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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...

We should pay attention to Leon Morris’s measured observation (1988: 315–316) when he states: Before we assume that it was used much like our ‘Papa’ or ‘Daddy’, we should reflect that the head of a family was an august figure in first-century society (the Roman paterfamilias still had the right to put members of his household to death, even if the right was used rarely; cf. Gen. 38:24). Apart from leaving abba untranslated (which may be the best solution), perhaps ‘dearest father’ (Witherington &
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