Surrejoinder to David Garner

Editor’s Note: On June 1, 2026 Dr. Lane Tipton published, “Is Jesus Christ the Nature and Adopted Son of God.” Drs. Letham and Tipton each published an essay at that same address.  Dr. Letham’s appears first and Dr. Tipton’s essay appears after Letham’s footnotes under the title: The Impossibility of the Adoption of the Incarnate Mediator.   Dr. Tipton’s essay interacted with David B. Garner’s view concerning the Son’s adoption as set forth in his book, Sons in the Son. Dr. Garner responded on June 17, 2026 with Resurrection and Adoption: A Response to Drs. Letham and Tipton. The essay below is Dr. Tipton’s surrejoinder.  

The Crux of the Issue

Dr. David Garner has written a response to Dr. Robert Letham’s and my essays, in which we contend that his doctrine of Christ’s adoption in the resurrection contravenes orthodox Christology. I am thankful for the response. Unfortunately, he dismisses Dr. Letham’s concerns as wholly invalid and describes my analysis as “baffling.” I respectfully dispute both claims. Dr. Lethem and I have sought extensively to clarify the precise ways that Dr. Garner’s thesis departs from biblical teaching, creedal orthodoxy, and confessional reformed theology.

That clarity is not advanced by Dr. Garner’s attempted reframing of the debate around secondary or tangential matters. The question is not as Dr. Garner says whether “the resurrection of Christ can or should, in any sense, be considered his adoption.” His previously published claims are far more precise than that. Nor is it whether Christ’s exaltation secured our adoption as believers; it did. Nor is it whether Christ was confirmed as great David’s greater Son in his resurrection; he was. Nor is it whether Christ now enjoys an unprecedented state of exalted mediatorial sonship; he does. The issue does not turn on which seminary colleagues agree with him, nor on whether the appearance of Dr. Letham’s and my essays was politically timed. The issue is not even what I have written in the past, which I am glad to clarify. These matters raised by Dr. Garner in his response obscure rather than illuminate the central doctrinal question.

The issue is this: Dr. Garner holds that Christ attained the very same filial benefit of adoption that is conferred upon sinners in union with him. That is the problem. He writes:

• “[Christ] cannot give what he does not possess; he does not yield what he does not attain. For redemption—in all its specific features—to be applied, redemption had to be accomplished—in those same specific ways” (Sons in the Son, 203).

• “Adoption, properly understood, is not a gift of Christ to believers yet unattained by him” (Sons in the Son, 250).

• “The ordo salutis informs and regulates the historia salutis. Without an ounce of distinction, that which is accomplished is applied, and whatever is applied has been accomplished” (Sons in the Son, 281).

• “Paul’s method of theological reciprocity between Christology and soteriology mandates the adoption of the Lord Jesus . . . Since the believers’ resurrection is adoption (Rom. 8:23), so, too, Christ’s resurrection was his adoption (1:4)” (Sons in the Son, 282).

• “For Paul, the huiothesian concept means that the adoptive sonship attained by Christ is the adoptive sonship attained by those who belong to him” (Sons in the Son, 283).

• Most explicitly, “The believers’ redemptive adoption comes by the adoption of the Redeemer. His adoption is our adoption, his holy sonship our holy sonship” (Sons in the Son, xxv).

These are not vague, incidental, or isolated statements. Coursing through Sons in the Son is Dr. Garner’s assertion that the redemptive adoption attained by Christ and the redemptive adoption given to believers in union with Christ are the same filial reality. According to Dr. Garner, Christ can convey adoption to believers only because he himself has first attained it. Dr. Garner plainly asserts that the gospel requires that believers’ adoption come to them only by way of Christ’s own attained adoption.

The Problems Enumerated

Dr. Garner’s proposal that Jesus in his life experience attained the same adoption that he then grants to believers in their union with  him subverts four key tenets of biblically grounded orthodox Christology.

First, Jesus Christ was not and cannot be adopted because he is a divine person. Adoption, as Reformed theology defines it, is a gracious soteriological benefit bestowed upon sinful human persons who are united to Christ. The subject of the incarnation is not a human person who comes to stand in a new filial relation to God by grace. His sonship is natural, eternal, necessary, and immutable. Therefore, the eternal person of the Son cannot be the subject of adoption without denying or obscuring his eternal generation and natural sonship.

Second, Jesus Christ was not and cannot be adopted according to his assumed human nature. Adoption is not predicated of abstract human nature, nor even of sinless human nature, but of fallen human persons redeemed by grace and united to Christ. Christ’s humanity is holy, undefiled, and personally subsistent in the Son; his human nature does not require, nor can it receive, redemption, reconciliation, justification, or adoption. Dr. Garner’s positing of a second “according-to-[Christ’s]-human nature sonship” misses this point. The condition for adoption—a sinful human person brought into filial standing through union with Christ—does not obtain in Christ’s assumed humanity.

Third, Jesus Christ was not and cannot be adopted because he is the Redeemer, not the redeemed. Adoption belongs to those whom Christ saves, not to Christ as the one who saves them. The incarnate Son enters history as the Mediator appointed to secure those benefits for his people. His obedience, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, and session are not the means by which he acquires soteriological benefits for himself, but the means by which he accomplishes redemption for sinners. Christ is not adopted in order that believers may be adopted. It is, rather, believers who are adopted because he is the eternal Son, incarnate as Mediator, who redeems them and brings them into filial communion with the Father.

Dr. Garner’s appeal to Christ’s “pluriform” sonship does not solve the problem. Though he acknowledges that Christ, as incarnate, is eternally the Son of God, he also suggests that the incarnation entails certain contours of “according-to-his-human-nature sonship,” so that Christ had somehow to attain filial status not as the eternal Son but as man. On the one hand, Garner concedes that Christ is Son in himself; on the other, he asserts that covenantally and according to his humanity, Christ must attain sonship. But there can be no sonship ascribed to Christ’s human nature beyond its personalization by the eternal Logos. His humanity is not an independent filial subject capable of attaining adoption. To suggest otherwise bifurcates the two natures and obscures the singular personhood of the divine Son. That is not Chalcedonian Christology. It is a movement toward a two-person Nestorian abstraction, and it vindicates the substance of our critique.

Fourth, Romans 1:4 does not teach the granting of soteriological adoption to Christ. When Paul says that Christ was “declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead,” he is not saying that Christ became the Son by adoption, nor that he acquired a filial status previously lacking. Rather, it teaches the public advancement of the incarnate Mediator from humiliation to exaltation, in which the incarnate Son  is openly manifested as the messianic Lord, the last Adam, and the exalted Mediator. The resurrection is the eschatological declaration, vindication, and enthronement of the eternal Son in his mediatorial office. It is not the acquisition of a new sonship via adoption. Romans 1:4 therefore concerns the advancement of the Mediator’s office and estate, not the conferral of adoptive sonship.

Taken together, these four defects expose the fundamental incoherence in Garner’s proposal. He relocates a soteriological benefit proper to fallen persons into the incarnate Son’s person, assumed humanity, and mediatorial office. In doing so, he confuses historia salutis and ordo salutis, collapses the Redeemer into the category of the redeemed, and misreads Romans 1:4 as though resurrection-exaltation conferred adoptive sonship rather than publicly declared and enthroned the Son who is already eternally and naturally Son. The result is not a refinement of Reformed adoption but its deformation.

Geerhardus Vos versus Sons in the Son

The foregoing is why I enlisted and centered Vos from the Reformed Dogmatics and the Pauline Eschatology in my critique of Sons in the Son. I appropriated the orthodox biblical and dogmatic theology of Vos in order to bring clarity to the fact that Dr. Garner’s doctrinal formulations are simply impossible to reconcile with the categories just stated.

The premises derived from Vos—divine personhood, enhypostatic humanity, and mediatorial office and estates—set forth a Christological asymmetry–the true distinction between the historia salutis and the ordo salutis–into the center of the discussion. There is, to be sure, an ordered analogy between Christ’s resurrection, vindication, and exaltation and the benefits believers receive in union with him (I have strived to teach this for years). But that ordered analogy necessarily preserves the distinction between the Redeemer and the redeemed–it does not collapse that distinction around the doctrinal conception of univocal adoption. It instead precludes ascribing to the person of the incarnate Mediator benefits proper only to sinful persons.

Earlier formulations at Westminster Seminary, though lacking the precision offered by Vos as dogmatician, sought to move in a broadly Vosian direction. They aimed to preserve an ordered analogy between Christ and believers, an analogy governed by Christological asymmetry. On that view, Christ’s resurrection, vindication, and exaltation are the ground, pattern, and final cause of the benefits believers receive in union with him. But those benefits were not predicated of Christ and believers in a univocal sense. Christ is not a sinner adopted by grace. He is the eternal Son, incarnate, crucified, raised, and exalted as Mediator, who confers adoption upon sinners. As our theology matures, including my own, we must advance toward Vos and reformed orthodoxy and not veer away from it.

Vos’ orthodox biblical and dogmatic theology enables us to maintain the organic relation between Christology and soteriology without collapsing their distinction. Christ’s resurrection is indeed the fountainhead of believers’ resurrection-life, justification, adoption, and glory. But Christ possesses resurrection glory, vindication, and exalted filial dominion as the incarnate, obedient, vindicated, and exalted Son. Believers receive justification, adoption, sanctification, and glory as sinners saved by grace in union with him.

As long as Garner maintains that adoption applies first to Christ and then to believers, he cannot consistently affirm the basic structures of orthodox creedal and reformed Christology. The divine person of the Son, his enhypostatic humanity, and his mediatorial office exclude the notion that Christ receives a benefit proper to the redeemed. Christ is the Redeemer who secures adoption; believers are the redeemed who receive it.

Christ’s “Adoption” and “Blasphemy”

In his response, Dr. Garner emphatically rejects any notion that “our sinless Savior personally need[ed] redemption and adoption.” He calls that notion “repugnant and blasphemous.” To repeat, my criticism is not that Garner holds that Christ was sinful and needed adoption to redeem him from that fallen condition. Such a notion is indeed repugnant. My concern runs deeper: Dr. Garner holds that Christ first attained in his own experience the blessing of redemptive adoption that properly applies only to sinners, not to the eternal Son. His own recoil from the former error ought to apply just as forcefully to the latter.

Dr. Garner does not say in any direct or explicit way that Christ needed adoption because he was  a sinner. The problem is that he makes a theological move with entailments he does not appear to recognize. By ascribing to the sinless incarnate Mediator the benefit of adoption that is then given to believers, he predicates of Christ a grace that is proper only to sinful human persons united to Christ. Therefore, even if Garner does not directly call Christ a sinner, his construction assigns to Christ a benefit whose confessional definition presupposes the condition of sinfulness of the persons needing redemption.

Dr. Garner’s contention that Christ “cannot give what he does not possess” and “does not yield what he does not attain” is unavailing. Christ clearly confers much that he did not himself achieve. He gives justification, yet he is not justified as an ungodly person. He gives regeneration, yet he is not regenerated. He gives repentance, yet he does not repent. He gives forgiveness, yet he is not forgiven. Likewise, he gives adoption, yet he is not adopted.

Dr. Garner’s appeal to my earlier language, stripped of its controlling qualifications, also fails to evade the problem. Even if I had claimed that Christ “attains” the very benefit of adoption given to believers in union with Christ—which I have neverdone—that would not ameliorate the problems inherent in Garner’s published claims. The truth or falsity of Garner’s proposal must be judged by Scripture, orthodox Christology, and the Reformed doctrine of adoption, not by a tu quoque fallacy.

Again, the issue is not whether Christ’s resurrection grounds, patterns, or secures the adoption of believers in union with him. The issue is whether the incarnate Son himself first attained the redemptive adoption given to believers. Believers’ adoption, Garner says, “does not serve to distinguish redemptive sonship from that belonging to the Redeemer,” but celebrates filial realities “fully shared by and with Christ Jesus.” That is the thesis Dr. Garner has repeatedly advanced, and that is the thesis our critique rejects.

Conclusion

The issue, again, is not whether Christ’s resurrection has “adoptive significance” for believers. Of course it does. The issue is whether the incarnate Son, in his resurrection, received the soteriological benefit of adoption that belongs to sinners united to him. Garner has answered that question in the affirmative, and that affirmation cannot be assimilated to orthodox Christology, Reformed soteriology, or Vosian biblical and dogmatic theology.

Scripture presents Christ as the eternal Son incarnate, the one Mediator, the Redeemer who secures adoption for those united to him. The creeds confess this same Christ as a divine person with a true and complete human nature assumed into personal union. The Reformed confessions locate adoption among the saving benefits given to believers, not among the acquisitions of Christ. Vos preserves the same order: Christ accomplishes redemption in the historia salutis; believers receive its benefits in the ordo salutis. Garner’s thesis abandons that order by predicating of Christ what belongs only to the redeemed.

This problem cannot be repaired by speaking generally about “union with Christ,” “redemptive history,” or “resurrection sonship.” Those categories, when detached from orthodox Christology, become instruments of confusion rather than precision. Dr. Garner’s “retooled” doctrine is not a more biblical doctrine of adoption; it is  rather a teaching insufficiently disciplined by the identity of the incarnate Son as revealed in Scripture and confessed in orthodox reformed theology.

The doctrine of adoption does not need to be “retooled” by assigning adoption first to Christ and then to believers. It needs to be properly tooled by the truth that the eternal Son became incarnate, obeyed, suffered, died, rose, ascended, and was enthroned as Mediator in order to confer adoption upon sinners united to him by faith. Christ is not adopted. Christ adopts. Any doctrine that loses that ordered distinction obscures the incarnate Mediator as revealed in Scripture, confessed by the creeds, and delineated by the confessions of the Reformed church.