This
appeal to family relationships raises one difficult question. It has often been
asked whether the New Testament teaches that God is the Father of all men and
that all begin, as it were, with the status of children within the divine
family: or whether it teaches that all begin as strangers and foreigners in
relation to the divine fatherland and can only gain a new standing through God’s
creative act and their own willed response. At the risk of seeming illogical I
am bound to affirm not only that both conceptions are to be found in the New
Testament but that each is valid within its own framework of reference. Even in
the Hebrew social structure made familiar to us by the Old Testament the practice
of ‘adoption’ was allowed tough in point of fact few instances are to be found.
But the very circumstances of the Gentile mission in early Christianity made it
necessary to employ this kind of imagery if the already existing body of
doctrine and devotion relating to the Divine Fatherhood and Jesus’ new
revelation of the nature of sonship was to become meaningful. In differing
contexts there are differing emphases. But the basic relationship of father to
son is common to all.
So
far as the New Testament records are concerned the first body of imagery is
derived from the unshakable conviction that God had called and chosen Abraham
to be the father of God’s family on earth, a family through which all the
peoples of the earth would receive blessing. With this conviction there existed
innumerable questionings about who, at any precise period, constituted the true
children of Abraham. All who were circumcised? All who kept the law? All who
were of pure physical descent? All who abjured idolatry in any shape or form?
All show shared Abraham’s faith? The possibilities were almost limitless. Yet
in Jewish minds the conviction held fast that the family of God existed in the
world. It might only constitute a minority or a remnant but still its marks
could be recognized. It was an organism continuous in its life from the past:
it was God’s flock: it was God’s vineyard: it was God’s family.
Within
such a framework of thought and imagination it was natural to conceive God’s
new and climactic initiative in terms of seeking out the lost sheep of the
house of Israel, of cleansing and restoring the life of the vineyard, of
gathering the children as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, of
bringing back the prodigal to his true inheritance. One writer insists that the
Saviour who came into the world had to concern himself with the descendants of
Abraham (Hebrews 2:16). He had to share their flesh and blood, he had to be
made like them in every respect so that he might act on their behalf in the
things pertaining to their true life and destiny in God. Considerable attention
is paid to the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament writings: he
is a Son of David, he is Son of Abraham, he is of the tribe of Judah, he is a
true Israelite—all of these titles indicating that He could rightly claim to be
the brother of those He had come to save, that so far as flesh and blood were
concerned He shared the lot of the family of God and was in every way qualified
both to be the bearer of the fresh initiative from the Divine side and to act
on behalf of the maimed and disordered family on the human side. (F. W.
Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement [London: James Nisbet
& Co. Ltd., 1967, 1968], 221-22)
