Adoption: What Joseph of Nazareth Can Teach Us about This Countercultural Choice
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About this ebook
Joseph of Nazareth was a good and honorable man. The adoptive father of Jesus, he stood by his wife and raised her son—even when it appeared that she had betrayed him. Such is the love of adoption. But this love stands in stark contrast to what we see in our world today: on-demand abortion, unreported abuse, and widespread neglect.
Adapted from Russell Moore’s influential book Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, this short volume calls Christians to seriously consider adoption for their own families and thus take a stand for children—born and unborn.
Russell Moore
Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.
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Book preview
Adoption - Russell Moore
Preface
What it would mean if our churches and families were known as the people who adopt babies—and toddlers, and children, and teenagers. What if we as Christians were known, once again, as the people who take in orphans, and make of them beloved sons and daughters?
Not everyone is called to adopt. No one wants parents who adopt children out of the same sense of duty with which they may give to the building fund for the new church gymnasium. But all of us have a stake in the adoption issue, because Jesus does. He is the one who tells us his Father is also the Father of the fatherless
(Ps. 68:5). He is the One who insists on calling the least of these
his brothers (Matt. 25:40), and who tells us that the first time we hear his voice he will be asking us if we did the same.
I don’t know why, in the mystery of God’s plan, you were led to pick up this booklet. But, I know this. You have a stake in the adoption issue—even if you never adopt a child. There’s a war going on around you—and perhaps within you—and adoption is one crucial arena of that war. With that in mind, perhaps there are some changes to be made in our lives. For some of us, I hope this book changes the makeup of our households. For some of us, I hope it helps to change our monthly bank account balances. For all of us, I hope it changes something of the way we say brother
and sister
in our pews next Sunday, and the way we cry out Father
on our knees tonight.
Introduction
Joseph of Nazareth
What’s at Stake When We Talk about Adoption
I played a cow in my first-grade Christmas pageant, and I had more lines than the kid who played Joseph. He was a prop, or so it seemed, for Mary, the plastic doll in the manger, and the rest of us. We were just following the script. There’s rarely much room in the inn of the contemporary Christian imagination for Joseph, especially among conservative Protestants like me. His only role, it seems, is an usher—to get Mary to the stable in Bethlehem in the first place and then to get her back to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to find the wandering twelve-year-old Jesus.
But there’s much more to the Joseph figure.
Joseph serves as a model to follow as we see what’s at stake in the issue of adoption. Joseph, after all, is an adoptive father. In some ways, his situation is, of course, far different from that of any reader holding this book right now. In other ways, though, Joseph’s mission belongs to all of us. As Joseph images the Father of the fatherless, he shows us how adoption is more than charity. It’s spiritual