Tag: #kuyper

As part of the stabilising of creation, God causes animals to fear humans and permits them to be taken as food. The right to all animal life belongs to God and we are only allowed to eat meat because he grants it. Having said that ‘everything that lives and moves can be used as food’, there has to be a further stabilising restraint that institutes safeguards against the killing of humans.

In Genesis 9:6, God institutes judicial killing of the murderer specifically because he or she has attacked the image of God. It is civil government (and not private individuals) which has been given the delegated authority of God to mete out capital punishment and the commandment is not rescinded under the New Covenant, as Romans 13 attests.

Kuyper begins his scriptural survey of the doctrine of Common Grace not with the creation of humankind in God’s image, nor at the Fall, but at the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9. By way of introduction, he notes that Common Grace concerns the blessings of God to all humanity and may be thought of as, in a sense, preceding Covenant Grace and Saving Grace. People have had a tendency to collapse the covenant with Noah into the Abrahamic covenant and therefore addressed to God’s covenant people concerning their salvation. Kuyper argues that this covenant is both broader than that and has a different purpose in view.

The purpose of the Noahic covenant is the stabilising of creation post-Fall to allow for its flourishing. The situation of chaos and increasing human evil which Genesis 6 alludes to elicits God’s judgement in the form of the Flood, which sets the stage for a merciful intervention of God. “The restraining power proceeding from common grace against sin,” says Kuyper, “has become increased from God’s side after the flood. The beast within man remains just as evil and wild, but the bars around its cage were fortified, so that it cannot again escape like it used to.” The ultimate outcome is not a ‘new humanity’ but rather a steadying of the original and Noah is a ‘second-progenitor’, descended from previous generations, as opposed to a ‘new Adam’ (cf. Romans 5).

This covenant is made between God and all of creation as represented by Noah’s family and the creatures they have brought with them. Speaking generically, Kuyper says, “This covenant involves man as man, man in his society on earth with other men, man in his relationship to the animals, and man in his relationship to the destructive elements of nature.”Even though the content of this covenant is general in nature and ‘non-saving’, it is nevertheless Holy as a work of God.

As a new series for 2019 I plan to share my complete summaries of Abraham Kuyper’s Common Grace volume 1. They form part of my ongoing PhD thesis which is concerned with investigating Kuyper’s articulation Common Grace, specifically in testing its ‘portability’ across various modes of Christian engagement with the public square.

The original purpose of these summaries was to convey succinctly Kuyper’s actual thought to Christians working in the public square who had agreed to participate in my project. Their reactions and reflections will form part of the method for critically assessing the utility of Kuyper’s doctrine for today.

The content of the doctrine

The doctrine itself is a Reformed articulation of God’s gracious workings for humankind beyond personal salvation. This concerns the restraint of evil and corruption progressing to the utmost and the positive enabling of the flourishing of humankind. Kuyper’s reflections around these basic points extend into considerations of the relation of the common grace of God to the special, or saving, grace and how to rightly understand this working in light of eternity.

Why it matters

Obviously, any Christian organisation that is seeking to operate in the public square has to have a theological conception of those with whom they are seeking to engage: What does God think about these people? Reformed theology seeks to present a biblical account of God’s sovereign saving work of a people for himself from the mass of fallen humanity. This makes the need for a theological account of those indifferent or opposed to Jesus Christ and the triune God of Scripture particularly acute for Reformed theologians; hence Kuyper’s work. But this need to account is not limited to reformed theologians or to one type of Christian public practitioner. So my investigation is into the bounds of the usefulness of Common Grace as a working doctrine for Christians of all stripes.

Beyond the image

There is a fair deal of Christian unanimity concerning the imago dei as a differentiator between humans and other creatures. This gives a theological account of the ‘what’ of humanity and, by extension, a clue concerning the attitude of God to humanity in toto. However, many are satisfied to thereafter prescribe a general propitiousness to God’s assessment of humanity. But proclamation of such a ‘broad-brush blessing’ does not necessarily take seriously the issues of sin and the effects of the Fall. The Reformed are perhaps most keenly aware of these issues and of God’s sovereignty in saving sinners, to the extent that many within the tradition have been happy to consign the non-elect or reprobate portion of humanity merely to the final judgement they can expect. But, apart from being an unpalatable and even morally abhorrent explanation to many ears, this perspective also neglects to account for two important phenomena: Firstly, the great goodness that is experienced both by and from those who don’t or won’t own the name of Jesus. Secondly, the Scriptural witness to the same phenomena and the theological reasons deductible therein.

Description of Kuyper’s work

Kuyper writes his three volumes on Common Grace from within the Calvinist tradition and, perhaps because of his own political concerns, attends to this doctrine so thoroughly that he effectively invents Neocalvinism as a new school in the process. The first volume is an archaeological investigation into what Kuyper deems to be the consistent counsel of Scripture with regards to Common Grace. The second volume seeks to construct a practical theology from these findings and the third volume concerns the practical application of the findings of volumes one and two. Therefore, the final volume is perhaps the most situationally entrenched in Kuyper’s own late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dutch context.

What to expect

My approach to summarising volume 1 of Common Grace entailed drilling each of the 67 chapters down to a summary sentence and recrafting these into easily digestible prose with pertinent quotations from Kuyper. I have sought to refrain from inserting my own illustrations, notes or comments, so the experience should be that of actually walking through Kuyper’s thoughts as set out in the volume. I have found it a profitable and stimulating study and I offer it in the hope that it will prove to be the same for my readers.