Many theologians suggest that whatever truth may be found in the Bible is relative to the world view of the culture in which it was written. According to them, God has accommodated himself to the mistaken notions of the ancient Near East in His communication to us through the Bible. This viewpoint was never widely held until the rise of liberal theology in the eighteenth century,1 and assumes that God either cannot or does not communicate with us in such a way as to give us truth unencumbered with the false ideas of the people whom he inspired.
The theory of cultural accommodation is therefore the result of an antisupernaturalistic bias which is incompatible with the Bible's treatment of itself.
Along these lines, J. Robertson McQuilkin has written: My problem with the approach is simply that I find it nowhere enunciated in the Bible. Where in Scripture are we told that the specific declarations of God's truth and God's will for men are not normative, but only the principles that lie behind them?2
As McQuilkin observes, to set aside a particular Biblical teaching in such a way as to allow only the underlying principle to be normative "is to impose an extra-biblical notion and violate the authority of Scripture."3 He continues as follows:
If Scripture itself does not identify which teaching is founded upon the nature of God or the ordinances of creation and which teaching is purely culturally based, on what grounds do I make such a distinction? It seems to me that those grounds become my authority.4
Because the Bible claims to be the written record of the words of God, we cannot assume that it is "culture bound" without dismissing its claims. If we dismiss its claims, but continue to look to it as our authority, we are no longer treating it with integrity, because, as we have seen, it is insistent in its assertion that those who do not accept its claims are in rebellion against God.
1 Paul D. Feinberg, "A Response to Adequacy of Language and Accommodation," in Earl D. Radmacher and Robert D. Preus, eds., Hermeneutics, Inerrancy, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), p. 388.
2 J. Robertson McQuilkin, "Normativeness in Scripture," in Earl D. Radmacher and Robert D. Preus, eds., Hermeneutics, Inerrancy, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), p. 227.
3 Ibid., p. 228.
4 Ibid.
