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A Graceful Embrace: Theological Reflections on Adopting Children
 Theology in Practice

Editors-in-Chief

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Vanderbilt University)

Elaine Graham (University of Chester)

Editorial Board

Tom Beaudoin (Fordham University)

Dale P. Andrews✝ (Vanderbilt University)
Joyce Ann Mercer (Yale Divinity School)
Eileen Campbell-Reed (Central Baptist Theological Seminary)
Claire E. Wolfteich (Boston University)
Anthony Reddie (University of South Africa)

Volume 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/thip

A Graceful Embrace: Theological
Reflections on Adopting Children

Edited by

John Swinton
Brian Brock
Cover illustration: Ethereal Industry (7). © Photograph by Suzanne Forrest.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032126

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISSN 2352-9288
ISBN 978-90-04-35289-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-04-35290-2 (e-book)

Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill
Sense and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite
910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

This book is dedicated to our good friend and colleague Dale P. Andrews,
Dale Andrews. Dale, you left us far too soon. We miss you.

∵
Contents

Foreword ix
List of Tables xii
Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction 1
John Swinton and Brian Brock

Part 1
Adoption: A Theological Account

1 On Language, Children and God: Naming, Dominion and

Domination 15
Brian Brock

2 Why Christians Should (Not) Choose Adoption 36

Jana Marguerite Bennett

3 Belonging: A Theological and Moral Inquiry into Adoption 57

Brent Waters

4 Entrusted for Creaturely Life within God’s Story – The Ethos of Adoption
in Theological Perspective 69
Hans G. Ulrich

5 Adoption in Christian Social Ethics: Reflections from a German

Perspective 87
Henning Theißen

6 The Importance of Knowing Where You Come from 107

Karin Ulrich-Eschemann
viii Contents

Part 2
Explorations in Living out Adoption

7 Why Would I Look for My Parents?: Living Peaceably with the Only
Family I Have 121
John Swinton

8 Why is Adoption Such a Difficult Choice? A Practical Theology

Inquiry 131
Dale P. Andrews

9 Identity and the Adoption Triad 143

William R. McAlpine

10 Theological Reflection on Inter-country Adoptions of Special Needs

Children from Mainland China 161
Sarah Shea

11 Unnatural Ties: How Adoption Queers the Family 183

R. Ruard Ganzevoort and Marco Derks

12 Embraced in God’s Trembling-Womb Love: A Theology of Adoption 195

Kirsten Sonkyo Oh

13 Between Ascension and Pentecost: A Theology of Adoption 205

Heather Walton

14 Jonathan and Me: Constructing a Movie, Constructing Ourselves 217

Paul Shrier

References 237
Index 247
Foreword
Nick Watson

This generation has been wounded the most in relationships—it is in

relationships where the healing must begin.
Dr John Sowers1

There is a clear consensus amongst social scientists and Christian commen-

tators that we live in a fatherless age characterised by fractured relationships
and wide-spread family breakdown. John Swinton and Brian Brock, in the In-
troduction to this book, intimate this in stating that ‘spirits of fear’ are afoot in
Western cultural space, ‘… spirits which threaten the peace of children, adults
and whole societies’ (p. 12). Indeed, as Pope Benedict XVI has recently sug-
gested ‘the basis of family life is under threat’ and therefore the Church needs
to intentionally engage those who are deeply wounded by fractured familial
relationships.2 The thoughtful and carefully considered adoption of children
is one way in which the Christian community can, and needs to, respond to
this social and spiritual crisis. Thankfully the book you hold in your hands,
A Graceful Embrace: Theological Reflections on Adopting Children (edited by
two leading practical and pastoral theologians), provides a clearly articulated
response and call-to-action on this issue—a call to an intentional agape model
of embracing the most vulnerable among us.
As an adopted child, a practising Christian and an amateur theologian, I
was then delighted and honoured to write the Foreword to this book. A book
that beautifully interweaves insights from Christian ethicists and theologians
(some of whom are adopted, or, have adopted children themselves), and pro-
vides ‘practical’ suggestions for the Church and individuals to provide a re-
demptive response in this age. There is a burgeoning literature from both the
social and medical sciences that addresses the many dimensions of adoption.
For example, prenatal and perinatal psychology and social policy research that
informs the strategies of adoption agencies. This volume offers a diverse and
yet coherent set of essays addressing a wide range of issues from a theolog-
ical standpoint, i.e., the theology of naming and the morality of adopting

1 Cited on the home-page, The Mentoring Project, 3 November, 2015, http://www.

thementoringproject.org/.
2 Libereria Editrice Vaticana, The Basis of Family Life is Under Threat (Pope Benedict XVI’s
annual address to the Curia), The Catholic Herald, 4 January (2013): 5.
x Foreword

children, and analyses of ‘adoption hot topics’, such as identity and belong-
ing, inter-country adoption of special needs children and a fascinating auto-
biographical essay by John Swinton. Reading John’s essay made me again re-
alise that people’s lived experience of adoption are vastly different and are
moderated by a multitude of variables (many of which are examined in this
book). John’s experience of being adopted seemed to have had little conscious
impact upon his psyche and life. Conversely, I was deeply wounded from my
encounter with adoption at just ten days old—my dear mother had been in
psychiatric care and was troubled whilst carrying me in her womb. John and I
have one thing in common though. We have been ‘gracefully embraced’ by Ab-
ba, as described by Paul in the Romans 8, and our adoptive parents. We have
been ‘healed in relationship’ by the creator and his chosen parental image-
bearers.
The deep ‘primal wound’ described by Nancy Verrier in her land-mark
book,3 The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, which millions of
children receive from the experience of separation from their birth parents, of-
ten has a devastating effect on their sense of identity, orientation in the world
(to others and God), and ability to contribute positively to the families, com-
munities and societies which they inhabit. Consider the millions of orphaned
and abandoned children in South Africa, America and Western Europe. And
then consider the importance of a book such as this which introduces and
develops a Christian understanding of adoption and which should inform gov-
ernment legislation, the decision making of prospective adoptive parents, the
policies and strategies of adoption agencies and the amendment of family law.
The fatherless age in which we live is at its roots a spiritual issue—an aban-
donment of the divine mandate to obey God and live in harmonious relation-
ships that were modelled in Eden. Satan was the first of God’s creatures to
become an orphan. And now, he is an intentional orphan-maker bent on the
destruction of the nuclear family and therefore social order—bent on warring
against Divine love and parenting. The editors of this book propose a response
from God’s image bearers:

Understood Christianly, then, human adoptive

practices are explorative ways of seeking out and
awaiting the divine love for every child that expresses
the Christian freedom for love
(p. 19)

3 Verrier, N. (2009) The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. UK: British Associa-
tion for Fostering and Adopting.
Foreword xi

We are to ‘… counter a broader culture of abandonment that often rules

supreme within our societies’, suggests John Swinton (p. 168). The editors and
chapter contributors to this book have initiated this process through careful
theological (and personal) reflection, providing an invaluable resource for the
Church, adoption organisations and individuals alike.

Dr Nick J. Watson
York St John University
UK
List of Tables

10.1 Percentage of special needs adoptions in intercountry adoptions originated

from Mainland China, 2005-2009 162
10.2 Top three receiving countries of Mainland Chinese adoptees with special needs,
2005-2009 163
Notes on Contributors

Dr. Dale P. Andrews

is Distinguished Professor of Homiletics, Social Justice, and Practical Theolo-
gy at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Re-
ligion. Dr. Andrews earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University and
M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. In addition to multiple chapters
in diverse edited volumes and journal articles, he is the author of Practical The-
ology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Re-
ligion). He also co-authored Listening to Listeners: Homiletical Case Studies and
New Proclamation: Advent through Holy Week, Year A, 2004-2005 and is coeditor
of a multivolume lectionary commentary series, Preaching God’s Transforming
Justice. Tragically Dale passed away before this book was published. He left us
far too soon and we miss him.

Jana Marguerite Bennett

is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and the University of Dayton, where
she teaches courses in sexual ethics and catholic moral theology. She is the
author of Thicker than Blood: A Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Single-
ness (2008).

Brian Brock
is Reader in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is
the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scrip-
ture, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age and Captive to Christ, Open to the
World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public. He also edited Theology, Disability
and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church and Disability in the Chris-
tian Tradition: A Reader, both with John Swinton, and is Managing Editor of
the Journal of Disability and Religion.

Marco Derks
studied theology in Kampen (MA) and Manchester (MPhil) works as a Trainee
Research Assistant (PhD candidate) at Utrecht University for the project Con-
tested Privates. His research interests include Augustinian Studies, Christian
Ethics, Cultural Studies, Queer Theory/Theology, and Radical Theologies. Hav-
ing worked as e.g. project manager, teacher and editor, he is the chair of the
Dutch Society of Queer Theologians and (managing) editor of gOdschrift.
xiv Notes on Contributors

R. Ruard Ganzevoort
is professor of practical theology at VU University Amsterdam and director
of the Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion. His main research
regards trauma, sexual diversity, and popular culture. Full details on www.
ruardganzevoort.nl.

Bill McAlpine
is professor of Pastoral Theology at Ambrose University College. He has au-
thored two books, Sacred Space for the Missional Church Four Essential Loves:
Heart Readiness for Leadership and Ministry. Bill has studied at Capernwray
Hall, England, Columbia Bible College (now Columbia International Universi-
ty) in Columbia, South Carolina, Canadian Theological Seminary, and defend-
ed his PhD dissertation through University of Aberdeen in Scotland in October
2006. He has pastored for just under 16 years in Alliance Churches in Ontario
and Saskatchewan and is presently serving as Professor of Pastoral Theology at
Ambrose University College.

Kirsten Sonkyo Oh
is an ordained elder in full connection in the California Pacific Annual Confer-
ence of the United Methodist Church. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical
Studies from Biola University, an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and
her Ph.D. in Practical Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Dr. Oh is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Practical Theology under the Divi-
sion of Religion and Philosophy.

Sarah Shea
graduated from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. The focus of her PhD
thesis was spiritual care for people with severe intellectual disabilities. Adopt-
ing a practical theological research approach, she explored the care practices
of local evangelical congregations from multiple perspectives. Her interest in
disability theologies was developed during the period of studies at the Divinity
School of Chung Chi College. Her master thesis explored the contribution of
Karl Barth’s Christological anthropology towards a theological understanding
of disabilities.

Paul Shrier
earned his PhD in practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and is pro-
fessor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University. Paul is a Canadian who
has lived in Los Angeles County for twenty-two years. In Canada, he was an
economist. Paul and his wife Cahleen have been involved with foster care for
Notes on Contributors xv

fifteen years. They have had seven foster children and adopted two children,
Jonathan and Emily. For the past eight years Paul has been making movies
and videos for seminaries, Christians universities and colleges. Christians in
the Workplace, a six-week video curriculum, has been used by over 25,000
people in church small groups and university classrooms. Most recently, Paul
has been working with colleagues on a documentary about Montrose Church
and the Special Olympics. Paul and his wife Cahleen, professor of biology at
APU, study, write and make presentations together integrating neurology and
theology. Paul co-teaches Suffering and Disability, a senior class at APU, with
colleagues from the Department of Social Work.

John Swinton
is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care in the School of Divin-
ity, Religious Studies and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He is
the author of a number of monographs including Dementia: Living in the
memories of God, Raging With Compassion: Theological responses to the Prob-
lem of Evil, Spirituality in Mental Health Care: Rediscovering a “Forgotten “Di-
mension. He is the Director of Aberdeen University’s Centre for Spirituali-
ty, Health and Disability (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/centre-for-spirituality-
health-and-disability-182.php).

Henning Theißen
studied Protestant Theology and philosophy at Tübingen and Bonn and
worked for five years as a vicar and pastor. He holds degrees from the universi-
ties of Bonn (Dr. theol.) and Greifswald (Dr. theol. habil.), where he has been
living with his wife and three daughters since 2007. His main research inter-
est is in Protestant ecclesiology where a Heisenberg Grant from the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft currently enables him to specialize in United Theol-
ogy. He is a member of the supervisory board of the Evangelical Association
for Adoption and Foster Care Service, which is one of the leading ecclesial
adoption authorities in Germany.

Hans. G. Ulrich
is Professor for Theological Ethics at the Institute of Systematic Theology, The-
ological Faculty, University Erlangen – Nürnberg (Germany); emeritus since
2008. His main areas of research are Biblical Ethics, Ethics and Hermeneu-
tics, Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Political-Ethics. He is a member of the Clinical
Ethics committee, Medical Faculty University Erlangen-Nurnberg.
xvi Notes on Contributors

Karin Ulrich-Eschemann
is Professor of Religious Education and Didactics of Protestant religious edu-
cation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

Heather Walton
is Senior Lecturer in Practical Theology and Co-Director of the Centre for Lit-
erature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow. Her research inter-
ests lie in the intersections between poetics and practical theology and in the
use of creative writing in theological reflection. She is the author of a number
of works in this field including her recent book Writing Methods in Theological
Reflection, SCM Press, 2014.

Brent Waters
is the Jerre and Mary Joy Professor of Christian Social Ethics, and Director
of the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values at Garrett-
Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Chris-
tian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture: From Posthuman Back to
Human, This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics and The Family in Chris-
tian Social and Political Thought.

Nick Watson
is Senior Lecturer, Sport, Culture and Religion Co-Director, Centre for Sport,
Spirituality and Religion, University of Gloucestershire, UK.
Introduction
John Swinton and Brian Brock

In 2013 a speech made by 15 year old Davion Navar Henry made global news by
exposing an uncomfortable reality. He stood up in front of a Florida church
and pled to be adopted. He hoped to avoid the plight of so many others
today—spending his entire childhood in foster care. He did so in a decade that
has seen well-known celebrities very publically flying around the world con-
structing rainbow families while governments face protests from their citizens
for “giving babies to foreigners”. Christian adoption charities with decades of
experience have closed rather than place children with gay couples, children
with some hues of skin predictably languish without being adopted, while
governments plea that red tape be reduced to increase low rates of domestic
adoption and Christian churches open ministries to increase adoption rates.1
What seems certain is that the cultural and moral landscape surrounding
contemporary practices of adoption are in great flux. While the last fifty years
have seen especially rapid changes in understandings of the family, sexuality
and reproduction, historically, adoption practices have varied widely over the
centuries. How are Christians to assess and negotiate the vast complexity of
this field? Any theological account of adoption faces a dauntingly broad and
fluid set of social and legal trends that are reshaping modern families and
conceptual disputes about what a family is today.
This volume is the fruit of a five year long conversation between Christian
ethicists and practical theologians from around the globe. In introducing this
conversation we will set out some of the underlying theological arguments
that sustained the dialogue over time. The chapters that follow can be con-
sidered attempts to read contemporary experience and the Christian tradition
in light of the fact that there are precious few depictions in the biblical nar-
ratives of anything like modern adoption practices. Briefly surveying some of
the main lines of the biblical witness will prepare readers for the discussions
in this volume by illustrating why the theme of adoption engages Christians
in theologically far-reaching questions about the relation of divine and hu-
man love, about the relation of metaphorical to literal language, and about
how to understand the role of theology in judging and supporting institutions
designed to uphold justice, especially for the most needy. In the face of great

1 Legacy 685 http://www.houstonsfirst.org/find-help/adoption-foster-orphan-care/.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004352902_002

2 Swinton and Brock

flux in contemporary understandings of adoption scripture does not offer us a

single blueprint for proper practices of human adoption.
Nevertheless, a stability is observable in the biblical metaphors used to de-
scribe God’s caring for humans. We will suggest that it is this metaphorical sta-
bility which offers us entry into a theological account of adoption. We will con-
sider the claim that the primal adoption is God’s huiothesia of Jesus, a divine
act which establishes the status of “adoption” of humans through which every
human being can experience themselves as God’s child. In Christian theology
all discussion of taking care of children, whether biological or not, is grounded
in the gift of being made a child of God. This is the matrix of metaphorical
meaning that allows Christians to negotiate practical and ethical questions
about the practice of adoption today. Because humans have been adopted by
God through Jesus Christ they are freed to love children freely which means
to love them for their own sakes. This is not yet to have an answer to what
sort of adoptive practices Christians should be supporting today, but it is to
indicate how a theological account of adoption can orient supple and con-
textually sensitive engagement with human practices of adoption. But it is on
these premises that the authors of this volume seek to discern afresh what
adoption might look like in our age.

1 A Brief Overview of Adoption in the Ancient World and Christian

Scripture

The English term “adoption” (like the French) is derived from Latin. “Ad optāre”
means “to choose for one’s self,” which explains why one can adopt a policy
as well as a loanword from another language, though in Latin as well as in
English the term has always been strongly associated with the voluntary taking
of children into a relationship with an adult.2 The breadth of English meanings
obscures the fact that the Latin applied strictly to a formal legal procedure in
which the paterfamilias designated an heir.

1.1 Greco-Roman Practices of Adoption

In Greek and Roman societies this legal transaction notarized a choice by the
paterfamilias to bestow rights of succession and property. Greco-Roman prac-
tice presumed that if the paterfamilias refused to hold a newborn child, it was

2 The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd vol. 1, J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner eds., (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 171.
Introduction 3

not accepted into the family and was to be abandoned. A reverse form of this
procedure inducted a non-biological child as a legal heir. The legal ceremony
was typically conducted in the presence of biological parents and with their
consent, and did not assume the complete severing of ties with the adoptee’s
birth family.3 Very early on Christians rejected the right of the paterfamilias
to reject a biological child, and were publically known for liberally taking in
children abandoned by Roman families. They did this without the concern
for legal ties that concerned the Romans. Thus at the height of late-medieval
Christendom the practice of legal adoption had entirely disappeared from the
statute books, and when the word was used, it designated the relation to a
child’s godparents after baptism, not their family or the household that had
become their home (here paralleling the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on the
baptismal relation being more fundamental than the biological relation).4 His-
torical evidence suggests that the fluidity that characterized the adoptive prac-
tices in Christendom as it sifted out what was to be taken from Roman prac-
tices and law, as well as the drift toward the baptismal act as determining core
aspects of adoptive relationships, reflect the configuration of the language of
adoption in the biblical traditions.

1.2 Old Testament Practices of Adoption

The Old Testament sharply diverges from Greco-Roman practice in its total
disinterest in the legal forms and definitions of adoption. No Hebrew term
is plausibly translated with the modern term adoption, and no instances are
depicted of the adoption of individual children in Israel’s canonical narra-
tives. The three examples of adoption often adduced from the Old Testament,
of Moses (Ex. 2:10), Genubath (1 Kings 11:20) and Esther (Est. 2:7) take place
in foreign societies (Egypt and Persia) and indicate various forms of taking a
child as one’s own, rather than indicating any legal procedure indigenous to
Israelite society.5 In Israel parenthood or fatherhood was a biological concept
rooted in the creation narratives, and therefore any care provided to children
by those other than their biological parents would not change the legal sta-
tus of the child in relation to their biological father.6 The recurrence in the

3 The Oxford Classical Dictionary, M. Cary, A. D. Nock, J. D. Dennison, W. D. Ross, J. Wight Duff
and H. H. Scullard eds., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 7.
4 Sarah L. Charlton, The Creation of Families: Christianity and Contemporary Adoption, doctoral
thesis, Durham University, 2009.
5 William E. Brown, “Adoption,” Baker Theological Dictionary of the Bible, Walter A. Elwell, ed.,
(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 11.
6 Leo G. Perdue, Joseph Blenkinsopp, John J. Collins, and Carol Meyers, Families in Ancient
Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), ch. 4.
4 Swinton and Brock

Old Testament of the blessing and command to “be fruitful and multiply” indi-
cates that Israel understood fertility to be one of the prime indicators of divine
pleasure in Israel’s obedience. Within such an understanding of human fertil-
ity, adoption as the need of a faithful people could not arise (cf. Gen. 29-30,
1 Sam. 1-2:11). Nothing in the Old Testament suggests that the Israelites could
conceptualize anything like modern or Greco-Roman accounts of adoption.
The assumption in Israel was that the care of children at risk was the respon-
sibility of the extended family, and where that was not possible, an informal
arrangement most comparable to the modern practice of foster care was the
only possible response of Israel to the plight of the orphan.7 Practices like the
legal duty of levirate marriage (Deut. 25:6) and the concubinage of a wife’s
slave (Gen. 30:3) were not concerned with the reception of individual children
already born, but, as in Roman practice, with securing a legitimate male heir.
In the beginning of Israel’s story God is depicted not as begetting or bear-
ing but as making or forming humanity (Gen. 1:26-27, 2:7), setting the stage
for some humans to be taken into a special relationship with the Creator. This
special relationship is often described in terms that resonate with adoptive re-
lationships. The seminal moment in the paternal claiming of Israel as offspring
appears in the divine rescue of Israel from Egypt, in Moses’ announcement of
God’s words to Pharaoh: “Israel is my firstborn son” (Ex. 4:22). The repeated
stress in the Pentateuch that the first issue of the womb is the Lord’s militates
against reading this formula as a straightforward adoption formula. Rather, as
the prophets stress, Israel is literally the child of Yahweh in being created and
formed by his steadfast love. As the prophet Hosea puts it:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,

and out of Egypt I called my son. …
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.
(Hos. 11:1-4, cf. Is. 1:2, Jer. 3:19-21, Ezek. 16:3)

7 David Bartlett, “Adoption in the Bible,” in Marcia Bunge, ed., The Child in the Bible (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 381-382.
Introduction 5

God’s love is here is depicted as like a parenting relationship with Israel. No

hint of legal adoption is implied from which some right might be asserted
to claim rights as an heir. This may go some way in explaining the seeming
disinterest in setting out legal forms for adoption in Old Testament law while
at the same time indicating why Israel had an enduring interest in the welfare
of orphans: the dominance of the metaphor of divine parenthood placed a
strong but not practically over determined emphasis on human attendance to
the institutions that foster the care of children (cf. Ps. 65:8 Hos. 14:3).
Something closer to the Greco-Roman practice of adoption as the formal
establishment of legal heirship does appear, however, in the Old Testament in
relation to the Davidic kingship. In 2 Sam 7:14 (prominently quoted in Psalm
2:7) the Lord promises David a patrimony that will not be removed using the
language of making David’s children God’s own sons: “I will be a father to him,
and he shall be a son to me.” In this promise (commonly taken to be a royal
enthronement formula) God commits himself to protecting a Davidic inheri-
tance down through the ages. The suggestion seems to be that the parenting
to which God has committed Godself in rescuing Israel from Egypt is to be
upheld through this special divine bond with the Davidic line.

1.3 New Testament Practices of Adoption

In the New Testament this emphasis on the intimacy of divine parenting meets
the Roman world, in which “Adoption was not nearly so much a matter of af-
fection as it was of pragmatic distribution of wealth and power.”8 The Greek
word that is most often translated as adoption (huiothesia) is used five times in
the New Testament, and only by the Apostle Paul. Some of his usages are note-
worthy in their reliance on the Greco-Roman conception of legal adoption
which re-narrate Israel’s conception of the divine parenting of the people of
Israel as a whole and of the Davidic line in particular for first century readers.
These features are particularly clear in Galatians 4:1-7:

My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than
slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain
under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us;
while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the
world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of
a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under
the law, so that we might receive adoption [huiothesia] as children. And

8 Bartlett, “Adoption in the Bible,” 384.

6 Swinton and Brock

because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and
if a child then also an heir, through God.

This reference to the processes of inheritance by minors makes the point that
the condition of humanity is one of slavery, which casts the work of Christ
to be the elevation of the social status of believers by emancipating them
from their slavery to the spirits of the age (literally, the chthonic powers of the
earth). God’s own Son (real, not adopted) has been sent so that humans might
be freed by being given a share in his inheritance. The Spirit of Jesus evokes the
Abba prayer (Mt. 6:9, Lk. 11:2) in believers, the prayer of familiarity and intima-
cy with God, vouchsafing their status as heirs. While this formulation does not
explicitly draw on Old Testament ideas of God’s parental solicitude to all Israel
and the Davidic line in particular, it does extend the Hebrew sensibility that
the adoption of all Israel is not a heritage that can be claimed by legal right,
but is wholly dependent on God’s loyal adoptive-love toward them. It is this
love which Paul suggests is extended through Christ to all the world. For Paul,
then, the primary reference of the language of adoption is Trinitarian; those
who are adopted become one with the true Son through the Spirit, a union
made evident through lives lived in evident freedom from the lords of the age.
His account directs our attention to the form, steadfastness and intimacy of
divine love as the core feature both of God’s adoptive work and the types of
behavior generated in humans by it. Put more sharply, it can only be through
the divine work of the Spirit that God’s love for humans comes to animate
genuine human love toward other humans.
Of the five uses of the term in the Paul’s writings, Romans 8:12-14 offers the
most pregnant description of the contours in practice of this divine work of
claiming human lives for God’s own love of humanity.

Therefore (oun) brothers and sisters we are in debt not to the flesh… (v.12),
for (gar) if you live according to the sinful nature you will die but if you
put to death the misdeeds of the body you will live (v. 13), for (gar) those
who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God, (v. 14) for (gar) you have not
received a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear (pneuma douleias)
but (alla) you have received the spirit of adoption (pneuma huiothesias).9

9 Trevor J. Burke trans., in, Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor (Downer’s
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 137. The next two paragraphs interact with Burke, 137-150.
Introduction 7

The long string of connecting participles sets up a sharp contrast between liv-
ing by the flesh and the redeemed state of living as “sons [or children] of God”.
The contrast is a qualitative one, distinguishing ways of living which tangibly
manifest different spirits. When the “Spirit of adoption” governs human lives
they are not characterized by the slavish and fearful adherence to the patterns
of this world. We propose that Paul’s move here maps quite nicely onto our
earlier suggestion that much of the contemporary discourses surrounding ac-
counts of the family and adoption are trapped in sterile antimonies. There are
spirits of fear afoot in the cultural space that is adoption in the west, whether
of scarcity, loneliness or national decline, spirits which threaten the peace of
children, adults and whole societies. This is why it is central to our inquiry to
try to understand what is entailed in this Pauline antithesis. What is life in the
spirit of adoption?
To receive the Spirit of adoption is a synecdoche for the redeemed life, and
names its inner content and direction. Here form and content are absolute-
ly entwined. A powerful new link emerges with human practices of adoption
which can now be understood as a being caught up into rather than an im-
itation of the divine work. To receive the Spirit of adoption will manifest in
practices that seek to bring in the orphan from the highways and byways, as in
fact they have done from the very beginning of the Christian era.10 Theologi-
cally such practices can be read as entailments of a Trinitarian understanding
of the church’s mission: “Go ye…I will be with you” (Mt. 28:19-20, cf. 25:31-46).
It is thus a sign of the Spirit of adoption when believers cry out at the plight
of the orphan having received God’s heart as their own: “Father of orphans
and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God gives the desolate
a home to live in” (Ps. 68:5-6a). The ending of Romans chapter 8:19-21 suggests
the backdrop to Christian hope when encountering the plight of the orphan:
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of
God…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay
and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Though chil-
dren and parents often experience searing suffering and loneliness because
of the breakup of birth families, the new desires given to those freed by be-
ing taken up into the working of the Spirit of adoption are not designed to
staunch the blood from a primal or personal tragedy, but flow from a divinely
given hope that the children of God will be revealed. In Christ this hope beams
from every human child. The human action of loving an orphan in any form is

10 John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe
from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (London: Penguin, 1988).
8 Swinton and Brock

only secure if it grows from and defers to the loving care which pursues that
child even should the human parents no longer be able or willing to love. The
Spirit of adoption, then, is a Spirit who opens a new time, a time in which
wonders happen, in which the blind are made to see, the lame walk, and most
importantly for us, the orphan is given a stable, loving home. It is this adoptive
Spirit that rules the practical discernment of Christians about appropriate and
inappropriate adoptive practices.
In the course of our studies our working group therefore discovered a thick
theological account of how human parental promising and covenant making
can only be grounded in God’s prior promising, covenant making and bestowal
of an inheritance. But we did not do so without facing a core methodological
question: How do human cultural or legal forms relate to what looks to us
like a “metaphorical” description of divine action? It is clear that for Paul the
adoption that is determinative is a divine rather than a human action, leaving
us with a question about how divine adoption relates to or illumines human
practices. Is Paul’s knowledge of Roman adoption practices an interpretative
grid he projects into his beliefs about divine action (as historical critical schol-
arship often assumes)? Or does he draw on his contemporary experience of
Roman adoption because he believes it can at least partially communicate
something he has experienced about divine love?
These questions provoke exegetical dilemmas with direct relevance for con-
temporary concerns. To what types of human activity do we properly attach
the term “adoption”? The apostle Paul has made entering this question easi-
er by explicitly using a term that might be translated adoption, but has made
our task much more difficult in using it exclusively of divine action. But per-
haps other examples of adoption are depicted in the New Testament? Here we
must face the methodological problem squarely: any other examples of adop-
tion we might adduce in the New Testament will betray our presuppositions
about what constitutes the core content of the concept.
Take for instance Joseph’s decision to embrace Mary’s nascent child as his
own. What Matthew clearly tells us is that Joseph accepted the child by naming
him, but only at the behest of an angel of the Lord (Mt. 1:24-25). Bartlett’s
reading is typical of many contemporary theologies of adoption in moving
quickly to call this adoption in a quasi-modern sense:

Just as in Exodus 2:10 Pharaoh’s daughter claims the child as her own
by giving him his name, Moses, here Joseph claims the child as his own
family by naming him Jesus. If Matthew wants the reader to recognize
the parallel between the two adoption stories, it will not be the only time
where Matthew uses Moses as a type for Jesus (see Matt. 2:16; 5:1). It is
Introduction 9

this adoption that makes possible the claim that Jesus is not only son of
God but also (still) son of David, Messiah, through his adoptive father.
In this sense Joseph follows the pattern both of Old Testament and of
first-century Greco-Roman adoption: he claims Jesus for his own and by
claiming him makes him part of his patrilineal family—son of Joseph,
son of David.11

But as we have seen, Israel had no conception of or practice of the adop-

tion of individual children, and so Moses is, on Israel’s terms, only dubiously
and anachronistically referred to as an adoptee.12 Nor is it clear how Joseph’s
naming of an infant can be said to conform to the Greco-Roman practice of
adopting adult children with the permission of the birth parents. All that re-
mains of Bartlett’s analysis is the observation that Joseph’s obedience lies in
his naming Jesus and so entering into a relationship of parental faithfulness to
him, an obedience that, within the scope of the overarching biblical narrative,
facilitates the completion of God’s promise to David to care for David’s heirs.
Matthew emphasizes the role of divine activity in provoking Joseph’s identi-
fication with Jesus, but has no interest in any visit to the magistrate to “make
it official”. It seems that, once again, we are not made privy by scripture to
an example of human adoption in the sense that we think of it today, but are
rather shown yet another example of God instigating human behaviors toward
children that advance God’s interest in adopting all humans as God’s own chil-
dren. The most we can say about Joseph is that God’s love toward all humanity
has the effect of commanding this human being to embark on a path of com-
mitted love for an infant, in the face of personal embarrassment and potential
mockery.
Understood Christianly, then, human adoptive practices are explorative
ways of seeking out and awaiting the divine love for every child that expresses
the Christian freedom for love. Having known the power of this Spirit, believ-
ers await the power of this Spirit in the lives of every child. To baptize a child is
to lay claim to this promise and to formally declare one’s self, as a parent and
as a member of the church, the first of many in the ecclesia who will point this
child to the pre-existing reality of their containment in grace, and the promise
which attaches to them that they were created to be holy and blameless.

11 Bartlett, “Adoption in the Bible,” 387.

12 In addition to Moses’ being taken into Pharaoh’s family being set in an Egyptian legal
context, the Pentateuch as a whole could never be construed as depicting the taking
of any Israelite into a gentile household to be raised in a pagan religion and cultural
tradition as anything other than a foreboding event that only God could rescue.
10 Swinton and Brock

The common contemporary conception of a child being legally adopted

into a nuclear family primarily to serve the child’s need for belonging and love
and the parent’s desire for offspring or the experience of childrearing stands
at quite a distance both from the Greco-Roman world and that of scripture.
Any theological account of adoption will need to articulate the relationship
between divine action toward humans and human adoptive behavior toward
other humans. And it will need to do so in the face of the complex dynamics
of contemporary understandings of adoption. It is this task which the authors
of this volume undertake.

2 Chapter Summaries

The book falls into two main sections. In the first section we concentrate
on theological ethics. Brian Brock begins by providing us with a deep and
thoughtful exploration of the power of naming. Working outwards from the
Genesis account of Adam’s naming the animals, he presents a powerful case
for perceiving naming as a moment within created time wherein humans take
responsibility for other creatures. Adoption is deeply tied in with naming and
as such is a primal human task which is paradigmatic in the articulation of hu-
man understanding of their place before God and God’s creatures. Jana Ben-
nett develops another perspective a perspective on adoption that also urges us
to move beyond viewing adoption as a legal concept, towards an understand-
ing within which Christians perceive adoption in terms of Christian practice.
Baptism provides the bridge between the culture and the family. In baptism we
come to realise that relationships with God are the product of Divine rather
than human will. This theological dynamic opens up adoption as a Christian
practice that is deeply tied in with the trinity. Brent Waters asks us to reflect on
the ethics of belonging, highlighting some profound problems with adoption
as it is carried out within what he describes as: “a culture of procreative lib-
erty.” Whilst affirming the relevance and appropriateness of procreation and
adoption, Waters warns us that the reasons why we pursue our parental calling
or vocation and how we go about doing that is a matter of theological and pub-
lic concern. Hans Ulrich, in line with the thoughts of Henning Theißen, urges
us to perceive families as an expression and reflection of the social nature of
humanity. Families are places of belonging where our inherent relationality
is nurtured and revealed. It is here that we learn what it means not only to
be with others, but to belong to one another. Ulrich and Theißen in different
ways begins to open up space for perceiving children as gifts that are given to
families and indeed to the church as part of God’s redemptive mission in, to
Introduction 11

and for the world. This giftedness is not based on biology, but on calling and
grace.
Children, Hans Ulrich indicates, are not primarily defined by their biology.
Such a thin understanding of children belies the rich depth of families and
the vocational significance of parenting. Rather, as Brock makes clear, chil-
dren are the bearers of the next generation; a generation which will encounter
fresh ways of living out God’s redemptive story; a story that tells us that the
adopting God is with us and for us in all things and at all times. Karin Ul-
rich’s chapter functions as a bridge between ethics and practical theology by
reflecting on the vital question of origins and asking what the significance of
where one comes from is for understanding and effectively responding to the
experience of adoption. Working with the critical tension between biological
and adoptive families, she picks up on Jesus words: “Who are my mother and
brothers?” Effectively answering this question in practice is the key to success-
ful and faithful adoption. Taken together these essays help us reflect in depth
on the question: what and how do children and parents encounter God and one
another within the purview of God’s coming Kingdom?
Section two moves into the area of Practical Theology and begins to pick up
and reflect on some vital aspects of what it means to practice adoption. John
Swinton reflects autobiographically on the process of adoption and makes a
case for parenting to be seen as a vocation that is not based on biology but on
calling. Bill McAlpine and Dale Andrews begin to open up the practical issues
by reflecting on the difficulties of drawing diverse children into already estab-
lished family units. Both, in different ways, wrestle with the deep tension be-
tween offering a stable home that truly is the child’s home, whilst at the same
time, in line with Karin Ulrich’s thoughts, help the child to feel connected
with its origins and roots. Being with children “in the now,” means recognizing
where they have come from. The question as to how an adopted child can find
and sustain its identity and develop a shared narrative with past and present
is complicated. These complexities are compounded, as both McAlpine and
Sarah Shea point out, by the clash of cultures between the new family and
the old life. This clash, as Shea points out, is particularly sharp when it comes
to inter-country adoptions. Overcoming the inevitable cultural dissonance re-
quires time, patience and awareness.
In their chapter Ruard Ganzervoort and Marco Derks offer some important
theological reflections on the issue of homosexuality and adoption, an issue
that is both topical, controversial and vital. They present an empathetic crit-
ical theological framework that enables us to see the ethical, theological and
practical dimensions of the issue. Kirsten Oh offers a rich and powerful the-
ology of adoption. Through reflection on her own experience of barrenness,
12 Swinton and Brock

lament, grief and expectation around issues of adoptive parents she presents
profound insight into some of the key issues that surround being a prospec-
tive adopting parent. The power of her story is made even more poignant by
the fact that since writing this essay she has become the proud mother of an
adopted child! sadness has turned int dancing in her essay. Heather Walton
offers a meaningful and moving reflection on adoption in the context of infer-
tility. By opening her own story to embrace the issues presented in the volume,
Walton helps ground the book in a very personal experience and in so doing,
presses all of us to remember that theology includes bodies. In the concluding
essay Paul Shrier shares his personal story of fostering and adopting children
whose needs differ from some other children. As he opens up about the com-
plexities of his experience, so we are drawn into a world that is sometimes
difficult, but always marked by an undying desire to love. In many ways Paul’s
story embodies the love and grace that sits at the heart of practice of adopting
children.
Taken together the essays presented in this book offer a rich and deep prac-
tical theological and ethical reflection on the experience of adoption. It is our
hope that the spread and depth of the essays presented in this volume will
act as stimulus and a catalyst for an ongoing conversation around what we
consider to be a vital area of practical theology and ethical reflection.

3 Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Amy Joy Erickson one of our PhD students for her
invaluable assistance with the referees for the book. You not only saved us
time, you increased the quality of the text. We are grateful to you.
 Part 1
Adoption: A Theological Account

∵
 Chapter 1

On Language, Children and God: Naming,

Dominion and Domination

Brian Brock

In this essay I would like to engage several apparently unrelated themes tak-
en up by the contributors of this volume.1 Brent Waters, followed by Henning
Theißen, has proposed that we understand families as an expression of the
social nature of humanity, a space where we belong with rather than to other
people. In families naked human life is socialized into a cultural unit, and in a
Christian home, this is done within an understanding of the child as a divine
gift. Hans Ulrich advances this line of discussion by theologically situating the
human refusal to leave a child as a “bare” “unenculturated” biological entity as
a welcoming of the next human generation through whom God’s story with
humanity will continue. In framing the discussion this way, Ulrich exposes a
fundamental question: How does the Christian tradition understand children
and parents to encounter one another within and upheld by a divine promise?
The question is asked in full awareness of the legal headaches, financial cost,
heartache and difficulty adoption often entails, all of which press Christians
sharply to articulate the reasons for their hope that good will come from en-
tering adoptive relations.
Thiesßen, Bill McAlpine, Dale Andrews and Paul Shrier wrestle concrete-
ly with the poignant practical difficulties that often accompany the work of
adoption, especially the complexities of enculturating children into adoptive
families in a manner that offers them a secure home and family life but with-
out cutting them off from those with whom they share a biological or cultural
inheritance. In the course of these investigations they uncover another fun-
damental question: How should adoptive parents and children discover and
articulate a shared identity and narrative? As McAlpine and Sarah Shea point
out, these questions are exacerbated the greater the apparent distance be-
tween the culture of origin and the new home culture of an adoptive child, a
tension that is most evident in the context of transnational adoptions.

1 I would also like to thank Brian Williams for his theologically astute comments on an earlier
draft of this paper, and his frankness about his experiences as an adoptive parent negotiating
questions of naming and culture-keeping.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004352902_003

16 Brock

Jesus unsettles many contemporary certainties around these issues with his
open ended question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” Karin Ulrich ex-
plores the complex tensions between the biological and the cultural family
this question provokes, as well as the tensions between both and the commu-
nity of faith which belongs together in belonging to Jesus Christ. The church
has in the past negotiated this latter tension between the cultures of families
and the community of the church through the rite of baptism, Jana Bennett
observes, in which relationships with God and others are embraced not as cre-
ated by human willing, but as recognized and received. Bennett only notes in
passing the relationship of baptism to the giving of Christian names, which
has been a very close one in Christendom. One of the reasons for this linkage
of baptism and naming is discussed by McAlpine, who draws on the discovery
of modern social sciences that in the activity of naming many traditions are
negotiating questions of receipt and cultural transition in an especially trans-
parent manner. What McAlpine frames in the idiom of the social scientist, that
naming is a core aspect of identity formation in many cultures through which
children are linked with one or more cultures, I would like to explore within a
more densely Christian theological rationality. Because this rationality is at its
core biblical, we will discover that it is not closed off from other traditions, but
is distinctive enough to offer us illuminating avenues into many of the issues
and quandaries faced by those engaged in adoptive practices today.
We normally think of naming as the action of applying words to things.
A child, however, is not a thing, but a person, who has come to us through the
actions of other persons. The existence of this creature is indelibly embedded
in deep webs of personal relations, including to her Creator. I want to suggest
that if a child is received as most fundamentally coming from the hand of
the Creator, this suggests that every child can be received as a divine address.
This is to allow us fruitfully to consider the naming of a child to be an act of
hearing and responding to the Creator and Lord of history, a verbal articulation
of awareness of and appreciation for the work of the Creator and Life-giver
in a very concrete context. My interest in this paper is not to spell out the
ethical and practical implications of this insight, but to situate reflection in
a range of real life situations within a theological grammar that can foster a
deeper and more theological engagement by Christians wrestling with a range
of dilemmas in the arena of adoptive practice.

1 Two Dilemmas of Naming

The brief mention of the naming of the animals in Genesis two has received
relatively little theological attention in the modern period. Chapter 2:19-20
On Language, Children and God 17

reads, “And the Lord God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and
each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would
call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.”2
Two features of this passage are noteworthy. The first is the lack of differ-
entiation of the origin of humans and the animals—God fashions both from
the soil. Any differences between them cannot therefore be material, or on-
tological, but only the way that God treats them and sets them in specific
relations to one another. In the Hebrew the breath given to every living thing
is also not distinguishable by species, though the impartation of this breath to
the human is depicted in an especially intimate way in the creation narrative
(2:7).
What does distinguish the human from the living creatures of the land and
air is God’s configuration of this relation by bringing each animal to the hu-
man “to see what he would call it”. This formulation assumes that humans
were created with the capacity to speak and to name. But the power of speech
or communication is presumed of many other creatures in the Old Testament
and it is therefore improbable that the author(s) of Genesis is trying to sug-
gest that humans are distinctive among the creatures due to their powers of
speech. This leaves us with only one unambiguous distinction: between the
creatures that God gathers and parades, and the creature before whom this pa-
rade is held. In putting the human in the position to name the other creatures
a power differential is established between the one who names, and those who
receive names. This will be our first point of departure.
The second is indicated by the puzzling reason given for setting up this pow-
er relation: “to see what he would call it”. In addition to the hint of their being
limits to divine foreknowledge, this wording also seems to allow humans a role
in the creative process: “whatever the human creature called a living creature,
that was its name.” Given the interminable arguments had today amongst bi-
ologists about animal taxonomy, it seems clear that we have lost this skill, and
forgotten these names, which scripture is here suggesting are the original and
true names. The psalmists go so far as to depict God as stressing that God alone
now knows the names of every creature as a way of reminding Israel of their
fallen state and their need for repentance (Ps. 147:4, cf. Ps. 50: 9, 11).
Are traditional readings correct to take this passage as a one-off act of
prophetic symbolism in the pre-lapsarian world3 or a depiction of human

2 Robert Alter trans., from The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2004), 22.
3 Augustine, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis,” in On Genesis, Edmund Hill trans. and intro.
(New York: New City Press, 2002), IX.20-22, 387-388.
18 Brock

powers of perception and control over the animals lost in the fall?4 The giv-
ing and receiving of names continues throughout the entire biblical witness,
and in contexts which suggest that even if name-giving functions different-
ly after the fall, it remains in the post-lapsarian world a theological weighty
moment in human life. We still give names today, even if that activity faces
complications that surely were not present in the garden. Two sets of contem-
porary moral problematics offer striking parallels to the exegetical questions
we have just noted, and suggest we may still have something to learn from this
passage today.

2 Naming, Taxonomy and Domination

A first problematic becomes evident if we examine the common assumption

that the first human naming indicated kinds of animals—the thing that hops
with a pouch is a kangaroo, the one with a long neck a giraffe, and so on.
(For the sake of convenience I will be referring to this first human as Adam,
though at this point the human is still non-gendered, and so properly speak-
ing not the male known as Adam.) David Clough has recently pointed out that
this type of activity is still very much ongoing, though we now find ourselves
trapped in the sheer subjectivity of the exercise. “Once we have recognized
that there is more than one way of ordering the differences between organ-
isms, we encounter a plethora of possible candidates. … To embark on [listing]
possible ways of ordering creatures in a unilinear way is already to appreciate
the oddness of believing that any single principle for ordering different crea-
tures could be thought of as definitive.”5 In fact, as we repeatedly observe in
political squabbles over the giving of commemorative street and place names,
if human naming is understood as simply a matter of social convention, it can-
not but degenerate into power struggles over whose name will be applied in a
given instance.6
This conceptual quandary is shadowed by a moral dilemma. How is this
initial naming of the animals different than the conquistadores replacing the

4 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1-5, Luther’s Works vol. 1 Jaroslav Pelikan ed. (St.
Louis: Concordia, 1958), 120.
5 David Clough, On Animals: Volume 1, Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 61-62.
6 Reuben s. Rose-Redwood, “From Number to Name: Symbolic Capital, Places of Memory, and
the Politics of Street Renaming in New York City,” Social & Cultural Geography, 9:4, 2008,
431-452; Flavia Hodges, “Language Planning and Place naming in Australia,” Current Issues in
Language Planning, 8:3, 2007, 383-403.
On Language, Children and God 19

local place names of conquered lands with the names of the new sovereign, so
displaying or representing the power of dominion that seeks to determine all
references to places and particular creatures? Is Adam showing his power over
the animals by naming them, or, as Luther suggests, finding a name that is con-
sonant with the features of the creature being recognized by naming? While
Luther is clear that the naming itself was an act of perception receptive to the
divine revelation of each animal, he then goes on to assert that, “from this en-
lightenment there also followed, of course, the rule over all the animals…since
they were named in accordance with Adam’s will.”7
Sune Borkfelt is worried, with good reason, about this voluntaristic turn in
Luther’s reading, leading her to conclude that such a naming of animals, “is
thus an assertion of rule over them, an act whereby Man makes the animals,
their actions and their use, subjects to his power, appointed to him by God.
A process very similar indeed to Columbus’ naming of islands God has en-
abled him to discover, and indicative of the same power relations justified by
reference to the divine will.”8 In her view an act of naming is always a signi-
fier of inequality and dominance, a claim corroborated by animal names that
uncritically perpetuate the human tendency to project our views of the world,
such as when we call something that is not a “river horse” a hippopotamus,
or an animal that is clearly not a pig a “guinea pig”.9 But this tyranny is by no
means confined to animals, warns Borkfeldt:

For us as humans, the vast majority of other animals seem to have fit
nicely into generic categories, and our use of these categories may say
quite a lot about the ways in which we regard other species. Bundling to-
gether a number of individuals in order to create hierarchies and assert
power relations is a practice that has of course been applied to humans
time and again throughout history, whether through reference to race
and ethnicity, gender or other shared features of those being categorized
and put at the lower end of a hierarchy. Through all ages, those who have
physically resembled us the most have been those most willingly admit-
ted into our communities and those, who we have wished to keep beyond
the moral pale, have been categorized generically by reference to the fea-
tures perceived to mark their difference from us. With categorizations

7 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1-5, Luther’s Works vol. 1 Jaroslav Pelikan ed. (St.
Louis: Concordia, 1958), 119.
8 Sune Borkfelt, “What’s in a Name?—Consequences of Naming Non-Human Animals,” Ani-
mals, vol. 1, 2011, 118.
9 Borkfelt, “What’s in a Name?”, 119.
20 Brock

of non-human animals, however, we might argue the practice has been

taken to its extreme.10

Given these criticisms of the problems associated with generic naming, it

seems worthwhile considering the thought that Adam was not so much la-
belling generic features of kinds of animals, but was giving particular names,
as we often do with pets. Borkfeldt points out that it is no accident that in
an age of factory farming, in which naming an animal forms attachments that
raise questions about its treatment in life, the giving of particular names to
animals seems to cross a moral divide between animals for whom we accept
some personal responsibility and with whom our own stories intertwine and
those who we dare not extend this sympathy, destined as they are for a fac-
tory slaughter. In previous eras, when animals worked alongside humans in
many vocations, this divide was more easily crossed, because to train a horse
to plough or a dog to herd sheep demands they be spoken to with a name to
which they can respond.11
The basic assumption that Adam was naming kinds, ironically, thus ends up
inverting the surface meaning of the biblical text by insisting that what Adam
is doing in naming is discovering himself and his powers by way of distinguish-
ing the differences of the human from the animal and exploring the control of
the human over the animal realm. Thinkers as divergent as Aquinas,12 Calvin,13
Herder,14 John Paul II15 and Leon Kass16 have agreed that Adam’s naming is
best understood as an exercise in human self -discovery, arguing that without
this exercise Adam would not have been able to appreciate the woman in all
her creaturely distinctiveness. On this account, in the guise of asking the hu-
man to name the animals, God is in fact asking the human to attend to the
generic aspects of animals as a means of human self -discovery. Clough sug-
gests that from the beginning all the way up to contemporary thinkers like

10 Borkfelt, “What’s in a Name?”, 120.

11 Borkfelt, “What’s in a Name?”, 121.
12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Fathers of the English Dominican Province trans.
(London: Burns and Oates, 1922),Prima Pars, q. 96 a. 1 r. 3.
13 John Calvin, Genesis, Alister McGrath and J. I. Packer eds. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 38.
14 Johann Gottfried von Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, vol. 2, James Marsh trans.
(Burlington: Edward Smith, 1833, reprinted by Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2000), 15.
15 John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, Michael Wald-
stein trans. and intro., (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), “Man in Search of His
Essence,” 148-150.
16 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, (New York: Free Press, 2003),
100.
On Language, Children and God 21

Barth and Kelsey, Christian theologians have been trapped in an anthropocen-

tric account of adamic naming by this tendency conceive naming as related
to formal categories. He suggests, therefore, that the antidote lies in the op-
posite direction; “Adam’s naming of the animals brought before him suggests
his attention to their particularity rather than concern to order them.”17 But in
saying this Clough never answers his own question: How are we to understand
such a particularized adamic naming?

3 Renaming, Tradition and Church

Here a second cluster of contemporary questions about naming becomes rel-

evant, which, once again is prefigured in the scriptural witness and the theo-
logical tradition. When Adam first meets the woman, he does not name her,
but verbally expresses delight at her distinctive being and presence and “says
to (or proclaims) her” (yiqqārē’), woman (’iššāh), a variant of his own self-
designation (’īš).18 Only later, after the fall, does he “call her” (same word)
a proper name “Eve” (ḥawwāh) (3:20) which, tellingly in light of the discus-
sions above, is to rename her by reference to a generic characteristic of wom-
en in general—their capacities as life-givers. We must leave aside for now the
question of the relation of the sexes implied in Adam’s naming of Eve in ei-
ther instance. My interest is the later renaming of “the woman” as “Eve” by
Adam.
Renaming has a long history in scripture and Christianity, from the divine
giving of new names to Abraham (Gen. 17:5) Sarah (Gen. 17:15) and Israel (Gen.
35:10) as a symbol of their being claimed in a special way for God’s purposes,
through Jesus’ renaming of the disciples (Jn. 1:42) to the giving of new names
upon being inducted into monastic orders, a practice still kept publically vis-
ible in the re-naming of popes on their investiture. Traditionally Christian re-
naming has been tied to a sacramental moment, especially the baptism of
a child. In Christendom baptism has been understood as not only a bath in
water, but as also being remade by immersion “in the name of the Lord Je-
sus” (Acts 8:16, 19:5).19 This immersion had implications for the naming of the

17 Clough, On Animals, 63-64.

18 This is the word used when God renames Abraham (Gen. 2:23), and Isaac (Gen. 21:12) and
Jacob (Gen. 36:10).
19 Lars Hartman, ‘Into the Name of the Lord Jesus’: Baptism in the Early Church (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1997), ch. 3.
22 Brock

one baptised. “It could be argued,” writes historian Will Coster, “that the ser-
vice of baptism in early modern England was not…so much a religious rite as
a naming ceremony. Not only did it induct the infant into the spiritual and
temporal communities, but also, paradoxically it gave them their individu-
al identity, carried in their forename.”20 This was so because the practice in
medieval England simply reproduced traditional practice in Christendom, as
inscribed in the baptismal liturgy. A child was named after a godparent in the
baptismal rite as recalled in the confirmation ceremony, which included the
lines:

What is your name?

N or M.
Who gave you this name?
My Godfather and Godmother in my baptism.21

Nor was this practice modified by the Reformers, as we are reminded by an ac-
rimonious post-reformation dispute. The dispute in question arose in Calvin’s
Geneva during the years 1546-1554. Calvin had strongly asserted that children’s
names ought to reflect the reality that children are a gift from God. The min-
isters in Geneva believed, reasonably, that this warranted their pastoral over-
sight of parental naming, and therefore took to refusing to recognize some
names at baptism—names considered superstitious, or names associated with
local shrines, the godhead or feast days—names that were by no means rare as
children were usually given names of their godparents, and many popular local
names ran afoul of these rules. There were cross-cultural sensitivities at stake
here, given the presence of a large refugee community, as well as church-state
issues, since the magistrates eventually had to wade into the dispute. “Chil-
dren thus became a public battleground in disputes over ecclesiastical power,
parental rights and obligations, and “ethnic” resentments between Genevans
and French,” comments Barbara Pitkin. “For some parents, their right to name
their children as they wished conflicted with their duty to present them for
baptism and raise them in the reformed faith. In such cases the ministers and,
ultimately, the magistrates felt the need to step in and resolve the conflict, even
if this meant sacrificing familial to Christian identity.”22 Within the context of

20 Will Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2002), 167.
21 Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship, 172.
22 Barbara Pitkin, “‘The Heritage of the Lord’: Children in the Theology of John Calvin,” in
Marcia Bunge ed., The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 178.
On Language, Children and God 23

modern Protestantism this renaming dispute seems not only outdated, but
even a little perverse, smacking as it does of authoritarian ecclesial or political
governance. But it does reflect the movement of Christendom away from the
Roman account of adoption as primarily a manner of establishing a legal heir
and toward an understanding of the baptismal moment as the place where the
true identity of the child is both revealed and definitively solidified in social
space.
A secular version of this debate has recently re-emerged in the context
of transnational adoption. Since the 1990’s transnational adoption rates have
soared, with the United States the greatest recipient country in trans-national
adoptions.23 The top sending nations during this period have been China, Rus-
sia and Guatemala.24 Social scientific research tells us that most of these chil-
dren are given names different than the ones given by their birthparents, with
the percentages rising the more the adopted children are perceived to “look
different” than their adoptive parents.25 In some countries, such as Canada,
Australia and New Zealand there has been a growing consensus that children
adopted out of indigenous people groups by parents in the majority popu-
lation should retain their given names in the interest of keeping children
in contact with their cultures of origin.26 After surveying discussions taking
place on websites devoted to the swapping of information about transnation-
al adoption, one commentator noted the strong influence of media portray-
als on trends in adoptive practice in North America, which, coupled with a
few high profile celebrities building rainbow families through trans-national
adoption, has raised the profile of trans-national adoption as a legitimate so-
cial choice.27 It has done so, however, at the cost of fanning attitudes and

The case is discussed in more detail in William G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation
of the Genevan Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), ch. 5, “The
Company of Pastors: Ministers or Masters?”, 144-153.
23 US international adoption rates rose dramatically since 1990 when a little over 7,000 chil-
dren were adopted. “However, by 1998 the number more than doubled, and it tripled by
2003. Today [2007] there are over 22,000 international adoptions per year.” M. Engel, N.K.
Phillips and F.A. Dellacava, “International Adoption: A Sociological Account of the US
Experience,” The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 27:5, 2007, 257-270.
24 See Sarah Shea’s article in this volume, and Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism in Transnational
Adoption”, 529.
25 See Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism in Transnational Adoption”, 530; and Cardell K. Jacobson,
Lelia Nielsen and Andrea Hardeman, “Family Trends in Transracial Adoption in the Unit-
ed States,” Adoption Quarterly 15:2, 2012, 73-87.
26 For a discussion of this premise, see Bill McAlpine’s chapter in this volume.
27 Engel, et. al. “International Adoption,” 257.
24 Brock

practices that are better described as tourism than genuine bilateral cultural
engagement, leading to the child’s sending culture being “appropriated with-
out being embraced”.28 This appropriative relation to children from other cul-
tures is wrapped up with a widespread sense that such children are not only
being rescued from orphan status, but also out of a primitive or broken home
culture.
The resulting irony is this, concludes Raka Shome, “our hatred of the con-
ditions that have produced the native child always interrupts our capacity to
seriously love the child on an equal cultural level, for to love the child with dig-
nity and equality is to love its nation and culture with dignity. Thus, romantic
internationalism mobilizes our love in the west as conditions of attachment
to underprivileged nations but it simultaneously reifies our underlying disgust
for these nations.”29 If such children are to know their culture of origin at all, a
cultural identity must be artificially staged by adoptive parents living in a very
different culture who will be forced to pick and choose which cultural repre-
sentations will be passed on to their children. The risk is that this will produce
thin representations of the sending culture that are likely to alienate children
in the long term. Pamela Anne Quiroz relates the following experience to illus-
trate the problem.

A striking example of this occurred in an international adoption work-

shop in which the facilitator provided a moving rendition of her adoptive
family’s successful negotiation of culture. The [white, middle class, North
American] mother and facilitator offered examples of what she deemed
culture keeping, such as learning about the history of India and enrolling
her daughter in Indian folk dance classes. After this discussion the fa-
cilitator’s daughter (in her late 20’s) participated on a panel with three
other adult adoptees and completely contradicted her adoptive mother’s
narrative. The adopted daughter assessed her experiences as lacking re-
al cultural understanding and her disposition as generally unhappy. She
also contradicted her mother’s positive version of the cultural activities
in which she was placed and described them as difficult and isolating.
Far from feeling accepted, the daughter claimed that the other Indian
children in her folk dance class regarded her as white, and therefore, she

28 Pamela Anne Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism in Transnational Adoption: “Staged Authenticity”

and Its Implications for Adopted Children,” Journal of Family Issues, 33.4, 2012, 532.
29 Raka Shome, “‘Global Motherhood’: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity,”
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28:5 2011, 388-406, quotation from p. 402.
On Language, Children and God 25

was socially ostracized from the group. Struck by these contrasting narra-
tives, I observed the mother while her daughter spoke but witnessed no
surprise regarding the discrepancies in their narratives and little obvious
concern.30

Quiroz identifies renaming as a prime indicator of cross-cultural adoption

practiced as cultural tourism in distinction from adoption practiced as a
deeper culture-keeping approach in which children’s original names are kept
and adoptive parents’ own self-identification is reoriented.31 This observation
throws uncomfortable light on the findings of social scientists that in US adop-
tions, less than one third of adoptive children and one fifth of Chinese chil-
dren were called by their names of origin.32 At the same time, the reasons par-
ents gave for this renaming are also theologically interesting—the new names
are often intended to honour family members and thus to embed children
in adoptive families. The quandary is that the means of doing so distances
the child from their biological family and culture. “Deculturalization refers to
the historic process of how dominant groups literally stripped away the cul-
ture of dominated groups in the United States through enslavement, displace-
ment, and abolishment of language. … Culture avoidance is the silence sur-
rounding the child’s culture, race, and nation of origin; the anglicised name
removes the last connection to that culture.”33 Renaming, then, is an arena in
which parents very publically display their hopes and fears, the boundaries
and affinities that often unconsciously shape their decisions about which re-
lationships are worth forming and maintaining, and which should be left be-
hind.
Once again, it seems, naming appears at a crucial node in the processes
of human creatures forming material and moral bonds with other creatures
within traditioned human societies. Naming seems still to be a special point
of convergence in which humans express the configurations of separation
and binding that they perceive or hope for between different creatures. Per-
haps counter-intuitively for a Christian theologian, I want to suggest that the
thinker who offers us the most fertile theological entry point into the whole
constellation of questions I have raised happens to have been a modern quasi-
atheist Jew, Walter Benjamin.

30 Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism,” 548.

31 Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism,” 536.
32 Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism,” 542.
33 Quiroz, “Cultural Tourism,” 543.
26 Brock

4 Benjamin on Adamic Naming

Benjamin’s reflections on naming develop a strand of early modern puzzling

about the question of the origin of language,34 discussions which provide the
backdrop of Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man” (1916).35 I will be reading this essay as offering Christians a way to
understand ourselves embedded in, and the recipient of, divine, kenotic self-
communication that is tangible enough to orient our living.
In engaging this earlier discussion about the origin of language, Benjamin
finds himself driven back to fundamental questions about speaking, naming
and God. He advances our investigation in starting where Clough ended—
by repudiating the search for “transcendent essences” of creatures which can
be categorized in the activity of naming. In his view the most basic form of
language does not name generic features, but identifies particular features of
objects and so constitutes them as humanly perceptible entities. I am read-
ing Benjamin’s account of language as a representative of what Ian Hacking
calls “dynamic nominalism”, an understanding of language in which the real
properties of the created realm both shape human naming, but become per-
ceptible in conjunction with human observation and the giving of names.36
Whereas Clough stands within the language of universal truth to show us the
problems inherent in understanding our relation to creatures with the cate-
gories of generic universals, Benjamin begins with a very Hebrew premise, as
Hanna Arendt has pointed out.

For Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking,

the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light. …Benjamin re-

34 Cf. Oswald Bayer, A Contemporary in Dissent: Johann Georg Hamann as a Radical Enlight-
ener, Roy Harrisville and Mark Mattes trans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), ch. 5; Isaiah
Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism,
Henry Hardy ed. (London: John Murray, 1993), 72-87; Michael N. Forester, After Herder:
Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
The parallel discussion in the English speaking world comes slightly later and is outside
of Benjamin’s perview. Cf. Roy Harris ed., The Origin of Language (Bristol, Thoemmes
Press, 1996).
35 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Walter Ben-
jamin: Selected Writings vol. 1, 1913-1926, Marcus bullock and Michael Jennings eds., (Cam-
bridge MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 62-74.
36 Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Thomas C. Heller, David E. Wellbery and Morton
Sosna ed., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western
Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222-236.
On Language, Children and God 27

garded truth as an exclusively acoustical phenomenon: “Not Plato but

Adam,” who gave things their names, was to him the “father of philos-
ophy.” Hence tradition was the form in which these name-giving words
were transmitted; it too was an essentially acoustical phenomenon.37

Though a secular Jew, Benjamin did not give up the idea that traditions are
carried by words: the act of naming puts words to things in a manner that can
form a tradition if they are handed on and explained. Names, therefore, are
communicable and ground human communication, making them the condi-
tion of human communion.38 Before outlining Benjamin’s reading of Adam’s
naming, let me now at least indicate why I take his position to be important for
Christians today. Benjamin offers us the idea that God asks Adam to name and
waits to “see what he will name them” because God is entrusting to a grate-
ful humanity the task of putting appropriate words to the created world—
appropriate in recognizing and handing on to their children and neighbors
their recognition of the divine working. In Adam’s naming of the animals we
are offered both an account of the beginning of tradition, but also a vision
of what naming is, theologically understood: naming is a verbal recognition of
the material and historical works of the Lord which are simultaneously praised
in real time and handed on to future generation in both the activity of nam-
ing and the preservation of names. This is, as Alexander Schmemann puts it,
a way of engaging with creatures that allows their nature as a divine gift to
determine our understanding of them (and notice here that it is their essence
as a divine gift, not as an alienated substance that is determinative).

Now in the Bible a name…reveals the very essence of a thing, or rather its
essence as a gift… To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value
God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and
function within the cosmos created by God. To name a thing, in other
words, is to bless God for it and in it.39

Benjamin presses the question of what this theological insight reveals about
language itself. He begins his discussion of the origin of language with the flat

37 Hanna Arendt, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940,” in Walter Benjamin, Illumina-

tions, Harry Zorn trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 49.
38 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 66.
39 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 15.
28 Brock

assertion that all creaturely entities are “linguistic”—are possessed of intrinsi-

cally communicative properties. Whether or not anyone “hears” the languages
things utter, “this cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total absence
of language in anything.”40 When humans speak language, this speaking does
not invent words and grammar, but is always proceeded by and responsive to
what Benjamin calls the “linguistic being of all things.”41 Each creature speaks
in its own language, and, as the Genesis account suggests, a significant aspect
of human language is expressed in naming. “It is therefore the linguistic being
of man to name things.”42
Who then is the addressee of human speech-as-naming? To hold that the
only addressee of human naming is other humans, is to affirm the pragmatic
utility of naming activity but at the cost of giving up any reference that would
allow names to be judged more or less appropriate to their object. This sug-
gests, says Benjamin, that it is finally to God that humanity as the “naming
creature” speaks.43 God wants to, “see what he would name them” because in
the self-expression that is Adam’s naming of specific creatures, creation ad-
dresses itself (creature to creature) while at the same time addressing God.44
Thus, suggests Benjamin, a human act of naming can finally be adjudged as a
human expression of what a specific human has heard, in this concrete crea-
ture, from God. This leads Benjamin further, to suggest that the true origin of
human language is the divine breath of life. Human speech and naming are
the returning of God’s gift of life/breath (the Hebrew nephesh entailing both)
as sound given a new density. A crucial passage reads:

In the word, creation took place, and God’s linguistic being is the word.
All human language is only the reflection of the word in name. The name
is no closer to the word than knowledge is to creation. The infinity of all
human language always remains limited and analytic in nature, in com-
parison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine
word.45

To give proper names then is to approach the “frontier between finite and in-
finite language” because “of all beings, man is the only one who names his

40 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 62.

41 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 63.
42 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 64. Italics in original.
43 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 65.
44 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 65.
45 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 68.
On Language, Children and God 29

own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name.”46 Naming then,
of children or any other creature, is a communing of the human word with
the creative and anterior word of God which gives every being its existence
and form. Because God said “Let there be…” human speech is put in the posi-
tion of needing to articulate a response when engaging with every creature.47
In naming we both recognize creatures as distinct, and bind them into the
traditions in which we live and have learned to think and speak. Though Ben-
jamin does not often mention his sources, one he does mention by name, J.G.
Hamann, is clear that the proper orientation of human language is found in
echoing back to God recognition not only of God’s creative work, but also of
the divine redemptive work in historical occurrence.48 This understanding of

46 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 69. [This raises the question of the Fall directly, be-
cause God did name Israel, Is. 43:1.]
47 It becomes apparent at this point that Benjamin’s account develops a Lutheran under-
standing of the relation of divine creation and speaking. In a characteristic passage
Luther writes, “He [God] wills to speak, then, namely, when we, almost despairing, de-
cide that He will keep silence forever. But what or in what manner will He speak? Here
we must observe the Hebrew way of expression. For when Scripture says that God speaks,
it understands a word related to a real thing or action [verbum reale], not just a sound,
as ours is. For God does not have a mouth or a tongue, since He is a Spirit, though scrip-
ture speaks of the mouth and tongue of God: “He spoke, and it came to be” (Ps. 33:9).
And when He speaks, the mountains tremble, kingdoms are scattered, then indeed the
whole earth is moved. This is a language different from ours. When the sun rises, when
the sun sets, God speaks. When the fruits grown in size, when human beings are born,
God speaks. Accordingly the words of God are not empty air, but things very great and
wonderful, which we see with our eyes and feel with our hands. For when, according to
Moses (Gen. 1), the Lord said “Let there be a sun, let there be a moon, let the earth bring
forth trees,” etc., as soon as He said it, it was done. No one heard this voice, but we see the
works and the things themselves before our eyes, and we touch them with our hands.”
Martin Luther, “Psalm 2,”in Luther’s Works, Selected Psalms I, Vol. 12 Jaroslav Pelikan ed.
(St. Louis, Concordia, 1955), 32.
48 “Did scripture not seek out this most despicable of people, one of the smallest, and its
worst, even its most sinful actions, in order to clothe God’s providence and wisdom and
to reveal him in this lowliness of images? Nature and history are therefore the two great
commentaries on the divine Word, and this Word is the only key to unlock a knowledge
of both. What does the difference between natural and revealed knowledge mean? If I
understand it aright, the difference is no more than that between the eye of a man who
sees a picture without understanding the least thing about painting or drawing or the
story that is represented, and the eye of a painter; or between natural hearing and a
musical ear.” In Ronald Gregor Smith, J. G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence, With
Selections From his Writings, (London: Collins, 1960), 166.
Another random document with
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the same level. The sap as it boils passes from one compartment to
another becoming more dense and sweeter until it reaches the
syruping off pan, where it is drawn off in the form of syrup. The right
density can be determined by a thermometer or the skilled operator
can tell by the way the syrup “leather aprons” from the edge of the
dipper. If the thermometer is used a temperature of 219° F. will give a
syrup that will weigh eleven pounds to the gallon net. It must be
remembered, however, that the thermometers are graduated at the
sea level, and as the altitude increases a lower temperature will give
the same result on account of the reduced air pressure. An
allowance of 1° for every 500 feet rise has been found to be about
right; thus at an altitude of 1,000 feet a boiling temperature of 217°F.
will give the 11 pounds syrup. Syrup is not however usually brought
to the required density in the evaporating pan but is drawn off a little
less than 11 pounds net, and brought to a uniform standard in larger
quantities than would be possible in the evaporating pan. The fire
under the boiling sap should be quick and hot, as the sooner it is
reduced to syrup after it runs from the tree the better the product. As
the sap begins to boil a scum of bubbles rises to the top, which must
be constantly removed with a skimmer, and the man who tends the
fires, skims the sap and draws off the syrup has a busy job.
When the sap has been reduced to syrup having a density of
about 11 pounds to the gallon, the niter or malate of lime, sometimes
called sugar sand, which is held in solution in the sap and which
crystalizes or precipitates at this stage of evaporation, can be
separated from the syrup. This is accomplished in two or more ways;
some strain it through felt while hot and leave the syrup free of niter;
others let stand in buckets or tanks until cold; then turn or draw off
the clear amber syrup leaving the malate of lime at the bottom.
Nothing has as yet been said about sugaring off, but this is a
process by itself and comes after we get the syrup. Anyone who has
maple syrup can sugar off, as the saying is, or convert the syrup to
sugar by boiling it.
In the sugar camp the sugaring off is usually done in a deep pan
on a separate arch, as the boiling sugar has a tendency to boil over
unless constantly watched. The size of the pan depends on the form
of product to be made. If the sugar is to be put in tin pails or wood
tubs it can be handled in lots of 100 pounds or more; this would
require a pan 12 inches high, 2 feet wide and 4 feet long. For
shipping long distances or to hot climates the sugar should be
cooked down to a density of 240° to 245°F. Great care is necessary
however, not to burn or scorch the sugar when cooked to so high a
temperature. For ordinary purposes if the sugar is to be used soon
after it is made a temperature of 235° to 238° is high enough.
When making small cakes it is better to have two or more smaller
pans and have the batches of sugar done at different intervals as the
color and grain of the cake sugar depend largely on the amount of
stirring it gets while hot and the sooner it is stirred after it is done the
better. When the sugar gets so thick that it will barely pour it is run
into moulds where it soon hardens and is ready to be wrapped in
waxed paper, packed in boxes and sent to market.
There is another form of sugar, and no sugar party is complete
without it, that is sugar on snow or ice. Boil the syrup down a little
past 230°, cool it and put on snow with the spoon. When cooled, the
waxed sugar eaten with an occasional plain doughnut and now and
then a pickle is a pleasure long to be remembered and a banquet fit
for a King.
To be sure and get the pure goods, order direct from the producer
or from the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Market, Randolph, Vt.,
where maple goods can be procured at any season of the year.
This market is the outgrowth of and closely connected with the
Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association.
The addresses of producers will be found at the back part of this
booklet.
 THE SUGARING OFF.
Will Carleton in Everywhere.

You’d hardly ever think it sir,

That this big city now astir
With every rattling noisy thing
With twentieth century thought to bring,
With roofs a-shuttin’ out the sky,
An’ trolley-wagons skippin’ by,
An’ wires a’ dodgin’ here and there,
For folks to whisper through the air.
An’ factories at the daylight’s gleam
A-blowin’ loud their horns o’ steam,
You’d hardly ever think, I say,
A-reasonin’ round the usual way,
That here, instead o’ things like these,
Was once a grove of maple trees,
An’ under yon electric lamp
We used to run a sugar camp?

One star-lit night—it seems, you know,

About a year or two ago,
But when you come to count it square
It’s fifty of ’em, I declare—
We gathered on my father’s lands,
’Bout where that market wagon stands;
Us younger folks each other found
From wooded regions all around,
An’ then with genuine laugh and smile,
We sugared off in county style!

Since then, these memory hallowed spots

Are fenced up into city lots;
The farm is raisin’ spires and domes,
Where once the maples had their homes;
Big feats are given, rich and rare,
Of which, I own, I have had my share,
But nothin’ ever tasted quite
So good, as on that star-lit night!

An’ when the sap was boilin’ there

Till we could taste it in the air,
We wood-land boys with hearts awhirl,
Each took a cupful to his girl,
An’ cuddled down with her an’ ate,
With just the white snow for a plate.
You see that first-class candy-shop
Up yonder where them school girls stop?
They’ve gathered sweet-meats there that’s worth
As much as any now on earth;
But they’ve got nothin’ that’s in sight
Of what we ate that winter’s night.

An’ up on Woodland Avenue,

A young, old lady, kind an’ true,
With han’some tresses gray enough,
But still on earth, an’ “up to snuff,”
Will tell you, when we go that way,
(If she hasn’t changed her mind today)
That, though the years have brought her nigh
All earthly good that cash can buy,
She’d give them all for that one night,
When, from the sap fire’s fadin’ light,
We wandered homeward side by side,
An’ kindled flames that never died,
An’ felt confession’s sudden charm,
An’ slowly walkin’ arm-in-arm,
With no one there to laugh or scoff,
Just had a private sugarin’-off.
 MAPLE GROVE IN SOUTHEASTERN VERMONT. ASCUTNEY
MOUNTAIN IN THE DISTANCE.

VERMONT MAPLE SYRUP AND THE

ENVIRONMENT OF MANUFACTURE.
E. Wellman Barnard, Open Ridge, Springfield, Vt.

W HEN Vermonters congregate at some special social function

when responses are expected concerning the state and its
products, the speakers may be relied on to advance at least the
claim of excellence for the men it sends to other states and countries
to become noted factors in the land of their adoption; for its gracious
women; for its pure bred Morgan horses and its far famed maple
sweets. These claims are in a great measure valid and the inborn
pride that vouches for them is pardonable, for of the first it is only
necessary to consult municipal, state and national Blue Books to find
corroborative evidence; the second are known the world around in
art and song and story. The supple Morgan, elastic to the tread of his
native hills, with arching neck and prancing feet, an ear for martial
music, and an intelligence too often of a higher degree than his
master, has enlivened the trotting and road stock of the country. It is
of the last product and the environment of its manufacture we will
treat. Vermont has become as justly celebrated for its fine flavored
maple products, as for the silky fibre of its merino wool. For the
climate and soil contribute to that end as much as do the soils and
climate of Cuba and Sumatra to the delicate aroma of smoking
tobacco, and it is safe to say that nowhere in the known world do
these exact conditions occur to such a great degree as in the section
which comprises upper New England and some portions of New
York and Canada. There is probably no crop dependent upon the
elements, so sensitive to and actuated by meteorological conditions
as this, from the day the bud of the maple bursts forth a tiny leaf in
May or June to the day of sap flowing in the March or April following.
The summer’s heat is quite as essential as the winter cold, for the
former makes the starchy growth to the tree that the latter converts
into sugar, and while the sugar maker is blistering in his hay field in
mid-summer or putting up the fires to keep out 30° below zero
temperature when winter shuts him in, he knows the right forces are
at work in nature’s laboratory to produce his sugar crop, and is so
patient in his discontent. The sugar season may commence early in
March or it may be delayed until April, all again “depends on the
weather.” The old time saying “When ye ancient moon of April shall
glow so shall ye maple sap in abundance flow,” often holds good, but
when it sometimes happens there are two last quarters of a moon in
April the sugar maker can take his choice as to which he will close
the harvest.
 THE CAMP AFTER A SUGAR SNOW.
As the sun advances northward from its long southern sojourn and
the north and south winds lock and interlock for supremacy, the frost
and fury line gradually recedes and the more direct actinic rays of
the sun thaws out the hard frozen timber, the crows hold their annual
matrimonial pow-wow for pairing; blue birds come and a snow crust
often forms at night hard enough to hold a man if not a team. It is
then the sugar maker begins to think of his annual effort.
All up-to-date plants have substantial buildings, running water and
heaters for washing; use galvanized iron tanks for gathering and
storage; galvanized iron or tin buckets and sap spouts and also one
of the more modern evaporators. This often represents a cash outlay
quite sufficient to handle some business in town and is in use only
two or three weeks in the year, the rest of the time being idle unless
the owner includes the making of cider apple jellies in the fall and
provides himself with a copper evaporator for the purpose.
 If the sugar maker has been wise he has erected his sugar house
along side a bank or declivity at least 30 feet high and easy of
approach so that he can handle all the sap by gravity from the
gathering tank downward to the straining tank and on to the holding
tanks and then into the evaporator; each being well below the other.
He uses an iron arch and stack which he keeps well coated with
asphalt varnish to prevent rust and in case the draft of his arch is not
good uses a Fenn rotary chimney top on his stack. Of course he has
an ample supply of wood fuel that has been provided a year or more
in advance under an adjoining shed so that it may be very dry for a
quick fire is one of the main factors of rapid evaporation so
necessary for good product, and another quite as important is that
the evaporator room be built for it, with a space of about 5 feet all
around it, and the walls sealed close to make a hot air draft upward.
He does not need to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by
providing sound rock maple wood. Any timber will do if dry; old dry
pine stumps are the ne plus ultra and hemlock boughs, a good
second.
 AT THE CLOSE OF THE SEASON; BUCKETS DRYING
IN THE SUN.
The competent sugar maker has thoroughly cleansed all his
apparatus when he put it up at the end of the season before, but
many things will need a new scald. The buckets however, and
spouts are usually ready for business if properly stored after a little
dusting at short notice and this is most important and often saves the
first run of sap, and here let me add, the competent sugar maker
must be as alert and use as much care and forethought as the
competent hay maker, who cures hay rather than “handles it”.
Afterthought does not count at sugaring except for the next season,
but then again scatter brains has poor memory. Our city cousin
whom we gladly greet in our homes in the “good old summer time”
has lost some of the joys of the round of the country season if he has
not been on hand on the morning of some fine spicy day when
through the brilliant mirror-like atmosphere Mount Washington looks
like the Jungfrau, standing aloft in the grand circle of the green and
granite mountains of New England so reminiscent of Switzerland,
and robin red breast is back to his old home sending forth cheery
notes of greeting to go along with the sugar maker and his big load
of buckets to the sugar bush, over a road that has been shoveled or
plowed or broken through the deep snows on a thawy day ready for
the event and in the early morn, while the snow crust will hold up and
with plenty of helpers the buckets, perhaps a thousand or more, are
hung. The men who tap the trees with the wide swing bit stock and
7-16 bit, but have the experience and adeptness to quickly select
new growth timber in the old tapped tree and also to secure an
upright resting place for the bucket. The spout men must never
chaffer the tree into the inner bark and must not injure the spout
when driving it securely in. The bucket should be properly placed
and kept so at all future gatherings of sap. There is some discussion
pro and con as to the convenience and necessity of covers, but they
save lots of trouble in stormy weather and save much good sap that
otherwise would be wasted. The coming bucket will be a large one,
holding more then 20 quarts, perfectly covered, well flared for ice
expansion and compression, concaved on one side to fit the tree and
having in the bottom a flat, sap tight, easily worked faucet that will
discharge quickly all the sap into the gathering pails without
disturbing the bucket. Inventors take notice. Our city friend may take
a hand at gathering and note the necessity of getting the sap from
tree to evaporator quickly and holding it in as low temperature as
possible to prevent acids inherent to the tree circulation getting in
adverse chemical action and detrimenting the product. It is a good
plan to have good, clean chunks of ice on hand to keep in storage
tanks although at times it will not be required because of the low
temperature prevailing. The ideal sugar weather is 25° at night and
55° during the day with damp northerly winds.
Now as the sap has commenced running our guest will soon
realize that the whole proposition and output depends strictly on the
weather conditions. A shift of the wind; a change in temperature or
humidity and especially a change of barometer pressure, which is
the actual force behind a rapid flow of sap, may turn a big sap day
into a complete fiasco and perhaps the often reoccurrence, a whole
season, and thus the competent sugar maker with his $30 per month
and board “help” and $4.00 per day teams may be quite out of
pocket at the end of the season for no cause of his own, even
though he obtain $1.50 per gallon for his canned syrup; but then he
may charge all this up in his profit and loss account along with his
products of milk and cream for the city contractor often backing up
the latter with a mortgage on his farm the grain, help and imposed
conditions account that the mill may go around by day and year.

MAPLE GROVE IN EARLY SPRING.

Has it ever occurred to the city consumer that the modern dairy
building and apparatus so glibly demanded will cost from $3,000 to
$5,000 according to locality, for a herd of 25 cows often more than
the whole farm does sell for at auction after such improvement has
been added. And this holds good as to the sugar output; $1,000
goes a short way for a 2,500 tree establishment and it is the many
full buckets that count against short runs, rather than a smaller
number with less initial expense. Moreover it should be borne in
mind by the town consumer that the farm price demanded has never
been exorbitant for any product and that for at least a quarter of a
century has ruled so dangerously low that no other business or
calling that did not have its habitation and crude food products
included in the output would have stood up to it for a season; but
then, there is the middleman who is often a needless or exaggerated
adjunct that in many lines has become an avaricious parasite to
legitimate business—but that is another story and our city friends
can help us solve that after they have canvassed the situation by
actual contact, and with benefit to themselves.
PRESENT STATUS OF THE INDUSTRY.
By Dr. Harvey W. Wiley.
(From the Government Bulletin.)

Development of Present Conditions.

M APLE sugar was made by the early settlers as an article of

food, the West Indian cane sugar being costly and difficult to
transport inland. The commonest kind of “muscovado,” however, was
preferred to maple sugar, if it could be obtained. With the increased
supply of cane sugar there is little doubt that maple sugar would
have almost ceased to be a commodity on the market but for its
peculiar flavor, which, while objectionable for general purposes,
created a special demand. Thus, while the cheaper and unflavored
cane product has almost displaced maple sugar as an article of food,
the demand for maple syrup and sugar as luxuries and flavoring
materials not only keeps the industry alive, but calls for a continually
increasing supply.
It would naturally be supposed that this growth in demand would
have been followed by a corresponding increase in production.
Such, however, is not the case; while the demand for maple sugar
and syrup is continually increasing, the production has been more or
less stationary for twenty years. The explanation lies in the fact that,
at the very lowest estimate, seven-eighths of the product sold today
is a spurious article, which is only in part maple sugar, or is
manufactured entirely from foreign materials.
When maple sugar began to come into general demand, the
market fell naturally into the hands of the wholesale dealers. The
farmers were unorganized, and, as a rule, out of touch with the
consumers. Consequently the sugar, made in the early spring, when
the farmer was most in need of ready money, was generally either
sold to the country store at a low price, or exchanged for cane sugar,
pound for pound, irrespective of general market conditions. It was
then bought again by the “mixers” and used to flavor a body of
glucose or cane sugar six or ten times as great, making a product
which was marketed as “pure maple sugar.” The mixers preferred to
buy a dark, inferior sugar, because it would go further in the mixture.
If the season was bad they bought less, but at almost the same
price, and increased the proportion of the adulterant. Thus a
shortage in the maple sugar crop has no effect whatever on the
general supply. It is also true that while the trade in maple sugar has
been steadily growing, the production from the trees has remained
stationary. The mixer controls the situation, with the effect of lowering
the profits of the farmer, preventing a compensatory increase in price
when the crop is short, and retarding progress in the industry by the
demand for a low-grade tub sugar.
 MAPLE SUGAR CAMP IN ONE OF THE
LARGEST GROVES IN NORTHERN VERMONT.
(Continuation of this picture on opposite page.)
But there has always been a certain amount of trade in pure maple
sugar and syrup. A part of the city and town population comes from
the country, where they have known the genuine article, and they
have generally been able to supply their wants by dealing directly
with the producers. The progressive and well-to-do sugar maker has
also worked in this field. Of course there are farmers and others
who, having pride and capacity, do their utmost to produce the best
goods and market them in the most advantageous manner. Such
sugar makers are unwilling to sell their high-grade goods to the
mixers at a low price, but make every effort to reach a steady market
of regular customers.
In the effort to make such a market more general, several maple
sugar makers’ associations have come into existence. That of
Vermont is the most notable. The annual meetings of this society
have done much to stimulate improved methods, as well as to build
up a legitimate trade. The association has established a central
market, has adopted a registered trade-mark, and guarantees
absolute purity. Its trade, through advertising and other business
methods, has reached good proportions. But there is only a very
small part of the business, even at the present time, which is not in
the hands of the mixers.

MAPLE SUGAR CAMP IN ONE OF THE

LARGEST GROVES IN NORTHERN VERMONT.
The following quotations are from the testimony of Mr. Madden
before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce,
Fifty-seventh Congress, pages 85 and following:
Mr. Madden. I would like to speak to you a moment in regard to
maple syrup. That is a subject that will undoubtedly interest you all.
We are in a very peculiar position in regard to maple syrup. We do
not believe it is right that a syrup composed of maple syrup made
from either the sap of the maple tree or from maple sugar and mixed
with glucose should be sold as a maple syrup; but we do believe that
a maple syrup made from syrup of the maple sugar and mixed with
cane-sugar syrup or refined-sugar syrup, I will say—because beet
and cane sugar are the same after they have been through
boneblack—we do believe that should be sold for maple syrup, and I
will tell you why. In the first place, the amount of sap of maple syrup
—that is, syrup that is made from boiling the sap of the maple tree
without converting it into sugar—is so limited that it would not, in my
judgment, supply more than 5 percent of the demand for maple
syrup in the United States.
Now, when maple sap is boiled into sugar—and I want to say
before I go further that the reason that the amount of sap syrup is so
limited is because it is hard to keep it from fermentation, and the
season is so short in which the sap runs that it is difficult to
manufacture, to boil enough in the camps to supply the demand;
consequently a large proportion of the sap in the States where maple
sugar is made is boiled into maple sugar. Now, we have found by
experience—not by chemical analysis, but by experience—that the
maple sugar made from the sap of the maple tree in Ohio is not so
strong as the maple sugar made from the sap of the maple tree in
Vermont, and that the maple sugar made from the sap of the maple
tree in Vermont is not so strong in flavor as that which is made in
Canada, in Quebec Province, because it seems the colder the
climate, the stronger in flavor the maple sap is.
Now, we buy these various sugars and reduce them to a liquor to
make maple syrup, and I will give you my word, gentlemen, if we
take a Canadian sugar, which is the highest priced maple sugar we
have, it being worth at the present time twelve cents a pound, while
Vermont is worth only eight cents a pound—I give you my word that
if we make a liquor by melting that Canadian maple sugar, without
the addition of sugar to reduce the strength of the flavor, it is so
strong you could not use it.
Mr. Coombs. What do you mean by strong?
 Mr. Madden. Strong in flavor.
Mr. Coombs. You mean it is positive?
Mr. Madden. The flavor is so positive; yes, sir.
Mr. Coombs. And it is sweet?
Mr. Madden. Sweet, yes; but if you put it on a hot cake you would
say right away, “Take it away; I won’t have such stuff,” and you would
ordinarily say that it was glucose. You would be wrong, but that is
what you would say.
Now the Vermont sugar is not so strong, and it does not require so
much cane sugar to reduce that to a flavor comparing with the
natural maple syrup obtained from the sap itself; and I tell you that
we can take maple sugar and reduce it, blending it with cane sugar
—and by that I mean take ordinary cut-loaf sugar, for instance, and
melt it—and we can take this syrup that is made by melting the
maple sugar and blend it with the white syrup, and we can produce a
maple syrup that is in flavor strong enough and yet delicate enough
to satisfy the appetite, and that, in my judgment, is better than the
sap syrup made from the maple tree for a great majority of the
people.
As an illustration, although we get $11.50 per dozen gallons for a
sap maple syrup that is boiled from the sap of the maple tree and the
character of the maple syrup that I have just described, about 95
percent of our business is on the syrup that is made from the maple
sugar and the cane sugar rather than on the syrup made from the
sap itself. Now, if we have to take this maple syrup and brand it as
cane sugar, or have any such restrictions, we can not sell it. Now,
what are we going to do? We do not believe in frauds any more than
you do. We think just as much of our reputation as you do of yours;
but we do not want to be held responsible for conditions that we
have not built up.
 INTERIOR OF MODERN EQUIPPED MAPLE SUGAR CAMP.
Mr. Coombs. It seems to me your whole argument has illustrated
that everybody who buys these things knows he is not buying the
pure article.
Mr. Richardson. It is either that or you are deceiving them, one or
the other.
Mr. Madden. Well, I will answer another phase of that question.
Now, it is commonly assumed, I think, that these blends, mixtures,
substitutes, and what some of our theoretical gentlemen call
commercial frauds, are done for the purpose of palming off on the
people something that is cheap or inferior at a high price. Right there
is where the mistake is made. The profits on that class of goods are
less to us than on the higher class and more expensive goods,
because competition forces these lower-class commodities down to
such an extent that they pay us less profit than any other.