The Blog of Brian Collins
Common grace is a theological concept that has often been abused. Cornelius Van Til, who defended the concept against thinkers who wished to deny it entirely, warns against this abuse:
When men dream dreams of a paradise regained by means of common grace, they only manifest the ‘strong delusion’ that falls as punishment of God upon those that abuse his natural revelation.
Cornelius Van Til, “Nature and Scripture,” in The Infallible Word
Sinclair Ferguson provides a helpful summary of John Murray’s view of the functions of common grace. I’ve highlighted the various functions that he enumerates.
Common grace is marked by both negative and positive features. It restrains human depravity and its effects. . . . In common grace God also restrains his own wrath. His longsuffering (1 Pet 3:20) and forbearance (Acts 17:30) are expressions of this. Further, God restrains the influence of the evil that entered the world through sin. The disintegration of life is contained: crops grow even in the midst of the thorns and thistles of the divine curse (Gen 3:17). Nature may well be “red in tooth and claw,” but God has graciously placed the fear of man on the animal world to restrain its destructive tendency.
Positively, God has ordained good in the beauty and abundance of creation and among even unregenerate men. Admittedly the Lord blessed the Egyptians for Joseph’s sake (Gen 39:5); but he did bless them! He bestows good gifts on men (Matt 5:44–45). . . . Furthermore, through common grace “Good is attributed to unregenerate men” (ibid.). Admittedly there is paradox in such a statement, but Murray appeals to The Westminster Confession of Faith (16.7) for confirmation of his exposition. . . .
Again, civil government provides peace and order for men. Strife and unrest are inevitable in a sinful world. That there should be any peace is an evidence of common grace.
What, then, is the function of common grace? It is the precondition for special grace, and ultimately the context in which the salvation and glorification of the elect will take place. Common grace provides both the sphere and the materials in and on which special grace operates.
Sinclair Ferguson, “The Whole Counsel of God: Fifty Years of Theological Studies,” WTJ 50, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 271-72.
One of the intriguing functions, mentioned by Ferguson at the end of his quotation, is the service common grace provides as the precondition for special grace. Abraham Kuyper expands on this function:
Without common grace the elect would not have been born . . . . Had Adam and Eve died on the day they sinned, Seth would not have been born from them, nor Enoch from Seth, and no widely ramified race of peoples and nations would ever have originated on earth. On that basis alone all special grace assumes common grace. But there is more. Even if you assumed that their temporal death had been postponed so that the human race could have made a start, but that for the rest sin in all its horror had broken out unhindered, you would still be nowhere. For then life on earth would immediately have turned into a hell and under such hellish conditions the church of God would not have had a place to strike root anywhere. . . . From whatever angle we one looks at this issue, then special grace presupposes common grace. Without the latter the former cannot function.
Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 169.
Dumbrell, W. J. Covenant and Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants
This is a study of the Old Testament covenants, notable for its defense of a creation covenant. The writing style is a bit obscure, but there is a great deal of valuable information in this volume. I’ve marked references to particular pages throughout my notebooks. This does not necessarily mean I agree with Dumbrell. I affirm an Adamic covenant, but I do not find his argumentation for it to be the most compelling. Nonetheless, this remains an important study of the biblical covenants.
Rouse, Marylynn, ed. Ministry On My Mind: John Newton on Entering Pastoral Ministry. Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: John Newton Project, 2010.
Before entering the ministry John Newton wrote “miscellaneous thoughts” about the ministry and his calling into the ministry. These thoughts are reflections on Scripture texts related to the ministry or to making momentous decisions. Newton also records his resolutions regarding entering into the ministry and plans to prepare his heart for such an endeavor. This is a work to warm one’s heart toward God and to inspire seriousness of purpose in undertaking the work of the ministry.
There are at least three theological foundations for common grace.
First, for it to be grace, it must be founded on the atoning work of Christ. McCune comments:
There is no one verse that anchors common grace in the atonement of Christ. However, theologically this is necessarily so. Any mitigation of the effects of sin is due ultimately to the cross work of Christ. There is no other basis on which God could deal with sin in grace or mercy. Common grace is grace—non-redemptive grace—and is a mitigation of the full effects of sin.
Rolland McCune, A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity
A confirmation of this is found in the fact that the Noahic Covenant, a common grace covenant, is based on a burnt offering, which Leviticus 1:4 identifies as a sacrifice that makes atonement.
Second, common grace is founded on the reality of God’s sovereignty over all creation. The good things that happen to people, the growth of food, etc. are not merely natural occurances. They are gifts from God. As Kuyper notes,
If God is sovereign, then his Lordship must remain over all life and cannot be closed up within church walls or Christian circles. The extra-Christian world has not been given over to satan or to fallen humanity or to chance.
Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader
Third, common grace is rooted in the reality that God built his law into creation. Living in the world contrary to God’s law always has consequences. As humans reckon with those consequences, sin is retrained to a degree. Al Wolters comments on this reality:
The structure of all the creational givens persists despite their directional perversion. That structure, anchored in God’s faithfulness, sets a limit on the corruption and bondage wrought by evil. . . . Ignoring the law of creation is impossible. The law is like a spring that can be pressed down or pushed out of sight only with great effort and that continues to make its presence felt even when repressed for a long time. The ‘structure’ of a thing is the law that is in force for it, and not amount of repression or perversion will ever succeed in nullifying its presence and effect.
Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained
The concept of common grace can be inferred from a number of Scripture texts.
At the end of Genesis 3, God pronounces judgment on the serpent, Eve, and Adam for their sin. The judgment for Adam and Eve was a curse that affected the blessing of Genesis 1:26-28. Yet the curse did not remove the blessing entirely. A great deal of that blessing remains for all human, svaed or lost. In addition, the penalty of death was not enacted on the outer man immediately. Instead it was delayed by many years.
This same pattern is seen in the Noahic Covenant. Precisely because man is sinful from his infancy (Gen. 8:20), God institutes a covenant that binds him to not destroy earth with a Flood ever again and to preserve regular days and seasons until the end. Apart from the covenant, God would have been just to send one Flood after another upon sinful humanity. This the Noahic covenant is gracious. Since it is made with all of creation, it is also common.
God waited to bring the judgment of the Flood upon the earth to give sinners time to repent (1 Peter 3:20), and after the Flood God deferred judgment on sinners, also giving them a chance to repent (Acts 17:30).
Isaiah 28:23-29 teaches that by God’s common grace both the saved and lost can develop the intellectual and practical skills to succeed at their vocations. God enables people to understand the world as he created in it and to succeed in living in it.
Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:44-45 that the Father shows love toward his enemies (grace) by giving sunshine and rain to both the righteous and the unrighteous alike (common).
Paul also points to the rains and the provision of food as the goodness of God shown to pagan people (Acts 14:17). In addition Paul indicates that this goodness was a witness to God himself (suppressed according to Romans 1).
This manifestation of grace consisted in restraining, blocking, or redirecting the consequences that would otherwise have resulted from sin. It intercepts the natural outworking of the poison of sin and either diverts and alters it or opposes and destroys it. For that reason we must distinguish two dimensions in the manifestations of grace: 1. a saving grace, which in the end abolishes sin and completely undoes its consequences; and 2. a temporal restraining grace, which holds back and blocks the effect of sin. The former, that is saving grace, is in the nature of the case special and restricted to God’s elect. The second, common grace, is extended to the whole of our human life.
Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader
Daniel Strange, “Rooted and Grounded? The Legitimacy of Abraham Kuyper’s Distinction between Church as Institute and Church as Organism, and Its Usefulness in Constructing an Evangelical Public Theology,” Themelios 40, no. 3 (2015): 430-445.
In this article Strange conducts a helpful survey of Kuyper’s church as institution / church as organism distinction. Strange notes that this distinction is used by many in discussions of public theology, but Kuyper’s precise understanding is often not in view. After surveying Kuyper, Strange raises a number of concerns. First, he notes that Kuyper moves from metaphors in Ephesians that are organic and institutional to a model of the church as institutional and organic. Exegetically, he finds this move untenable. Second, Strange seems hesitant to identify as church anything that is not gathered. He seems to understand the universal church as gathered in some sense in heaven. Third, he’s concerned that Kuyper privileged the organic church over the institutional church, especially in his later writings. Interestingly, he brings in Van Til’s critique of Kuyper’s view of common grace at this point in which Van Til thinks Kuyper too influenced by Plato and Kant in an emphasis on “abstract universals” (the organic church being more of an abstract universal than the institutional church), Nonetheless, Strange is willing to accept distinctions such as “church as church, and church as Christians” (Carson), “the public ministry of the church and the church as people scattered in their various vocations” (Horton), or “church ‘gathered’ and church ‘going’” (Strange’s own proposal).
This is a helpful survey and critique. Though not convinced of the second point of the critique, I find Strange’s other concerns to be compelling. Nonetheless, I still wonder if the organic/institution language may still retain value.
Common grace is an operation of the Holy Spirit, based on the atonement of Christ and God’s merciful and benevolent attitude toward all, by which He immediately or through secondary causation restrains the effects of sin and enables the positive accomplishment and performance of civic righteousness and good among all people.
McCune, A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity
Grace is basically God’s condescending, unmerited favor. Common grace is favor shown to all men in common. God was under no constraint or compulsion of necessity to show this favor. He could justly have left the world to the full, unrestrained and unmitigated effects of sin. That God arrested the progress of these just desirets is all of grace.
McCune, A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity
It follows that the creeds of the church do not constitute deductive systems derived from the master concept of God. They are rather statements containing, so far as possible, all the various facets of truth about God and his relation to the world. There is coherence in these creeds, but it is not the coherence of deduction. The famous doctrine of the two natures of Christ as set forth in the Chalcedon creed exhibits the fact that the church was unwilling to submit the apparently contradictory materials of Scripture to the requirements of a deductive system.
Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., 206.