Adoptionism

I was not always a Christian. In fact, I wasn’t baptized until I was 40 years old. Befitting someone whose family on his mother’s side could trace their lineage to the Pilgrims, a group who thought Calvin was too Catholic, my father was not a fan of infant baptism. On the other hand, Pappy, his paternal Grandfather, had emigrated from England and inherited from him that Anglican dislike of a firm position. The result of which was that I was to ‘make my own choice,’ which took a long, long time.

Now I don’t know what I can attribute the change in me to, exactly. Was I already being led by the Spirit, leading me to baptism? Was it the commitment to praying the Daily Offices as my Bishop promoted in the Inquirer’s Class before I was baptized? Was it partaking of the Eucharist the following week after my confirmation?

I don’t know, but I do know that I was a fundamentally different being from the one who had spent 40 years hiding from God.

The heresy of adoptionism, sometimes styled by theologians unbothered by brevity as “dynamic Monarchianism” posits that in Jesus’s baptism a change was wrought in Him in an even more profound way. The heresy holds that, up until that time, Jesus was simply a man. Righteous, to be sure, but still only human. Jesus, the man, did not preexist his earthly birth. Instead, at His baptism, He was ‘adopted’ by God, and made divine.

In this denial of Jesus as eternally begotten, Adoptionism, along with Sabellianism, represents the major forms of Monarchianism, heresies which seek to maintain the absolute oneness of God. But like Sabellianism, which we explored last time, some problems arise from such a theory. The early Church saw that such a theory would mean Jesus possessed two persons because he was both the natural-born son of Mary and also an adopted son, because sonship is a attribute of the person. 

But while such theological reasoning is important, the real problem with adoptionism is that it requires one to discount scripture itself. Forget about all the stuff in Luke’s gospel before Jesus’s baptism by John, forget about the annunciation, and most definitely sweep the virgin birth under the rug. In fact, adoptionism is often very closely allied with those who would deny the virgin birth of Jesus. 

This should be a lesson for us all to refrain from picking and choosing which bits of scripture fit into our preferences and which do not. Adoptionism requires one to ignore the opening chapters of Matthew, Luke, and John and it requires gymnastics to get around the words of Jesus Himself. But while such acts are damaging to scripture, the ultimate harm comes to the person themselves. When someone sets themselves as the arbiter of scripture, and that is what the Adoptionist is really doing, deciding what ‘fits’ their view and what does not, it gives place to man’s own corrupted nature to take the easy path, the one that most conforms to one’s own comfort zone. Sure, you can cut out the supernatural parts from the New Testament like Thomas Jefferson did, or you can try to burn out the passages against adultery like in the short story ‘The Bible Repairman,’ but all you wind up doing is, instead of being an image of God, you make God an image of yourself.