Accommodation (religion)

Accommodation (or condescension) is the theological principle that God, while being in His nature unknowable and unreachable, has nevertheless communicated with humanity in a way which humans can understand and respond to. The concept is that scripture has accommodated, or made allowance for, the original audience's language and general level of understanding. Often included in these ideas is the notion of human sinfulness or capacity; so in other words God accommodates himself to the human capacities of those to whom biblical revelation is given.

It has a long history reaching back into antiquity in Jewish biblical interpretation. It was taken up and developed by Christian theologians like Origen and Augustine, which ensured its continuance into the work of medieval biblical exegetes. Erasmus of Rotterdam employed it as did numerous Reformation theologians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin is a key developer of the concept, though contemporaries from Martin Luther to Ulrich Zwingli, Peter Martyr Vermigli and numerous others used it.

There has been scholarly debate about John Calvin's use of the concept of accommodation which continues to the present day. Scholars like E. David Willis and Ford Lewis Battles, and more recently Arnold Huijgen, have argued that Calvin developed the idea from sources related to classical rhetoric while others such as David F. Wright and Jon Balserak have argued that Calvin's usage of the idea of divine accommodation is too diffuse to fit into any concept (such as decorum) associated with rhetoric. None of these scholars are disputing Calvin's credentials as a Renaissance humanist but rather whether they explain his appreciation and use of divine accommodation. Both groups acknowledge Calvin's indebtedness to the Church Fathers from whom he appropriated the motif, or cluster of motifs, of divine accommodation.

It appears almost contradictory that the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible, is often described in terms of his supreme transcendence and the inability of limited, finite man to comprehend and know the God who is unlimited and infinite – the contradiction being that even this knowledge can be known by humanity and recorded in scripture. Although this may appear on the surface to be an illogicality, the status of the Christian God's unknowability is only true insofar as God acts not to reveal himself. In this line of thinking, no human being can ever hope to even understand or know God via their own powers of discernment. The principle of accommodation is that God has chosen to reveal aspects of himself to humanity in a way which humanity is able to understand.

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