Saturday, August 8, 2009

All Scripture is anthropomorphic

From John Frame's chapter 'Images of God' in his book The Doctrine of God:

In one sense, as Herman Bavinck puts it, "all Scripture is anthropomorphic." All Scripture is written in human language, not some divine language. God's revelation is "accommodated," as Calvin liked to say, to human understanding. Scripture takes abstract attributes of God, no less than concrete images of him, from human life-words that have uses in our conversations about earthly things. This is the only kind of revelation there is. The purpose of revelation is communication, and so the very purpose of revelation is to get God's message into human terms. So Bavinck adds, "Whosoever, therefore, objects to anthropomorphism, thereby in principle denies the possibility of a revelation of God in his creatures." But we should not object to these, because there are genuine resemblances, amid great differences, between Creator and creature." (367)

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