Not by Nature but by Grace

Forming Families through Adoption

Gilbert C. Meilaender

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268100711
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

Working from within the contours of Christian faith, this book examines the relation between two ways of forming families—through nature (by procreation) and through history (by adoption). Christians honor the biological tie between parents and children, for it is the work of God in creation. Yet Christians cannot forget that it is adoption, and not simply natural descent, that is at the center of the New Testament's depiction of God's grace. Gilbert Meilaender takes up a range of issues raised by the practice of adoption, always seeking to do justice to both nature and history in the formation of families, while keeping at the center of our vision the truth that it is not by nature but by grace that we can become adopted children of the one whom Jesus called his Father.

Meilaender begins with reflection on the puzzling relation of nature and history in forming families and proceeds to unpack the meaning of huiothesia, the word used in the New Testament to name the grace by which a follower of Jesus becomes an adopted child of God. That perspective is applied to a range of questions that regularly arise in Christian theological discussions of adoption: Is adoption only for the infertile? Should single persons adopt? Is it wise for adoption to take place across racial or national boundaries? Special attention is paid to the relation between adoption and new reproductive technologies and to what is called "embryo adoption." Interspersed between the chapters are letters written by the author to his own son by adoption. But if the argument of the book is taken seriously, these letters are written not to one who falls within a special category of "adopted son or daughter, " but to one who is, simply and entirely, a son or daughter.

CHAPTER 1

Nature and History

Pointing to Sophocles’ story of Oedipus as an example of one way in which mythic stories in Western culture have depicted adoption, Marianne Novy writes: “The plot of Oedipus is based on the assumption that parenthood is a matter of genetics, which determines identity.”¹ To say, as Oedipus does, “I will know who I am,” is, Novy notes, “to define your parentage as your identity.”²

Doing so is, however, by no means as obvious as it might seem. Nature has its claims upon us, but so does history. In a well-ordered world these claims might not seem to be in competition, but, alas, our worlds are often not well ordered. “Critics,” Novy reminds us, “almost always refer to Laius and Jocasta as Oedipus’s father and mother, without regard to the fact that they both wanted him killed as an infant, or that Jocasta spent only three days with the baby before giving him to the shepherd to expose.”³ To think about the meaning and significance of adoption is to reflect upon lives in which nature and history are not harmoniously ordered. We can consider several puzzling examples as an invitation to engage in such reflection.

PUZZLE I

In George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner (published in 1861), a series of tragic events makes Silas—a reclusive weaver without friends or family—the adoptive father for a little orphaned girl whom he names Eppie. Eppie’s opium-addicted mother, Molly, dies of exposure on a cold and snowy winter’s evening, having been unable to get Godfrey Cass, to whom she was secretly married, to acknowledge his paternity. The little girl wanders into Silas’s cottage, he cares for her, and, since her mother is dead and her father unknown, he continues to raise her as his daughter. (There were no children’s service agencies to intervene!) When Silas wonders whether he really has a right to the child, Mrs. Winthrop, a kind-hearted neighbor, tells him, “‘You’ll have a right to her if you’re a father to her.’”⁴

Given the circumstances under which Eppie came to him and given the evidence in her hair and eyes that Eppie is not Silas’s biological child, it would, of course, be impossible for Silas to pretend that he and his daughter were joined by nature through a biological tie. Nor does he attempt that. As Eppie grows older, Silas shares with her some of the details of how she came to live with him. Eppie puzzles a good bit over her mother, who died in the snow, but she gives relatively little thought to the father she has never known. After all, Eliot writes, “Had she not a father very close to her, who loved her better than real fathers in the village seemed to love their daughters?” (197).

That sentence, simple as it is and ringing true as it does, may nonetheless leave us puzzled. Eppie has a father, indeed a close and loving father, better than other fathers in the village. But Eliot does not just say that. She writes that the love of Eppie’s father is better than that of any of the “real” fathers in the village. So in the very sentence that seems to affirm in the strongest terms Silas’s fatherhood, those whose tie to their daughters is not just historical but also natural are characterized as real fathers.

It is hard to miss, though, that the story gives Eppie the last word on this puzzle. Her biological father, Godfrey Cass, had experienced Molly’s death as liberating. It freed him to marry Nancy Lammeter, a far more respectable choice for a wife than Molly had been. Years pass, Godfrey and Nancy remain childless, and he finally tells Nancy that Eppie is actually his child. Thinking that they are in a position to give Eppie advantages that Silas cannot, they offer to take her into their home and acknowledge her as Godfrey’s child.

Eppie resists the idea, wanting to remain with Silas, but Godfrey says: “‘I have a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims…. I have a natural claim that must stand before every other’” (228–29). This rouses Silas from his normal reticence, and, pitting history against nature, he replies: “‘It’s me she’s been calling her father ever since she could say the word’” (229). It is Eppie who finally settles the matter, in the following exchange with Nancy:

“What you say is natural, my dear child—it’s natural you should cling to those who’ve brought you up,” she said, mildly; “but there’s a duty you owe to your lawful father. There’s perhaps something to be given up on more sides than one. When your father opens his home to you, I think it’s right you shouldn’t turn your back on it.”

“I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,” said Eppie, impetuously, while the tears gathered. (231)

It is hard to imagine most readers of the story not adding their “Amen” to the feeling Eppie expresses, and it is hard to imagine George Eliot not intending that they should. However strong the claims of nature may be, in this story those claims pale into insignificance when set over against the shared familial history of Silas and Eppie. Thus, Marianne Novy writes, Silas Marner “makes a case for the benefits and the naturalness of adoption, the redefinition of family by nurture rather than by genetics, more emphatically than any well-known novel before the twentieth century.”⁵

How puzzling, then, that Eliot wrote another novel, Daniel Deronda (published in 1876), which “makes a powerful case for the view that adoptees must learn their heredity to know who they really are.”⁶ To attempt to summarize the plot(s) of this mammoth novel is well beyond my critical powers. It is really at least two stories—that of Daniel Deronda and that of Gwendolen Harleth—though the stories intersect in many ways. Critics have sometimes suggested that it would have been better to publish only one of the stories, Gwendolen’s or Daniel’s, though they do not necessarily agree which it should have been. For my purposes, though, the focus must clearly be on Daniel Deronda.

He is a young English gentleman, who has been raised with love and attention by Sir Hugo Mallinger, whom he calls his uncle. Knowing only that he does not know the identity of his biological father or mother, Daniel cannot help wondering whether Sir Hugo may actually be his father, and he often finds himself longing for a more secure sense of identity and belonging (experiencing, one might say, what some today have taken to calling “genealogical bewilderment”).

Through a series of twists and turns rather too fantastic to be entirely believable, Daniel comes to learn that he is Jewish by birth. Having rescued a young Jewish woman named Mirah when she was about to take her own life, Daniel, who is drawn to her more than he perhaps even realizes at first, tries to learn whether her mother or brother is still alive. Although he finds a man who for several reasons might be a plausible candidate for Mirah’s brother, this man is a rather unappealing pawnbroker, and Daniel is not certain Mirah would be well served to discover that such a man was her brother. His uncertainties about himself intersect with his concern for Mirah. “How far was he justified in determining another life by his own notions? Was it not his secret complaint against the way in which others had ordered his own life, that he had not open daylight on all its relations, so that he had not, like other men, the full guidance of primary duties?”⁷

Daniel also comes to know a mystical Jewish visionary, Ezra Mordecai Cohen, who is living with the pawnbroker’s family. Mordecai is actually Mirah’s brother, though it takes some time for Daniel to learn that. In the meantime he comes under Mordecai’s spell, becoming something like his disciple. Mordecai is a dying man, and he is looking for someone who will carry forward and work toward his vision of a restored Jewish nation. He sees in Daniel Deronda that someone, and Daniel is not immune to the lure of Mordecai’s vision. The problem, of course, is that Daniel is not Jewish. How then could he be the one to carry on the vision of Mordecai?

“What my birth was does not lie in my will,” [Daniel] answered. “My sense of claims on me cannot be independent of my knowledge there. And I cannot promise you that I will try to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I have never yet been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it would become if it were made a part of yours.” (2:154–55)

Mordecai is, however, serenely confident that Daniel is in fact Jewish, and events turn out to support his confidence. Deronda’s biological mother, Leonora Halm-Eberstein, sends him a letter through Sir Hugo. After having been entirely removed from her child’s life for years, she now wants to meet and speak with him. She is Jewish, and her desire to be an opera singer had been opposed by her father and only achieved after his death. For her, being Jewish had been a narrow, restrictive identity against which she had rebelled with all her heart.

Many men had loved her, Sir Hugo among them. But having married her Jewish cousin and given birth to Daniel, she had no desire to raise a child. Moreover, she thought she would be doing her son a favor by releasing him “from the bondage of having been born a Jew” (2:342). “I have not the foolish notion,” she says to Daniel, “that you can love me merely because I am your mother, when you have never seen or heard of me all your life. But I thought I chose something better for you than being with me. I did not think that I deprived you of anything worth having” (2:341).

Even though his mother continues to affirm her abandonment of him, there is for Daniel something liberating in learning the truth about his origins. His affection for Sir Hugo remains, but he takes up his Jewish identity eagerly. It frees him to acknowledge his love for Mirah and to see her as a possible wife, something he had not thought possible as long as she was Jewish and he was not. It frees him also to make Mordecai’s vision his own. He and Mirah marry and soon leave for the “East,” there to devote themselves to the recovery of a Jewish homeland.

Eliot’s two novels, taken together, constitute for us a problem. With her identity shaped by their shared history, Eppie feels at home with Silas; living with him as his daughter is where she belongs. Daniel, though loved with much affection by Sir Hugo, always carries about with himself a vague sense of difference, of not belonging. For him that shared history does not overcome a feeling that nature has set him apart. Marianne Novy, acknowledging the contrast, warns that we might make too much of it. After all, Daniel’s newfound sense of identity owes at least as much to Mordecai’s “spiritual parentage” as to the knowledge Daniel gains from Leonora. Hence, one might still argue that Daniel Deronda favors “fostering over kinship.”⁸

True as this may be, readers who manage to make their way through the whole of Daniel Deronda are likely to think that in weighing the conflicting claims of nature and history it comes down far more on the side of nature as identity-shaping than does Silas Marner. Taken together, the novels pose a problem they do not solve.

PUZZLE II

Consider the contrasting views of two clergymen. Russell Moore is a Southern Baptist theologian, currently serving as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He and his wife have five sons, the oldest two of whom were born in Russia, orphaned, and adopted by the Moores. The process of adopting these sons came to have far more than personal significance for Moore; for the experience compelled him to reflect theologically on what it means to be an adopted child or adoptive parent. And his 2009 book, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, is a powerful and engaging explication of the meaning and significance of adoption.⁹

There is much in his view that we might take up here, much with which to agree and perhaps some with which to disagree. For my purposes at the moment, however, I will concentrate on just one strand of his discussion, his opposition to what might be called biological essentialism. From that standpoint it is “traceable genetic material” that creates the parent-child bond (24). Then adoption becomes simply a second-best, fallback option for couples who experience infertility—“a plan B for people who can’t have children” (107).

For Moore, however, adoption seems to be Plan A, though perhaps we should say that he makes this case only with respect to Christians in particular. But Christians, at any rate, are called to recognize as kin, as their own flesh and blood, those with whom they do not share traceable genetic material. A history of relationship, commitment sustained over time, is what forms and sustains the bond of father and mother with their children.

How seriously Moore intends this becomes clear in what seems, to me at least, to be the most striking passage in his book. Recalling that when he and his wife adopted their two sons from Russia, many people encouraged them not to forget to teach these boys about their cultural heritage—meaning by that the heritage of their Russian roots—Moore gives a different spin to that task. “As we see it,” he writes, “that’s not their heritage anymore, and we hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home. We teach them about their heritage, yes, but their heritage as Mississippians” (36). Thus, the boys learn about their grandfather, a Baptist pastor in the South, their great-grandfather who raised cotton, and the civil rights movement. All this becomes their history.¹⁰

As far as Moore is concerned, this approach is a natural and necessary outgrowth of Christian faith. The New Testament uses precisely the language of adoption to characterize the manner in which one becomes a Christian—as, for example, in Galatians 4:5, where St. Paul writes that God sent his Son as redeemer “so that we might receive adoption as sons.”¹¹ Hence, adoption creates in believers a new identity, a shared identity. Because it is the means by which one comes to belong to the body of Christ, no one belongs by nature, and all who belong do so by virtue of their adoption. “People will often ask me,” Moore writes, “what the key to raising adopted children is. I tell them that honestly, we don’t know—we don’t have any adopted children. The term ‘adopted kid’ assumes an ongoing difference, something that differentiates him from a ‘regular kid’” (191).

In an essay titled “Adoption after Altruism,” Paul Sauer gives voice to a contrasting angle of vision.¹² Sauer is also a clergyman, and he wears several hats—as pastor and executive minister of Our Saviour Lutheran Church and School in the Bronx; as an assistant professor of religion at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York; and as associate editor of the Lutheran Forum. More immediately germane to my purpose here is that he, like Moore, is the father of two internationally adopted children. His understanding of the meaning of adoption is rather different from Moore’s, however. In part, his view is different simply because he focuses his essay on unethical practices that have sometimes marked international adoptions, even and especially those done under the auspices of “so-called Christian adoption agencies” (12).

More generally, however, he rejects what he calls the “altruistic adoption image,” which pictures the adopted child as one who has been rescued from a hopeless, poverty-stricken and abandoned life to something far better. We should not, he says, characterize an adopted child as lucky or fortunate. “A ‘lucky child’ would be one where there would be no need for adoption because the biological parents … would be able to raise the child themselves” (11).¹³

But Sauer is not just troubled by unethical practices. He believes that the “altruistic adoption image” seduces us into overlooking the continuing importance of biological ties in the life of the adopted child. Children adopted from other countries may be left “with little to no sense of their own history” (11). He insists that while, to be sure, “the adoption of children can make them part of an ethnically different family,” it remains the case that adoption “does not change their own ethnicity” (12). At least on the face of it, then, the contrast with Russell Moore’s approach could hardly be more striking.

This contrast will not disappear, but it is only fair to note that both Moore and Sauer qualify their views in order to acknowledge the complex relation of nature and history in adoption. Sauer sees how understandable it is that would-be adoptive parents should find themselves drawn to the altruistic adoption image. They may quickly come to think that their adoption of a particular child “was meant to be” (12). Moreover, “there will always be a need for adoption” in a world distorted and broken by sin (12). And even after asserting that the adopted child’s ethnicity remains what it was, even after noting how important it is that adoptive parents should respect the cultural tradition from which their child came, he writes that such respect means that the parents should “incorporate that culture into their own family’s traditions” (13). Thus, while the adoptive family’s shared life is enriched and expanded by honoring the culture from which their child came, it is still true that ...