Divine Accommodation
Some Christians (e.g. Calvin) have argued that in some way God has to accommodate himself to us in his revelation in the Bible because the truth about him is too 'high' for us to grasp:
For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xiii.1)Two things are odd about this:
- The people putting forward these ideas think that they can grasp the truth that is allegedly too high for us to grasp. Maybe they think that the ideas are too high for normal people, and that the Bible is written primarily for normal people.
- The consequence of this view is that God reveals falsehoods to us in Scripture, and so the Bible is not wholly true. It may be as near the truth as we can get, but it is still false.
posted by Daniel Hill | 8/21/2006 11:30:00 am
2 Comments:
I don't think the people putting forward those ideas do think they can grasp it. I think they can grasp that they can't grasp it.
I wouldn't say God lies to us - rather he does not tell us the whole truth. He tells us true things about himself, or metaphors which allow us to construct a limited (but accurate in as far as it goes) picture of God.
As a Presbyterian who is not a high Calvinist, I'm very interested by this quote from Calvin -- but in a counterintuitive way:
Consider that Calvin believed that God's kind of love is not love as we know it -- that his justice is not justice as we know it: that God only loves a chosen few with his special saving love, while he leaves the rest in never ending damnation by witholding the special grace that would save them.
If you believe that and believe the Bible is clear on these same points (which it is not), then isn't that a bit contradictory?
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