'High' view of God (5) - Divine accommodation

One way one may try to deal with the ‘conflict’ between theology and text is to harmonise, or align, the text with one’s theology. That means that we are subjecting the Bible to our theology, giving a higher priority to our theology that is supposed to be based on Scripture.

Another way theologians tried to deal with this difficult issue is to ascribe the difference between text and theology to “Divine Accommodation”. Faced with the idea of the omniscient and immutable God ‘repenting’ (again Genesis 6:6), Calvin wrote that, “repentance cannot take place in God…. Certainly God is not sorrowful or sad; but remains for ever like himself in his celestial and happy repose…”. The only way to explain this apparent ‘oxymoron’, is to conclude that the incomprehensible God have to ‘speak our language’ (accommodate us) in order to be understood. Calvin continues by stating:

For since we cannot comprehend him as he is, it is necessary that, for our sake, he should, in a certain sense, transform himself…yet, because it cannot otherwise be known how great is God’s hatred and detestation of sin, therefore the Spirit accommodates himself to our capacity. [my emphasis]

Following Calvin line of reasoning, Matthew Henry (1994) explains the issue we are faced with in Genesis 6 as follows:

These are expressions after the manner of men, and must be understood so as not to reflect upon the honour of God’s immutability or felicity. This language does not imply any passion or uneasiness in God (nothing can create disturbance to the Eternal Mind), but it expresses his just and holy displeasure against sin and sinners, against sin as odious to his holiness and against sinners as obnoxious to his justice.

These explanations sound credible. However, we believe that God revealed himself to us through Scripture. Why would Scripture then reveal God in a way that he is not and how are we to decide whether this revelation renders a true image of who and how God is or is not?

As I mentioned before, this theology is based on a “Greek philosophical god-concept” by which “certain requirements or characteristics of ‘the divine’ gradually became general in the early church” (König 1978:73). The most prominent of these were “the dignum deo that was appropriated to God”. The idea of the dignum deo could not accommodate any form of anthropomorphism of God. Any idea of God having a body, being emotional or being able to change, was outright rejected. By implication, a worldview that is essentially foreign to Scripture have been superimposed on the text and took priority over what the text itself wants to communicate. Thus, while affirming a high regard of Scripture in theory, in practice, the Bible became subject to the reader’s own preconceived ideas. While advocating a high view of God and his Word, an image of God is created that is not based on Scripture.