Accommodating Speech
I am sure we have all noticed the many places in Scripture where it seems as if God is described as having body parts or else acting in ways that ordinarily require body parts. Other times God is depicted as having thoughts or emotions, or making choices in the same way that human beings do. Each of these are what serious students of the Bible come to find out to be a figure of speech.
When we hear the words assigned to these manners of speaking, perhaps we are bound to think it is a kind of trick, a card to play for the Christian to make some exception for something that is clearly an embarrassment in the biblical text. But in fact it is so frequent in Scripture that one is forced to conclude that the biblical authors were well aware of its awkwardness.
Here I will discuss two species of this way of speaking, both of which start with the same root word—an anthropomorphism and an anthropopathism.
Anthropomorphism
An anthropomorphism is a kind of figurative speech whereby God depicts himself in the form (morphe) of a man (anthropos). Here the focus is more on the appearance, visible and, one might think, physical dimensions. These are either descriptions of body parts or movements that imply such bodily existence.
For example, we are told that, “the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth” (2 Chr. 16:9). Moreover, figures like “everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27), and “the arm of the LORD” (Isa. 51:9), are meant to communicate the security and the power of God’s salvation. In one place, the LORD even says that if the people “will seek my face … I will hear from heaven” (2 Chr. 7:14). Here we might try to envision not only ears and a face, but also—more understandably—we might think of heaven as a physical location. Likewise, “God saw” (Gen. 1:4), was “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8); or “when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma” (Gen. 8:21).
Now what is the obvious dilemma? Jesus tells us that “God is Spirit” (Jn. 4:24) and that “a spirit does not have flesh and bones” (Lk. 24:39). God does not have a body; and yet the Scriptures use these bodily expressions of Him all the same.
Anthropopathism
It is one thing to be able to understand that God does not have a body, and so to place all such passages in their figurative perspective. It is another thing to come to texts that speak of God having thoughts or feelings that seem to arise in time, or in reaction to events in time, or which depict God doing one thing other than what it seemed previously to say that He would do.
That last category involves what are called “counterfactuals,” so named because the hypothetical state of affairs expresses what is counter, or contrary, to what has in fact happened. Yet such texts usually hinge on the appearance of God changing something in His inner life.
As the notion of body parts would contradict the simplicity of God, so any effect in God’s inner life would contradict his omniscience (if any unit of knowledge is gained), impassibility (if its a passion arising), or immutability (if there is any such change).
In Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, 1 Samuel 15:11, 35, and Jonah 3:9-10, we see God relenting. The Genesis and Samuel texts even express the emotion of regret or sorrow. In the King James Version of the Exodus passage, we are told that God even “repented” of the judgment he would have brought on Israel. What do we make of these events?
The first thing to do is often to define our terms. Most basically, to “repent” means to turn from one thing to another. All that this requires is that God turned events from one consequence that He would bring about to another. The sorrow or regret that is described is a means of showing what God disapproves of—a statement more about the object in view in light of an eternal disposition, rather than any effect in the divine essence. These are called anthropopathisms from that same word for man (anthropos), but now attaching the word for “feeling” or “emotion” or “passion” (pathos).
Why Would the Bible Use Such Accommodations?
The purpose of these figures of speech is to explain one or a few things at a time so that we can understand the relevant point. This has been called “accommodation” or “condescension”—two words which incidentally have also morphed in modern English. All that it means is that God (and, watch, I am going to do it right here in this sentence)—that God “comes down to our level.” Does the divine essence really “come down” to our level? But hopefully the reader gets the point. He communicates Himself in a form of speech and in the use of images that will help us grasp the main point without having to encompass the totality of rabbit trails.
If God had to tell everything about himself in order to tell us anything about himself, things would never get started and we would never arrive at the original point of the speech. Far from being a rabbit-in-the-hat for the Christian apologist, such accommodating speech has a very good reason for itself.
And in fact, if we are being honest for a moment, we might even catch ourselves attributing to our own spiritual activity language that is bodily. We do it all the time.
We say things like “I see your point.” No you don’t. Such a thing as this kind of “point” cannot be seen with eyes. Are you starting to hear the music? Or do you catch my drift? Not too fast: let’s pace ourselves.
Get the point?
In fact we are cheating when we call unintelligible or arbitrary about divine speech what we do countless times a day in human speech.
Let me give one more biblical example.
Sometimes the eyes of the Lord speak to someone being found pleasing to God, so that “Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Gen. 6:8), while other times his eyes are a way of speaking of a moral valuation. For example, “Asa did what was right in the eyes of the LORD” (1 Kings 15:11). Eyes from a view. They set a value. How does such a “view” or “valuation” take place in the actual divine life? Well, let’s just say that it would take a lifetime to explain. So He sets before us “eyes,” to tell us something important, expecting of us enough maturity to remember that he doesn’t literally have eyes, so that by “the eyes of our mind,” we might ascend to the higher truth in view. And He speaks of this favor having been “found” not by a searching God but by a needy Noah and by a king waiting for his weight in the balance.
The Case of Jonah 3:10
The matter of what are often called counterfactuals is the most difficult part of this to think about. The Scripture says about Nineveh,
“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it” (v. 10).
First, God SAW; second, God RELENTED; third what God said he WOULD do, he did not do. We have already covered how God seeing does not mean he literally has eyes, and that God relenting means only a turn in the narrative from one consequence to its opposite. There is no avoiding deep theologizing in our final step.
The seventeenth century Reformed theologian, Francis Turretin, rightly divides how we are to think of God doing what he otherwise would not, and letting it hinge (in some sense) on human action. But in what way?
“It is one thing for the thing decreed to be conditional; another for the decree itself. The former we grant, but not the latter. There can be granted an antecedent cause or condition of the thing willed, but not immediately of the volition itself.”1
God decreed the Ninevites to repent on this occasion; He did not decree them to resist. And so for the inspired author to speak of what God “would have done” only refers to the natural consequence of the possible world in which they resisted. It is not meant for the reader to pontificate whether or not the actual outcome was ever in “divine doubt.”
The Bible is written to the widest audience, that none may have an excuse. It is not a set of theses for philosophers to debate. Divine speech accommodates human understanding on a “need to know” basis.
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1. Francis Turretin, Institutes, I.4.3.9
