What do the following characters have in common? Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter. Tarzan. Mowgli. Superman. Batman. Jane Eyre. Bambi. Oliver Twist. Buddy the Elf. Kung Fu Panda. Anne of Green Gables. Moses.

Answer: They’re all—in various senses of the word—adopted.

Granted, some of these adoptive situations worked out better than others, and it’s admittedly better to be taken in by Pharaoh’s daughter than it is to be raised by wolves, or so I would imagine.

But my point is that many of our culture’s best stories feature main characters who find themselves orphaned and in need of the ultimate act of grace: Adoption. We find beauty in that image, and we can’t help but write about it again and again.

It might be surprising to many to discover that a “family-centric” worldview such as Bill Gothard’s would have anything against the idea of adoption, but Gothard’s writings and teachings are decidedly against the practice. Though never stating outright in print that adoption is wrong for a Christian couple, Gothard’s lectures—and personal counsel to many families—demonstrate his belief that the benefits are not worth the risks.

Any Advanced Training Institute (ATI) family considering adoption is asked to first consult the ATI staff. Gothard’s CARE Booklet on the topic offers so many warnings and case studies of adoptive failure that its cumulative effect is most certainly to dissuade prospective parents from considering this option.

Although he does acknowledge Moses and Esther as instances of biblical adoptions in Scripture, he believes that adoption is a cultural, not a biblical, convention: “It is significant that our modern concept of adoption in unknown to the Law which God gave to Israel.”[1]

Adopting a child is certainly a choice to be made soberly and in full view of the unique responsibilities and challenges it entails. But it is also a decision to be made out of faith, not fear. The concept Gothard uses to cast the most doubt and fear on the practice is the concept of ‘generational sin.’ For those who grew up in ATI, the diagrams are familiar.[2]

Gothard proof-texts the idea that we are connected to the sins of our ancestors by referring to an obscure text in Hebrews: “One might even say that Levi, who collects the tenth, paid the tenth through Abraham, because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor.” (Hebrews 7:9-10)

On the surface, the passage suggests that Levi was physically involved in the actions and decisions of his great-grandfather Abraham. Gothard then uses this model to interpret several biblical examples of amplified inherited sin: Abraham’s lying passed down to Isaac and Jacob, or Hagar’s resentment passed down to Esau. This argument appears whenever Gothard addresses the topic of generational sin, but what does it have to do with adoption? Let me illustrate.

My 5-year-old son has discovered the world of Legos, and our local Lego store has become a regular stop on our father-son rounds. So as not to leave the store empty-handed or empty-walleted, we’ve often settled for purchasing an inexpensive ‘Minifigure.’ The Minifigures are uniquely-created Lego people wrapped in a sealed ‘mystery bag’ so that you don’t know which figure you’ve purchased until after the sale. You might get a fireman, or you might get Frankenstein.

I see this as a parallel to Gothard’s adoption fears. When we adopt a child from another ‘spiritual ancestry,’ what are we bringing home? Will our child have the predisposition of a fireman or a Frankenstein, a hero or a monster? Adoption is a genetic ‘mystery bag’; because we don’t know the sin patterns of their parents, we can’t properly acknowledge their ancestral sins and be free of them.

Gothard tells potential adopting parents to try to research the potential specific sins of the biological parents so as to confess them and negate their consequences.[3] This equates to some animistic form of binding ancestral demons, and lacks any biblical merit.

Hebrews 7:9-10 is not a passage about generational sin at all, but about the superior priesthood of Jesus Christ, and using it as the seminal text for the concept of sin-genetics is asking it to support weight it was never meant to bear.[4]

The Bible does speak of a kind of generational sin we bear; the doctrine of ‘original sin’ teaches that we were all ‘in Adam’ when he and Eve committed the world’s first sin. But is this to be understood as being physically soul-present in the Garden, or as being fully represented in the act? Romans 5 brings clarity, paralleling the situation to that of Christ, who acts as a ‘second Adam’ and representative of a new and forgiven humanity. Our being ‘in Adam’ and ‘in Christ’ are not true in a genetic sense (Jesus didn’t pass on his DNA, unless you’re a DaVinci Code devotee…), but in a representative sense.

So in relation to hereditary sin, it is Adam who represents us. What does this mean for adoption? It means that I have inherited a fallen nature from the first Adam, not a specific sin of lust or pride or rebellion from my great-great-grandfather. An adopted child and an adoptive family both inherit the same thing; I don’t have some lesser propensity to sin because I come from ‘better stock.’

This is not to negate the real issues involved in many adoptive situations, such as Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) or other issues that stem from parental abuse or orphanage life. But these are clinical issues, not generational strongholds of rebellion.

In other words, all of us have the capacity to be the hero or the Frankenstein.

And in fact we see in ourselves a little of both, sinner and saint. The adoptive children in our church are just as in need of the transforming power of Christ as the biological children. The biological parents of an orphaned child stand just as much in need of a Savior as the adoptive parents. And the cure for our guilt in the first Adam is the grace of the second Adam (Christ).

If this is the situation, then we all need adoption, a rescue from our spiritual orphanages to the table of the King. Galatians 4:3-7 says that “…we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.” This is the cosmic adoption that all earthly adoptions picture in miniature: the rescue of the helpless to the status of sonship. Adoption pictures the heart of God.

The end of Gothard’s booklet on adoption is haunting. Two case studies tell stories of people who determined after the adoptive process that they had made a mistake, and needed to ‘send back’ the child. Both stories suggest that God blessed these parents for their decisions (financial windfalls, domestic harmony, and a bonus biological child are cited as evidences of God blessing their abandonment of the trouble-child).

These two cases are not unique in the ATI culture. The adult children of IBLP/ATI families can tell similar stories:

– An adopted child was rejected as a ‘problem child’ at age 3 and re-adopted to another family, only to be continually threatened with repeat abandonment, shuffled off to family friends, and told by her parents, ‘No one is willing to take you in.’

– A family whose adoptive relationship with their pre-teen son was ‘not working out,’ was personally counseled by Gothard to send the child away permanently.

Not only do these stories perplexingly erode Gothard’s cryptic teaching on the necessity of making and keeping vows, but they erode the picture of unconditionality that gospel sonship depicts. All parenting is hard work, especially adoptive parenting, and I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t times when parents feel like giving up, or are required to get help outside the home for establishing peace or safety.

But adoption is meant to establish a child’s safe fixed point, to say ‘you belong here’ without suspicions, conditions, or retractions. This is the adoption that is ours in Christ: it’s hard to imagine a more lavish picture of His amazing grace.

Kevin Burrell is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as an Assistant Pastor at StoneBridge Church Community (PCA) in Charlotte, NC. This article first appeared on the Recovering Grace website and is used with permission

[1] Basic Care Bulletin 5: “How to Make Wise Decisions on Adoption,” p. 5.
[2] This teaching, and its corresponding diagrams, can be found in Basic Care Bulletin 5, pp, 31ff, as well as Anger Resolution Seminar Session 8: Acknowledging Inherited Weaknesses, and other publications.
[3] Bill Gothard, Ten Reasons Why Adopted Children Tend to Have More Conflicts, pp. 1-2. 11.
[4] Regarding the verse, Leon Morris says that the Greek phrase ‘One might even say,’ only found in this one instance in the New Testament, “serves to introduce a statement which may startle a reader, and which requires to be guarded from misinterpretation” (Morris, EBC, p. 65) and Peter O’Brien notes that the expression could be used “when presenting a thought that goes strictly beyond the evidence, but is true in some sense.” (O’Brien, The Letter to the Hebrews, Pillar New Testament Commentary, p. 254. In other words, the verse is tangential. The authorial intent was not to build a theology of the pathways of generational sin.

Some helpful info on adoption can be found at:
Hope For Orphans [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Shaohannah’s Hope: A Movement to Care for Orphans
Many also recommend the book Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell D. Moore.