Uncommon grace

Uncommon grace?

Why do unbelievers often seem so much more noble and admirable than believers?  This is frequently our experience. So, unless we’re going to deny reality – never a good idea – it’s crucial we wrestle with this question. Failure to answer this question responsibly might lead us to places where we end up thinking either that sin isn’t that bad (which it is) or that the gospel doesn’t create a fundamental division between those who trust in Christ and those who don’t (which it does). We don’t want to downplay sin. We don’t want to blur the boundaries between the world and the church. We don’t want to lose our voice in our cultural engagement.  So, how do we explain why unbelievers often outshine believers in virtue, insight and character?

The better than expected world

Well, helpfully, we’re not the first ones to ask this question. Someone who deeply considered this question was Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920).  Kuyper worked as a Dutch pastor, founded a University, wrote extensive theological works, edited a newspaper, started a political party as well as a church denomination and was Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the early 1900s – and more besides!

He stated the problem in these terms:

The world turns out to be better than expected and the church worse than expected.[1]

He knew that unless this issue was resolved thoughtfully ‘one of two things has to happen: either we lose faith in our confession, or we hold fast to our confession but hang a veil in front of reality in order not to see it.’[2]  Neither are attractive options. And so he drew on the resources in the doctrine of common grace to forge a better path. In total Kuyper wrote around three quarters of a million words on common grace, published initially as a series of weekly editorials in his newspaper over many years. These articles are now (brilliantly) translated and republished in three volumes by Lexham Press in the US.

But what is common grace? In Kuyper’s words, common grace has two complementary elements to it:

The constant aspect [of common grace] consists in the fact that God, with all kinds of difference in gradation, arrests and restrains the curse of nature and the sin of the heart. The progressive aspect, by contrast, consists in the other kind of activity, through which God, under steady progress, ever more abundantly arms human life against suffering and brings it inwardly to richer and fuller development.[3]

In my words: the doctrine of common grace affirms God’s ongoing commitment to his creation and the purposes he has for creation, despite our rebellion against him. It’s distinct from, though connected to, his special or particular (saving) grace. And it teaches that God continues to be gracious to all that he has made – hence common or general. From this disposition God works to curb the worst impulses of our sinful nature directly or indirectly through social structures like government. This grace means that human society and culture are still possible after the Fall into sin. God works to restrain the effects of the curse on nature through giving resources in creation to alleviate suffering and aid progress in areas like health care and technology. God continues to shower blessings of creativity, energy and giftedness on believer and unbeliever alike that contribute to social stability, cultural development and human flourishing.

For Kuyper ‘common grace is not a speculative notion based on book learning. Rather, it reflects the attempt of Christ’s church to provide an answer … to an extremely important and indeed profound and complex problem – a problem with which every sensitive and reflective person is directly confronted at every moment in the world, in his church, in his surroundings, and in his own heart.’[4] Common grace explains why unbelievers are not as bad as we would expect in their rejection of their Maker. It unpacks why the world is better than we might assume. Grasping this keeps us from the false moves of either denying the reality of admirable unbelievers or throwing away our doctrine of sin.

This was no idle issue for Kuyper.  He wrote:

In the life of the world so much has developed that is interesting, so much that is beautiful, and so much that is attractive that we sometimes have felt a struggle well up in us to turn away from the church and seek our place in the life of the world.[5]

So for pastoral motivations and to resolve this tension, Kuyper appealed to common grace, which he judged ‘forgotten and neglected’[6] in his day.

An experience to avoid

My experience is that common grace is often ‘forgotten and neglected’ today too. I remember hearing about common grace while at Bible college after I had been a believer for a number of years and involved in Christian ministry for 5 years. It’s perfectly possible that people had taught me about common grace before but I wasn’t listening. Yet I distinctly remember grasping the idea of common grace, knowing that everything was different now in my theological grid in positive ways (I trust), and wishing someone had told me about it earlier.

I wonder if my own spiritual posture had made it hard to hear about common grace too. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has experienced the instinctive temptation to label the world ‘bad’ and the church ‘good’ in ways that honour the absolute division between faith and unbelief, but don’t nuance this by considering common grace. We need to recover a robust doctrine of common grace – which takes us back to Kuyper.

A calling to pursue

In addition to the pastoral, explanatory use of common grace already mentioned, we need common grace to underpin and ground our cultural engagement as believers. As Kuyper put it: ‘the calling of the Christian absolutely does not lie in the sphere of the church alone, but that Christians also have a calling in the midst of the life of this world. And the question as to how this is possible, how it is conceivable that a child of God should still be involved with a sinful world, has a brief, clear, and simple answer: it can and must be because God himself is still involved with that world.  And it is this involvement of our God with the world that is explained to us in the doctrine of common grace’.[7] Why should a believer live in the world given its obvious sinfulness?  Because God is still involved with that world – he hasn’t abandoned it and neither should we. Why should believers shape culture in the world, contribute to the common good in the world? Because God is committed in his common grace to that creation – and calls believers to play their part in building culture alongside unbelievers. Why can believers take their place in politics, in art, in business? Because through these things – produced by believer and unbeliever alike – God is glorified and humanity is enriched. Although believers and unbelievers will build culture in radically different ways due to their respective underlying commitments to Christ or to human autonomy, common grace means we can benefit from unbelieving cultural products.

Without common grace we might think that God only cares about our ‘church’ service and explicitly spiritual activities. Without common grace we might write the world off and attempt to remove ourselves from it. Without common grace we might fail to be fully thankful to God for his preservation of, commitment to, and gifts showered upon his creation. We are impoverished without common grace. God is not fully honoured where common grace is uncommon. Let’s ensure that this doesn’t happen by celebrating and sharing God’s common grace in our churches, small groups and youth groups. It took me too long to hear about common grace – let’s help others hear about it earlier! May God aid us – so that he is honoured, so that people are helped and so that we play our part fully in culture, knowing as Kuyper famously declared:

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’[8]

Jim is one of our Cultivate students and his research interest is the doctrine of common grace – especially as it is articulated and defended in the theology of Abraham Kuyper.  He enjoys drinking tea, talking theology and quoting Taylor Swift – ideally at the same time.

References

[1] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace Volume 2: The Doctrinal Section, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2019), 10.  Emphasis original.  For the sake of this article we will focus on exploring the first half of Kuyper’s dilemma.

[2] Kuyper, Common Grace Vol 2, 12.

[3] Kuyper, Common Grace Vol 2, 689.  We might have legitimate questions about Kuyper’s commitment to, and assessment of progress, as he determined it – especially given his evaluation of progress contributed to him making some problematic, inaccurate and indefensible statements on race and ethnicity.  This means we should be open to critique Kuyper – we don’t go with everything he said!

[4] Kuyper, Common Grace Vol 2, 11.

[5] Kuyper, Common Grace Vol 2, 6.

[6] Kuyper, Common Grace Vol 2, 12.

[7] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace Volume 3: The Practical Section, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2020), 17.  Emphasis original.

[8] Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.