At least from the Reformation onwards, common practice has been to associate the doctrine of grace strongly with God’s work in freely (viz. gratuitously), saving sinners. Because of the concomitant insistence on the Bible being rightly understood as teaching righteousness with God being solely a product of God’s gracious action, Reformed thinkers and writers have been very reluctant to allow the term of ‘grace’ to be applied either to works of God towards humankind short of salvation or that are perceived to deal outside the covenant universal salvation – what might be termed ‘universal grace’ (Kuyper : 2015, 596-598).
John Calvin and his work Institutes of the Christian Religion stand respectively as the preeminent founding theologian and the essential grundschrift of the Reformed tradition. In Institutes, Calvin sets forth a Biblical worldview in contradistinction to Roman Catholicism, positioning the whole of humankind as implicated in Adam’s Fall, thus bound to sin and thoroughly helpless before God (Calvin, Instit. 2.1-5), nevertheless a portion of humanity are gratuitously elected to experience the saving favour of God through Jesus Christ (Calvin, Instit. 3.21-24). For the adherent of Calvinism (or of one of its ‘descendant’ forms), this combination of doctrines sets up a tension regarding the attitude of God towards the portion of humanity outside of his electing Grace. One needs to account for God’s seeming goodness towards those who do not or will not acknowledge or worship him as they should. The Bible teaches that God is benevolent towards those who despise him in various places, notably Isaiah 26:10 where grace is said to be shown to the wicked and especially including the words of Christ in Luke 6:35 – “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” John Murray poses from a Calvinist point of view, the problem that the doctrine of common grace seeks to answer: “How is it that men who still lie under the wrath and curse of God and are heirs of hell enjoy so many good gifts at the hand of God? How is it that men who are not savingly renewed by the Spirit of God nevertheless exhibit so many qualities, gifts and accomplishments that promote the preservation, temporal happiness, cultural progress, social and economic improvement of themselves and of others? How is it that races and peoples that have been apparently untouched by the redemptive and regenerative influences of the gospel contribute so much to what we call human civilization? To put the question most comprehensively: how is it that this sin-cursed world enjoys so much favour and kindness at the hand of its holy and ever-blessed Creator?” (Murray : 1975, 93).
“There was in that sinful world, outside the church,” writes Kuyper, “so much that was beautiful, that was worthy of esteem, that provoked jealousy. This placed a choice before people: either deny all this good, contrary to better knowledge, and join the ranks of the Anabaptists, or suggest that fallen humanity had not fallen so deeply after all, and thereby succumb to the Arminian heresy. Placed before this choice, the Reformed confession refused to go with either one. We may not close our eyes to the good and the beautiful outside the church, among unbelievers, in the world. This good exists, and that had to be acknowledged. At the same time we may hardly minimize in any way the pervasive depravity of sinful [human] nature. So then the solution of this apparent contradiction lay in this, that outside the church grace operates among pagans in the midst of the world. This grace is neither an everlasting grace nor a saving grace, but a temporal grace for the restraint of ruin that lurks within sin.” (Kuyper : 2015, 9)
To furnish his answer to the question, Kuyper reaches back into the theological resources provider by previous protestant reformers, being very diligent in maintaining a the thorough emphasis on God’s sovereignty in the affairs of humankind. James Bratt writes that, although this what Kuyper had in view was not a saving grace “it was real grace nonetheless, the unmerited favour of God, shed upon all people, for it extended through the whole cosmos, just like the reign of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. It touched the body as well as the soul, peoples as well as persons, things ‘secular’ as well as ‘sacred’. In brief, common grace addressed an old problem in Reformed theology with a classic Reformed answer while warranting Kuyper’s new Calvinistic initiative.” (Bratt : 2013, 198)
REFERENCES
Kuyper, Abraham. 2015. Common Grace (Volume 1): God’s Gifts for a Fallen World (Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology) Lexham Press.
Murray, John 1975, Collected Writings Volume 2 : Systematic Theology Banner of Truth
Bratt, James D. 2013. Abraham kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat Eerdmans.