Accommodation and Criticism

Calvin described Scripture as an accommodation to human capacities – God babbles to us like a parent to a baby. Spinoza and Galileo appealed to the same principle. For Galileo, it was a way of retaining the truth of Scripture, at least as regards matters of faith, while also maintaining his new scientific discoveries that seemed to violate the sense of Scripture: “these propositions dictated by the Holy Spirit were expressed by the sacred writers in such a way as to accommodate the capacities of the very unrefined and undisciplined masses, for those who deserve to rise above the common people it is therefore necessary that wise interpreters formulate the true meaning and indicate the specific reasons why it is expressed by such words.”

Spinoza’s use of the theory was more all-encompassing: “Scripture, being particularly adapted to the needs of the common people, continually speaks in merely human fashion, for the common people are incapable of understanding higher things . . . . In this way the Prophets made up a whole parable depicting God as a king and lawgiver, because he had revealed the means that lead to salvation and perdition, and was the cause thereof.”

Both Galileo and Spinoza charged that without the principle of accommodation, the Bible would be blasphemous, since it would attribute body parts, passions, and actions to God that are not worthy of God.