John Calvin God Speaks to Us in Baby Talk
This post is part of a serial that Jawbone (specifically Eric) is doing with David of Brick by Brick. There will be posts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the 2 weeks this series is running. Posts will alternating betwixt posts by Eric and posts by David. This is David's second post.
Final time I looked at the Church Fathers. Today, John Calvin:
For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, equally nurses unremarkably do with infants, God is wont in a measure to "lisp" in speaking to usa? Thus such forms of speaking do non so much express clearly what God is like as arrange the noesis of him to our slight capacity. To do this He must descend far beneath His loftiness. (Institutes 1.13.ane)
The Bible is more than or less God'south baby-talk to united states of america. So said the great sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin about the Bible's unabashedly anthropomorphic descriptions of God.
Calvin was interested in goingad fontes and rereading the Bible with fresh (sixteenth-century Humanist) eyes. Only he was not interested in reinventing the theological wheel, and so, unsurprisingly, in this passage and others Calvin takes upwardly the notion of Origen, Chrysostom and others of the Church building Fathers that God accommodates His revelation to us to suit our finite, fallible, linguistic communication-and-culture-bound capacities for comprehension. According to Calvin, if God intends to communicate with finite creatures such equally united states of america, He implymust, as a matter of sheer logical necessity, accommodate His speech to His audience in this manner:
For because our weakness does not attain to His exalted state, the description of Him that is given to u.s.a. must be accommodated to our capacity and then that nosotros may understand it. (Institutes 1.xi.13)
In previous posts I have examined some of the ways Calvin'southward understanding of the Bible-equally-divine-revelation-accommodated-to-human-capacities-and-community played out for him in his interpretations of Genesis as a non-scientific text (here), the Gospels as quasi-"historical" documents (hither), and 2 Peter equally a ghost-written letter (hither). But Calvin applied the notion of accommodated Scripture more widely nonetheless. On the fashion the Bible changes up the religious and upstanding demands it makes on humans from one age and culture and context to another, Calvin writes:
I reply that God ought non to exist considered changeable merely because He accommodated various forms to different ages, as He knew would exist expedient for each…. Why, and so, exercise we brand God with the mark of inconstancy because He has with apt and fitting marks distinguished a multifariousness of times?…In the fact that He has changed the outward course and manner, He does non show Himself subject to change. Rather, He has accommodated Himself to men'due south capacity, which is varied and changeable. (Institutesii.11.thirteen)
While, for Calvin, God is timeless, the Bible is not. God'southward revelations in the Bible were, nonetheless, always timely.But they were not fourth dimensionl ess–they were not contextless and cultureless. No. In each instance God spoke directly to the hearts of item matters for particular peoples with particular proclivities in particular places and predicaments. Thus His revelations varied in tone, content, and character from context to context as they addressed different audiences, all while still originating in the one eternal and immovable God.
So, equally in the case of Genesis 1, it is sometimes the case that the Bible, having been addressed to ancient peoples and accommodated to their ancient, pre-scientific conceptions and conventions, does not always tally with modern scientific knowledge. And that's OK. And then, every bit in the case with the Sermon on the Mount, information technology is sometimes the instance that the Bible utilizes ancient literary and historiographical conventions thatmodernistic historians would consider to be playing fast and loose with the facts. And that's OK. And then, as in the case of well-nigh of Scripture, the Bible tin can talk about God in crass anthropomorphic terms and not in the arcane only technically more precise idiom of philosophical theology. And that's OK. So, to some extent, God can change His religious and moral demands upon His people so as to change with the times. And that's OK. For Calvin, all of these things are to be establish in Scripture and therefore they must existOK. If y'all can become the hang of thisa posteriori way of thinking about the Bible, then you will have gotten the hang of Calvin'south doctrine of accommodation.
As should be articulate by now, the doctrine of accommodation is zip new. In fact, information technologyis the traditional mainstream arroyo to the Scriptures, even if American Evangelicalism has largely forgotten that fact. Information technology is simplywrong to call back that to be a traditional Christian means interpreting the Bible with the well-nigh wooden literalism we can manage. That is a weird quirk of modern Fundamentalism, not a tenet of the mainstream interpretive tradition of the Church.
Source: https://thejawboneofanass.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/divine-accommodation-and-calvin/
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