George MacDonald and Adoption

When I wrote a post last year on George MacDonald’s sermons, I didn’t say anything about his deep feelings about the theological use of the word “adoption.” Early in his life, George MacDonald was told that he was not a child of God but that God could adopt him as a son. MacDonald grew up thinking that this message meant that God had rejected him to the point that He no longer recognized MacDonald as part of his creation. As an adult, he discovered, he tells us, that the Greek word translated “adoption” in the New Testament does not in fact mean adoption. He indicates the textual context of Galatians 4 in which the heir in Paul’s metaphor is in fact the son of the house but is treated as no better than a slave until “adoption,” which must therefore mean full recognition as a son, not chage of status from non-son to son. Tell a child he is not in his right relationship with his heavenly Father, MacDonald says, but don’t tell him God is not his Father.

This year, I read MacDonald’s novel Donal Grant, and partway through I started thinking: MacDonald sees Donal as himself, and Donal must believe that most Christians are wrong to think that God has adopted them. Then, sure enough, Donal says, in words understandably reminiscent of the sermon I read last year, that the word has been mistranslated and that the mistake has done grave harm to many people. I may be overreacting, but it seemed in this novel as if MacDonald were saying that any Christian who understood “adoption” as a valid theological concept was something like an enemy to the Truth, and that stance made it sound like MacDonald was pitting himself not just against a word or a detail but against the vast majority of English-speaking Christians.

I think that some Christians are wrong about some things. I think, for instance, that MacDonald is wrong to see the acceptance of the word “adoption” as a line in the sand. But I hold my disagreements with other Christians in two very important contexts. First, if most Christians disagree with me on some given doctrine, I simply must attenuate my absolute confidence that I am right. You know. Human. Fallible. Etc. Second, if I truly believe that person A is a Christian and I truly believe that A believes the wrong thing about doctrine B, then, if I see an enemy at all, I hold what I see as the wrong view on B as the enemy, not person A. We wrestle not with flesh and blood.

After reading this book, I feel like I’ve “figured out” MacDonald, and, as I just explained, I’m not sure I like what I figured out. I have three more of his novels on my list for this ten-year reading plan, and right now I’m not sure what I’ll do when they come up.