Abba, Father!

The passage: The spirit of adoption, by which we cry, “Abba, Father.”

To cry Father! from a full heart is the hardest and gladdest thing in the world. I want to help whoever I can to call on the Father so.

Every form of systematic Christian teaching has things that check this outgoing of the heart, and some make it impossible. The more delicate the affections, the more easily they are chilled and blown aside; even the suspicion of a cold reception paralyzes them. Such a cold wind at the very gate of heaven (thank God, outside it!) is the so-called doctrine of Adoption. When a heart hears and believes, or half believes, that it is not God’s child from the first of its being but may possibly be adopted, its love sinks in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this who would adopt it? In childhood this doctrine was to me a repellent cloud-phantom that took maturer thought to dissipate. But to stand against its hideousness takes not much knowledge or insight, only love that will not be denied, and courage to question the phantom.

A devout and honest scepticism on God’s side, not to be put down by anything called authority, is needed by anyone who would know the liberty with which Christ makes free. What good men believe deserves respect, but no teaching, whoever the teachers, must come between the soul and the Father, who himself teaches his children. To accept authority may even be to refuse what it would teach, which stays misunderstood for lack of the natural doubt and inquiry we were meant to go through.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so no feeling exists in one human heart alone; so I conclude many have groaned like me under this doctrine’s supposed authority. Refusing to look up to God as Father is the one central wrong of the human affair, and being unable to, the one central misery; whatever clears a difficulty from the way of recognizing the Father undermines every difficulty in life.

“Is God not my Father,” cries the child’s heart, “that I need to be adopted? Adoption can never satisfy me. Am I not his to begin with? Is he my Father only by a legal contrivance? There may be much love in adoption, but accepting it from anyone makes me the child of another! Adoption by God would be blessed if another had given me being; but if he gave it, adoption is not reception but 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 is not my father, he cannot become my father. A primary relation cannot be added later. That might matter little with earthly fatherhood, but for the very origin of my being, if he is only a maker and not a father, I am only a machine, 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 need not argue that I did not fall with Adam; I have fallen many a time, and a shadow on my soul, which I or another may call a curse, always comes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But can any repudiation, even God’s, undo the fact of an existing origin? And it is not only that he made me: by whose power do I go on living? When he cast me out, did I begin to draw my being from myself, or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being? I cannot fail to be the creature of God.”

“But creation is not fatherhood.”

“Creation in the image of God is. And if I am not in God’s image, how can his word mean anything to me? ‘He called them gods to whom the word of God came,’ says the Master himself. To be fit to receive his word is to be of his kind. However defaced his image in me, it is his image still, one 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. Nothing can make me not the child of God. If someone says, ‘Look at the animals: God made them, but you do not call them his children,’ I answer, ‘I am to blame; they are not! I cling to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood.’ Two things I am sure of: God is to them ‘a faithful creator,’ and the sooner I put in force my claim to be his child, 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 however I became an unworthy child, I cannot have ceased to be a child of God, as a child is always the child of the man he comes from. Is not my heart’s very complaint at the word Adoption proof of it? Is it not the spirit of the child crying, ‘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 adoption could reach, of the nature of God. Can a man adopt a dog? I must be of a nature for the word of God to come to, and so far of the divine nature, of the image of God! Had God dropped me and held no communication with me, I grant I could never have cried thus or cared when told I was not his child. But he has never repudiated me, and does not now desire to adopt me. Why should it grieve me to be told I am not a child of God, if I am not? If you say, ‘Because you have learned to love him,’ I answer that adoption would satisfy one who was not but would be a child; I cannot do without a father, and no adoption can 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, nothing, I grant, so long as the child does not desire to be taken to the father’s heart; but the moment he does, it is everything to him to be indeed the child of the one his soul thirsts for. However bad I am, I am the child of God, and therein lies my blame. I would not lose my blame; in it lies my hope, the pledge of what I am meant to be and 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; I say that our English presentation of his teaching is very misleading here. It is not for me to judge the learned and good men who revised the New Testament; I can only wonder why they kept the word adoption. Only Paul uses it in the New Testament. Liddell and Scott give ‘Adoption as a son,’ a mere submission to popular theology, citing only the New Testament. The relation of the word [Greek: niothesia] to [Greek: thetos], ‘taken,’ or rather ‘placed as one’s child,’ is, I presume, the sole ground for that translation; even plentiful and invariable usage could not justify it here, in face of what Paul elsewhere shows he means. The Greek word might be variously meant, though I find no use of it earlier than Paul; the English can mean but one thing, and not what Paul means. ‘The spirit of adoption’ Luther translates ‘the spirit of a child’; adoption, kindschaft, or childship

Of two things I am sure: that by niothesia Paul did not intend adoption; and that if the Revisers had felt the word come between God and their hearts as I have, they could not have let it stay in their version.

Once more: Paul’s word does not imply that God adopts children not his own, but that a second time he fathers his own, who are born a second time, from above; that he will be tenfold, infinitely, their father, and have them back into the very bosom they issued from, that they might learn they could live nowhere else, and be one with himself. It was for this that, in his Son, he died for them.

Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of the word, in his epistle to the Galatians, iv. 1-7.

Paul writes that so long as the heir is a child he differs nothing from a slave though lord of all, being under guardians and stewards until the time his father set. So we too, as children, were in bondage under the rudiments of the world; but when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. Because we are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father; so we are no longer slaves but sons, and if sons, heirs through God.

How could the Revisers choose this last reading, “an heir through God,” and keep adoption? The passage makes it as plain as Paul could that the word means raising a father’s own child from tutelage and subjection to others, a state he says is no better than a slave’s, 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. So it is in the earthly relation: many good children of good parents never know them or feel toward them as children might until they have grown and left home, or lost them. To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. Childship is the lower condition in the upward process toward sonship, the soil it grows from, without which it were impossible. God, like an earthly parent, cannot be content with children only; he must have sons and daughters, children of his soul, spirit, and love, not merely in that he loves them, or they love him, but in that they love like him, as he loves. For this he does not adopt them; he dies to give them himself and raise his own to his heart; he gives them a birth from above, born again out of himself and into himself, for he is the one and the all. They are not his real sons and daughters until they think, feel, and judge as he does, are at home with him and without fear before him because they love the same things and seek the same ends. For this we are created; it is the one end of our being and includes all others. Only unbelief can make men believe that God has cast them off and said they never were his children, while he spends himself to make us the children he designed, who would take him for their Father! He is our father all the time, but until we respond as true children he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our father! Because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.

Some readers, alas, may find no cheer or dawn in the word Father, and feel no tremble of even a vanished emotion at it. It is hardly likely to be their fault. Children seldom love up to the mark of reason, and some are inexplicable to the parent who loves them, yet if the parent has been ordinarily kind, even a son grown worthless will sometimes feel in better moments a dim reflex of childship, a faintly pleasant or sorrowful remembrance of the father around whose neck his arms once clung. In my own childhood my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp pain. To the son or daughter who takes no pleasure in the name Father I say, “Interpret the word by all you have missed in life. Every time someone might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, a father might have been a father indeed. If you have found a man or woman such a refuge, you have seen a shadow of the perfect, the back of the only man, the perfect Son of the perfect Father. All that human tenderness can give in nearness and readiness of love, and infinitely more, must be true of the perfect Father, the maker of fatherhood, the Father of all earth’s fathers, especially those who have shown a father-heart.”

This Father would make sons and daughters indeed: sons and daughters not merely by having come from his heart but by having returned to it, choosing to be what he is. He will have them share his being and nature, strong where he cares for strength, tender and gracious as he is, angry where and as he is angry. Even in the small matter of power, he will have them able to do whatever his Son Jesus could on earth, whose life was the perfect man’s, whose works were perfected humanity’s. Everything must at length be subject to man, as it was to The Man. When God can do what he will with a man, the man may do what he will with the world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord, and the deadliest thing cannot hurt him. The Lord said that whoever believes in him will do the works he does, and greater.

He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made through the Word, but what was made in the Word was life, the light of men. Those who live by this light, as Jesus lived, by obedience to the Father, share in their own making; the light becomes life in them, the life first born in Jesus; by obedience they become one with the godhead: “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” He does not make them sons of God but gives them power to become so: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes the true son of the Father of lights.

The Galatians passage is enough to show that adoption does not fit Paul’s idea. While we merely obey the law God has laid on us without knowing the Father’s heart that it comes from, we are slaves, not necessarily ignoble; but when we come to think with him, when the son’s mind and action are the Father’s, then the son is of the Father, and we are the sons of God. Both this passage and the one from Romans at the head of this sermon have Abba, Father, showing that he uses the word [Greek: uiothesia] in the same plain sense in both. Of the other passages where he uses it (he alone does, and may have coined it), one is in this same eighth chapter of Romans, which I keep for last. Another is in the next chapter, verse four, where he speaks of the [Greek: viothesia], literally the son-placing (the placing of sons in their true place), as belonging to the Jews. “Whose is the [Greek: viothesia]” cannot mean that they had already received it, or that it was theirs more than the Gentiles’; only that as the elder-brother-nation they had the foremost claim and would naturally first receive it, their best men always being nearest it. It must be wrought out first in those prepared for it; those were the Jews; of the Jews was the Son, bringing the sonship to all. Theirs was the [Greek: viothesia], as theirs was the gospel: to the Jew first, then the Gentile, though many a Gentile would have it before many a Jew. Those, and only those, who out of a true heart cry “Abba, Father,” whether of some paltry little so-called church other than the body of Christ, or of none, are the sons and daughters of God.

Paul uses the word also in Ephesians i. 5. The authorized version has “predestinated us unto the adoption of children”; the revised has “foreordained us unto adoption as sons”; there is little to choose, and neither gives Paul’s meaning. Whatever is gained by “of children” or “as sons” added to translate the word for which “adoption” alone serves elsewhere, the advantage goes only to the wrong interpretation.

Children we were; true sons we could never be, save through The Son. He brothers us. He takes us to the Father’s knees, and beholding his face we grow sons indeed. We could never have known the Father’s heart or felt it possible to love him as sons but for him who cast himself into the gulf between us. Even had we never sinned we could not have reached the sonship foreordained in him without him; we should have been little children loving the Father, but far from the sonhood that understands and adores. Those led by the Spirit of God are sons of God; anyone without the Spirit of Christ is none of his; and if we lack each other’s spirits, we do not belong to each other. There is no unity but having the same spirit, and there is but one spirit, that of truth.

It remains to note yet another passage.

Paul never meant anything he wrote to contribute to a system of theology. One sign is that he uses this word, perhaps coined by himself, in different and apparently opposing, though never contradictory, senses; his meanings always vivify each other. His ideas are so large they strain his words, but the honest heart, which alone he addresses, is in no danger of misunderstanding, though the ignorant and unsteadfast still wrest them. He speaks of sonship now as the Israelite’s possession, now as his who has learned to cry Abba, Father; and in the passage I consider last, Romans viii. 18-25, as yet to come, and as concerning our bodily rather than spiritual condition. This use, though unlike any other, is entirely consistent with the rest.

The 23rd verse says that we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan within ourselves, “waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body.”

The ideas in this verse and the main use are plainly associated. Putting a son in his true place has outward relations as well as inward reality; the outward arises from the inward and reveals it. When the child, his time under tutors past, took his place as a son, he would naturally change his dress and manner of life; so when God’s children cease to be slaves doing right from law and duty and become sons doing right from the essential love of God and neighbour, they too must exchange the garments of slavery for the robes of liberty, lay aside the body of this death, and appear in bodies like Christ’s, with whom they inherit of the Father. But many who have learned to cry Abba, Father are yet far from the liberty of the sons of God: sons, no longer children, yet groaning as in bondage! The apostle is not working out an idea but writing a letter with burning heart; yet he gives lines enough for us to work it out, and this is how it takes shape:

We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts seeking to be sons, the moment we begin to cry Father. But as the world must be redeemed first in a few men, so the soul is redeemed first in a few of its thoughts, wants, and ways, and the new creation takes long to finish. Having taken millions of years to bring the world to where a few of its inhabitants desire God, shall the creature of this new birth be perfected in a day? The process may now go tenfold faster, since the new factor of man’s fellow-working, for which all the previous means existed, is developed; but its end is far below the horizon of man’s vision:

The apostle speaks of the thing now as to come, now as done, when it is only begun; our ways of thought are like that. A man’s heart may leap for joy the moment a strong hand grasps his hair amid the sea-waves; he may cry, “I am saved!” and be safe, but not saved. So we are sons when we begin to cry Father, but far from perfected sons. While there is in us the least taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not received the sonship; we lack the life that raised Jesus’ body; we have not attained to the resurrection of the dead, by which word in Philippians iii Paul means, I think, what he here means by the sonship, which he puts in apposition with the redemption of the body:

So long as our outward condition is not that of sons royal and divine; so long as the garments of our souls, these mortal bodies, are mean, torn, and stained; so long as we groan under sickness, weakness, weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things, we have not received the sonship in full; we are only getting ready one day to creep from our chrysalids and spread the great heaven-storming wings of the psyches of God. We groan, burdened, waiting for the sonship, that is, the redemption of the body: its uplifting to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling spirit, nay, like Christ’s, of the deeper indwelling God. We shall always need bodies to manifest us to each other, bodies that present the soul with absolute truth. So the revealing of the sons of God in verse 19 is the redemption of the body: it is redeemed when made a fit revelation of them, as it was meant to be and always, imperfectly, was. This will be when truth is strong enough in the sons of God, for the soul makes the body. When we are sons of God in heart and soul, we shall be so in body too: “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

I care little to speculate on the kind of this body; two things only are needful to believe: that it will show the same self as before, and that it will show the being truly, without the defects of the former bodily revelation. Through their bodily presence we shall know our own infinitely better and find endlessly more delight in them. We must believe this or distrust the Father of our spirits. Until the body is redeemed, the [Greek: uiothesia] is only on the way, and it can come only by our working out the salvation he is working in us.

This redemption of the body, its deliverance from all that is amiss, unfinished, weak, or worn out and prevents the revelation of the sons of God, Paul calls not the adoption but the [Greek: niothesia], sonship in full manifestation. It is the slave left in the sons and daughters of God that has let the word adoption mislead them!

To see how the whole utterance hangs together, read verses 18 to 25, noticing the 19th: the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the revealing (the outshining) of the sons of God. When the sons of God show as they are, taking the appearance and place that belong to their sonship, sitting with the Son of God on their Father’s throne, they shall in fact be lords of the lower creation, bestowers of liberty and peace upon it; then shall the creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in their freedom and its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to serve them. Let the heartless scoff! The heart that cries Abba, Father cries to the God of the sparrow and the oxen; hope cannot go too far in hoping what that God will do for the creation that now groans and travails in pain because our higher birth is delayed. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Shall my heart be more compassionate than his?

If my interpretation does not satisfy a reader, I pray him not to spend his strength disputing my faith but in making sure of his own progress toward freedom and sonship. Only the child of God can judge truly; right opinion on the most momentous questions will deliver no man. The only cure for any ill in me or about me is to become the son of God I was born to be. Until Christ is born in me and I am revealed a son of God, pain and trouble will endure, and God grant they may! Call this presumption, and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing. If I presume for myself, I presume for you; but I do not presume. Jesus Christ and his love-slave Paul both represented God as a Father perfect in love, grand in self-forgetfulness, supreme in righteousness, devoted to the lives he has uttered. I will not believe less of the Father than I can conceive of glory after the lines he has given me, after the radiation of his glory in the face of his Son. He is the express image of the Father, by which we, his imperfect images, are to read and understand him: imperfect, we have yet perfection enough to spell toward the perfect.

It comes to this, then, after the apostle’s grand theory: the world exists for our education; it is the nursery of God’s children, served by troubled slaves, troubled because the children are themselves slaves, children but not good children. Beyond its own will or knowledge, the whole creation works to develop the children of God into the sons of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father, clothed in the best robe, with ring and shoes, shining out in their predestined sonship, then shall the mountains and hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field clap their hands. Then shall the wolf dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf, the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child lead them. Then shall the fables of a golden age, which faith invented and unbelief threw into the past, unfold their essential reality, and the tale of paradise prove a truth by becoming a fact. Then shall every ideal show itself a necessity, aspiration though satisfied put forth longer wings, and the hunger after righteousness know itself blessed. Then first shall we know what was in the Shepherd’s mind when he said, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”