For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Gregg Allison (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to explain the doctrine of divine accommodation.
The majority of people in the world believe in “God.”1 Of these people, the majority believe that this “God” created everything that exists.2 Of these “believers,” the majority hope that this “God” is knowable in some way.3 Our question becomes, then, “How can people know this ‘God?’”
Many people throughout the world focus on themselves as the answer to this question. They seek to know their “God” through engaging in religious ceremonies (for example, praying five times a day and going on a pilgrimage), following some law of freedom (for example, karma), focusing on self-denial through practices of abstinence or repudiation, seeking union with the cosmos or divine force, meditating to achieve self-emptying or an altered consciousness, and the like. That is, people initiate the way to know their “God.”
Christianity denies this is the way to know the one true living God, because there is no human starting point — nor can there be. On the contrary, God makes himself known to people. Christians answer the question, “How can people know God?” with one word: accommodation.
In this essay, I will define accommodation, give some analogies to help us better understand it, explore John Calvin’s contribution to this doctrine, call attention to attacks (one in particular) against it, highlight seven areas of the doctrine’s significance and implications, and offer a few questions for consideration and application.
Accommodation Defined
By way of definition, accommodation is “God’s act of condescending to human capacity in his revelation of himself.”4 In terms of the basic principle of accommodation, “for an infinite, perfect, and holy God to interact with finite, fallible, and fallen humanity, he must accommodate himself to our ability to understand him, coming down to our level so that we can grasp what he says and does.”5
The doctrine is closely associated with John Calvin, though it was certainly affirmed earlier in history. Calvin
underscored the appropriateness of God, who is infinitely exalted, accommodating himself to human weakness so that his adjusted revelation would be intelligible to its recipients. Indeed, God stoops like a mother when she communicates with her child. This accommodation is especially seen in Scripture: it is the Word of God written in limited human languages for sinful human beings with limited capacity to understand it, yet it does not participate in human error.6
Accommodation, then, acknowledges the need for God to “stoop” in order to reveal himself to us.
The above expression “God stoops like a mother when she communicates with her child” is just one of several metaphors/analogies theologians have used to portray divine accommodation. Others include a mother feeding her baby,7 a doctor prescribing medicine in accordance with his patient’s condition,8 an adult speaking with a child,9 a nurse “lisping” to an infant,10 or a schoolmaster teaching a young student.11
These helpful analogies underscore the condescension with which God acts as he seeks to make himself known through his communication in Scripture to human beings. Certainly, a mother, doctor, adult, nurse, and schoolmaster are of the same (human) nature as a baby, patient, child, infant, and young student. Such commonality shrinks the distance between the former and the latter. Such is not so with God, a divine being, in relation to human beings. God is infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient; human beings are finite, located, weak, uninformed. Such discontinuity exaggerates the chasm between the former and the latter.
Unsurprisingly, then, it is impossible for human beings to take the initiative to know God through even the best of human efforts. With this way to God shuttered, the only way for people to know him is by God making himself known to them.
This is divine accommodation.12
John Calvin on Accommodation
The leading Reformed voice on this doctrine was that of John Calvin (1509–1564).13 Two highlights of his significant contributions to the doctrine of divine accommodation are presented here.14
First, he used one of the powerful metaphors already noted. In his treatment of the Trinity, Calvin critiqued people who imagine that God is physical based on “the fact that Scripture often ascribes to him a mouth, ears, eyes, hands, and
