Скачать или смотреть Topic Video: The Doctrine of Divine Accommodation

How does an infinite God speak to finite people?

Learn how the doctrine of divine accommodation explains the way God revealed himself through language, culture, and context his people could understand.

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Divine accommodation is the idea that God designed his revelation to be understood by its first audience.

He adapted the words and ideas of Scripture to the culture, technology, social structures and even religious experiences of its first audiences, so that they would understand what he was saying.

It helps to think of divine accommodation in terms of a spectrum ranging from general to specific accommodations. On one end of the spectrum, every portion of Scripture was written to suit the universal human condition. By this we mean that every time God revealed himself to human beings, he did it in ways that were applicable, in one way or another, to every human being throughout history.

Listen to the way John Calvin described the general aspects of accommodation:

Who ... does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us? ... Such forms of speaking ... accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.

As Calvin pointed out, God is so immeasurably greater than we are, he has to stoop very low in order for us to understand him.

We see this kind of universal accommodation throughout the Scriptures. It appears most dramatically in anthropomorphisms — the times in Scripture when God speaks, behaves, or appears in ways that seem almost human. God speaks human language; he’s grieved; he changes his intentions; he asks questions. These and countless other features of divine revelation were designed to meet our general human limitations.

Toward the middle of the spectrum of divine accommodation, God also fit his revelation to cultural expectations. For example, he revealed himself in the ancient Near East. And in this cultural context, he established covenants that resembled ancient Near Eastern international treaties. With regard to language, God revealed himself through the specific languages of his first audiences, such as Hebrew and Aramaic in the Old Testament for the nation of Israel, and Greek for the international New Testament church. Divine revelation in the Bible took into account these kinds of broad cultural circumstances of the original audiences of Scripture.

On the other end of the spectrum, God also accommodated his revelation to individuals, such as the specific people to whom he spoke. For example, in the New Testament we have many letters that are addressed to one specific church or another. And within those letters, in places like Colossians 3, we find teachings that are given to smaller groups within those churches, such as fathers, children, slaves and masters. And some of Paul’s letters were actually written to one specific person. In various ways, the Holy Spirit shaped these scriptural revelations to meet the specific needs of their original audiences.

“Imagine if God had given ancient Israel a computerized version of the Ten Commandments. Or what if God had given the New Testament Scriptures to the early church in modern French or Mandarin? These scenarios don’t make sense because the original audiences of Scripture would not have understood what God was saying to them. And, of course, this isn’t what God did at all. He wrote the Ten Commandments on stones. He led Christ's apostles and prophets to write in Greek. In fact, throughout biblical history, to one degree or another, God always accommodated his revelation to his original audiences so that they could understand.” - Dr. Richard L. Pratt, Jr.