Accommodation

Accommodation, a name given in theological phraseology to a method in Scripture interpretation which explains the form as not necessarily more than the vehicle by which divine and spiritual truth is conveyed to the human understanding. Without such an adaptation, the divine revelation would not be intelligible to man, and thus much of the symbolic method, especially of the Old Testament, is merely a compromise with human weakness. The method of Jesus, in his teaching, is also claimed as an example of accommodation, in his selection of familiar natural phenomena and ordinary human experiences, as the means of conveying to the mind abstract spiritual truths. The secondary fulfilments of prophecy, and the New Testament explanations of the manner in which these were seen in the life of Jesus, are supposed by some to be accommodations, to which Jesus and the writers of the Gospels assented for the sake of their didactic value.