It was taken up and developed by Christian theologians like Origen and Augustine, which ensured its continuance into the work of medieval and Reformation biblical exegetes.
Divine Wisdom speaks to us in baby-talk and like a loving mother accommodates its words to our state of infancy"The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin is a notable developer of the concept, though contemporaries from Martin Luther to Ulrich Zwingli, Peter Martyr Vermigli and numerous others used it.
[7] The belief that God has been able to sufficiently accommodate and communicate to humanity, despite the failings and limitations of the latter, is given its supreme form in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Church tradition[clarification needed] (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.
Traditional Christian theology[clarification needed] 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.
One view, associated with John Calvin, holds that while some of the expressions and metaphors used in the Bible may be literally false, they are nonetheless essentially true.
Thus, there are two possible kinds of Biblical accommodation: one which holds that merely the expressive form of the Bible is modified to accord with human capacities; and a stronger version, which holds that the content of the Bible is modified to conform with human perceptions of divine reality, to the extent that it may be literally false.
Scholars like E. David Willis and Ford Lewis Battles, and more recently Arnold Huijgen, have argued that Calvin developed the idea from sources related to classical rhetoric[18] while others such as David F. Wright and Jon Balserak have argued that Calvin's usage of the idea of divine accommodation is too diffuse to fit into any concept (such as decorum) associated with rhetoric.
Gospel preaching is one of the most important facets of the Calvinistic principle of accommodation, for in it humankind is held to experience God's redemptive power through the work of the Spirit.