Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud;

be gracious to me and answer me!

You have said, “Seek my face.”

My heart says to you,

“Your face, LORD, do I seek.”

Hide not your face from me.

Turn not your servant away in anger,

O you who have been my help.

Cast me not off; forsake me not,

O God of my salvation!

For my father and my mother have forsaken me,

but the LORD will take me in. (Psalm 27:7–10)

Ours is an age marked by profound alienation, anxiety, and hopelessness. The previous U.S. Surgeon General observed that Americans suffer from a pervasive epidemic of loneliness. “Deaths of Despair,” such as drug overdose and suicide, have cut short the average American life expectancy for the past decade. Despite historic advances in communication technology, fewer people report having deep and meaningful relationships. As a psychiatrist who is also a ruling elder in a Reformed denomination, I believe the church has a unique opportunity to demonstrate the riches of our Reformed faith in this particular age. Specifically, our doctrine of adoption is just the balm we need to introduce healing to this lost and dying generation.

In developmental psychology, a foundational concept necessary for human flourishing is that of secure attachment. From the moment we are born, we are in need of another. We are absolutely dependent on the love and safety that a strong parental figure provides. We are created in such a way that the presence of this other is integral to the formation of healthy neurologic and emotional development.

Ideally, a child is born to a loving mother who so loves the child that the child comes to internalize the identity his mother proffers upon him. Having the security of this primary attachment affords the child the safety necessary to make his way in the world and its myriad dangers. As his journey into this fallen world of ours bruises and batters the child, he is psychologically equipped to carry on, having the comfort and reassurance of his mother’s secure base.

This secure attachment is a critically important building block in the healthy formation of the conception of one’s self, stable relationships, and self-regulatory capacities. Patterns of unhealthy and destructive behaviors do not form in a vacuum. Rather, they grow out of the interconnected substrate of our unconscious drives and the conscious understanding of who we are and how we are supposed to behave. This growth is powerfully mediated by our relationships with others and, especially so, our parental figures. This should not surprise us. As Christians, we confess a foundationally relational anthropology.

Our relational anthropology flows from our relational God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit; a Godhead of perfect and harmonious love. These three persons eternally behold one another in ecstatic and overflowing joy. This overflowing joy animates creation and culminates in the crown of creation—us.

First and foremost, we find our being in our relationship with this triune God. We were created to behold, and to be beheld by, this God of love in perfect harmony. As a result of the fall, however, our being became anything but harmonious. Instead of union with God, we became alienated from God. Being alienated from God, we became alienated from our neighbor, creation, and self. We were created to be harmoniously integrated creatures. We became disastrously dis-integrated creatures.

Although created to gaze upon God for a true understanding of our self and our rightly ordered passions, the human gaze turned upon the self. Building upon language used by Augustine, Martin Luther described fallen humanity as “homo incurvatus in se”—humanity turned inward upon itself. We are bent towards ‌abominable navel-gazing self-centeredness. We are born with a terrible case of spiritual scoliosis. Luther explained that man is “so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.”¹ Fallen humanity swallowed the lie that we can be as God without being united to God. This poison infects our entire being and bears the fruit of discord, disarray, and destruction in all our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

A universal consequence of this bent-inwardness is a deep recognition of our inability to be God. The recognition that we are not all-knowing, nor all-powerful, but rather filled with doubt and impotence produces a pervasive sense of shame. We cannot cash the checks our delusions of divinity have written. We are left with the inescapable and unbearable heaviness of failing to measure up. No matter what we do, at our core, we are less than. The weight of being less than keeps our gaze upon our inadequate selves and we employ all manner of shame-mitigation strategies to relieve this distress and keep our shameful selves from being exposed to others.

“Where are you?” is the first question God asked Adam following the Fall (Gen 3:9). Was God ignorant of Adam’s location? Of course not. Rather, God articulated Adam’s newly positioned metaphysical location. What was once a walking-together relationship had tragically become an alienation. Only after this alienation was identified did God ask what he had done (Gen 3:11–12). The shame of who Adam was (homo alienus), was established prior to the guilt of what he had done. The relationship had been severed.

This line of questioning was repeated with Cain when God first asked, “Where is your brother?” (Gen 4:9). This question situated Cain’s alienation from his brother. Cain gives a dramatic and declarative voice to this reality in his response—“Am I my brother’s keeper?” He should have been his brother’s protector, yet the shame of his offering compared to his brother’s fueled a fury that destroyed his brother. God’s gaze upon his brother with favor exposed his nakedness. He could not bear this exposure. Murder was the solution.

The story of Adam and Cain is the story of us. In our sin, we humans are a dysfunctional family. We are alienated from our Father (God), and we are alienated from our brother (neighbor). Instead of obeying the greatest commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and the second greatest commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” we rebel. Like Adam, we sew together our flimsy fig leaves to cover our nakedness, and like Cain, we destroy our brother rather than loving him as ourselves.

We engage in all manner of psychological defenses to keep from being seen for what we truly are—shameful. In our pride, we expose the weaknesses of others to make ourselves look stronger. “Look at that woman caught in adultery!” We project the things we hate about ourselves onto‌ other individuals or groups of people. “Shame on those silly charismatics!” We engage in denial. “I don’t have a problem! Nothing to see here!” We anesthetize our distress with various intoxicants, be they drugs, alcohol, sex, social media, shopping, or worldly pursuits of power. The most powerful temptation is the drunkenness of power that fuels our pride. Power can make us feel most like God while affording the opportunity to denigrate others and give us the false sense of being worthy. Sadly, this is too often socially legitimized and found as much in the church as it is in politics, industry, and academia.

Where does this leave the church and her obligation to proclaim the good news? How about we meet people where they are? And where they are is a world of pain, isolation, and shame. It is not just our neighbors who experience this world, but our Christian brothers and sisters do as well. They need a restoration of right relationships and the comfort of our heavenly Father. Our doctrine of adoption is ripe for a people in need of a secure attachment. The answer to Westminster Larger Catechism [WLC] 39 is:

It was requisite that the mediator should be man, that he might advance our nature, perform obedience to the law, suffer and make intercession for us in our nature, have a fellow-feeling of our infirmities; that we might receive the adoption of sons, and have comfort and access with boldness unto the throne of grace.

The answer to what is adoption is in WLC 74:

Adoption is an act of the free grace of God, in and for his only Son Jesus Christ, whereby all those that are justified are received into the number of his children, have his name put upon them, the Spirit of his Son given to them, are under his fatherly care and dispensations, admitted to all the liberties and privileges of the sons of God, made heirs of all the promises, and fellow-heirs with Christ in glory.

Adoption is most exemplified in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Here we see a son who is lost in sin and comes to recognize his utter unworthiness. He resigned himself to be a lowly servant in the hope that his basic needs may be met. He had reached the end of his independence. To his astonishment and delight, the embrace of his father welcomes him. His nakedness is clothed with a royal robe, and his hunger is fed with a celebratory communion meal. He is taken in, and the name of his father is placed upon him with all the rights and delights of sonship.

In our post-modern, post-Christian age, proclaiming God as Father and Comforter will be received in a way that proclaiming God as Judge may not. This is in no way to suggest we do not call people to repentance and lead them to rejoice in the glorious mystery of our forensic forgiveness; rather, introducing the lost and encouraging the saved with filial embrace is no less biblical and may profoundly penetrate hurting hearts.

The Heidelberg Catechism, the book of comfort, is particularly apropos for this age of despair. The answer to the question, “What is our only comfort in life and death?” is:

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

This belonging is something for which people are profoundly hungry and for which people are created to hunger. The church should be the one institution on earth where people know the embrace of this belonging because this is the place on earth where Christ is given. Here, we feed upon him. Here, his redeemed flesh clothes us. The church is the body of Christ, offering filial sacrificial love, healing, and comfort. The church should be our secure attachment where we can boldly go into the world, knowing that our shame is covered, that our identity is in him, and with joyful gratitude be “wholeheartedly willing and ready . . . to live for him.”

Note

1. Martin Luther, “Lectures on Romans,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 25, ed. Hilton C. Oswald et al. (Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 345.

©James Berry. All Rights Reserved.

---

RESOURCES

• Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
• Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
• Browse the Heidelshop!
• The Heidelblog Resource Page
• Heidelmedia Resources
• The Ecumenical Creeds
• The Reformed Confessions
• The Heidelberg Catechism
• The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025)
• Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
• Why I Am A Christian
• What Must A Christian Believe?
• Heidelblog Contributors
• Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

---

Post authored by:

• James Berry

  

  James H. Berry, DO is Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at West Virginia University. He is a nationally recognized addiction expert who treats patients, trains clinicians, and researches innovative ways to improve behavioral healthcare. He is a ruling elder in the OPC and is committed to helping the church care for those suffering from mental illness.

  More by James Berry ›