Prophecy and Adoption

Outpourings of the Spirit: Prophecy and Adoption

In the Christian scriptures, two prominent figures for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit are prophecy and adoption. In Romans 8 and Ephesians 1, those who receive the Holy Spirit receive the “spirit of adoption,” thereby becoming children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ. Adoption brings “inclusion in Christ,” sharing in both his sufferings and the joys of the resurrection. In Acts 2, Peter interprets the outpouring of God’s spirit by reciting Joel 2:28-32. He identifies Pentecost with the last days, when “your sons and daughters will prophesy” as God’s spirit is poured out on all flesh. Despite a seeming contrast, this essay explores the possibility that these two figures for spiritual inspiration are more closely related than they would initially appear to be. Namely, it hypothesizes that the experience of adoption is a condition for the capacity for prophecy. Scriptural narratives provide warrant for this intuition, as adoption frequently precedes prophetic action. In the Hebrew Bible, Moses, Samuel, and Esther are all adopted, and the prophet Muhammad’s adoption figures centrally in his story. Yet why adoption would be a condition for prophecy warrants further reflection. 

To consider this, this essay considers two scriptural models for relating prophecy and adoption. The first is what I would term the absorptive model. In Romans and Ephesians, adoption appears to absorb adoptees into a new identity. As children of God and heirs of Christ, those adopted are recognized and renewed in light of Christ’s identity. Incorporation into divinity, reconstituting family bonds, is one of the ways that Christian and Jewish scriptures strive to repair identity in the aftermath of trauma. Divine adoption offers repair and renewal to those suffering from the brokenness of the world, and saving them from potential orphanhood. For those who are, as the African-American spiritual says, like a motherless child, God’s spirit restores a sense of identity. In being a father (or mother) to the orphan, God takes on a prophetic stance, attending to those living on the margins, displaced by violence and domination within our world. God’s action, here, offers a paradigm for prophetic human action, as epitomized by Job’s being a “father to the poor” (Job 29:16). Beyond scripture, this image serves to ground Christian practices of adoption as a form of prophetic solidarity and justice. For many Christians, it expresses how adoption can be a counter-cultural movement that resists the social privileging of the biological and nuclear family, extends care and responsibility across ethnic and national boundaries, and responds to injustice and cruelty through its emulation of divine, agapic affection.

Perhaps because of its appeal, the absorptive model bears a number of dangers. Despite its appeals to solidarity and care for the poor, it imagines prophecy as taking place from a position of power. Conceiving adoption as an absorptive re-creation of identity can appear to legitimate dissolutions of prior identity, such as cultural tradition and connection, or family displacement. The more benign forms may overlook adoptees’ experiences of racism and exclusion; in the worst cases, such adoptive practices can be weapons of war. Moreover, this model seems to ignore how adoption often inflicts a renewed form of trauma and displacement, even when and where it strives to be reparative. These dangers are well-document within the histories of international adoptions, and adoptive practices toward indigenous populations as well. Moreover, the “orphans” are rarely simply orphans. The scriptural and theological category can obscure adoptees’ identity as much as it discloses. It erases the biological parents from the story, when many adoptees are not in fact parentless. It denies the complex and socially situated reasons which parents may have in placing children for adoption, and precludes adoptees’ pursuit of information or reconnection with their biological families. Despite their prophetic aspirations, absorptive conceptions of adoption are often structured in ways that serve the aims of adoptive parents and their societal hierarchies more than children themselves.

On the other hand, Joel and Acts offer an alternative model for how prophecy and adoption could be related. Rather than seeing the adopters as enacting divine justice and love, it is those on whom the spirit is poured out—the adoptees—who gain this capacity. When considered in this light, a different model of prophetic insight emerges, one that I will term a dislocative model. Namely, adoptees’ experiences and expressions of social dislocation may fracture the hierarchical structures of the social orders into which they are incorporated. Their status as internal outsiders—loved and welcomed through a traumatic disruption, privileged through familial identity while marginalized ethnically or racially, socially included in ways that disregard their particular identities—can open spaces from within which they can articulate and illuminate structures of social coercion and power. As they give voice to their fractured, complex journeys toward developing their sense of identity, adoptees disclose to their adoptive worlds the injustices, harms, and silences that bring these worlds into existence and sustain them. For example, Korean adoptees frequently recount how the stories of being “left on the orphanage step” suppress any connection to their birth mothers, making their reconnection with their biological families more difficult while concealing the social pressures whose coercive effects led their biological parents to place their children for adoption. Recognizing how these practices extenuate adoptees’ sense of trauma and dislocation calls into question the absorptive model, and calls for greater attunement to adoptees’ voices and narratives. By expressing how they live both within and without the social structures that legitimate injustice in our world, adoptees can grow into their own creative and flourishing identities, offering paths toward such flourishing for others in the process.