The Recovery of Adoption: A Brief Progress Report

Abstract: Talk of the neglect of the doctrine of adoption has become commonplace over the last decades. Less recognised is that this awareness has arisen from a slowly developing concern to recover the doctrine. Thus, the author, participant in the endeavour for thirty-plus years, explains why the recovery became necessary, identifies Robert S. Candlish’s 1864 Cunningham Lectures on the Fatherhood of God as its dawn, and traces the emergent interest in adoption down to the present via the disciplines of historical, biblical, and systematic theology. Various phases of the recovery are traversed, and numerous tensions (methodological, exegetical, linguistic, and structural) are highlighted. Their resolution promises the matured exposition and application of adoption, and calls for the methodological renewal of classic systematics. Aspects of this renewal and its benefits are mentioned, for adoption can only be said to be finally recovered once the doctrine is fully and satisfactorily (re-)integrated into the discipline of systematic theology.        

We love to sing Augustus Toplady’s hymn of 1774, ‘How Vast the Benefits Divine which we in Christ possess.’ Yet, for much of church history the thought of including adoption among them did not arise. Toplady’s lyrics illustrate this: “We are redeemed from guilt and shame and called, [not to sonship, but exclusively] to holiness.” He, thus, typified most before him and many following who thought of the gospel in terms of redemption, regeneration, justification, and sanctification, but not adoption.

This trend in history is difficult to unsee, especially now that attention has been drawn to it. Thus, to help reverse it, we must recognise it, and then, in praise to God, briefly sketch the progress being made in recovering adoption. Certainly, the day is now closer than perhaps at any time in history when it is afforded full and settled inclusion among the “vast benefits divine.”¹

1. The Context of Recovery

Although interest in the grace of adoption is traceable back to Irenaeus (130-202), it did not flourish as we might expect. The trinitarian and christological debates that prompted Athanasius’ fourth-century analysis of the Fatherhood of God also kept the church from soteriological discussion. Later, Augustine (354-430) became the first we know of to evaluate the doctrine. He both extolled “the word adoption” as “of great importance in the system of our faith, as is seen from the apostolic writings,” and described it as “a significant symbol.”² Yet, argues Scott Lidgett, “With the theology of Augustine, the Fatherhood of God… passed entirely out of sight. It had been replaced by the conception of his sovereignty.”³

Consequently, soteriological debates of the Reformation era focused on the legal side of the faith, notably on the doctrine of justification. Calvin was, of course, all in on defending God’s free justifying grace, yet his corpus also includes rich, Pauline, salvation-historical remarks on God’s free adopting grace. Regrettably, but consistent with the breadth of Calvin’s understanding of adoption, he omitted a chapter on the doctrine from his Institutio Christianae Religionis, and yet stands out as a, if not the, theologian par excellence of adoption. Despite retaining in his theological method the use of Aristotelian categories of cause and effect, his approach to adoption contrasts markedly with the Westminster Standards’ distinctive, highly logicised statements on adoption (WCF 12; WLC, 74; WSC 34). Although the shortest chapter in the WCF, “Of Adoption” is, so far as we know, the first of its kind in church history.⁴ Once copied verbatim into the Savoy Declaration (1658) and the Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/89), its influence broadened across Protestantism. 

We would assume that, together, these biblical-theological and systematic-theological approaches to adoption were enough to ensure thereafter its normative inclusion in Reformed soteriology. Yet, Rome’s strong opposition to the free grace of justification at the Council of Trent (1545-63), coupled with the endangering of that grace from within Protestantism by the accumulated threats of Rationalism, Deism, Arianism, Socinianism, and Neonomianism,⁵ led the Protestant and Reformed orthodox to forsake the reformers’ creative orthodoxy for a knee-jerk defence of the juridical side of the gospel. Overall, then, they lost the legal and relational balance of Scripture, one which Calvin and the Westminster Standards had sought to reflect. The eighteenth-century Methodists with their emphasis on the Spirit of adoption became an exception; even so, John Wesley eradicated every reference to adoption from his revision of the WSC.  

Clearly then, Toplady’s omission of adoption around that time, while unintentional, was not coincidental. Indeed, further movements solidified the general loss of creative orthodoxy among confessional Protestants. Whereas Enlightenment Rationalism and post-Enlightenment Romanticism undercut commitment to Scripture and its confessional summaries, the advent of industrialisation turned the church toward social issues. Thus, despite the confessional standing that adoption gained at the Westminster Assembly, the doctrine gradually slid off most Protestant and Reformed radars. Thereafter, a juridically lopsided gospel became embedded in Reformed thought, so much so that in the early nineteenth century there erupted a theological revolt intent on recovering the relational (specifically, the familial) side of the gospel. The Victorian broad school offered an even more regrettable relationally lopsided alternative. This the theologically orthodox rejected, choosing to cling to what they knew, but failing in the process to discern their part in the concerns of the broad school. Thus, they neither recaptured the balance of Scripture nor prevented the broad school’s aberrant protest for paternal grace from gathering momentum.

The protest began, chiefly, with two Scotsmen: John McLeod Campbell (1800-72) and Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788-1870). Observing from parish work the general joylessness of his people, MacLeod Campbell abandoned his penal view of atonement and posited assurance as of the essence of faith (contra WCF 18). Hastily deposing him from the Church of Scotland’s ministry in 1831, Westminster Calvinists were unable to hear from McLeod Cambell that our joy is fed not only by the retrospective aspect of the atonement (redemption) but its prospective aspect (the life of sonship). Meanwhile, Erskine, a laird, set out independently to promote a familial-friendly Calvinism, only to drift into a posthumously revealed Universalism.⁶ All it took was his romantic notion of Christian consciousness (an approach to theologising based not on exegesis but on one’s inner light) and his subtle retranslation of Paul’s term huiothesia as ‘sonship’ rather than ‘adoption’. Erskine thereby eradicated the adoptive act (the believer’s entrance into sonship) and paved the way for the espousal of the universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. Man needs, he taught, not an adoption but an education in the sonship he already possesses. Instead, then, of rebalancing biblically the juridical and relational sides of the faith, Erskine helped render the familial side of the faith guilty in the eyes of the theologically orthodox by its association with Universalism. With hindsight, then, we may belatedly confess that the culpability for the fissure within Protestantism has rested with us as also with the heterodox, albeit in divergent ways.⁷

2. The Contours of Recovery

Since Universalists oppose the doctrine of adoption, its recovery has been left to the theologically orthodox. While slow to recognise this responsibility, we may briefly trace the hopeful developments that have unfolded, focusing on the disciplines of historical, biblical, and systematic theology.⁸

i) Adoption in historical theology

By beginning with historical theology, we can continue the preceding narrative and show how a growing awareness of the annals of adoption is helping the recovery. 

The dawn: 1864–1947

By 1864, McLeod Campbell, after a quarter-century in an ecclesiastical wilderness, had published The Nature of the Atonement (1856). Others had joined Erskine in pressing for a fully-fledged Universalism. The theologically orthodox, though, continued to reinforce the juridical side of the faith. Yet, in 1864, pastor-theologian Robert S. Candlish (1806-73), a leader in the Free Church of Scotland, delivered the first series of Cunningham Lectures. These were named after Candlish’s fellow leader and historical-theological stalwart, William Cunningham (1805-61).

Addressing the Fatherhood of God, Candlish’s lectures are chiefly remembered for stirring a close-to-home debate with Thomas J. Crawford, Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, over God’s general or creative Fatherhood and the nature of the believer’s sonship vis-à-vis Christ’s.⁹ Yet, the lectures also included the first recognition in print of the historic neglect of adoption accompanied by a call for its recovery. Candlish observed, “the subject has not hitherto been adequately treated in the Church” nor “received the prominence to which it is on scriptural grounds entitled.” The creeds and confessions, he lamented, are silent, meagre, and defective on the Fatherhood of God and adoption. As for the reformers, their “hands were full.” Thus, he concluded, “I have long had the impression that in the region of that great truth there lies a rich field of precious ore to be surveyed and explored; and that somewhere in that direction theology has fresh work to do, and fresh treasures to bring out from the storehouses of the Divine Word.”¹⁰

We presume Candlish’s disappointment that his lectures neither turned the tide against the Victorian broad school nor retrieved immediately the familial in Reformed soteriology. Yet, his seeds sown did not die. Across the Atlantic, esteemed Southern Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818-1902) floated in 1881 the idea that John L. Girardeau (1825-1898), Professor of Didactic and Polemical Theology at Columbia Seminary, complete the system of theology begun by the prematurely deceased James Henley Thornwell (1812-62). Palmer envisioned a theological tome to represent the Seminary’s brand of Reformed theology. 

However, Girardeau’s shorter theological incumbency led him to focus instead on those issues deficiently handled in the respective Union and Princeton systematic theologies of Robert Louis Dabney (1871) and Charles Hodge (1880). Significantly, both leant on Francis Turretin’s seventeenth-century Institutio Theologica Elenctica. No text had greater influence on the post-Reformation loss of adoption, given Turretin’s subsuming of the doctrine under justification and the protracted use of his Institutio by theologians, pastors, and students. Thus, Girardeau took up the theme of adoption, yet his papers reveal that his treatment of it in his Discussion of Theological Questions (1905) are largely an amalgam of addresses countering the universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. 

His son-in-law, Robert A. Webb (1856-1919), followed in his train. A one-time student at Columbia Seminary, Webb went on to teach theology at Southwestern and Louisville Seminaries, thus spreading the Columbia interest in adoption. His lectures, however, were only published posthumously, the sponsors airing their conviction that his insights would counter effectively the dogma of the universal brotherhood of man. Yet, The Reformed Doctrine of Adoption (1947) fell far short of the promoters’ hopes, remaining significant today, as we shall see, but not as Webb or his sponsors would have hoped.¹¹

The post-dawn: 1950s-the present

By the mid-twentieth century, neo-orthodoxy had arisen as an Enlightenment-wedded middle ground between the Reformed orthodox and the heterodox. The writings of P.T. Forsyth (1848-1921), a Barthian before Barth, and Karl Barth (1886-1968) bear testimony to their endeavour to keep together the juridical and relational sides of the gospel.¹²

Gradually, this caught on with the Reformed orthodox. Enter systematician John Murray (1898-1975). Noted for his Redemption: Accomplished and Applied (1955) and Collected Writings (1977), he witnessed firsthand the emergence of Reformed biblical theology and the renewed study of Calvin – two related movements that have proven essential to the recovery of adoption. Moreover, his close reading of the WCF kept before him the long-underutilised inclusion of adoption in Reformed soteriology. Additionally, as a Scottish theologian resident in America, Murray knew of the Candlish-Crawford debate and its influence on Southern Presbyterianism (et al.). Thus, he resurrected the WCF’s interest in adoption, distinguished the doctrine from both regeneration and justification, and challenged the hold of Turretin’s view on the tradition. Adoption, he proclaimed by contrast, is “much more than either or both of these acts of grace.” It is rather “the apex of redemptive grace and privilege.”¹³

Thereafter, others took fresh notice of the doctrine, notably James Packer in his classic Knowing God (1973) and Sinclair Ferguson in The Christian Life (1981). Ferguson observed that, since Candlish, all too little had been written on the subject, adding in his later chapter ‘The Reformed Doctrine of Sonship’ in Pulpit and People: Essays in Honour of William Still (1986) that voices had begun calling for the doctrine’s recovery. Then, Errol Hulse published “Recovering the Doctrine of Adoption” in Reformation Today (1988), drawing on Murray, Packer, and Ferguson to note deficiencies in the Puritan treatment of adoption. Next, Douglas Kelly published ‘Adoption: An Underdeveloped Heritage of the Westminster Standards’ in the Reformed Theological Review (1993). Supplementing Ferguson’s brief gleanings from the fathers, medieval theologians, reformers, and Puritans, Kelly argued in effect that the Westminster Standards would not have been so criticised for their content had subscribers, through neglect of adoption, not created a distorted impression of them. 

While the remarks of such authors were too isolated to effect much, once accumulated they became a platform on which the first full-length history of adoption could be constructed. Preparatory work began in the early 1990s at the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh, arising from a summarising of Herman Ridderbos’s chapter ‘The Adoption: The Inheritance’ (Paul: An Outline of His Theology [1977]). Taken aback by his setting of adoption within the historia salutis, I began to inquire what else was written on the doctrine, only to discover its dearth of resources. Thus, the clues of Murray, Packer, Ferguson, Hulse, and Kelly were a Godsend, and led me to apply in 1993 for doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, specifically to piece together the history of adoption and to explain it.¹⁴

The overall history was first aired in the introduction to my doctoral dissertation (2001), then in two articles in the Scottish Bulletin and Evangelical Theology (headed ‘The Theological History of Adoption’ [2002]), and now most fully in Adoption: The Road to Retrieval (2022). Within that history I encountered a fascinating tension between the claim of Robert Webb that “Calvin … makes no allusion whatever to adoption,” and that of Brian A. Gerrish in his newly published 1990 Cunningham Lectures (yes, same series!), that “Calvin describes the gospel [as], quite simply, the good news of adoption.”¹⁵ The subsequent probing of these claims resulted in the main body of the dissertation: a narrative of the fortunes of adoption from sixteenth-century Calvin to the nineteenth-century loss of adoption among those bearing his name. 

Along the way, I discerned an array of reasons why adoption has been, and continues to be overlooked: unwitting neglect, preoccupation (with Adoptionism, and justification), excision (by Wesley, Erskine, and George MacDonald), absorption (N.T. Wright’s redefining of justification), denial, and fear of how the recovery of adoption challenges traditions of theology, whether methodologically or theologically.¹⁶ These could have been countered earlier had publishers been more inclined to create a market for serious treatments of adoption, and to realise the role they could play in retrieving adoption. 

While the history now on record is the most comprehensive to date, it isn’t exhaustive. The narrative can yet benefit from a fuller probing of the church fathers, the Middle Ages, and non-Protestant traditions of the professing church. Hindered during the doctorate by the University’s word limit, I have since been thankful for Joel Beeke’s fleshing out of the post-Reformation interest in Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on adoption (2008) and have woven his findings into my most recent account of the history. He exonerates the Puritans from an absolute neglect of adoption, but not, I argue, from a quantitative or qualitative neglect. Their 1,200 pages on adoption (1620-1727) cannot match their 30,000 booklets on church-related issues (1640-1662),¹⁷ nor can their curtailment of adoption to the ordo salutis compensate for the salvation-historical scope of the Pauline doctrine, and neither can their admixture of Pauline and non-Pauline filial and familial terms justify the obscuring of the clarity of Paul’s thought. 

ii) Adoption in biblical theology

The recovery of adoption requires more, then, than additional spilled ink. In Reformation fashion, we need to return to Scripture (ad fontes). This is essential if we are to resolve the methodological, exegetical, linguistic, and structural tensions unearthed from the history. 

Methodological tensions

Advocates of a rethinking of the way we expound adoption see in the likes of Irenaeus and Calvin forerunners of a fresh salvation-historical approach. Both theologians predate the emergence of Protestant scholasticism and the unmistakable hiatus it created in the exposition of adoption. Thus, today, attention to adoption is revealing competing biblical-theological (historical) and systematic-theological (logicised) approaches to the doctrine and is cautioning us against dismissing methodological discontinuities in the Reformed tradition amid the defence of its theological continuities. 

While Scripture remained authoritative for Protestant scholastics, their emphasis on its divineness (one God, one Bible, one gospel) came to overshadow its humanness, notably the progressively revealed unfolding of God’s dealings with his people, the authorial diversity of the New Testament, and the functioning of figures of speech. Their strength lay in advocating systems of theology and eliciting from the biblical text its doctrinal principia or axiomata, not so much in expounding Scripture on its own terms. To quote Hans Emil Weber, their exegesis served to provide “a logically coherent and defensible system of belief.”¹⁸ Thus, what treatments of adoption followed in Protestant and Reformed orthodoxy were impoverished hermeneutically and exegetically, which is why the mere repetition of the highly logicised treatments of our Puritan forebears do not satisfy. They are neat but inclined to eisegesis, and while they follow exegetical traditions, we err to assume that the traditions, given the neglect of adoption, were the product of mature reflection. 

The open-mindedness of Puritan advocate D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ (1899-1981) fascinates in this regard. Including adoption in his Friday evening lectures at Westminster Chapel (1952-55), he very much followed Paul’s salvation-historical unfolding of adoption, although theologically he echoed A.A. Hodge’s (re)interpretation of the WCF, teaching that adoption is a capstone that sits astride justification and regeneration. Concurrently, John Murray was not only raising the profile of adoption but began injecting salvation-historical considerations into his systematics. In this, he was not only influenced by Geerhardus Vos (1862-1949), the first Princeton professor of Biblical Theology and the father of Reformed Biblical theology, but by the emerging renaissance in Calvin studies emanating from Scotland via the work of the neo-orthodox Torrances and their co-labourer Ronald Wallace. Murray thus began advocating a more objective assessment of ratiocinated systematics, questioning in effect whether classic systematics do justice to the shape and feel of Scripture. Thus, he prepared the way for a fresh look at adoption but did not get so far as to consider adoption metaphorically or to challenge the engrained conflation of the filial and familial terms of the New Testament.¹⁹

Yet, two years after Murray’s death and coinciding with the appearance of his Collected Writings (1977), Ridderbos’ Paul appeared in English. His brief chapter on adoption is what first alerted me to variant approaches to its exposition, for he implicitly challenged the reading of non-Pauline authors into Paul, and the confinement of adoption to the ordo salutis. “Sonship,” he wrote, “is not to be approached from the subjective experience of the new condition of salvation, but rather from the divine economy of salvation.”²⁰ In this, Ridderbos seemed to me to be a lone voice until I learned that Calvin had long before discerned Paul’s redemptive-historical perspective on adoption. Between them, they convinced me that a biblical-theological approach must shape the systematic-theological treatments of the doctrine, and that we can only say that adoption is recovered once it has. 

Exegetical tensions

That shaping begins with certain indisputable exegetical facts. First, we must know that huiothesia is the sole term in Scripture for adoption, referring, literally, to the placing of the son (huios plus thesia, from tithemi, to place). Indeed, there is no comparable term in Scripture, which means that huiothesia makes a unique contribution to the gospel, for, unlike such terms as ‘child’ or ‘son’, huiothesia encompasses both the adoptive act (entrance into sonship) and the adoptive state (the life of sonship).²¹ Second, none other, and no one less than the Apostle Paul introduced huiothesia into our theological vocabulary, by including it in three of his high-profile epistles (Rom. 8:15, 23; 9:4; Gal. 4:5; Eph. 1:5). 

Such facts, though, have been lost on many. First, because the specificities of the filial and familial terms of Scripture have been inadequately considered. Luther, for instance, translated huiothesia not even as Sohnschaft (sonship) but as Kindschaft (childhood). Indeed, to this day, dynamic-equivalent Bible translations, being more interpretative, use a mix of adoption and sonship translations, and thus obscure the uniqueness of Paul’s term. Second, because the scholastic stress on systems of theology has influenced the conflation of the distinctive language of Paul (huiothesia) with the more generic filial or familial terms of non-Pauline authors. Third, because the scholastic emphasis on the divineness of Scripture precluded the inconveniences of its humanness, such as those arising from the New Testament’s distinctively structured figures of speech. This remains mystifying, for while we seek to avoid mixing metaphors in everyday conversation, theologians have typically run together the Johannine and Petrine language of the new birth and the Pauline language of adoption without a second thought. 

Challenges to this tendency are gradually gaining ground. James Scott’s scholarly work Adoption as Sons (1992), while not proactively pursuing the recovery of adoption, has nevertheless served it well. By unearthing compelling evidence from the Greco-Roman world that huiothesia means ‘adoption’ or ‘adoption as son’, Scott has negated clumsy translations of huiothesia, historic conflations of adoption and the new birth,²² the subsuming of adoption under justification (Turretin, et al.), attempts either to depict Paul as a Universalist (Erskine) or to redefine justification (N.T. Wright), and has lent support to formal-equivalent translations of huiothesia as ‘adoption’.²³ Note, for instance, that the NIV now uniformly translates huiothesia as ‘adoption’, henceforth impeding theologians from ignoring its distinctive meaning.²⁴

Linguistic tensions

Rarely has the question been raised as to how the word huiothesia functions. In highly logicised systems of theology, adoption is treated as a proposition rather than as a figure of speech. Calvin refers to tropes such as metaphorae, but, to date, I have found no reference to his view of adoption. God, however, is using the postmodern fascination with language and its claim that truth is but a social construct to challenge our presumptions about Paul’s language of adoption. 

Gleaning from philosophical schools of thought, we dismiss a positivist view of huiothesia, since in positivism man can only know observable realities. Our adoption, by contrast, is received through faith and is enjoyed by an assurance in an unseen acceptance (Rom. 8:15-16; Gal. 4:6). Likewise, we dismiss the idealist view, wherein man responds not to reality but to need, for our adoption was in God’s mind before we ever felt our need of it (Eph. 1:4-5). This leaves us with two realist options. The naïve realist believes huiothesia speaks of our acceptance with God exactly the way it is, which likely explains why theologians rarely comment on how Paul’s language of adoption functions. Yet, nowadays, critical realists believe naïve realists to blur the Creator-creature distinction by positing that God and man view adoption in the same way. Instead, critical realists view a term like huiothesia as reality-depicting but in metaphorical garb. Thus, God sees our acceptance the way it actually is, but reveals it to us as an adoption so that we, with our limited capabilities, can have some grasp of what it means to be accepted. 

God’s genius radiates through Paul’s inspired use of huiothesia, for in this one metaphor multiple linguistic theories of metaphor play out. Huiothesia adorns the notion of our divine acceptance (the ornamental theory), it unveils the profundity of our acceptance (the incremental theories), it evokes praise to God (the emotive theories), and so forth. Suffice it to say, that the recovery of adoption is taking us into new spheres of discussion, offering fresh, amazing vistas in which lovers of God and his Word can delight.²⁵

Structural tensions

Were huiothesia but a basic metaphor (a one-time analogy) its neglect might be tolerable. Yet, its five uses constitute huiothesia as a robust metaphor or theological model. It possesses both a core meaning (adoption) and a graphic association of ideas (slavery, redemption, sonship, and inheritance, et al.). These we label subordinate metaphors, although they may function as their own models in contexts other than adoption. 

Two issues are germane here. First, there is Erin Heim’s entrance into the conversation.²⁶ Although welcome, her omission of Paul’s use of huiothesia in Ephesians 1:5 is unwarranted, inconsistently argued, and detrimental to the apostle’s thought. This, however, matters less to Heim, for she views Paul’s uses of huiothesia not as a coherent model but as individual metaphors. Thus, despite sharing some helpful insights, Heim misses the apostles’ unified narrative of God’s adoptive dealings with his people. The narrative covers the entire scope of salvation history, from the first to the last things and from predestination to glorification: Ephesians 1:4-5; Romans 9:4; Galatians 4:4-7; Romans 8:15-16, 22-23. Indeed, the coherence of Paul’s distinctive model is highly relevant to its exposition. This Calvin illustrates, Ridderbos implies, and others today demonstrate.²⁷ Indeed, this salvation-historical coherence is now seeping into popular treatments once dominated by the admixture of the Pauline and Johannine models of adoption and the new birth and, with it, the truncation of Paul’s thought.²⁸

The second issue pertains to the question of the origin of huiothesia. As the recovery advances, so the Semitic background is being written off, for there is no indisputable evidence of the practice of adoption in old covenant times. Similarly, Greek forms of adoption are being discounted since they predate Paul. This leaves Roman adoption, advocated by Allen Mawhinney, Francis Lyall, and Trevor Burke.²⁹ Alternatively, Scott and Ridderbos observe that while Paul uses a Hellenistic term, he fills it with Old Testament content and applies it to New Testament times (Rom. 9:4 and Gal. 3:23–4:7). Yet, the Old Testament focus need not be pitched against the Roman influence on Paul’s use of huiothesia. After all, he lived in a triadic world of Hebraic, Greek, and Roman influences, and utilised huiothesia solely in epistles written either from Rome (or Roman provinces) or to those in Rome. His purpose was not only to extol God’s grace but to unite believing Gentiles and Jews in the same household (Eph. 2:11-22, especially v. 19). It appears, then, that Paul was intentionally vague, filling the Hellenistic term with old covenant content familiar to Jewish believers, while making allusions to the familiar Roman practice of adoptio to pique the interest of Gentile believers. 

iii) Adoption in systematic theology 

Although the recovery of adoption predates the revived trend of writing systematic theologies, it has had little impact yet on their shape or feel. Indeed, systematic theology is, I argue, the last discipline for the recovery to conquer. To quote Scottish church leader Robert Rainy (1826-1906): “It had never been doubted or concealed by any worthy expositor of the ways of God in salvation, that we are children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. Adoption is a Christian benefit. But much depends on the place in the mind given to a thought like this, and, especially, much depends on the dogmatic form it assumes, and the virtue allowed it in the system.”³⁰ Thus, we await reforms to systematic theology exceeding those Murray initiated, to afford virtue or space for the metaphorical workings, full scope, and non-clouded exposition of Paul’s model of adoption.   

The challenge of recovery³¹

Keeping to the English-speaking world, and to evangelicalism and confessional Reformed circles, we may mention at least the following authors of systematic theologies since the late 1980s: James Boice (1986); Wayne Grudem and Morton Smith (1994); Robert Reymond (1998); Robert Culver (2005); Gerald Bray (2012); John Frame (2006 and enlarged in 2013); Michael Horton (2011, abridged in 2013) and Michael Bird (2013); Robert Letham (2019); and Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley (2019-24). Among these there are some signs of greater sensitivity to the relevant biblical data, with Reymond’s, Horton’s, and Letham’s weaving in more salvation-historical considerations, and Bird’s refreshing attention to redemptive history, the ordo salutis, and to images of salvation in his creative rearrangement of soteriology.³² Yet, overall, these impressive volumes remain briefer in treating adoption than regeneration, justification, and sanctification; they lack consideration of adoption as a model; and they tend to perpetuate exegetical fallacies of the past, and sometimes subsume adoption under justification. 

Why is this? First, because we are still not out of the woods as regards the doctrine’s neglect. The New City Catechism (2017), for instance, advertised as an amalgam of post-Reformation catechisms including the Westminster Shorter Catechism, curiously eliminates Question 34, “What is adoption?” Second, the reasoning process of classic systematics is deeply, deeply engrained, and remains ‘safe.’ Actually, though, it is unsafe, for the best defence of Reformed orthodoxy requires that a high view of Scripture be accompanied by a high use of it. Third, while our evangelical and Reformed systematicians know of the challenge presented by the renaissance in biblical theology and Calvin studies, they may not be so clear on the necessary methodological reforms to systematic theology. Fourth, we are moulded by our history, and to a degree are still wary of endeavours to balance the juridical and relational (familial) content of the faith. Fifth, reforms are hindered by lack of inter-disciplinary cooperation. The defence of Protestant scholasticism is, for instance, the domain of historical, systematic, and philosophical theologians, but not of biblical theologians. A back-to-Scripture approach to adoption suggests, then, the need for a more modest defence of logicised systems of theology – one that upholds as ever objective truth, the divineness of Scripture, and its unity, yet factors in its humanness (as per an orthodox doctrine of Scripture), and allows for its distinctively structured models (also known as perspectives).

The influence of recovery

Envision the methodological pluses that systematic theology could gain from the recovery of adoption. First, the contours of adoption could encourage greater salvation-historical contextualisation of all biblical doctrines. Second, the exclusive Pauline use of adoption, encourages the consideration of how the authorial diversity of the New Testament applies to other doctrines. Third, the inability of the ordo salutis construct to accommodate the breadth of Paul’s adoption model alerts us to the difficulties of its exclusive use in arranging biblical soteriology. Fourth, in challenging the exclusive use of ordo salutis constructs, the recovery of adoption offers the possibility of re-centering union with Christ soteriologically and experientially.³³ Located belatedly in the WCF (26:1) and penultimately in Murray’s Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, we are, in ascending order, justified, sanctified, and adopted in Christ. Such benefits are best depicted not by a line that takes us ever further from Christ, but by a circle enveloping the Christ in whom these benefits are found.³⁴ Fifth, the incorporation of distinctively structured models supports John Frame’s and Vern Poythess’ case for multi-perspectivalism.³⁵

The benefits of recovery

In addition to the recovery’s methodological benefits there are theological benefits. Specifically, the recovery of adoption counters belatedly some of the historical-theological imbalances impacting how Christian, Protestant, and Reformed orthodoxy is viewed. First, it addresses the juridical lopsidedness of the Middle Ages and the modern era, finally recapturing the biblical balance of the gospel and effectively answering the Victorian protest for paternal grace. 

Second, adoption helps us bridge the respective liberal and conservative emphases on the incarnation and the cross. The former opposes penal atonement for the elect and promotes Universalism, the latter upholds a penal atonement, but where the focus is on the elect we need to keep in view God’s general love for our race and Calvin’s reminder of Christ’s incarnational union with us in our humanity. The core adoption text, Galatians 4:4-6, is very helpful in this regard, for it conveys the gospel as a continuum in which the incarnation makes no sense without Christ’s redemptive work, the redemption has no victory without Christ’s resurrection, and the resurrection no confirmation without Pentecost. Thus, adoption dispels the impression that the incarnation is a mere prefix to the redemption, and that the redemption is a mere suffix of the incarnation.

Third, with pneumatological union so central to the adoptive act (the huioi being placed in the Huios), adoption offers to keep together different aspects of the gospel: the objective (what Christ does for us) and the subjective (what the Spirit does in us). The union thus nullifies the claim that the gospel is a paper fiction, for we are justified, sanctified, and adopted in Christ. Accordingly, union with Christ and its benefits are both critical to the gospel.

Fourth, the recovery of adoption holds out the hope that we may offset western individualism by balancing the individual and the community. Whereas baptism, the symbolum adoptionis, grants us entrance into the covenant community and is a sign and seal of adoption (WLC, Ans. 165), the Lord’s Supper bespeaks our continued union with Christ within God’s household. A similar balance is found among the benefits of the union. Whereas justification is God’s declaration of individuals as righteous in his sight, adoption leads on to membership of God’s household. The recovery of adoption affirms, then, N.T. Wright’s protest against a hyper-individualised justification, while simultaneously negating his corporate redefining of justification as God’s declaration of our membership in his covenant family. Once we factor in adoption, his redefinition is both unnecessary and unconvincing – a travesty of both justification and adoption.

Fifth, the recovery would finally answer McLeod Campbell’s concern that we do as much justice to the prospective as to the retrospective aspects of the atonement. This concern was brought back to the fore in the latter twentieth century by Jack Miller’s Sonship Discipleship Course. Despite its imprecise exegesis, the confusion of adoption from slavery with a supposed adoption from orphanhood (a common misconception in practical and popular theology), and the reduction of the means of sanctification to faith (leading to charges of antinomianism), Sonship was, I believe, our second opportunity from God to recover adoption. It seems no coincidence that McLeod Campbell and Miller, although separated by time and space, both reacted against the retrospective and juridical lopsidedness of Reformed orthodoxy, both understood the need to recover the filial and familial emphases of the New Testament, both were influenced by Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, both were correct in principle but poor executioners, and both were opposed without perception of the kernel of truth in their thinking.³⁶

Finally, the recovery of adoption has the potential to renew our view of heaven. Too often, we focus on heaven in its intermediate state, when the climax of New Testament hope is the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our salvation, then, pertains not only to our souls but to our bodies. Paul writes that our adoption is consummated when our bodies are redeemed (Rom. 8:22-23). In them, we shall be revealed to the cosmos as God’s sons, both free and glorified in Christ – a reality that was rendered certain by the Son’s prototypical redemption from death at his resurrection. 

Conclusion

Adoption has every right then, both biblically (as a model) and theologically (as a doctrine), to be included among our vast benefits in Christ. Spiritually speaking, we have in adoption union with the Son, access to the Father, and indwelling by the Spirit. We are freed from enslavement, assured of God’s love, able to pray, called to obedience, are members of God’s household, guaranteed the redemption of our bodies, and are heirs of the redeemed earth to come. Yet, there is also benefit for the Reformed tradition in recognizing adoption to be a vast benefit in Christ. While many newcomers are attracted to the Reformed faith, for two centuries we have bled the defections of those dissatisfied with our unresolved imbalances. 

Thus, we press on to fully recover adoption, offering assurances as we do, that to polish our family silver is not to sell it, nor is to replace worn shoes a departure from the old paths. We therefore continue digging into Scripture, looking up to our triune God, and ensuring that our theology ever passes into praise. It is fitting, then, to end by glorifying God in song: 

We praise you God, in nature seen by all!
But, in your Word, re-vealed through Mark and Paul –
Christ, our brother, who’s taught us to call:
Abba, Father! Abba, Father!

We praise you Christ, this evil sphere did brave,
Us to redeem, who badly do behave;
Children of wrath, who bound in sin did rave.
Blessèd Redeemer! Blessèd Redeemer! 

Adopted now, by Father, God of love, 
Placed in the Son, closer than hand in glove
The Spirit sheds abroad through Christ his love.
Wonderful Spirit! Wonderful Spirit!

Bondage now gone, no turning back to fear!
As sons we’re free, as siblings drawn near,  
From house of death for home of him so dear.
We’re brothers and sisters! Brothers and sisters!

In the firstborn, we adopted have hope!
Through his raised life, we live rather than cope,
We’re heirs with him, God’s great estate to scope.
Come, then, Lord Jesus! Come, then, Lord Jesus!

On that great day, our bodies raised again,
No more sinning, no more pain!
Completely whole, on new earth to proclaim:
Father, Son, Spirit! Father, Son, Spirit!³⁷

---

1. For the supporting sources, evidence, and arguments underlying this brief report, see Tim J. R. Trumper, “An Historical Study of the Doctrine of Adoption in the Calvinistic Tradition” (University of Edinburgh: Ph.D. Diss., 2001 [sometimes listed 2002], available online at https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/6803, accessed August 8, 2025); Adoption: A Road to Retrieval (Grand Rapids: From His Fullness Ministries, 2022); and When History Teaches Us Nothing: The Recent Reformed Sonship Debate in Context, first published 2008, second ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2022). ↩︎
2. Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, edited by Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 4:160. ↩︎
3. J. Scott Lidgett, The Fatherhood of God in Christian Truth and Life (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902), 200. ↩︎
4. The first catechism we know of to include questions and answers on adoption is Craig’s Catechism, 1581.  ↩︎
5. For an unpacking of the historical movements in this and the next paragraph, see Trumper, When History Teaches Us Nothing, 1-32. ↩︎
6. Thomas Erskine, The Spiritual Order and other Papers Selected from the Manuscripts of the late Thomas Erskine (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871). ↩︎
7. For more on McLeod Campbell and Erskine, and, given what follows, on Robert Candlish and Thomas Crawford, John Girardeau and Robert Webb, see Trumper, “An Historical Study,” 280-455. ↩︎
8. For the progress in practical theology, see Trumper, Adoption, 103-10. ↩︎
9. Other pastor-theologians to weigh in included Hugh Martin (‘Candlish’s Cunningham Lectures,’ British and Foreign Evangelical Review 14 [Oct. 1865], 720–87) and John Kennedy of Dingwall (Man’s Relations to God: Traced in the Light of ‘the Present Truth,’ reprint of 1869 ed. [The James Begg Society, 1995]). ↩︎
10. Robert S. Candlish, The Fatherhood of God: Being the First Series of the Cunningham Lectures, fifth edition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), 192-93. ↩︎
11. The minimal influence of Thomas Houston’s welcome volume The Adoption of Sons, Its Nature, Spirit, Privileges and Effects: A Practical and Experimental Treatise (Paisley, UK: Alex. Gardner, 1872) might have warned the promoters against excessive confidence. ↩︎
12. P. T. Forsyth, God the Holy Father (1897) and Karl Barth, especially the sections in his Church Dogmatics ‘God the Father’ and ‘God the Father as Lord of His Creature’ (I.1 and III.3). ↩︎
13. John Murray, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, reprint ed. (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 132; Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1977), 233. ↩︎
14. For a fuller account of this journey, see Trumper, Adoption, xv–xxviii. ↩︎
15. Robert A. Webb, The Reformed Doctrine of Adoption (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1947), 17; Brian A. Gerrish, Grace & Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 89. ↩︎
16. Trumper, Adoption, 1-161. ↩︎
17. Among these pages are treatises by Thomas Granger (1620), M.G. (1645), Samuel Petto (1654), Simon Ford (1655), John Crabb (1682), Samuel Willard (1684), and Cotton Mather (1727). For further details, see Joel R. Beeke, Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on Adoption (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008, 7-14). The estimate concerning the church-related booklets is by Thomas M’Crie the younger and is cited in The Reformation of the Church: A Collection of Reformed and Puritan Documents on Church Issues, Selected with introductory notes by Iain H. Murray, reprint ed. (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 7. ↩︎
18. Richard Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2003), 76. ↩︎
19. For an unpacking of methodological developments in confessional Reformed thought since Vos and Murray, see Tim J. R. Trumper, “John Frame’s Methodology: A Case Study in Constructive Calvinism”, Speaking the Truth in Love: The Theology of John Frame, edited by John J. Hughes (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R, 2009), 145–172. ↩︎
20. Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, transl. by John Richard De Witt (London: SPCK, 1977), 198. ↩︎
21. I am indebted to Sinclair Ferguson for this distinction (from personal correspondence in the early 1990s). ↩︎
22. For more on this, see Trumper, Adoption, 172-93. ↩︎
23. Ricky Andries Tan’s forthcoming study Adoption Reimagined: An Unconcealed Theology of Huiothesía (Υἱοθεσία) in Pauline Thought (Wipf and Stock), boldly claims that adoption is not huiothesia, yet the manuscript as of September 2025 omits any mention of Scott’s research. ↩︎
24. Cf., the NIV (1973, 1978, 1984) and the NIV (2011). ↩︎
25. For an unpacking of these linguistic tensions, see Trumper, Adoption, 193–215. ↩︎
26. Erin Heim, ‘Light through a Prism: New Avenues of Inquiry for the Pauline Υἱοθεσία Metaphors’ (Ph.D. Diss.: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2014), now published as (Adoption in Galatians and Romans [Brill 2017]). ↩︎
27. Ridderbos, Paul, 197-204; Tim J. R. Trumper, “A Fresh Exposition of Adoption: I. An Outline,” SBET 23 no. 1 (Spring 2005), 60-80, and Adoption, 237-302; David B. Garner, Sons in the Son: The Riches and Reach of Adoption in Christ (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2016). Garner’s warm-hearted exposition is, alas, marred by: (1) his confusion of the salvation-historical model of biblical theology with what Brevard Childs has called “biblical theology within categories of dogmatic theology”; (2) his unconvincing use of Romans 1:3-4 to promote the notions of Christ’s resurrection-adoption and his two supposed dimensions of Sonship (the one eternal and static, the other human and developmental); and (3) his silence concerning how Paul’s language functions. Thus, he rounds off Paul’s thought systemically in ways not true to the apostle’s model, he skews the exposition making Romans 1:3-4 rather than Galatians 4:4-7 the key adoption text (contrary to the likes of Calvin), and while evading Nestorianism by using the singular Sonship in reference to Christ, he nevertheless opens the door to it by his belief in Christ’s two filial dimensions. Long ago, Ambrose and Aquinas refuted the idea in Hilary and Augustine that Christ as man is the adopted Son of God, for sonship belongs to the person and not the natures of Christ (Summa Theologica, Complete ed. [Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1948], 4:2141-43). Garner would do well, it seems to me, to jettison his creative theory for a position biblically and historically attested, more accessible, and more preachable (Trumper, Adoption, 295–302, and JETS 62:1 [March 2019], 204-09). ↩︎
28. For example, Dan Cruver (Ed.), Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living through the Rediscovery of Abba Father (Adelphi, MD: Cruciform Press, 2011); Michael P. V. Barrett, Complete in Him: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying the Gospel, reprint ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 165–92; Barton D. Priebe, Adopted by God: Discover the Life-Transforming Joy of a Neglected Truth (independently published, 2021). ↩︎
29. See especially Allen Mawhinney, ‘υἱοθεσία in the Pauline epistles: Its Background, Use, and Implications’ (Ph.D.: Baylor University, Waco, Tx, 1983), Francis Lyall, Slaves, Citizens, Sons: Legal Metaphors in the Epistles (Grand Rapids: Academie Books [Zondervan], 1984), and Trevor J. Burke, Adopted into Gods Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). ↩︎
30. Robert Rainy, ‘Dr. Candlish as a Theologian,’ in William Wilson’s Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1880), 615. ↩︎
31. The following sections are unpacked in detail in Trumper, Adoption, 98-103, 304-85. ↩︎
32. Without implying agreement with Bird on all his methodological or theological detail, his rearrangement takes good account of the fact that the biblical elements of soteriology are historical, doctrinal, and metaphorical. He offers a visual of what soteriology may look like when not wedded exclusively to the ordo salutis and its limitations (Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012], 489–605; cf. Trumper, Adoption, 325-42). ↩︎
33. For a balanced evaluation of the ordo salutis construct, see Sinclair Ferguson’s piece ‘Ordo Salutis’ in New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright and J. I. Packer (Consulting Editor), (Leicester, England and Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), 480-481. Among the “widespread criticism” of the ordo salutis, he notes its heavy reliance on Romans 8:28-30; its distortion of the basic New Testament emphasis on historia salutis, and its reductionist approach to the disparate dimensions of salvation. The concern, then, is not for orderly thought about salvation, but for the orderliness to be centred in Christ. ↩︎
34. For such a depiction, see Trumper, Adoption, 355. ↩︎
35. John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God: A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987); Vern S. Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspective in Theology (Grand Rapids: Academie Books [Zondervan], 1987). ↩︎
36. For the unpacking of these commonalities, see Trumper, When History Teaches Us Nothing, 33-87. ↩︎
37. Words, Tim J. R. Trumper, 2017; tune: Sine Nomine, Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1906. ↩︎