Accommodation

Accommodation March 2, 2015

Brian Howell’s In the Eyes of God is a substantial contribution to the discussion of theological language and to our understanding of the workings of biblical anthropomorphism. His approach rests on the “three legs” of “the biblical depiction of the divine-human relationship, divine Speech Acts, and context-sensitive metaphorical interpretation” (57). 

Metaphor here is understood in a strong sense, not merely as literary window-dressing but as a conceptually rigorous way of knowing and speaking. On Howell’s semantic understanding of metaphor, metaphors have specifiable entailments in particular contexts, and thus are able to make truth-claims. To speak of metaphor here isn’t to dismiss it as “only slightly true” but rather to highlight As the title indicates, the book focuses on the biblical metaphor of divine sight, a rich vein of imagery that Howell unpacks in its various meanings throughout the book.

Using this approach, Howell concludes that “there is a spectrum of meaning within any given divine predicate that is neither located exclusively within the human, nor the divine realms. Rather, this semantic field ranges from the ‘natural’ to the ‘supernatural,’ with both God and humans potentially capable, with some concessions, of action involving elements of both ends of the spectrum. . . . the fact that there denotations can be transferred to the divine and human subjects demonstrates that the nature of the action is derived as much from its context as its actor” (57). It is not simply projection, then, to say “God sees.”

One of the main alternatives to this metaphorical account of anthropomorphism has been the notion of divine accommodation. According to Calvin, for instance, the Bible’s talk about God’s changing His mind is accommodated to human capacities. God doesn’t actually do anything that can be described as changing His mind, but the Bible speaks as if He does so that we can understand something of the ineffable divine character.

Howell rightly shatters this model. On this specific point, he argues that “Calvin’s exegesis of such texts is theologically-driven to the point of muting the individual senses of the terms” (31). More generally, he asks “What exactly would the biblical text have to say to prove that God changes His mind?” (32). Accommodation “rules out any possible conditions for God’s change of mind.” Biblical readers are somehow to know before they come to the text that God cannot change His mind, and nothing the text says can dislodge that assumption. Most seriously, “accommodation can mute the sense of the text” (32).

Howell points to Nicholas of Lyra’s treatment of “God forgets” as a positive examine. In dealing with Genesis 8:1, Nicholas says, “One is said to forget someone when he will not free him from present difficulties though he is able to; and one is said to remember him when he begins to help him” (32). Howell notes that Nicholas “recognizes that the idiom ‘to forget’ can mean other things than simple lack of cognitive ability to recall, even with human subjects” (33). There is no need to appeal to divine accommodation here; both God and humans are capable of “forgetting” in the contextually relevant sense. The text doesn’t really address the question of whether God can lose track of information, and so there’s no need for the problematic apparatus of accommodation.


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