I was recently caught by surprise by how passionately G. Macdonald rejects the translators’ use of the word ‘adoption’ for what St. Paul was teaching in the new testament. He (Macdonald) makes his case in his unspoken sermon: “Abba, Father!” which I’ll quote just a bit from below.
I’ll just let Macdonald speak for himself … (though the entire sermon is worth a read) From that sermon:
As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in human heart which exists in that heart alone, which is not, in some form or degree, in every heart; and thence I conclude that many must have groaned like myself under the supposed authority of this doctrine. The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.
‘Is God then not my Father,’ cries the heart of the child, ‘that I need to be adopted by him? Adoption! that can never satisfy me. Who is my father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is he my Father only in a sort or fashion—by a legal contrivance? Truly, much love may lie in adoption, but if I accept it from any one, I allow myself the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a blessed thing if another than he had given me being! but if he gave me being, then it means no reception, but a repudiation.—“O Father, am I not your child?”’
‘No; but he will adopt you. He will not acknowledge you his child, but he will call you his child, and be a father to you.’
‘Alas!’ cries the child, 'if he be not my father, he cannot become my father. A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation cannot be superinduced. The consequence might be small where earthly fatherhood was concerned, but the very origin of my being—alas, if he be only a maker and not a father! Then am I only a machine, and not a child—not a man! It is false to say I was created in his image!
'It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing, …
A bit later in the same sermon Macdonald sheds light on what he thinks Paul was really talking about that is so badly misrepresented by our modern choice of the word ‘adoption’. Continuing with that part of the sermon below:
‘Then you dare to say the apostle is wrong in what he so plainly teaches?’
'By no means; what I do say is, that our English presentation of his teaching is in this point very misleading. It is not for me to judge the learned and good men who have revised the translation of the New Testament–with so much gain to every one whose love of truth is greater than his loving prejudice for accustomed form;–I can only say, I wonder what may have been their reasons for retaining this word adoption . In the New Testament the word is used only by the apostle Paul. Liddell and Scott give the meaning–“Adoption as a son,” which is a mere submission to popular theology: they give no reference except to the New Testament. The relation of the word [Greek: niothesia ] to the form [Greek: thetos ], which means “taken,” or rather, " placed as one’s child," is, I presume, the sole ground for the so translating of it: usage plentiful and invariable could not justify that translation here, in the face of what St. Paul elsewhere shows he means by the word. The Greek word might be variously meant–though I can find no use of it earlier than St. Paul; the English can mean but one thing, and that is not what St. Paul means. “The spirit of adoption” Luther translates “the spirit of a child;” adoption he translates kindschaft , or childship ’
Of two things I am sure–first, that by niothesia St. Paul did not intend adoption ; and second, that if the Revisers had gone through what I have gone through because of the word, if they had felt it come between God and their hearts as I have felt it, they could not have allowed it to remain in their version.
Once more I say, the word used by St Paul does not imply that God adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he fathers his own; that a second time they are born–this time from above; that he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father: he will have them back into the very bosom whence they issued, issued that they might learn they could live nowhere else; he will have them one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died for them.
Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of the word. It is in another of his epistles–that to the Galatians: iv. I-7.
‘But I say that so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the world: but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.’
How could the Revisers choose this last reading, ‘an heir through God,’ and keep the word adoption ? From the passage it is as plain as St. Paul could make it, that, by the word translated adoption , he means the raising of a father’s own child from the condition of tutelage and subjection to others, a state which, he says, is no better than that of a slave, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could become a son; the idea is–a spiritual coming of age; only when the child is a man is he really and fully a son . …
MacDonald, George. The Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated Edition) … Musaicum Books. Kindle Edition.