DAY 174
CHALLENGE
“In Scripture, God has a physical form, doesn’t know things, learns new things, changes his mind, and so on, but modern philosophers and theologians portray God as immaterial, changeless, and perfect.”
DEFENSE
The early portions of Scripture describe God using anthropomorphic language accommodated to the original audience.
Divine revelation was given to mankind over a period of more than a thousand years. When God began to guide the Israelites, he initiated a “divine pedagogy” in which he “communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ” (CCC 53).
This is similar to helping children learn a subject. At an early stage, children are only able to grasp the rudiments of a field—whether theology or anything else. We thus must accommodate our explanations to what children are capable of understanding. But as they develop intellectually, we can give them a more sophisticated presentation of the topic.
The original Israelites were not culturally and intellectually pre- pared to understand God in the sophisticated way that the history of thought later made possible. They would have no more been able to understand the details of modern theology than they would have been able to understand the technical aspects of modern science. The needed concepts had not yet been developed.
Thus, particularly in Genesis, we find anthropomorphic images used to communicate things about God to the Israelites. He is de- scribed as walking in the garden (Gen. 3:8), asking questions (Gen. 3:9–13), “learning” things (Gen. 22:12–13), changing his mind (Gen. 6:6–7), and so on.
This mode of language involves symbols, but it conveys real truths about God (cf. CCC 42, 390). It therefore points beyond itself to the more refined understanding that God led his people to discover, ultimately giving them his definitive word in the person of Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:1–2; Jude 3). We see this process unfolding in Scripture itself, which elsewhere makes clear that God is immaterial (John 4:24; cf. Luke 24:39), all-knowing (Ps. 147:5; 1 John 3:20), and changeless (Num. 23:19; James 1:17).
In the 2,000 years since public revelation ended, further reflection has led to an ever-more refined understanding of the deposit of faith (John 14:26, 16:13).