Thursday, May 2, 2019

Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williams, "Is Everyone a Child of God?"


Is Everyone a Child of God?

Although both St. Paul and St. John speak of the fact that Christians have become children of God as an extraordinary grace, it is common to hear people refer to every human being as a child of God. What does Scripture teach?

To begin with, Genesis presents Adam, who represents humanity as a whole in God’s image and likeness, as God’s son (see Gen 1:27; 5:1-3), and the Gospel of Luke confirms this perspective in its genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:38). It is therefore legitimate, biblically speaking, to speak of all human beings as God’s children.

Scripture also speaks in a particular way about the people of Israel as God’s son (Exod 4:22-23; Hosea 11:1) and about the Israelites as “sons and daughters” (Deut 32:19; Isa 43:6).

God promises a special relationship of sonship to the kings who descend from David: “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sam 7:14). Although this promise, famously expressed in Ps 2:6-9, applied in some measure to all the Davidic kings, it found its complete and ultimate fulfillment in Jesus, the Messiah.

Jesus revealed that his own relationship to God as Son was something altogether new and of a different order from any other sonship. On the one hand, he was the human son of God by being the son of David, by embodying Israel in himself (Hosea 11:1), and by being the Son of Man (Hebrew ben adam)—that is, Adam’s preeminent descendant. On the other hand, Christ was the preexistent divine Son, who was the Father from all eternity (Matt 11:27; John 1:1-14; 3:12; 5:19-20; 6:38; 10:30; 14:9-11; 16:28; Phil 2:5-11; Col 1:13-16; Heb 1:2).

Jesus’ coming into the world made possible a new kind of relationship with God that comes by divine power, through faith in Jesus, rather than by ordinary human generation (John 1:12-13). While John speaks of this new divine sonship as being born of or begotten by God (1 John 2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 4, 18), Paul uses the analogy of adoption to describe it (Rom 6:15; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5) but indicates that it entails far more than a change of legal status, since God has sent “the spirit of his Son into our hearts” (Gal 4:6; see also Rom 8:15).

Nonetheless, the New Testament points to an even more wonderful future relationship with God as his sons and daughters. Paul speaks of an “adoption” that we await, “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23). For John that future intimacy with God goes beyond the marvelous current condition of being God’s children in whom his seed (Greek sperma; RSV, “nature”) is present (1 John 3:9). He says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

To sum up, while every human being is a child of God, created in his image and likeness, and Israel is God’s son through God’s covenant with the patriarchs, baptized Christians have been adopted by God and made his children in a far deeper way. We have received in our hearts the Spirit of God’s only begotten Son, who makes possible an extraordinary intimacy with the Father (to know him as “Abba,” Gal 4:6) and with Christ himself (to become “one spirit with him,” 1 Cor 6:17). An even greater intimacy with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit awaits us when Christ returns (1 Cor 15:28; Eph 2:7). (Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williams, Galatians [Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2019], 142-43)