That Scripture thus assigns to God the form, voice, actions, emotions, etc., of a human being not
only serves to show consideration for the uneducated and the weak; but we great and learned men,
who are versed in the Scriptures, are also obliged to adopt these simple images, because God has
presented them to us and has revealed Himself to us through them.
8
A discussion of God's accommodations in His Word, then, involves Scripture's anthropomorphisms
(ascribing human form or attributes to the Deity) and anthropopathisms (ascribing human feelings,
emotions, or passions to God). The ascription of human actions to God can be included under both terms.
Referring to both by the general use of the one term "anthropopathism," Tayler Lewis points out, "Why
talk of anthropopathism as if there were some special absurdity covered by this sounding term, when any
revelation conceivable must be anthropopathic? . . . There is no escape from it. Whatever comes in this
way to man must take the measure of man . . ."
9
John Lange, after noting the necessity of
anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms, focuses on the latter, noting that if we do not accept them we
will "have in the mind a total blank in respect to all those conceptions of God that most concern us as moral
beings."
10
He explains:
Talk as we will of impassibility, we must think of God as having pathe, affections, something
connecting him with the human . . . We must either have in our thoughts [with regard to God] a
blank intellectuality making only an intellectual difference between good and evil (if that can be
called any difference at all), or we are compelled to bring in something emotional, and that, too,
with a measure of intensity corresponding to other differences by which the divine exceeds the
human.
11
Lange concludes: "Without this, the highest form of scientific or philosophic theism has no more of
religion than the blankest atheism. We could as well worship a system of mathematics as such a theistic
indifference."
12
In other words, anthropopathisms, and anthropomorphisms, besides being the vehicles for
communicating to us truths about the Deity, give life to the text. They are particularly appropriate in the
Old Testament , where, Milton Terry writes, they are "the vivid concepts which impressed the emotional
Hebrew mind, and are in perfect keeping with the spirit of the language."
13
7
Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 6-14, Volume 2 of Luther's Works (trans. George Schick;
St. Louis: Concordia, 1960), p. 45.
8
Luther, p. 46.
9
Tayler Lewis, quoted by Milton Terry in Terry's Biblical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1969), p. 103, n. 1.
10
John Lange, Genesis, or, The First Book of Moses (trans. Tayler Lewis and A. Gosman; 5
th
ed. rev.; New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902), p. 288.
11
Lange, Genesis, p. 288.
12
Lange, Genesis, p. 288.
13
Terry, p. 103.