Are We All God's Children?

The answer may surprise you!

It is one of the most important theological questions of all theological questions. Is God the Father of all humanity? Or are we all the children of God? So in this part of the series we are asking (when it comes to the perspective of Christian universalism) is a “Yes!” to this question biblically justified?

What does the Bible say? Well the answer may surprise you. It is a controversial question. Only a few weeks ago the Pope was speaking to an interreligious group of various faiths and he said a couple of things that turned out to be, as I said, rather controversial. Almost immediately YouTube videos started popping up from various perspectives but almost all of them, if not all that I watch personally, were largely in disagreement with the Pope. And so you see here he basically made two pronouncements. One was that he said to this interreligious group that we are all children of God. But then he went on to say that all religions are sort of like different languages that speak about the same God, which I think some interpreted. The Pope is saying that all paths equally lead to God.

Of course I want to make it very clear here and now that I definitely do not agree. If that is indeed what the Pope meant, I do not agree that all paths lead to God. There is truly and genuinely only one way to the Father and is through his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

He is the only way to the Father. But what about the first proposition? The first statement that he made that we are all the children of God, that God is the Father of us all. It was remarkable to me that Glenn Scrivener's channel took exception to both statements of the Pope. Most of the Catholic channels made no mention of the first statement that the Pope made regarding our all being children of God regardless of our religion. But there was this one that I watched with Glenn Scrivener on his Speak Like channel, which I will leave a reference, a link to down in the description if you want to watch the whole of it in full. But I want to share with you the portion that is most relevant to the question we are seeking an answer to today.

“Or Ephesians chapter 2, which talks about before the Gospel came to the Ephesians, they were without hope and without God in the world. There is an exclusivity to Christ such that without Christ you don't have a Father, you don't have a Father, you don't have a Father, you don't have salvation and you don't have hope. Now what I want to do in this video is show you why Pope Francis is wrong.”

It is interesting among the critical videos that I watched, and of course I am sure there were many more, that only this one took exception to the Pope's remark about the Fatherhood of God. Most again ignored it. Only Sam Shimon affirmed it, but then did so in a very qualified sense. In a certain way we are all children of God.

So again you can see the link to the video in the description below. What does the Bible say about this question? How does the Bible on the whole answer it? Well, first of all, it says, no, we are not all children of God.

Many passages can be cited to prove this answer. For instance, Jesus said to the hypocritical Pharisees, you are of your Father, the devil. It's also even like you could contend at least, implicit in such passages as John 1-12, yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, which seems to presuppose you are not yet children of God. First John 3-10 is a pretty glaring answer to this question. In this the children of God are manifest. It raises some questions.

What does he mean? What's implicit in the manifestation of the children of God? And this the children of God are manifest and the children of the devil. Whoever doeth not righteousness is not of God.

Neither he that loveth not is brother. Now there is Galatians 3-26. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, implying at least that if you're outside of Christ Jesus, you're not a child of God because you do not yet have faith. Once again such passages are subject to a little bit of nuance because this passage could be translated, you are all children of God through the faithfulness of Christ as opposed to your faith in Christ. And then there's the whole issue raised by Paul's use of the term in the Greek “huiothesia” which is translated into the English word adoption. I think in some ways it truly is an unfortunate translation because I believe that it's misunderstood because it's simply taken almost as a one-on-one idea with the same meaning as we in the Western world especially and say for the US we would hear the word adoption and we all automatically would think that when someone is adopted they're obviously not already children of the adopted parents but that they're orphans. And so if we read these types of ideas into Paul's word which really literally means to be placed as a son, to be placed in as a son which definitely opens up again other more nuanced ideas about what Paul means when he uses the word as opposed to the word, the English word adoption. But because it is translated almost always in translations as into the English word adoption many would read these passages as undeniably, though implicitly meaning that we're not born into this world as children of God that only by faith in Jesus Christ, only by the new birth, being born again, etc. can it's said to be true that we are children of God.

So the Bible I believe does though overall give us some justification for answering this question with a very firm no. And you might not have been expecting me to say that but it's undeniable. It's there. It won't go away.

But there are some other undeniable passages that are there and they won't go away either. And this brings us to the yes. We are all of God's offspring. We are all his children. He is the father of all according to these passages and to some which I believe logically imply the relationship of being children to God though we are born as prodigal children. The first and in some ways the clearest the most compelling passages passage that will simply not go away will not vanish is Acts 17, 28 and 29 where Paul twice says to his audience who were pagan Athenians, we are all the offspring of God which in the New American Standard version is just simply translated we're all the children of God because that's what it means. We are all the children of God. In other places again Paul seems to assume something of the truth of this statement like in Ephesians 4, 6 where he speaks of God as the one God and father of all in Ephesians 3, 15 that God is the one by whom every family on the earth receives its name. So Paul again explicitly states the fatherhood of God in Acts 17 and implicitly assumes that relationship in other places. But for me one of the most compelling theological arguments based on scripture that I think you could offer in the affirmative to this question is that found in the very statement that we are all made in the image of God.

All humanity exists in the image of God as the image and in the likeness of God. And as I've probably said to you before, I will never forget the day even after many years of the study of scripture, after seminary, after pastoring for many years when, as though it were for the first time, I saw the passage in Genesis 5.3. And there it says that Adam had a son and his name was Seth, and he was in Adam's image and likeness.

That opened up a whole avenue of meaning for me. And it is significant, I believe, that this is the first time this couplet of image and likeness is used in Scripture after its original use in describing God's making Adam and Eve. And so it should be no surprise that even in the genealogies of Christ, Adam is spoken of as “the Son of God”. What are the implications of what it means to be made in the image of God? What are the implications when we find out in the new revelation of the New Testament that Jesus Christ is the image of God? When you couple those things together, when you compare spiritual things with spiritual things, what insights might that bring to us? And indeed, might this actually lie at the very foundations of what Paul speaks about when he talks about the mystery of Christ, which I'm convinced that at the core of Paul's theology is this supreme Mystery.

I'm going to wrap things up for this particular post, trying to keep these a bit shorter, more manageable sizes to absorb, to think over. But what I hope you see is why this matters from a Christian universalist perspective. That, for one thing, God's motivation for saving us is seen in a very different light. Not only is this just an almost more deistic God who's created the world (but he has no real significant relationship with it, apart from having been its creator). It's like I can create an invention and it's not my child. It's just an object that I've created and I have no inherent legal or moral commitment to its survival or to its salvation. But if we are in fact by virtue of having been created by God and in his image, if we are related to God in such a way, it frames the entire process of salvation, the motivation, it's the entirety of salvation history you have to look at in a different light, because God is not only just saving some kind of alien other, he is saving his own children as opposed to mere orphans. Secondly, it is the fact that we are not simply not in relationship with God. I mean, again, Recall Acts 17, in him Paul said to the pagans, “in him we live and move and have our being”.

ALL things are created in Christ and are sustained by Christ. That's a pretty strong “relationship”! And so it's important, as I hope you can see just from these observations, that we being in this fundamental relationship with God are simply estranged and alienated from our Father. Last, I'll just mention (and I'm sure there are many other reasons that you could think of as well) is that our salvation is all about recovery, recovering what has been lost. It just makes sense out of that trifecta of Jesus' parables that are so compelling. Sometimes others ask me, “Well, why didn't Jesus teach universal reconciliation?” And I just believe, of course, with all my heart, that it's so strongly and logically and theologically implied in those three parables. Jesus tells back to back the parable of the lost sheep that he will not return to the flock until he has found that one lost sheep. That lost coin that significantly bears an imprint to me is sort of hinted at the fact that it is such a coin who is in search of the coin will not relent in her search until she has found it because it is so precious and valuable to her. And then of course the greatest Christ ending, I think among the three, the greatest parable, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, that he told and all the parables he told, the parable that we speak of as the parable of the prodigal son. How do you make sense of that parable apart from this framework? And how does that parable inform us about the truth of this way, this perspective, this way of looking at our relationship with God as his children? That our salvation is all about recovering what has been lost, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.

But before I close, I want to emphasize that pointing out this tension is so preeminently important. And I think there's so many Christians really do not face it. And by not facing this reality of what Scripture really offers us, these perspectives that are in such tension with one another that, and we're probably motivated in a sense by we don't want to be disturbed, we don't want the cognitive dissonance that looking at these varied perspectives can bring to us or to our the doctrine that we've been indoctrinated with, or the cognitive dissonance of hearing a different perspective that challenges our systematic theology.

So it's fundamentally important in terms of any type of transition that we're going to make, in wrestling with the angel of God's Scripture that he's given as such a precious gift to the church. And so I ask you today as I close, how will you handle these polarities? Will you ignore them? Will you harmonize them?

Will you synthesize them? Or what? What will we do with these verses on both sides of the issue that just will not go away? I believe that Paul shows us how to navigate between these dichotomies, these polarities that we've looked at among many other, and there are many others in Scripture that, you know, I could point out to you today that are not just on this topic, but these polarities at the very finish of his greatest of all theological arguments, spanning Romans one through eleven. I believe that even in that great symphony of argument where he's offering things that just wind up in a tension between various things that Paul has said that seem to stand in tension, purposefully, I believe, with one another in the enigma, the glass-darkly that Paul is communicating to us in the mystery of the Gospel. But I believe the key verse in some respects is that verse right at the end of his argument or toward the very end of it where he alerts us and says, behold the goodness and the severity of God. So having alerted us with this word that's meant to sort of grab hold of us and say, sit up and pay attention and look, how does Paul ultimately conclude this great argument? This theological argument he's offering us in Romans one through eleven. Does he leave both goodness and severity on an equal footing?

How does wisdom factor into all of this? Paul invokes that word and how are we to understand it and incorporate it into our hermeneutic, our interpretation of these puzzling and perplexing attentions that we must observe in Scripture. What are the implications of his final words? From him and through him and to him, God are all things. How do you think these final words of Paul might lead us and serve us toward a resolution of the opposing perspective that we have posed here today? I ask you to please leave a comment.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post - and please take a moment and tell me what you think in the comment section below. Tell me how you think these words of Paul at the end of Romans 11 might help us to see a way through this enigma and to behold that which God would have us to see above all other things.

Richest Blessings In Christ!

wayne