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The Westminster Confession’s Shortest Chapter Reveals the Warmth of Its Theology
Of Adoption
Moving from chapter to chapter, one of the noticeable things about the Westminster Confession of Faith is that some chapters are much longer than others. The length of a chapter, however, does not necessarily reveal its importance. Some doctrines require more explanation because they were heavily debated during the centuries and decades leading up to the writing of the Confession from 1643–1646.
Chapter 12, on adoption, is the shortest chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith. At just over one hundred words, it can easily be lost in the shadow of the extensive chapter on justification which directly precedes it. Yet its relative brevity should not be a judgment on its importance. Its importance is punctuated by the fact that the Westminster divines believed adoption deserved its very own chapter.
When one thinks of salvation according to the Reformed theology of the Confession, justification is likely to jump first to mind; and it is right that, in order, justification appears before adoption. However, even as they are distinct chapters, there is an integral relationship between them. One cannot enjoy the privileges of sonship in adoption apart from being accepted as righteous before God in justification. Yet adoption tells us something justification alone cannot tell us: Justification explains how guilty sinners are accepted before a holy God; adoption explains the relationship that follows. In justification God acts as judge, whereas in adoption he acts as Father and welcomes sons and daughters into his family. While not identical, the two doctrines are inseparable.
The Westminster Confession of Faith
J. V. Fesko, John R. Muether, D. Blair Smith
This collection of essays, written by faculty from Reformed Theological Seminary, presents an essential, single-volume guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith for modern audiences.
The existence of a separate chapter on the doctrine of adoption is especially interesting because at times the Westminster Confession has been criticized for being dryly scholastic or overly concerned with legal categories. Whatever one thinks of those criticisms, the presence of a chapter on adoption complicates that picture. Few doctrines are warmer for the Christian than adoption. In contrast to teaching that might be cold or abstract, the doctrine of adoption puts us face to face with the Father’s love, the believer’s identity as a child in the Father’s family, and the profound privilege of belonging to the Father’s household.
Background
Historically, the very existence of Chapter 12 of the Westminster Confession is noteworthy. Before the Reformation, there simply was little sustained reflection on the doctrine of adoption. The early church certainly taught about the sonship Christians gain in Christ, and themes related to adoption appear in important figures such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexandria, but the doctrine did not receive the same degree of development as the Trinity or Christology. And in the early decades of the Reformation, justification rightly received most of the attention within a broader doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. For these reasons, the Westminster Confession’s separate treatment of adoption—the first of its kind in a confession—is noteworthy in the history of theology.
The roots of the Confession’s teaching come from the Reformed tradition itself. Given the Reformation’s emphasis on Scripture and the richness of God’s grace in the gospel, it is easy to see why adoption emerged as a distinct emphasis. As already mentioned, justification naturally jumps to mind when reflecting on the application of Christ’s reconciling work. But what comes next? The fullness of salvation is not just about getting one’s sins forgiven and guilt washed away. It includes relationship, and Reformed theology could not rest until it took the doctrine of salvation to this natural conclusion.
Writing roughly a century before Westminster, reformer John Calvin did not dedicate a separate chapter to adoption in his Institutes of the Christian Religion; nonetheless, the doctrine is woven throughout his theology. The themes of God as a loving Father and the Christian life as a life of sonship regularly appear in Calvin’s writings. For Calvin, theology, first of all, deals with knowledge. He famously said, it is knowledge of God and of ourselves, but there is no true knowledge where there is no true piety. So what is true piety, according to Calvin? He defined it in the Institutes opening pages:
I call “piety” that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces. For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him—they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.1
Piety is reverence joined with love of God. But where does that come from? It comes from a knowledge of his benefits, which starts with his fatherly care. What Calvin is saying is that if we are ever going to respond to God with proper piety in our Christian lives, we must realize we have a heavenly Father who loves us and cares for us. In other words, we must understand we are adopted sons or daughters, members of a family with a loving heavenly Father.
The doctrine of adoption also makes sense within the larger framework of covenant theology that begins to emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the heart of covenant theology is God’s purpose to dwell with his people in fellowship. In the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam enjoyed life in God’s presence and experienced his generous provision in the Garden of Eden. Sadly, Adam’s sin changes everything. Therefore, humanity lost the blessed communion for which it had been created. The good news of the gospel is that God did not abandon his covenantal purposes. Through Jesus Christ, the last Adam, God secures redemption for his people, fulfilling the obligations Adam failed to fulfill and bearing the consequences of sin. The goal of Christ’s redemptive work is fellowship with God himself.
For that reason, adoption occupies a vital place within the covenant story. Throughout Scripture, the heart of covenant promise is expressed in the language of relationship: “I will be your God, and you will be my people” (see Genesis 17:7, 8; Exodus 6:7; Leviticus 26:12; Jeremiah 7:23; 31:33; 32:38; Ezekiel 36:28; 37:27). With the incarnation of the Father’s Son in the New Testament, that promise is given familial dimensions. God not only gathers a people to himself; he welcomes sons and daughters into his household. The covenant promise reaches a warm and beautiful expression when God declares, “I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me” (2 Corinthians 6:18).
God not only gathers a people to himself; he welcomes sons and daughters into his household.
Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter Twelve’s Contents
‘Of Adoption’ is short enough to quote in full:
All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth, in and for His only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption: by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God; have His name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption; have access to the throne of grace with boldness; are enabled to cry, Abba, Father; are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by Him as by a Father; yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.
This chapter clearly presents a trinitarian frame for understanding redemption. First, consider the source of our adoption. God the Father is mentioned three times: once implicitly, and twice explicitly. Implicitly it says God vouchsafeth—which is not a word used much today but it means to give or grant in a gracious way—in and for his only Son Jesus Christ. ‘God’ here is God the Father because the gift of adoption to those that are justified is from the Father in the Son. The chapter goes on to refer to the Father, then, as the object of the cry of the adoption—“Abba, Father”—and as the one who chastens his children.
The Son is considered here the heart of adoption as our adoption is “in him.” We know adoption to be when one is brought into a family to which he or she does not naturally belong. It is to enjoy the relationships of a family, but of a family that existed prior to your legal admittance into that family. The Father-Son relation is vital to our understanding of adoption, for as the Confession puts it we are made partakers of the grace of adoption “in and for His only Son Jesus Christ.”
Jesus is the natural Son, the one who is related to the Father eternally by nature. The Confession is acknowledging that to be adopted is to be given a familial position by grace that the Son has by nature. We become ‘sons in the Son’, children of the same heavenly Father. This comes through our union with the Son. Thus, adoption brings our attention to a trinitarian redemptive movement starting with the Father-Son relation, which we experience through the grace of being united to the Son. But it doesn’t stop there.
Having Son’s name on us, we receive the Spirit of adoption who cries out within us. Now, it has been a source of no little vexation among some over the years that the Confession lacks a separate chapter on the Holy Spirit. While it is true there is no separate chapter on the Holy Spirit in the original framing of the Confession, the Spirit and his ministry show up throughout. It is not entirely dis-analogous to see something in the Confession on the Spirit like what can be observed in Calvin’s Institutes with adoption. That is, while Calvin didn’t have a separate chapter on adoption, adoption is found throughout the substance of his theology. The Spirit, too, is found throughout the Confession, especially chapters 10-18, which deal with the application of our salvation. Among those, chapter 12 stands out.
The liberties and privileges of adoption are highlighted by the Westminster Divines. Christians “have access to the throne of grace with boldness; are enabled to cry, Abba, Father;” and they are “pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him as by a Father; yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption.” These high privileges are among those who “receive the Spirit of adoption.” Indeed, throughout they assume the ministry of the Spirit. A later chapter in the Confession, chapter 18 ‘Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation’, makes this link explicit when it says in section 2, “an infallible assurance of faith” is founded in part on “the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are children of God: which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.”
Just as the Confession has been critiqued for its lack of an original chapter on the Holy Spirit, so it has it been criticized for minimal formal attention to the Holy Trinity. And yet, as this brief interaction with chapter 12 has demonstrated, these prime doctrines often demonstrate their importance in how they are woven into the sinews of doctrinal construction. While chapter 12 does not give attention to the internal life of the Trinity, it does draw out a trinitarian economy in our redemption.
Conclusion
J. I. Packer observed in his classic book Knowing God that if we want to know whether someone truly understands Christianity, we should ask what he makes of being God’s child and having God as his Father (p. 201). There is profound insight in that statement. The Christian life is fundamentally the life of sons and daughters who have been welcomed into the Father’s family through the work of the Son and by the ministry of the Spirit.
Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 12 may be brief, but it expresses one of salvation’s richest themes. Through Jesus Christ, believers are not merely forgiven sinners. We are beloved children, bearing the Father’s name, enjoying the Father’s care, possessing the Spirit of adoption, and awaiting an everlasting inheritance. To know God as Father and ourselves as his children is not a peripheral aspect of Christianity. It lies very near the heart of the gospel itself.
Notes:
- Institutes 1.2.1
D. Blair Smith is an editor of The Westminster Confession of Faith: A Comprehensive Commentary on Its History, Theology, and Application.
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