Most are aware of what Calvin wrote about divine accommodation:
“For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, god is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.” (Institutes I.13.1)
Where did Calvin
get this idea from? Huijgen suggests from Erasmus – “Divine Accommodation” p123.
But what about
this quote from Zwingli from his “Friendly Exegesis” sent to Luther in 1527? He
is trying to get Luther to understand the use of tropes and other figures of
speech in Scripture
“But before I
undertake the explanation of the words of the Lord, I shall have to say a few
words upon the collation of the Scriptures, namely, that after the human tongue
began, by means of tropes and figures and varieties of expression, to season
its speech with sweet smelling spices, or paint it with varying hues, as it
were, then the divine Goodness (which everywhere babbles to us like parents to
their infants, and uses our own language), condescended in talking with us, to
use our own tropes and figures.” H Wayne Pipkin “Huldrych Zwingli Writings” Vol
2, p350
Antequam autem ad verborum domini expositionem accedamus, paucula
nobis de scripturarum collatione praemittenda erunt; ista videlicet, quod
posteaquam humanum os coepit tropis, figuris ac locutionibus orationem veluti
odoribus aut pigmentis condere et variegare, divinam quoque bonitatem (quae ubique
parentum instar nobiscum balbutit linguaque nostra loquitur) huc sese
demisisse, ut et ipsa nobiscum loquens tropis ac schęmatismis nostris uteretur.
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