GOD needs to speak to us in our own language. As the Anglican poet Malcolm Guite puts it: “Hail your God in any language, he replies in your own mother tongue” (David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms; Canterbury Press, 2021) (Poet’s Corner , 22 January 2021). When you consider the matter, that is 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 small enough to enter through the narrow gate of our minuscule human understanding. According to Neil D. Lawrence, the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at 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 information per minute, while that of a computer is 60 billion bits per minute. God’s bandwidth, of course, is infinite.
GOD speaking to us in a language we can understand is an example of God’s humility: “Just as a human mother stoops down to reach her child, so God stoops to come to our level” (Alistair McGrath, Christian Theology: An introduction; Blackwell, 1993). Calvin pointed out that, in the Old Testament, God chose to speak to the patriarchs in words and concepts comprehensible to wandering nomadic tribes (McGrath, op. cit.).
When I worked as a doctor in Malawi, it was apparent that the Malawians could relate directly to the Old Testament stories in a way that we Westerners do not: until relatively recently, they had shared a similar way of life. I recall a moving Bible study on the book of Ruth with a group of my Malawian midwife colleagues. For us Westerners, one problem with the book of Ruth is that the most important relationship is that between Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, not the relationship 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 in the language of the hearers, but also communicating with people whose minds and understanding had been darkened by sin (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 2.14, 3.1-3).
The concept of accommodation can be found in earlier writers — Augustine uses it widely, and not 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 can say almost nothing about him. It is God who has to reach out to us. And he does so through revelation: in the scriptures, and, supremely, in his son, Jesus. But, in order to make that reaching out comprehensible to us, he has to accommodate his revelation to our understanding.
TO GIVE a human example, accommodation is used by teachers of chemistry. For GCSE, students are taught a model of atoms as consisting of a solid nucleus around which spin electrons, rather as planets spin around the sun. When they move on to A level, however, these same students are now taught that electrons can move only in certain fixed orbits, and require a specific quantum of energy to move between orbits.
Then, if these students are fortunate enough to make it to university, they will learn that electrons are not simple little balls of matter, but can behave both as particles and as waves. Finally, the students will learn that electrons are such that we can never know exactly both their speed and location.
Clearly, chemistry teachers have accommodated the most accurate picture of electrons they know — that derived from quantum physics — at several different levels, to allow for the understanding of pupils of different ages. Why should God not do the same for us?
PEOPLE are sometimes advised to start reading the New Testament by choosing the one of the four Gospels that appeals to them most directly. Looking at the Gospels, it seems as if Jesus is speaking to each evangelist in his own language —or at least as if each evangelist heard Jesus in his own language. Is there a parallel here with Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit enabled the crowd to hear the apostles in such a way that “each person in the crowd heard their own language being spoken” (Acts 2.6)?
John, in his Gospel, records Jesus delivering a philosophical discourse drenched in 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 not philosophy?
THE idea of accommodation is 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] did not send any messenger except [speaking] in 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 such as Moses in Hebrew, just as he is speaking to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic. But this verse has also been interpreted to mean that, although the Qu’ran is in Arabic, it is a universal message for all.
PERHAPS Jesus really did speak rather 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 opposite 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 which are more accurately reflected in the synoptics. Which is nearer the truth?
In the end, 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, so that neither version is a word-for-word rendering. Unlike the Qur’an, the Gospels do not 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 this, and because it is the only way he can communicate with us, it follows that, if we wish to speak to others about God, we must speak in their language.
Sometimes, theological education can focus too exclusively on learning about God, but we must also listen carefully, and for quite a long time, to learn the language of those to whom we are sent before we start to speak. Until we learn their language, what we have learned about God cannot be communicated.
Dr Gervase Vernon is a retired GP.