Divine accommodation

Divine accommodation is the principle that God adapts revelation of himself to what finite, creaturely minds can receive, rather than disclosing his own infinite being directly. Revelation therefore comes in human language, in historically particular acts spread across “many times” and “many ways” rather than all at once, and, where Scripture describes God through bodily or emotional terms, in the creaturely categories treated separately as anthropomorphism. Even the sacraments extend the same principle into visible signs adapted to human senses. Accommodating revelation’s form to human capacity is not the same as accommodating its content to human error.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled accommodation, since the term names a principle assumed throughout revelation rather than a distinct article of faith. Its opening chapter states that God, having revealed himself only partially through “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence,” was pleased “at sundry times and in divers manners to reveal himself, and to declare his will unto his church,” before committing that revelation “wholly unto writing.”¹ A revelation given across multiple times and manners, rather than in one uniform disclosure, already assumes that God suits his self-revealing to the creatures and circumstances he addresses. The confession’s second chapter states what accommodation protects: God himself is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”² Because Scripture nonetheless speaks of God’s hand, eyes, and anger, that language cannot be a literal report of a literal divine body or divine mood swings; it must be accommodated address to creatures who know reality only through creaturely categories.

Biblical Basis

Hebrews opens by naming the same “many times and many ways” pattern the confession echoes: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1-2). Revelation’s historically staggered, progressively fuller form culminates in Christ rather than correcting what came before. Paul describes the believer’s present knowledge of God as inherently partial, a limit built into creaturely knowing rather than only into sin: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). John states the same limitation and its remedy together: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). The Son himself, God become man, is revelation’s fullest instance of accommodation, since only a mediator who is himself both God and man can disclose the infinite God within finite reach. God’s own words to Moses state the underlying constraint that makes some form of accommodation necessary in the first place: “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exod. 33:20).

Historical Development

Patristic and Reformed condescension

Reformed dogmatics inherited the underlying idea from an old Greek theological vocabulary. Bavinck writes that even the redeemed in heaven will never see God “with respect to his essence,” since “every vision of God always requires an act of divine condescension (συγκαταβασις), a revelation by which God on his part comes down to us and makes himself knowable”; a finite creature’s grasp of an infinite God remains, in glory as much as on earth, a finite grasp.³ John Calvin gave the principle its best-known Reformation statement in refuting those who mistook Scripture’s descriptions of God’s “mouth, ears, eyes, hands, and feet” for evidence of a literal divine body.⁴ Calvin extended the same logic well beyond that dispute, to the church’s sacraments. Because “our animal nature” cannot rise unaided to purely spiritual conceptions, he wrote, “our merciful Lord, with boundless condescension, so accommodates himself to our capacity” that he uses “earthly elements” to lead us to himself and “even in the flesh to exhibit a mirror of spiritual blessings,” quoting Chrysostom’s own rationale for the principle: “Were we incorporeal, he would give us these things in a naked and incorporeal form. Now because our souls are implanted in bodies, he delivers spiritual things under things visible.”⁵

Accommodation and biblical inerrancy

In the early twenty-first century, Peter Enns and Kenton Sparks re-cast accommodation as a way of reconciling historical-critical biblical scholarship with belief in Scripture’s divine origin. Sparks describes accommodation as “God’s adoption of Scripture to speak to the human audience in a finite and limited perspective,” a “necessary feature of revelation when this is mediated to us through the finitude and fallenness of a human author.”⁶ Since Scripture is, on this account, “truly a product of human authorship,” its “viewpoints will reflect the limited historical contingencies of its human authors and audience,” and readers “should not be surprised when they encounter errors, diversity, [and] limited perspective.”⁷ Sparks appeals to the same Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy article that affirms God “utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom he had chosen and prepared,” reading it as warrant for a more thoroughly human, and therefore fallible, Bible.⁸

Opposing Views

Confessional Reformed theology and the Enns/Sparks proposal use the word “accommodation” for two different things. On the classical account, accommodation adapts the form of revelation, its language, its images, its historical timing, to human capacity, without adapting its content to human error; Scripture’s authority rests “wholly upon God… who is truth itself.”⁹ On Sparks’s account, accommodation is precisely what permits Scripture to carry its human authors’ “errors, diversity, [and] limited perspective,” since Scripture is “in its essence, both divine and human discourse,” and its human side inherits the “finitude and fallenness” of the men who wrote it.⁷ English states the difference between the two usages plainly: “divine accommodation for Calvin did not include God condescending to error-prone communication, but rather, to a way of communicating that is intelligible to creatures, a distinction that both Enns and Sparks would likely deny.”¹⁰

Objections and Responses

If accommodation means Scripture’s language is shaped to fit its human audience, doesn’t that license treating any difficult claim as merely human, and therefore possibly mistaken? Accommodation, on the classical account, governs how revelation is given, not whether what it asserts is true. Scripture’s authority rests on God as its author, “who is truth itself,”⁹ so an accommodated form of address gives no warrant on its own for assuming an accommodated content is inaccurate. Form and truthfulness are, on this account, two separate questions.

If all knowledge of God, even Scripture’s own vocabulary for him, is accommodated rather than a literal, one-to-one description, can finite creatures know God as he truly is, or only a humanized substitute? Accommodated language need be neither a literal report nor an empty approximation; it can be analogical, real but not exhaustive knowledge. Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between an attribute’s substance (res significata) and its mode of signification (modus significandi) supplies the category: what a word says about God can be true even where the manner of saying it is borrowed from creaturely life.¹¹ “We may not know him as he is in himself, in his essence,” Barrett writes, applying that distinction, “but we may know him as he has made himself known to us by revelation,” a “relative knowledge” of an “absolute Being” rather than no knowledge at all.¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 13, 110. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 14, “Of the Sacraments,” 492-493, quoting John Chrysostom, Homily 60 to the People (secondhand, as quoted by Calvin). ↩
Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 243, quoted in John Thomas English III, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 79. ↩
Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words, 76-77, 205, quoted in English, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son,” 77-78. ↩ ↩²
English, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son,” 79, summarizing Sparks’s appeal to article 8 of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4. ↩ ↩²
English, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son,” 81. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 2, “Can We Think God’s Thoughts after Him? How the Creature Should (and Should Not) Talk about the Creator.” ↩ ↩²