Our church order is not a jot and tittle creature, rather it sets frameworks in which elders deciding together have great discretion and latitude. The doom-cry and the hand-wringing against 23 & 37 is not in fact a criticism of what the amendments will do. It is a criticism of what presbyteries will do with the amendments.

My denomination is discussing rules regarding the ordination of men who are gay and celibate. About this you may have no interest, and you have ended up in the oddest corner. If you have interest, step here to get started.
I’m in the pass-it-fiddle-with-it-in-the-future camp. It’s the Book of Church Order, we do that. I don’t see problems with the language, but I recognize that use and observation could discover need for improvement. That is why the BCO is amendable, and why it receives amendments most years. The purported dangers advanced by some are not mandated by the actual language of these amendments. They could well occur even without these amendments. Some remind us that there are elders who wouldn’t ordain a graduate of San Salvatore Academy, because in the opinion of those knuckleheads SSA is an acronym for unordainable– and the same fretful voices pass on that the knuckleheads claim that is the meaning of these amendments. The advocacy of those simplistic absolutists will not advance a whit by asserting that their previous opinion is actually now codified in the BCO. People disagree about the construal of BCO (did you know that?), and they vote accordingly (did you know that?): these amendments don’t change who or how many construe SSA this way or that way.
Read More

It is never pleasant to think about death. Yet death is real. It is not something we can afford to ignore, to wish away, to sentimentalize, or to trivialize. Scripture owns up to the reality of death and does so from its opening pages. Issues of “life and death” importance mark the first three chapters of the Bible.

We all have questions about death. What is death? Why do we die? Why do we all die? Why is death so scary? Why did Christ die? Why do Christians have to die? How can I face the death of someone I love? How can I prepare for death? How can I help others prepare for death? What happens after death?
To answer these questions, we need to go to the Scripture and see what God has to say to us there. The Bible is God’s Word and is completely reliable and true. If the Bible tells us something about death, then we can stake our lives on it.
We also have a lot of help. Our spiritual ancestors thought deeply and practically about death. Throughout the history of the church, pastors and teachers have sought to help God’s people face death in light of the riches of biblical truth. In the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, the church recovered the gospel in its full biblical integrity. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the British Puritans, and their spiritual heirs have left us rich reflections on suffering, death, and heaven in light of the gospel.
But we don’t live in the halls of church history. We live in the twenty-first century. Every generation faces its own particular challenges in thinking seriously and biblically about death and dying. The challenges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not always our own. To begin, we need to think about where we are. Why does modern Western culture—and sadly, sometimes, even the church—make it so hard for us to think about death?
CHALLENGES FROM OUR CULTURE
What are some obstacles that our culture raises to thinking properly about death and dying? There are at least two. The first is that we live in a culture of distraction. Think about it. We have year-round access to sports—live and televised events; domestic and international; football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. We have cable networks, talk shows, call-in shows—all devoted to sports. We have television and movie streaming—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+, for starters. In 2019, there were 532 original scripted television series broadcast in the United States; up from 495 in 2018 and 210 in 2009.1 And then there are the twenty-four-hour news channels. You couldn’t begin to watch all that’s offered. There is music streaming—Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. For a few dollars a month, you can stream or download hundreds or thousands of songs. And although social media is a relative newcomer, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok entice users to spend hours on their devices.
The point is not that sports, television, music, or social media are bad. They are not. I enjoy each of them. The problem is that our culture overwhelms us with entertainments and diversion. This multibillion-dollar industry keeps us from thinking about serious things—life, death, and eternity. Of course, diversion from serious things is not unique to our culture. It is part of our fallen bent as sinners to distract ourselves from the truth. Why do we do this? Blaise Pascal put it well nearly four hundred years ago: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things”2 and “It is easier to bear death when one is not thinking about it than the idea of death when there is no danger.”3
Therefore, our culture has not done something brand new in its pursuit of distraction. What is new is that we have taken distraction to new heights. The thought of death is so overwhelming that we would prefer not to think about it at all. Our modern industry of distraction helps us to do just that. We invest billions of dollars annually not to think about the unthinkable.
A second and related obstacle that our culture has raised to thinking seriously about death and dying is that we live in a culture of distancing and denial. We have all sorts of ways to try to keep death at arm’s length. Few young people, for instance, have had direct experience with death. They see dramatizations of death in TV and movies, often in shocking and gory detail.4 But many have never been to a funeral or memorial service, and even fewer have ever seen a dead body. It used to be that most people died at home. Now, most people die in institutions—hospitals and nursing homes, for instance.5 This is not a bad thing, of course, since these institutions are routinely staffed by skilled people who ensure that our friends and family members receive care and comfort in their last days. But this also means that families are often not with their loved ones in their last hours. Further, a routine experience of death in families has been mercifully stemmed: infant mortality. Parents, of course, continue to experience the tragic heartache of the loss of a child, but this is far less common than it used to be.6 The eighteenth-century Scottish pastor Thomas Boston, buried six children before they reached the age of two. The English Puritan John Owen had eleven children, but only one survived to adulthood. No one would want to return to the days when infant mortality was an expected, if not inevitable, part of family life. But that also means that fewer families today know what it is to experience death firsthand in the home.
We have also witnessed a revolution in the way that people mourn in our culture. Increasingly, funerals are called “celebrations of life.” This way of speaking serves to distance both the service and the mourners from the reality of death. One survey from 2019 found that the three most popular songs performed at funerals in the United Kingdom were Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” Andrea Boccelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye,” and Eva Cassidy’s recording of “Over the Rainbow.”7 It is revealing that these songs equip us to respond to death with sloppy sentimentality (“Time to Say Goodbye,” “Over the Rainbow”) or with bald defiance (“My Way”). The survey’s authors commented that “surprisingly no classical hymns made it on to the most popular top ten list.” Is this a surprise, though? Good hymns capture deep, substantive, biblical truths to bring gospel comfort to mourners. By and large, that is simply not what we want in the West today as we encounter death.
CHALLENGES FROM THE CHURCH
The culture is not the only place that we find obstacles to thinking seriously and substantively about death and dying. Sadly, the evangelical church has added its own set of obstacles. We may briefly reflect on three in particular. First, the church has embraced consumerism. The church too often treats attenders like customers, and these attenders too often act like customers. The church can present itself as selling a product in a competitive marketplace. Church attenders can demand to be kept satisfied or they will take their business elsewhere. If that model informs, even imperceptibly, our understanding of the church, then mortality and death will struggle to find a place in the teaching and songs of the church. If people are not made to feel positive and uplifted, the reasoning goes, they will leave and go elsewhere. There are incredible pressures to keep people coming and to attract more people to our services and programs. Why, then, would you put an unwelcome reality like death before them?
Second, the church has embraced an entertainment mentality. Often the buildings in which evangelical churches meet resemble stages with auditorium-style seating. A band is up front playing loud music (some churches even offer earplugs to attendees as they enter the building). Preaching reflects the influence of entertainment culture. Preaching is dedicated less to opening and applying a text of Scripture than to addressing the felt needs and concerns of contemporary hearers. It avoids being either serious or confrontational, and it is not particularly authoritative. Death and eternity, if they are handled at all, are handled sparingly and gingerly.
Read More

“Number of Original Scripted TV Series in the United States from 2009 to 2019,” Statistica, January 2021, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/444870/scripted-primetime-tv-series-number-usa ↩︎
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 66 (=Pensée 169). ↩︎
Pascal, Pensées, 72 (=Pensée 166). ↩︎
Timothy A. Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2017), 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Georgina Hamilton, “The Most Played Songs at Funerals Revealed—and Some Choices Are Bizarre,” Smooth Radio 97-108, May 2, 2019, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.smoothradio.com/news/quirky/most-popular-funeral-music-songs. ↩︎

Written by Richard B. Gaffin Jr. and David B. Garner |
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
The adopted sons’ predestined sharing by resurrection in a human nature like that of the glorified firstborn Son rests on and derives from the adoptive significance of the Son’s own resurrection, when by the Spirit he was effectively declared/appointed what he was not previously (in his human nature), “the Son of God in power” (Romans 1:4).

Abstract
This article responds to the recent article by Joshua Maurer and Ty Kieser, “Jesus, ‘Adopted Son of God?’ Romans 1:4, Orthodox Christology, and Concerns about a Contemporary Conclusion.” While we commend these authors’ desire to promote orthodox Christology, we correct their misreading of our own positions, particularly our view regarding the adoption of the divine Son according to his human nature, an adoption essential for the perfecting of the Son in accomplishing the salvation applied to believers. We conclude with an important pastoral observation concerning the adoption of the Son for the adoption of believers.
We appreciate the evident concern for orthodox Christology in the article by Maurer and Kieser, “Jesus, ‘Adopted Son of God?’”1 We assure readers that we share this concern. Also, we appreciate the tone of the article and take at face value their saying that they are not accusing those whose views they critique—including us—of heresy (p. 328, n. 53). However, despite this distinction intending to de-escalate, an unavoidable conclusion remains, even though the authors do not choose to draw it: If the positions they attribute to us are in fact ours, then we are guilty of serious heresy and in fundamental violation of our ordination vows as ministers of the gospel.
The whole of the article seeks to show that our views are “incompatible with orthodox Christology” (p. 328) and “unlike the affirmations of orthodox Christianity” (p. 332, emphasis original). Having made these general assertions, they specify our alleged kinship with particular heresies:

Adoptionism. “The only possible means to affirm Jesus’s adoption is to deny that Jesus was the Son of God before the resurrection” (p. 327), and Gaffin and Garner argue for “a change in Jesus according to his divine nature” (p. 331).
Nestorianism. Gaffin and Garner “incline toward affirming two sons, two persons” (p. 331); “the only way to speak of filial progress is to introduce a second Son” (p. 332); and “the implication here is that the ‘eternal Son’ and ‘economic Son’ are distinct persons, two Sons” (p. 332).
Kenotic Christology. “These accounts could appeal to some version of Kenoticism” (p. 331, n. 70).2

It is difficult to see how the quotations they selected, let alone the fuller body of our writings, could possibly be aligned with the Christological errors they attribute to us. We are disappointed by the massive misreading of our work that has led to the alien views imposed upon us.
Where the authors get untracked and are wrong in their basic assessment of our views is signaled in the final, summarizing sentence of their opening paragraph: “Paul, they suppose, spoke of the eternally divine Son’s ‘adoptive divine sonship’” (p. 320). Put in quotation marks yet without any indication of a source, “adoptive divine sonship” presumably highlights their own representation of the basic view they are intent on critiquing as erroneous: that the Son’s divine nature is not immutable but changes.
“Adoptive divine sonship” occurs multiple times in characterizing our views: in the introduction (1 time), in section 1.1. in relation to Gaffin (3 times, in two of which “adoptive” is italicized) and in section 1.3 in relation to Garner (1 time in the body, 1 time in n. 26; in each occurrence “adoptive” is italicized).
Suffice it to say, at no place have we ever spoken or written of “divine adoptive sonship” or of “Jesus’s acquiring of divine sonship.”3 As an encapsulation of our view we reject such language as thoroughly misleading.
In what follows, we reply further to Maurer and Kieser’s critiques. Gaffin responds first to the authors’ critique of his view. Then Garner addresses their assessment of his position and offers some observations about issues related to orthodox Christology raised by their article. Finally, together we offer concluding remarks concerning some pastoral implications of adoption.
1. Response from Gaffin
Maurer and Kieser summarize my view of Jesus’s sonship as follows in their article:
We see evidence of something like this alteration of the Son in Gaffin’s argument that Romans 1:4 “teaches that at the resurrection Christ began a new and unprecedented phase of divine sonship. The eternal Son of God … has become what he was not before.” Gaffin assigns this change to the “eternal Son” and his “divine sonship” (rather than his humanity) and thereby seems to fall into the ditch of a Son whose divinity changes. (pp. 330–31)4
This quotation and the conclusions the authors draw from it prompt several observations.5
First, this is what I actually wrote in The Centrality of the Resurrection: “Verse 4 teaches that at the resurrection Christ began a new and unprecedented phase of divine sonship. The eternal Son of God, who was born, lived, and died κατὰ σάρκα, has been raised κατὰ πνεῦμα and so, in his messianic identity (of the seed of David), has become what he was not before: the Son of God in power.”6 Further, to reinforce what is meant by these two sentences, I directly appended this footnote from Geerhardus Vos: “‘From resurrection-beginnings, from an eschatological genesis dated the pneumatic state of Christ’s glory which is described as sonship of God ἐν δυνάμει.’”7
To say that there is a considerable difference between the way Maurer and Kieser have quoted me and what I wrote is an understatement. I have puzzled over what prompted them to elide the material they did (italicized for easy reference above) and without any indication why they had done so. Presumably, it is to find an instance of the notion of “adoptive divine sonship” they are concerned to critique as erroneous and unorthodox.
However, in the second sentence of what I wrote, the relative clause they elided (“who was born…”) is not there as dispensable filler material that can be ignored without drastically changing the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Nor can “the Son of God in power” be omitted as they did without removing the specific bottom-line conclusion of both sentences taken together. The elided material is essential to the meaning of the two sentences. The way the authors have quoted me so substantially changes what I wrote that they do not simply obscure its meaning, but give it a sense it does not have.
At the end of the excerpt quoted above, Maurer and Kieser append footnote 67: “Gaffin shows that he is aware of, and willing to, predicate particular attributes to Jesus according to one nature and not the other (Gaffin, Centrality, 105). Yet, he (curiously) does not make these same qualifications for adoption” (p. 331).
To this I can only say that what they find “curiously” to be the case is because in quoting me (see above) they have deleted from their consideration the relative clause in the second sentence. There “…born, lived, … died, … raised, …, (of the seed of David)” are true and can only be true of Christ, the eternal Son of God, according to his human nature, not his divine nature. The sense of the sentence, particularly when it is read within its immediate and the broader context of the book, is accurately restated by substituting “according to his human nature” for the relative clause: “The eternal Son of God, according to his human nature, has become what he was not before: the Son of God in power.” The two sentences, properly cited and read, do not by any stretch of sound reasoning provide evidence of attributing change to the deity of the Son (rather than his humanity), or, as the authors think, of seeming “to fall into the ditch of a Son whose divinity changes” (pp. 330–31).
In Romans 1:3–4, there is indeed a change in view for God’s Son, a change that is at the heart of the gospel, a change without which there is no gospel (note how these verses connect with vv. 1‒2 and that the gospel is a primary focus of vv. 1‒4). That change is this: In his human nature the eternal Son of God, the person of the divine Son, “for us and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed), having persevered in his state of humiliation (v. 3), entered his state of exaltation (v. 4).
The authors’ concern for orthodox Christology is commendable. Their misreading of my view is regrettable.
2. Response from Garner
2.1. Adoptive Divine Sonship Predicated upon Eschatological Sonship
As previously noted, Maurer and Kieser designate our positions with the formula “adoptive divine sonship”—a phrase likely drawn from Michael Peppard.8 Whoever is the source, the quotation deserves attribution. More pertinent to my response here, however, is the unorthodox theological baggage toted in the phrase, since Peppard rejects the pre-existent sonship of Christ and openly aligns himself with the adoptionism of James D. G. Dunn.9 Just as Maurer and Kieser do with Gaffin, they impose the phrase and its objectionable theological baggage upon me.
The authors write, “He [Garner], like Gaffin, understands Romans 1:3–4 ‘is an epochal designation of historically attained sonship rather than an ontological one concerning the hypostatic union.’”10 Then, deploying their refrain of choice, Maurer and Kieser draw the following conclusion: “This means that Jesus’s adoptive divine sonship is, therefore, properly predicated only to this ‘eschatological’ sonship” (pp. 324–25, their emphasis).
In this quote, as in the one from their note 67, referenced in Gaffin’s response above, the writers here employ a grammatically strained formulation of a matter predicated “to” something rather than “on” or “upon” something.11 If what they mean here is that Christ’s divine sonship is predicated upon his adoption, the response is an emphatic no to such Christology from-below argumentation. Jesus is the divine Son from eternity past and remains ever so. He does not and cannot acquire, obtain, mature into what he already is eternally as “very God of very God” (Nicene Creed), the only-begotten Son of God.
Jesus’s divine sonship does not derive from his incarnational experience or eschatological sonship, formulations more reflective of Pannenberg than of Paul. Contrary to Maurer and Kieser, who seek to demonstrate that I make Christ’s divine sonship contingent upon his resurrection, I openly contend precisely the opposite: Christ’s human sonship experience is only properly predicated upon his antecedent divine sonship.
In fact, the chapter in Sons in the Son from which the selected quotation comes begins with an extensive treatment of the deity of the Son of God.12 I affirm the tried, tested, and trusted Christological creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon, and applaud the brilliant summation of orthodox Christology in the Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 8. In this same chapter of Sons in the Son, I further counter the heterodox and heretical Christology from-below paradigms, which predicate any notion of divinity upon his humanity. Instead, “the Son of God is ‘very and eternal God’ who took ‘upon him man’s nature. Christ’s divinity lies antecedent to his humanity.”13
Maurer and Kieser further misconstrue my view when they degrade my approach to Christ’s eternal sonship: “As Garner admits, ‘this sending does not create sonship, but presupposes it’” (p. 333). As the structure, argument, and tone of Sons in the Son unequivocally manifest, never do I “admit” the eternal sonship of Christ. Mere admission of Christ’s divinity strikes the protological and doxological heart of faithful Christology. As I make explicit, “The Logos asarkos precedes and qualifies the Logos ensarkos.”14 For this reason, the sentence immediately following their chosen quote from Sons in the Son cites Herman Ridderbos affirmingly: “The divine glory of Christ, even already in his pre-existence with the Father prior to his redemptive revelation, determines and underlies the Pauline Christology.”15 It is the divine Son that became incarnate, not a human son that became divine. This theological priority we must celebrate and effectuate, and never moderate or merely tolerate.
Read More
Related Posts: