Sometimes the lengths to which people go to adopt are amazing.
Not long before Romania shut its doors to private adoptions, I met a childless, two-income couple who desperately wanted kids. Disturbing reports about the Romanian orphanages moved them deeply. Soon, armed with a thick stack of notarized legal documents, the wife took a leave of absence from her job and flew to Romania. There she stayed for three months, unable to speak the language, sometimes afraid, but motivated by love. After hiring an interpreter, she began to visit orphanages, knock on doors, and follow leads. Despite many days of frustration, she kept looking. And in just over a month she found twin girls. Her husband soon joined her in Bucharest, and together they navigated the treacherous waters of adoption laws in Romania and in the United States.
That was not the first time I have been moved by an adoption. As my law practice has increasingly emphasized adoption cases over the past decade, I have sometimes been amazed at what I’ve seen. And I have begun to see in the lives of the adoptive families I work with a picture of God’s love—for others and for me. I have concluded that recovering a biblical theology of adoption can help us know more about God and experience him in new and vital ways.
Loved by choice
It is not clear how well the apostle Paul knew Latin, but verses in Ephesians 1 suggest that he was familiar with the existing Roman law of adoptio and that he understood the root meaning of that word: to choose. He wrote, “For [God] chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will” (Eph. 1:4–5, NIV).
To be adopted ultimately depends upon the choice of someone else. Only parents can petition to adopt a child, not vice versa. Paul says that God chooses us to be his children. He also says that the motivating force behind this choice is love.
Not long ago a friend called me to discuss adoption. He and his wife were happily married but had no children. “Dave,” he said, “I just have to have that kind of outlet for my love.” My friend had quite a number of nephews and nieces, and he volunteered as a Big Brother. Yet I sensed he might burst if he did not have the opportunity to love a child of his own.
This kind of love is active, passionate, and relentless. It will knock on countless doors, hire interpreters, and conquer mountains of red tape to find a child to love. Yet it pales in relation to God’s love for us and his searching after us.
God choosing us as adopted children is not predicated on what we have achieved or will achieve, according to Paul. Instead, God chooses us because he loves us. There are no conditions or preconditions to this love, even though he knows everything about us—our past, present, and future. Similarly, parents do not choose to adopt a child because of his or her past or future accomplishments, but solely because of their love for the child.
Former Baltimore Oriole Jim Palmer described something of this unconditional love at his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, when he remarked that he had been adopted at birth. “How does this happen that you have parents that want you, that love you and were always there for you?” How does this happen, indeed? Jim Palmer said, in effect, that his parents would have always been there for him, would have always loved him, even if he had failed as a pitcher.
Whatever our pedigree, whatever our accomplishments or failings, whatever our obedience or disobedience, God loves us and desires us to be his children.
This picture of God’s love and grace becomes all the more vivid in light of a contemporary need in adoptions. There is great demand today by adoptive parents for healthy newborns. Conversely, it is difficult to find adoptive homes for children having mental or physical disabilities. Relatively few adoptive parents are able and willing to adopt a “special-needs” child. It is always a privilege to provide assistance in these adoptions.
The special-needs adoption that has most affected me, however, did not involve me as an attorney. I was just another parent spending time at Seattle’s Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, where our newborn daughter, Maggie, had recently undergone surgery.
There we met Sally and her parents. Sally had gone through two heart surgeries in her short life. As I talked with her parents, one of whom was almost always at Sally’s crib side, I learned that they had adopted Sally as a newborn even though they knew that there were significant medical risks ahead. When the surgeries came, they did not change their minds about the adoption. Sally’s adoptive parents demonstrated their love to her by being almost constantly present in the hospital room, by talking to her, by bathing her, and by holding her. In years to come, Sally may experience various disabilities, but her parents give every indication that they will continue to love her in a way consistent with their initial choice to adopt her.
I know a couple who spent almost $10,000 in counseling fees for their two adopted boys, who are now in early adolescence. Both boys suffer the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. I know another couple that has begun to invest in counseling for their young adopted son, who is beginning to exhibit some symptoms of his biological mother’s paranoid schizophrenia. Still another couple has adopted three special-needs children from India: one girl had polio in one leg and never walked until she was fitted with leg braces in the States, another girl had surgery for a cleft palate, and their younger brother needs blood transfusions every three weeks. All these moms and dads did not have to love and adopt the child they chose; they were not compelled to shoulder the extra burden of disabilities. I would have understood if they had said no. But they did not.
We may not want to admit it, but each of us is a special-needs child in our relationship to God. We may not have any significant disabilities in the eyes of this world, but we are often spiritually blind and sick, disobedient and willful. How can it be that God is there, always waiting, always loving, even when we are unlovable?
How God adopts
The means by which God has adopted us, Paul tells us, is “through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5). “When the time had fully come,” Paul writes, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those under the Law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Gal. 4:4–5, NIV). By sending to the cross his perfect Son, with whom he had fellowship and in whom he delighted, God was able to adopt us special-needs children.
Analogies can be stretched too far, and adoption is no exception. The legal processes I work through offer no parallel for someone giving a child over to death in order to adopt the orphaned or abandoned child of another. What is analogous, however, is that adoption can only occur by going through specific legal procedures.
An attorney once called me to ask if there was such a thing as an equitable adoption. He had a probate case in which a young person had spent much time in and around the house of the decedent, growing up as “one of the family.” The attorney wanted to know whether this person should be treated as an adopted family member for inheritance purposes. I told him no. Specific legal procedures have to be followed and specific court orders obtained in order to adopt. Adoption just does not exist outside the legal process.
Similarly, we cannot be adopted apart from Christ’s work on the cross. It is the linchpin upon which our adoption depends. If it is true, as New Testament scholar Donald Guthrie wrote, that adoption “is the ultimate purpose of the incarnation,” it is also the ultimate result of the cross. And the cross cannot be bypassed.
Bonded through the Spirit
Richard and Dixie Montgomery had appeared previously before the court with their four older adopted children: one Korean, one Vietnamese, and two Haitians. Now another Haitian boy was waiting to join them and the Montgomerys’ four “home-grown” children. With a signature, a judge finalized the decree of adoption. As the family and judge squeezed together so I could get them all in their camera’s viewfinder, I knew I was witnessing something very special. Everyone, including the children, treated everyone else as equal members of the family.
I later asked Dixie her thoughts about the finalization hearing. She said it was special but, in a way, anticlimactic. She said that she knew an adoption has to be legally and formally completed, but that their newest child had already become a part of the family by the bonding that had taken place over the past several months.
Dixie articulated what every adoptive parent knows: There must be more to a new parent-child relationship than legal procedures and formalities, however important they are. A successful adoption requires a bond of love that grows between the parents and the adopted child. Then the child will freely call out “Mommy” and “Daddy,” and each parent will respond to the child in parental love.
Similarly, Paul recognized that God did not simply provide for the “legal” means of our adoption, whereby we are justified in God’s sight through the death of Jesus. Our heavenly Father also gave us the Holy Spirit to provide an emotional bond to him. “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out ‘Abba, Father’ ” (Gal. 4:6, NIV). Paul also wrote, “You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15–16, NRSV).
“God’s purpose,” writes John Stott, “was not only to secure our sonship by his Son, but to assure us of it by his Spirit. He sent his Son that we might have the status of sonship, and He sent His Spirit that we might have an experience of it.”
It should come as no surprise that the two times Paul referred to God as Abba are also the times he described our adoption by God. And these passages are very trinitarian; each person of the Trinity is active and essential. God sent his Son to redeem us, and God sent his Spirit to confirm his love in our hearts—to create a bonding with our heavenly Father, enabling us to come as children before him and say “Daddy.”
In the finalization of a recent stepparent adoption, the judge asked a seven-year old girl whether she had anything to say about her adoption by her mother’s husband. She looked down shyly and then, looking up, said, “Just that I love him.” This is what the Spirit enables us to feel toward and to say to God.
New birth, new Parent
Hints of what may be adoption imagery are scattered throughout Jesus’ life and ministry. He referred to those who did the will of his Father as his family. Jesus prayed to God as “Abba, Father.” There are even suggestions in John’s gospel, when Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again. Nicodemus, thinking only about physical birth, asks how can a man re-enter the womb. Jesus’ response is familiar: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Commentators usually interpret this as a personal transformation. But if the explanation stops there it is incomplete. One is not born by oneself but by another, so a new relationship is created, a new name is given, and a new identity is formed. This is what happens in adoption.
After the judge signs the decree of adoption, I file the registration papers for a new birth certificate. The new birth certificate will list the actual hospital where the child was born, the doctor who delivered the child, and it will show the exact time and date of birth. The difference is that on the new birth certificate the child will be given a completely new name and completely new parents. In a tangible way, this new birth certificate shows that there has been a new birth. A new parent-child relationship is formed; the child has a new source of identity. While the New Testament’s pictures of our adoption and birth are not synonymous, they overlap.
When adoptive parents hold that new birth certificate, it is often with a sense of wonder and mystery because it is proof that they are the parents of someone who was not physically born to them. There is the deep awareness that a miracle has occurred, a miracle that each of us who has been adopted by God experiences in an even more profound way.
More than justified
What are the implications of our being adopted by God?
First, adoption offers another picture to describe what it means to be a Christian. Being a Christian is more than being justified and redeemed; it is also about being a child of our Father in heaven and about being in a father-child relationship with him. For me, adoption is the theological peg on which I have been able to hang my understanding of that oft-used phrase personal relationship with God.
Second, the more we understand that we are adopted as special-needs children by our Father in heaven, the more we will experience what Christian writer and speaker Brennan Manning refers to as a healing of our image of God. All of us need help with this healing; some, who have not had fathers growing up or who now have painful memories of their fathers, need more help in seeing God as “Abba, Father.” As we understand and internalize our own adoption by God, as we realize that his choosing is based on his immense love for us, without regard for what we’ve done or accomplished, our image of God can begin to be healed.
How can it be that we have a heavenly Father who wants us, loves us, and is always there for us? How can it be, indeed.
David V. Andersen is a Seattle attorney with Leach, Brown, and Andersen and an elder at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Seattle.
