Church, Society, and the Christian Common Good

Essays in Conversation with Philip Turner

Ephraim Radner, Radner

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781498281379
• eBook ISBN: 9781498281386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Philip Turner's contributions as a leader and thinker in Christian missions and social ethics are here engaged by an array of friends and colleagues. Turner's scholarly and clerical career spans a key era of transition in American and world Christianity, and his thinking and teaching about the intersection between ecclesial and civil life have encouraged several generations of Christian theologians and ministers. The essays in this collection touch on key topics in which Turner has been involved: cross-cultural missions, social relations in terms of family and procreation, ecclesiology, scriptural interpretation, the nature of the public good, and the character of a human life before God. Turner has been a pioneer, within the Anglican world especially, in promoting what has been called a "generous orthodoxy, " and these essays by prominent theologians from America and the United Kingdom extend his witness in lively and fruitful ways.

Section IV

Prophet

7

The Church: A Family of the Adopted

Gilbert Meilaender

In Ethics and the Church Philip Turner uses the New Testament letter to the Ephesians as a “prismatic case” for developing an ethic that, while attending also to self and society, focuses centrally on the life of the church.199 The issue I take up in this essay does not play a major role in Turner’s discussion; yet, it is central to the New Testament’s understanding of the church, even though it is mentioned specifically in only a few passages—one of them at the very outset of Ephesians (1:4–5). Indeed, Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner can even write, “The book of Ephesians contains the fullest scriptural treatment of adoption,” depicting God as Father of a new family formed through the Spirit of adoption.200 In reflecting upon the meaning and significance for Christians of adoption we therefore take up a topic at the very heart of the church’s life.

Adoption as Sons

Although it does not occur frequently, the language of adoption is of great significance in the New Testament. The Greek word huiothesia, a literal translation of which would be “adoption as a son” or “to place as a son,” occurs relatively few times in the Pauline letters, but it characterizes the way in which one comes to live “in Christ” and through him as a child of his Father.201 So, for example, in Ephesians 1:5 believers are told that through Jesus they have been destined in love for huiothesia, for adoption as sons. Similarly, in Romans 8:23 St. Paul writes that, living in a world that is in bondage to decay and suffering the pangs of childbirth, we live in hope as we wait for the promised “adoption as sons.”

Because Jewish tradition had no legal practice of adoption, it is likely that Paul’s use of the language of adoption had Roman law as its background. And, as Trevor Burke notes, the Pauline letters use the metaphor of huiothesia “only in letters to communities directly under the rule of Roman law.”202 The purpose of adoption in Roman law was not to benefit the child adopted but to ensure that the family line would continue.203 Yet, of course, there were also important consequences for the person adopted. In Roman law, Francis Lyall writes, “the adoptee is taken out of his previous state and is placed in a new relationship with his new paterfamilias. All his old debts are canceled, and in effect he starts a new life.”204

Such a practice seems to lie in the background when Paul writes in Romans 8:14–15 that believers, having received the Spirit of God, received not a spirit of slavery but the Spirit of adoption, making them, like Christ, sons who can cry “Abba! Father!” A similar pattern of thought appears in chapter 4 of Galatians. God sent his Son, Paul writes, for the sake of those who were enslaved by the elemental spirits of the universe—in order that they might be redeemed, receive huiothesia, and, living by the Spirit of Christ, cry out “Abba! Father!”

It is no legal fiction that Paul has in mind.205 What the Spirit’s work of huiothesia does is give the place—the genuine place—of a son to one to whom that place does not belong by nature. That is, the adoptee’s sonship is not assured “by natural descent or merit,” but it is “a sonship always dependent on God’s free grace.”206 Even God’s chosen people, Israel, is so not by nature but by covenant. Their status also, Paul writes in Romans 9:4, is one of huiothesia, as Jesus himself made clear when he taught that it was not sufficient for Israelites to appeal to Abraham as their father.207 Therefore, it is not as if Gentile Christians are incorporated into God’s people on a basis different from that of Jewish believers; all receive the Spirit-given adoption as sons.208 Of all people it is true, as St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:50, that flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom.

In this way Paul relativizes biological fatherhood without denying its significance. God’s fatherhood comes first; ours is a reflection and imitation. Thus, in Ephesians 3:14–15 the apostle says that all other fatherhood, whether in heaven or on earth, takes its name from the Father before whom we should bend the knee.209 In our created nature we can already be called children of the God who has made us and all that is; thus, in the famous speech of Paul on the Areopagus, as it is recounted in Acts, we are said to be “God’s offspring.”210 But that creation only points toward a deeper relation, characterized by the Pauline letters as “sonship.” In Jesus God does more than just restore the integrity of the creation that has been corrupted by sin. He reveals, as Karl Barth put it, “a perfection concealed even in the original creation in its integrity.”211 What is concealed comes to fulfillment in the huiothesia worked by the Spirit of Christ, enabling us now to name the Creator as our Father. This identity is given not in nature but in history, in the history of God’s work of redemption. No one can claim it simply by virtue of his or her created nature.

In this connection we should recall the significance for Christians of baptism as a means by which one becomes a child of God. That significance is especially powerful when parents bring a newborn child for baptism, handing over—indeed, relinquishing—that child. Deeply bound as they are to this child by ties of biology, gestation, and birth, the child is not theirs to possess. Indeed, Michael Banner has recently noted the moral implications of the role of godparents as that office developed centuries ago, although it has now lost much of its traditional meaning.212 The origins of the practice are not entirely clear, and it varied somewhat from place to place and time to time, but by the early Middle Ages it was often the case that the child was presented for baptism by the godparents. In some places the parents were expected to be absent from the baptism, and relatives were sometimes forbidden to be godparents.

Why? Because an “intensification of ‘natural’ kinship which occurs with the use of relatives in this role was fundamentally at odds with a practice which sought not to intensify existing kinship, but to displace or relativize it.”213 This did not mean that natural kinship was of no significance, but it did mean that Christians had to rework their understanding of it. Baptism is not primarily an event of importance for the biological family, even if relatives of the child are generally present. Rather, it signifies that at the deepest level the child’s identity is marked by relation to God, who sets his hand upon us in baptism and calls us by name. The baptized person is destined for a greater family than the one into which he was born—a destiny that comes not through natural bonds but through huiothesia. Hence, all Christian parents must relinquish their children for adoption, and we are (one and all) adoptees.

A Theological Framework

To know ourselves as God’s adopted children we must see ourselves within the history of God’s redeeming work. That history does not ignore the significance of our created nature, but it also sees us as people on the way toward the greater destiny of God’s new creation. This requires that we understand human life not as static but as always “on the way”—and, hence, characterized by the several forms of God’s activity that shape this history.

A useful framework for thinking of this history of redemption is the one provided by Karl Barth in the massive (and never completed) volumes of his Church Dogmatics. He offers there an account of human life that corresponds to the threefold form of God’s action in creation, reconciliation, and redemption.214 Because we are God’s creatures, we must acknowledge, honor, and even celebrate the human nature that is ours. Because we are (pardoned) sinners whom God has in Jesus acted to reconcile, we must come to terms with the countless ways in which human life is disordered and broken. And because we are heirs of the future God has promised, we must live toward a destiny that will fulfill and transform our created nature without simply obliterating it. If we take this threefold structure seriously, we will not deny the significance of biological ties, we will not deny the pain and sorrow that is often embedded in the circumstances that lead to adoption, and we will not deny that our identity as God’s children is in the end determined not by biology alone but by adoption. In short, we cannot say just one thing or think within just one perspective and expect thereby to do justice to a person’s identity.

Complex though Barth’s approach may be, it is a complexity that corresponds to the nature of human life before God, and it is to be preferred to an approach that would isolate any single point in this history of redemption and allow it to define our identity without remainder. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section I: Missionary
• Section II: Priest
• Section III: Scholar
• Section IV: Prophet
• Afterword: The Point Is the Difference