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Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor is unavailable, but you can change that!

The relationship between God and his people is understood in various ways by the biblical writers, and it is arguably the apostle Paul who uses the richest vocabulary. Unique to Paul’s writings is the term huiothesia, the process or act of being “adopted as son(s).” It occurs five times in three of his letters, where it functions as a key theological metaphor. Trevor Burke argues that huiothesia...

During my study of adoption, which began when I was teaching an exegesis class on Romans in a theological seminary in West Africa, I was struck by two main points: first, throughout the history of the church, adoption has (at times) been misunderstood; and second, popular and scholarly interests in this expression have been too narrowly focused. Regarding the former, adoption has been misinterpreted by systematicians and ‘has … been more often in the dark
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