Tag: Common Grace Series

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMMON GRACE AND SPECIAL GRACE?

Kuyper spends a lot of time in the latter parts of his Common Grace project working out the practical ways that special (or saving) grace overlaps and interacts with common grace. It is an observable deficiency of Kuyper’s treatment of Common Grace that he does not relate the gifts given by God in common grace explicitly to the work of Christ. Rather, he reasons that God is a good God and humankind are in His image and he gives gifts to them on that basis and for His own glory. Arguing for grace being shown on the basis of human beings being the image of God is problematic on an orthodox Christian basis because it would mean that, even in Hell there would be elements of God’s gracious favour present. Louis Berkhof, writing a couple of generations after Kuyper explains the reluctance that might be underpinning Kuyper’s treatment: “Reformed theologians generally hesitate to say that Christ by his atoning blood merited these blessings for the impenitent and reprobate.” Again, we see the tensions between doctrines of grace and reprobation in Reformed theology. The area of the relationship between the work of Christ and bestowal of common grace is a (potentially deliberately), undeveloped area in Kuyper which receives modern treatment from (de Graaf : 1981) and (Tuininga : 1966). However, it does have some antiquity preceding Kuyper as Scottish theologian and one of the founders the Free Church of Scotland William Cunningham writes: “It is not denied by the advocates of particular redemption, or of a limited atonement, that mankind in general, even those who ultimately perish, do derive some advantages or benefits from Christ’s death; and no position they hold requires them to deny this. They believe that important benefits have accrued to the whole human race from the death of Christ, and that in these benefits those who are finally impenitent and unbelieving partake. What they deny is that Christ intended to procure or did procure for all, those blessings which are the proper and peculiar fruits of his death in its specific character as an atonement…Many blessings flow to mankind at large from the death of Christ, collaterally and incidentally, in consequence of the relation in which men, viewed collectively, stand to each other.” (Cunningham : 1870, 332-333). Cunningham lived from 1805-1861 preceding Kuyper by a decade and a half, and considering Kuyper’s familiarity with British Reformed teachers, it is not presumptuous to assume he would have been aware of these thoughts.  John Murray gives a succinct treatment in his work Redemption Achieved and Applied where he writes, “The unbelieving and reprobate in this world enjoy numerous benefits that flow from the fact that Christ died and rose again. The mediatorial dominion of Christ is universal, Christ is head over all things and is given all authority in heaven and in earth. It is within this mediatorial dominion that all the blessings that men enjoy is dispensed. But this dominion Christ exercises on the basis and as the reward of the finished work of redemption… Consequently, since all benefits and blessings are within the realm of Christ’s dominion and since this dominion rests upon his finished work of atonement, the benefits innumerable which are enjoyed by all men indiscriminately are related to the death of Christ and may be said to accrue from it in one way or another… The denial of universal atonement does not carry with it the denial of any such relation that the benefits enjoyed by all men may sustain to Christ’s death and finished work.” (Murray : 2015, 59-60) And even more concisely, Louis Berkhof says in his Systematic Theology: “All that the natural man receives other than curse and death is an indirect result of the redemptive work of Christ.” (Berkhof : 1959)

REFERENCES

Berkhof, Louis. 1959. Systematic theology Banner of Truth.

Cunningham, W. 1870. Historical theology: A review of the principal doctrinal discussions in the christian church since the apostolic age.

de Graaf, S. G. 1981. Promise and deliverance (4 volumes). Trans. Gordon J. Spykman Paedia.

Murray, J. 2015. Redemption accomplished and applied Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Tuininga, J. 1966. The Christological basis of common grace Westminster Theological Seminary.

2) DOESN’T COMMON GRACE NULLIFY SPECIAL GRACE?

In a concern related to the one in the previous post, some voiced concern that teaching that God is in some way gracious to all people was a slippery slope to Universalism: the teaching that all people regardless of creed and practice will be saved by God. In this regard it is informative to note Kuyper’s outline of the situation of common grace with reference to other ‘graces’ of God shown to humankind. He writes that

“Covenant grace must come to expand into particular grace, but behind covenant grace there is yet a third phenomenon expanding into covenant grace, namely, common grace. So we find three emanations of God’s grace: a grace that applies to you personally, then a grace that you have in common with all God’s saints in the covenant, but also thirdly, a grace of God that you as a human being have in common with all people. There is nothing in this that does not glorify God. Your personal salvation is entirely the fruit of sovereign grace. Your blossoming as a branch, together with all the sacred branches of the Vine, is the result of nothing except sovereign grace bestowed upon you. But now also your progress in that redemption as a human being, by virtue of your ancestry, by your birth and your entire human life, is a gift, a kindness, an outworking of the very same grace of God.” (Kuyper : 2016, 5)

Thus he delineates at the start of his project, three specific manifestations of God’s grace to humankind, each bearing the character of gracious action but containing differing potencies.

REFERENCE

Kuyper, Abraham. 2015. Common Grace (Volume 1): God’s Gifts for a Fallen World (Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology) Lexham Press.

1) DOES COMMON GRACE DENY THE DOCTRINE OF REPROBATION?

As we saw outlined in Part 5, Herman Hoeksema, the PRC and others like them objected to the doctrine of common grace. This was chiefly because they saw in this teaching an outright refutation of the Reformed doctrine of reprobation; viz. that some people are actively not chosen by God for salvation in Christ and will thus face his judgement. If the doctrine of Common Grace actually did state this, it would make it untenable for a Reformed believer to hold to and remain thus. With specific regard to the argument that the doctrine of reprobation necessarily precludes the doctrine of common grace, John Murray writes: “The decree of reprobation is of course undeniable. But denial of the reality of temporal goodness and kindness, goodness and kindness as expressions of the mind and will of God, is to put the decree of reprobation so much out of focus that it eclipses the straightforward testimony of Scripture to other truths.” (Murray : 1942)

REFERENCE

Murray, John. 1942. Common grace  . Westminster Theological Journal 5 (1): 1-28.

Summing up the argument on the provenance of the doctrine of Common Grace (see part 3 and part 4), historical theologian Richard Muller comments that there is “good ground for concluding that the modern conception of ‘common grace’ finds its root more in the period of Reformed orthodoxy [the 1600’s] than in the era of Calvin and his contemporaries, given that many of the orthodox theologians were willing to define the gratia Dei [grace of God] as a bounty or graciousness extending to all creation.” (Muller : 2003, 572)

These sources are helpful in generally corroborating Kuyper’s thesis that common grace was not a novel theological doctrine so much as one underserved in its development. It fell to a later descendant of Kuyper – the similarly-named Herman Kuiper – to provide in his work Calvin on Common Grace (Kuiper : 1928) a commentary on the definitive collection of data from Calvin’s corpus in support of the theory that Calvin teaches that

1. There is a common grace of God given to all humankind
2. In God’s covenant, common grace extends to the reprobate

In the appendix, Kuiper offers a summary of other treatments of the doctrine of common grace, many of which remain in either Dutch or Latin. It is noteworthy that it is only at our contemporary point in history that the Dutch works of such a luminary as Kuyper are coming into English and this might be attributed to the dying out of the last generation of Dutch speakers in the American-Dutch diaspora. In his book Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture, James D. Bratt offers many insights into the subsequent effects that the doctrine of Common Grace had in shaping the Dutch communities in the USA. Chief amongst these are the rift in the Christian Reformed Church in North America which actually split over the issue in 1924. This was elicited by their formulation of the succinct doctrinal statement known as ‘The Three Points of Common Grace’ which is as follows:

 

1. In addition to the saving grace of God, shown only to those who are elected to eternal life, there is also a certain favor, or grace, of God shown to his creatures in general.
2. Since the fall, human life in society remains possible because God, through his Spirit, restrains the power of sin.
3. God, without renewing the heart, so influences human beings that, though incapable of doing any saving good, they are able to do civil good.

There is a more detailed version which makes reference to the confessional documents of Reformed believers known as the Three Forms of Unity (Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, and the Heidelberg Catechism). These proved unconvincing to a faction led by clergyman Herman Hoeksema who founded the Protestant Reformed Churches. A press release from the PRC outlines their genesis and some of the doctrinal issues which prompted it: “Founded in 1925 following the deposition of Rev. Herman Hoeksema and two other ministers from the Christian Reformed denomination, the primary distinctives of the Protestant Reformed Churches are denial of common grace and denial that synods and classes have the right to depose ministers and elders of local churches… Hoeksema had been a key leader in the termination of Dr. Ralph Janssen from Calvin Seminary in 1922 for teaching higher critical views of Scripture. Supporters of Janssen then accused Hoeksema of denying common grace. Synod 1924 received a number of protests against Hoeksema and in response drew up the so-called ‘Three Points of Common Grace,’ setting forth the view that although special grace is necessary for salvation, God has a favorable attitude toward reprobate people as well as the elect in that God offers salvation to all men, that he prevents the world from becoming as wicked as it could be, and that he enables all men to do certain civil good. Hoeksema refused to accept the ‘Three Points of Common Grace’ and as a result both he and the consistory of his church were deposed by Classis Grand Rapids East.” (Maurina : 1994) As of 2017 in the USA, the PRC is a significantly smaller denomination than the CRC with 8,055 and 235,921 members respectively.

REFERENCES

Kuiper, Herman. 1928. Calvin on common grace Oosterbaan & Le Cointre.

Maurina, Darrell Todd. 1994. Protestant reformed reach highest membership in history Reformed Believers Press Service (Press Release) 1994.

Muller, Richard A. 2017. Dictionary of latin and greek theological terms: Drawn principally from protestant scholastic theology Baker Academic.

Whilst common grace as a theological concept offers an answer to a genuine theological tension (outlined in part two), the motivating force in Abraham Kuyper’s development of the doctrine was practical: “Faith-based politics requires some common ground with people of fundamentally different convictions – at least to establish mutual intelligibility and respect for the rules of the game, and at most to build coalitions on issues of common interest” (Bratt : 2013, 198). But even if it was elicited by practical concerns, it was nevertheless a theological investigation. “He unfolded the concept in his theology column in De Heraut over a six-year period – from September 1895, soon after he had re-entered Parliament, until July 1901, when he was forming the cabinet.” (Bratt : 2013, 197-198) and the columns were published in the three volumes of De Gemeene Gratie (Common Grace) concurrently with his term as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper has been most famous in the English speaking world for his Lectures on Calvinism delivered in English at Princeton in 1898. This set of six lectures present a confessional Calvinist Christian vision for the whole of life and are deeply informed by Kuyper’s concurrent writing of De Gemeene Gratie in Dutch. Although the concerns were brought to the fore by Kuyper’s re-engagement with national politics, the theological programme he developed in De Gemeene Gratie represents a formalising of principles which had informed his wider social programme: as a church reformer, education reformer, journalist for at least the two preceding decades. Others in his orbit had written in a similar vein, notably Herman Bavinck’s rectoral address to the Theological School at Kampen at the end of 1894 (Bavinck : 1989).

In setting out to develop what he wishes to be a coherent and complete statement of a doctrine which he sees latent in Calvin he starts by engaging with Institutes 2.3.3. which concerns the corrupt nature of man. He notes that “When in the footsteps of Calvin, the attention primarily of Reformed theologians was specially directed to this extremely important subject, they managed to work out its main features, but without devoting a separate chapter to it. The subject was treated mostly in connection with “the virtues of the heathen,” “civic righteousness,” “the natural knowledge of God,” and so on, but without ever arranging all the various elements belonging to this subject into one ordered, coherent discussion.” (Kuyper : 2015, 7).

REFERENCES

Bavinck, Herman. 1989. De algemeene genade, rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de theologische school te kampen op 6 december 1894 (kampen: Zalsman, 1894); ET: “Herman Bavinck’s ‘Common grace,’ ” trans. R. C. van leeuwen. Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1): 36-65.

Bratt, James D. 2013. Abraham kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat Eerdmans.

Kuyper, Abraham. 2015. Common Grace (Volume 1): God’s Gifts for a Fallen World (Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology) Lexham Press.

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.

This series of posts will provide an introduction the protestant Christian doctrine of Common Grace in general and to begin a critical appraisal of its articulation by the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper. The overall aim is threefold:
1) To describe the theological content of the doctrine
2) To outline the historical conditions necessitating the doctrine
3) To highlight prominent strands of criticism and objections to the doctrine and their counterarguments.
It is necessary to begin with some general definitions of the overarching term, ‘grace’. Viewed externally, the Christian theological concept of grace might be described as “the expression of God’s love in his free unmerited favour or assistance.” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions : 2003) In religious studies and philosophy of religion, this then serves as a comparative term for the description of proximate concepts in other religious systems. Internally as a term of the church, grace is described as “the supernatural assistance of God bestowed upon rational beings with a view to their sanctification. While the need for this aid is generally admitted, the manner of it has been the subject of much discussion.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church : 2006) The second sentence in this description alludes to the broad area of discourse under which the doctrinal considerations of this paper will fall. A more theological reckoning states that “In the Bible, the term grace combines ideas in tension that point to profound mystery. Grace names the undeserved gift that creates relationships and the sustaining, responding, forebearing attitude‐plus‐action that nurtures relationships. Grace concerns the interaction between gracious person and graced recipient, involving the wills of both. The motives of the grace giver; the acceptance, rejection, or forgetfulness of the recipient; the forbearance of the giver; the entire dynamic of forgiveness; the life‐renewing impact of the gift—all these are at issue. All pertain whether the gracious one is divine or human. English translations interchange “grace,” “favour,” “mercy,” “compassion,” “kindness,” and “love” in probing the theme.” (Oxford Companion to the Bible : 1993, 259-260) 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.