UNNATURAL TIES AND HOW THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE BENDS REALITY

EVALUATION: NATURAL AND UNNATURAL TIES

Conference Theology of Adoption, May 24-26 2010, Aberdeen
© R.Ruard Ganzevoort

I have argued that adoption changes the family just as much as it changes the child. I have advocated a dialectical approach to the natural and the unnatural, hoping that that will help us move beyond a view of adoption as changing, adapting, normalizing the child. Let me conclude by pushing it one step further. If we reflect theologically on the non-procreation based family, we first have to affirm the natural, the earthly, the physical. Obviously that includes procreation.

Our human existence commences on being born, or if you want on the occasion of the merger of male and female genetic material. Being born and becoming part of humankind means sharing this physical existence. It also creates a very specific connection with the man and the woman whose bodies created ours. To overlook the centrality of that connection is to develop an illusionary theology that negates
our fundamental physicality.

And yet, even if this is a necessary condition for our existence, it is not a sufficient one, especially when we talk about becoming part of a family. Even when one is born into a procreation-based family, it is not until the parents receive, accept, adopt that is, the child that a family comes into being. Acceptance, care, love, responsibility: terms like these define the family ties. But they are not defined by procreation, they are part of the process of adopting the child. If parents do not build that kind of relations, there is no family. In that sense, we all have to adopt our children, whether or not they are biologically our own. The defining element
of family is not procreation, it is adoption.

And so we have come full circle in critically reflecting on the natural and unnatural ties. Theology’s preference as lived out by the church may traditionally have been with the natural order, in the end it should probably be with the unnatural. A critical theological examination challenges our preference for the natural and shows that procreation is just not good enough. This very specifically implies that adopted children are not the exception. They are prototypical for human family life. To speak of adoption is to speak of family, I said at the beginning. But that is not because family life is constitutive for adoption. It is the other way around. Adoption is constitutive for the family.

Yes, the non-procreation based family may indeed symbolize mercy and grace, but not because solitary individuals are restored into the normal situation of family life by adoption. Non-procreation based families are a symbol of grace because they show us that life depends on undeserved acceptance and love, not on any quality in and of ourselves. They are a symbol of grace, of life, because they remind us that it is not our natural origins that count, but our relational future. They are a symbol of grace because they embody that we are not determined by the limitations of natural life, but called into the unnatural freedom of loving care.

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