“But creation is not fatherhood.”
“Creation in the image of God, is. And if I am not in the image of God, how can the word of God be of any meaning to me? ‘He called them gods to whom the word of God came,’ says the Master himself. To be fit to receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his defaced image—an image yet that can hear his word. What makes me evil and miserable is, that the thing spoiled in me is the image of the Perfect. Nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good hypostasis. No, no! nothing can make it that I am not the child of God. If one say, ‘Look at the animals: God made them: you do not call them the children of God!’ I answer: ‘But I am to blame; they are not to blame! I cling fast to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood.’ I have nothing to argue from in the animals, for I do not understand them. Two things only I am sure of: that God is to them ‘a faithful creator;’ and that the sooner I put in force my claim to be a child of God, the better for them; for they too are fallen, though without blame.”
“But you are evil: how can you be a child of the Good?”
“Just as many an evil son is the child of a good parent.”
“But in him you call a good parent, there yet lay evil, and that accounts for the child being evil.”
“I cannot explain. God let me be born through evil channels. But in whatever manner I may have become an unworthy child, I cannot thereby have ceased to be a child of God—his child in the way that a child must ever be the child of the man of whom he comes. Is it not proof—this complaint of my heart at the word ‘Adoption’? Is it not the spirit of the child, crying out, ‘Abba, Father’?”
“Yes; but that is the spirit of adoption; the text says so.”
“Away with your adoption! I could not even be adopted if I were not such as the adoption could reach—that is, of the nature of God. Much as he may love him, can a man adopt a dog? I must be of a nature for the word of God to come to—yea, so far, of the divine nature, of the image of God! Heartily do I grant that, had I been left to myself, had God dropped me, held no communication with me, I could never have thus cried, never have cared when they told me I was not a child of God. But he has never repudiated me, and does not now desire to adopt me. Pray, why should it grieve me to be told I am not a child of God, if I be not a child of God? If you say—Because you have learned to love him, I answer—Adoption would satisfy the love of one who was not but would be a child; for me, I cannot do without a father, nor can any adoption give me one.”
“But what is the good of all you say, if the child is such that the father cannot take him to his heart?”
“Ah, indeed, I grant you, nothing!—so long as the child does not desire to be taken to the father’s heart; but the moment he does, then it is everything to the child’s heart that he should be indeed the child of him after whom his soul is thirsting. However bad I may be, I am the child of God, and therein lies my blame. Ah, I would not lose my blame! in my blame lies my hope. It is the pledge of what I am, and what I am not; the pledge of what I am meant to be, what I shall one day be, the child of God in spirit and in truth.”
“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 everyone 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 νἱοθεσία to the form θετὸς, 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 νἱοθεσία St. Paul did not intend “adoption”; and second, that if the Revisers
