self identity to a perpetuated feeling of isolation. To offer him the experience of being lifted out of the side of the road is to redefine his understanding of the honor-shame system. It makes humility a virtue rather than a vice. What does it mean to belong to the family of God? It means that no matter who we believe we are in the eyes of the world, in Christ we are already declared to belong “completely”. This gives us an identity to live out of and towards rather than to live in to and to accomplish.

When the story is read as a nice complementary piece for social justice it becomes nothing more than an added piece of baggage for what we must do in order to belong. The truth that we find when Jesus flips the question around (particularly in the strategic placing of the four characters in the story), is that it is more about the heart and desire of God to declare us in right standing and to belong as a part of His family (in contrast to the message of the world) than it is about our desire to prove we belong somewhere or anywhere based on our own good works or what we feel we should deserve. 

In my own story this resonates as a call to move forward out of my own depreciating and struggling self-awareness to a greater awareness of what it means to belong as a self declared child of God. It challenges my lack of self confidence and makes me aware of my consistent struggle to belong somewhere (anywhere) in this world. This is the unique Christian message that is born out of a complimentary Jewish history. The power of this message is that it speaks to all of the areas of the world and its secular/religious institutions, which are so often enslaved to methodologies and theories of “living” that still reflect pieces of the honor-shame system. This can be hard to see when so many have become adept at being “socially conscious” on such a grand and global scale. And yet the problem we find in the parable of the good Samaritan appears to remain very much alive. Stories abound of those who feel the immense pressure of failing to live up to social norms, and who fall continually out of place and go unnoticed, even in a world that remains socially conscious and entirely aware of the kind of stories that make the front page news and social media trendings on a daily basis. As the lawyer in the good Samaritan parable demonstrates, social consciousness can just as easily become a mark of what it means to be successful and a part of the elite, and efforts to keep up with the “Joneses” of social reform can just as easily result in a feeling of defeat.

Thankfully the Christian message has long stood undefined by these paramaters, even as the very institutions and people that exist under its banner often get its message dangerously wrong. It is a tough thing to deal with the tension of law and grace that exists within the freedom of the Christian message. Social norms create comfortable social parameters, regardless of good or bad intentions. Social identities create practical means of belonging. And yet to grasp anything less than the truth that adoption language declares to be true regarding these social paramaters is to miss the point of the Gospel entirely. We (all people) are placed with equal status with no concern for the messy middle ground of the teknon where the dividing lines that are necessary for recognizing the distinctions of social status, class and ability can be erected. This is where all social concern must begin, is with the individual, and in theological terms with the individual relationship between (wo)man and God. This is what drove the passion of the prophets of the Old Testament world. It drove the passion of Jesus and the Gospel writers understanding of kingdom language as an already/not yet dichotomy. It surrounds the witness of Paul and the early Church. It is the same passion that should drive us today. It is from here that we can then grasp the defining notion of a Christ led vision for the world. It is because we first belonged that we can share the message that all belong as a part of the family of God. This is good news indeed.

Read Francis Lyall (Slaves, Citizens, Sons)