Justin Taylor on Adoption

Justin Taylor has a great little article on adoption this month.

Justin and his wife have adopted children, and he shares some wonderfully Biblical thinking on the question of the "real parents":

Fellow Christians will sometimes ask my wife and me if we know anything about our children's "real parents." We're also sometimes asked, "Do you have any children of your own?" Now we know what people mean when they ask these questions, and we also know that they are well-intentioned. But they are problematic nonetheless.

Russell Moore — dean of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of a forthcoming adoption manifesto — has drawn my attention to a parallel in the New Testament. He has written:

As I read through the Books of Ephesians and Galatians and Romans, it occurred to me that this is precisely the question that was faced by the apostle Paul and the first-century Christian churches.

As pig-flesh eating Gentile believers — formerly goddess-worshippers and Caesar-magnifiers and all the rest — began confessing Jesus as Messiah, some Jewish Christians demanded to know, "Are they circumcised?" The Gentile believers would respond, "Yes, with the circumcision made without hands, the circumcision of Christ." From the heated letters of the New Testament, it is evident that the response was along the lines of, "Yes, but are you really circumcised, and you know what I mean."

This was no peripheral issue. For the apostle Paul, the unity of the church as a household had everything to do with the Gospel itself. And where the tribal fracturing of the church was most threatening, Paul laid out a key insight into the church's union with Christ, the spirit of adoption.

In other words, these well-intended questions reveal that too many of us still accustomed to thinking that biology is more important than legality. The opposite of "real parents" is "fake parents." The opposite of "your own children" is "children not your own." There is something about "adoption" that makes us think that relationships are somehow less real.

But we must put on our gospel-centered glasses and ask ourselves: Am I really a child of God or not? Is God really my Father or not? Is Jesus really my brother? For those who trust in Jesus the answer is unambiguously Yes!

Even though I support adoption and recognize the spiritual parallels with my own life (as a spiritually adopted child of God) I had never really thought too deeply about it. I'm usually guilty of the very thing that Justin talks about in this article: I tend to think about adoption in a way that does makes the relationship "less real", giving priority to biology over legality. The questions he asks are really good for us all to consider: does my biological prejudice invalidate the very basis of my acceptance before God?