>From: PHSEELY@aol.com
> The reformed theologian Charles Hodge, who was certainly the epitome of
> orthodoxy, accepted the fact that the firmament in Gen 1 is solid, and
> explained the fact that it was in Scripture by appealing to Calvin's idea of
> accommodation to the ways of thought of the rude and unlearned. (Syst Theol
> 1, chp 10, pp. 569-70).
1. A question. Was Calvin the first to craft this strategy of declaring the
text an "accommodation to the ways of thought of the rude and unlearned"? I
recall having seen it it earlier writers, such as Aquinas.
2. A comment. This strikes some people as no more than a clever strategy for
escaping the possibility that the text _really is_ a collection of honest
but fallible reflections by the "rude and unlearned" on their authentic
experience of the divine presence. Is the accommodation strategy any more
substantive than saying of a duck, "Yes, it looks like a duck, walks like a
duck, and sounds like a duck, but we know that it's really a lovely swan in
disguise"?
3. The question then becomes, How does one tell the difference between a
text that (1) is a set of _divine revelations_ whose written form has, by
the Spirit's direction, been crafted in the conceptual vocabulary, literary
styles and limited knowledge base of the "rude and unlearned," or (2)
actually is a thoroughly _human account_ of an authentic human experience of
the divine presence, written in the conceptual vocabulary, literary styles
and limited knowledge base of the writers?
Howard Van Till
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