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Accommodation (or condescension) is the theological principle that God, while being in his nature unknowable and unreachable, has nevertheless communicated with humanity in a way which humans can understand and respond to. The concept is that scripture has accommodated, or made allowance for, the original audience's language and general level of understanding.〔McGrath, Alister. 1998. ''Historical Theology, An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought.'' Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. p.208-9.〕 The 16th-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin is a key developer of the concept, in response to that century's discoveries in natural science, foremost Copernicus' theory of heliocentrism that conflicted with medieval theological traditions of reading the Bible "through geocentric spectacles".〔McGrath. op.cit. p.207-10.〕 The concept of accommodation is thus an alternative method of Bible interpretation to the tradition of Biblical literalism, which, together with an insistence on traditional Bible interpretation, formed the basis for the Roman Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century.〔McGrath. op.cit. pp. 210-12〕 Accommodation is not an innovation of the Reformation Period, but "has a long tradition of use within Judaism and subsequently within Christian theology, and can easily be shown to have been influential within the patristic period."〔McGrath. op.cit. p. 208.〕 It appears almost contradictory that the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible, is often described in terms of his supreme transcendence and the inability of limited, finite man to comprehend and know the God who is unlimited and infinite – the contradiction being that even this knowledge can be known by humanity and recorded in scripture. Although this may appear on the surface to be an illogicality, the status of the Christian God's unknowability is only true insofar as God acts not to reveal himself. In this line of thinking, no human being can ever hope to even understand or know God via their own powers of discernment. The principle of accommodation is that God has chosen to reveal aspects of himself to humanity in a way which humanity is able to understand. This principle helps to underline other parts of Christian theology, especially the role of God in supervising the writing of the Bible. While the Bible itself claims that humans are limited and sinful and can make mistakes, God has nevertheless supervised the writing of the Bible to ensure that no mistakes were made. This belief was generally held throughout the historical Christian church, and is still held by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians today. ==The Bible== Throughout the history of the Christian church, it has been generally held that the Bible – both the Old Testament and the New Testament – were divinely inspired. The principle of accommodation allows for both the ability of the Bible to communicate objective spiritual truths about the nature of God, as well as the ability of the human authors to act as God's means by which this is to be communicated to humanity. While it is true that the authors themselves were limited and prone to mistakes, accommodation allows for the perfect and truthful God to work in and through his human agents in order to reveal information about himself that is sufficient and complete. It is obvious that even the means which God uses are imperfect and limited: Ezekiel 1:28 finds the author struggling to put down in words what he was experiencing as he stood in the presence of God; 1 Corinthians 13:9-12 mentions that what we see now – what God has chosen to reveal to us – is "but a poor reflection". The fact that God has chosen to use the limited in order to reveal the unlimited may seem hard to understand, but is easy to accept once the notion of an infinite, all-powerful God is presupposed. Linked to this idea is the added complication of human languages. Church tradition (including more recent statements of faith like the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and the Cambridge Declaration) holds to the belief that only the original Hebrew Old Testament text and the original Greek New Testament text can be clearly identified as God's word. Therefore, any human translation of the original language will automatically not be considered God's inspired word – which naturally includes the 5th century Latin Vulgate, as well as today's more contemporary translations. Yet accommodation allows for the belief that despite this natural linguistic barrier, God still has the power to use such translations in order to reveal his nature to people. This means, of course, that Christians don't have to learn Ancient Hebrew and Greek in order to hear what God has to say. This all may seem to be a contradiction: # Only the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament can be considered the word of God. # God will use translations of the original languages to present the truth of himself to human beings. Yet it could also be argued that, given that this is correct, we as human beings, by our very nature, are incapable of understanding why it is true. Traditional Christian theology asserts that it is through the work of the Holy Spirit within the individual that God the Father is able to communicate to them via the words of the Bible. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Accommodation (religion)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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