Degrees of understanding of God

GOD needs to talk to us in our own language. As the Anglican poet Malcolm Guite puts it: “Hail your God in any language, he replies in your personal mother tongue” (David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms; Canterbury Press, 2021) (Poet’s Corner , 22 January 2021). When you think about the matter, that’s the only way that God can communicate with us. To paraphrase Paul, “[God] makes himself all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9.22).

God has to make himself sufficiently small to enter through the narrow gate of our minuscule human understanding. According to Neil D. Lawrence, the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning on the University of Cambridge (The Atomic Human, Allen Lane, 2024), the bandwidth, or rate of communication of a human brain, is about 2000 bits of data per minute, while that of a pc is 60 billion bits per minute. God’s bandwidth, after all, is infinite.

GOD talking to us in a language we are able to understand is an example of God’s humility: “Just as a human mother stoops right down to reach her child, so God stoops to come back to our level” (Alistair McGrath, Christian Theology: An introduction; Blackwell, 1993). Calvin identified that, within the Old Testament, God selected to talk to the patriarchs in words and ideas comprehensible to wandering nomadic tribes (McGrath, op. cit.).

When I worked as a physician in Malawi, it was apparent that the Malawians could relate on to the Old Testament stories in a way that we Westerners don’t: until relatively recently, that they had shared an analogous lifestyle. I recall a moving Bible study on the book of Ruth with a gaggle of my Malawian midwife colleagues. For us Westerners, one problem with the book of Ruth is that an important relationship is that between Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, not the connection between Ruth and her husband. But for Malawian midwives, this was obvious: it was their lived, day-to-day reality. They shared a kitchen and a household with their mothers-in-law. Their husbands they saw only briefly.

CALVIN called the concept that God adapts his words to his hearers “accommodation”. For him, this meant not only speaking within the language of the hearers, but additionally communicating with people whose minds and understanding had been darkened by sin (see, for instance, 1 Corinthians 2.14, 3.1-3).

The concept of accommodation might be present in earlier writers — Augustine uses it widely, and never only in biblical interpretation. For him, as for Calvin later, the supreme act of accommodation is the Incarnation (Edward J. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, Columbia University Press, 1952).

Humans are so different from God that, unaided, we are able to say almost nothing about him. It is God who has to achieve out to us. And he does so through revelation: within the scriptures, and, supremely, in his son, Jesus. But, with a view to make that reaching out comprehensible to us, he has to accommodate his revelation to our understanding.

TO GIVE a human example, accommodation is utilized by teachers of chemistry. For GCSE, students are taught a model of atoms as consisting of a solid nucleus around which spin electrons, fairly as planets spin across the sun. When they move on to A level, nevertheless, these same students at the moment are taught that electrons can move only in certain fixed orbits, and require a selected quantum of energy to maneuver between orbits.

Then, if these students are fortunate enough to make it to school, they are going to learn that electrons should not easy little balls of matter, but can behave each as particles and as waves. Finally, the scholars will learn that electrons are such that we are able to never know exactly each their speed and placement.

Clearly, chemistry teachers have accommodated essentially the most accurate picture of electrons they know — that derived from quantum physics — at several different levels, to permit for the understanding of pupils of various ages. Why should God not do the identical for us?

PEOPLE are sometimes advised to start out reading the New Testament by selecting the one in every of the 4 Gospels that appeals to them most directly. Looking on the Gospels, it seems as if Jesus is talking to each evangelist in his own language —or not less than as if each evangelist heard Jesus in his own language. Is there a parallel here with Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit enabled the gang to listen to the apostles in such a way that “everybody in the gang heard their very own language being spoken” (Acts 2.6)?

John, in his Gospel, records Jesus delivering a philosophical discourse drenched within the Hebrew scriptures. Mark, in contrast, has Jesus sharing the pithy wisdom of a Galilean artisan. Was this because Mark himself could hear and understand only folk wisdom, and never philosophy?

THE idea of accommodation is just not unique to Christian theology. It permeates the Talmud (The Footprints of God: Divine accommodation in Jewish and Christian thought, Stephen D. Benin, State University of New York Press, 1993). The Qu’ran also teaches that God speaks to us in our own language: “We [Allah] didn’t send any messenger except [speaking] within the language of his people to state clearly for them” (Chapter 14, surat ib’rahim, verse 4; Sahih International translation).

The context seems to suggest that God spoke to prophets similar to Moses in Hebrew, just as he’s talking to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic. But this verse has also been interpreted to mean that, although the Qu’ran is in Arabic, it’s a universal message for all.

PERHAPS Jesus really did speak fairly just like the Jesus recorded in John. After all, John’s Gospel has turned out to be surprisingly accurate — more accurate than the synoptics in some archaeological details. Did Peter, the Galilean fisherman, remember and pass on to Mark only the bits of Jesus’s speeches that he understood?

This suggestion is the alternative of the widespread assumption that the words of Jesus in John are the fruits of a lifetime’s reflection and elaboration by John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, on the words Jesus actually spoke — words that are more accurately reflected within the synoptics. Which is nearer the reality?

In the top, it matters little which is closer to the literal version of what Jesus said: the Gospel of John or the synoptics. Jesus was, in any case, speaking in Aramaic, not New Testament Greek, in order that neither version is a word-for-word rendering. Unlike the Qur’an, the Gospels don’t claim to be a literal record of the words that God spoke.

IF GOD speaks to us in our own language because he chooses to do that, and since it’s the only way he can communicate with us, it follows that, if we wish to talk to others about God, we must speak of their language.

Sometimes, theological education can focus too exclusively on learning about God, but we must also listen fastidiously, and for quite a protracted time, to learn the language of those to whom we’re sent before we begin to speak. Until we learn their language, what we have now learned about God can’t be communicated.

Dr Gervase Vernon is a retired GP.