One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation by Johnson Marcus Peter

Author:Johnson, Marcus Peter [Johnson, Marcus Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781433531514
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2013-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

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ADOPTION AND SONSHIP IN CHRIST

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

GALATIANS 3:26

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

JOHN 1:12–13

Jesus Christ is an inexhaustible fountain of blessing to us. When he gives himself to us that we might enjoy him, he is not only our justification—the One through whom we experience the forgiveness of sins and the fellowship of his righteousness—he is also our sanctification—the One through whom we are made holy and are transformed into his image. Yet he is the source of yet another blessing, one so amazing that it would be blasphemous to suggest if it were not true. In our union with Christ, the only begotten Son of God, we participate in what is most precious to him: his relationship with his Father. We are, in union with Christ, adopted into the family of God; we become the children, the sons and daughters, of the Most High God. The blessing of adoptive sonship answers another desperate need we have as sinners. Whereas justification (a forensic benefit) addresses the guilt and condemnation that accompanies sin, and sanctification (a transformative benefit) addresses the depravity and pollution of our nature, adoptive sonship (a familial benefit) addresses our estrangement and alienation from God.

J. I. Packer writes that adoption is “the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification. . . . Adoption is higher, because of the richer relationship with God that it involves.”1 Donald Fairbairn suggests that, while it is true and important to speak of salvation in terms of justification and sanctification, “neither of these is the central aspect of the Christian life. Instead, forgiveness and becoming Christ-like flow from our participation in a relationship, from our becoming sons and daughters by adoption so as to share in the communion that the natural Son has with God the Father.” This understanding of salvation, he asserts, was “widely represented in, and perhaps even the consensus of, the early church.”2 It is not widely known that John Calvin, too, regarded adoption as central to the gospel’s benefits: “There are innumerable other ways indeed in which God daily testifies his fatherly love toward us, but the mark of adoption is justly preferred to them all.”3

Given these testimonies, it is remarkable that the doctrine of adoptive sonship has been so neglected in the history of Christian thought. Packer goes so far as to write that “it is a strange fact that the truth of adoption has been little regarded in Christian history. Apart from two last-century books, now scarcely known . . . there is no evangelical writing on it, nor has there been at any time since the Reformation, any more than there was before.”4 Tim Trumper is right to say that “the time has arrived for our theology of adoption to catch up to our experience of it.

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