Supporting Theological Reflection and Conversation that Strengthen the Ministry of the Church

Calvinists are not known for generosity in their judgments on the non-elect. Of course, they see that the sun rises on the reprobate as well as on God’s chosen people, and they can appeal to Calvin himself for the view that there are beneficent acts and gifts of the Spirit that have no regard for the division of humankind into elect and non-elect. Calvin did not hesitate to ascribe these tokens of divine goodwill to God’s “grace.” Not, however, to the grace that saves! In the unregenerate, the liberality of the Holy Spirit is countered by perversity, pride, and willful blindness, which incur the wrath of God. Only saving grace can heal these symptoms of the sickness of sin, and, Calvin believed, it heals them only in the elect. Hence, the later Calvinists drew a firm line between common grace and saving grace, or else refused to speak of the common benefits of the Spirit as “grace” at all.

The theme of common grace was explored in detail by the great Dutch Reformed theologians Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. (Kuyper wrote a three-volume treatise on the subject.) When their views migrated to America, they split the Dutch-American Reformed community. In 1924, the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church declared in favor of common grace and tried to specify what it includes; those who rejected it withdrew to form a separate denomination, the Protestant Reformed Church. The fear of the gainsayers was that talk of common grace would open the door to the Arminian heresy, or even to Pelagianism: that is, the belief that everyone has a God-given, but natural ability to respond to God’s call. In any case, they thought it incongruous to say that God’s grace, in any proper sense of the word, reaches out to the vessels of wrath that God has made for destruction. Others weighed the arguments for and against and looked for a middle ground. Cornelius Van Til, for example, would not grant that a plea for common grace can rest, as some argued, on the creation story in Genesis (“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good”), since God’s benevolence toward humankind later changed to hatred—a “fearlessly anthropomorphic” turn of phrase, as Van Til admitted. Nevertheless, because the final separation of the elect from the non-elect awaits the Last Day, he could still affirm that, as history unfolds, God maintains an attitude of favor to all humanity—“up to a point.” Strictly speaking, common grace is earlier grace (prelapsarian); it diminishes as time goes by. Van Til concluded that for now the gifts of God to unbelievers continue, bringing them a joy that in the end will turn to bitterness and helping to make the life of believers possible, even pleasant.

The debate over common grace did not reveal the most attractive side of the Calvinist temper; perhaps it is just as well that it stirred little or no interest outside Dutch-Reformed circles. In this winsome study, however, He Shines in All That’s Fair, Richard Mouw makes a persuasive case for taking another look at common grace. The brevity of the book (just over a hundred pages) belies its value and importance. In an easy, conversational style, the author speaks from a profound concern for humanity, elect and non-elect alike, and without any trace of the old party rancor. He succeeds in showing that real theological questions are at stake here, not for the Dutch Reformed family alone, and his own answers leave room for an engaging modesty. His theme is the mystery of common grace. “I am convinced that there is such a thing as common grace,” he says, “but I am not very clear about what it is” (p. 13). And in his conclusion he writes: “For all I know—and for all any of us can know—much of what we now think of as common grace may in the end time be revealed to be saving grace” (p. 100).

Professor Mouw’s defense of common grace goes, in brief, like this. Christians do have an obligation to be on their guard against the prevailing culture, but not to withdraw from it. The concept of common grace means “that God has a positive, albeit non-salvific, regard for those who are not elect, a regard that he asks us to cultivate in our own souls” (p. 82). The supralapsarian divines seem to imagine that everything serves God’s one intention to glorify Godself by saving some and damning others. But the salvation of the elect is not all God thinks about. Common grace attests God’s delight in human accomplishments; and because God shows concern for all humanity, so should Christians. Recognizing their common humanity with the non-elect, they must undertake “common grace ministries,” which simply aim at human flourishing and the common good.

He Shines in All That’s Fair is not intended to deal with every pertinent aspect of common grace, but rather to “revive a discussion of a topic that has received little attention in recent years on the part of mainstream Reformed theologians” (pp. 89-90). I hope it succeeds—it deserves to—and I venture to propose three questions for the continuing conversation.

First, although Mouw’s idea of a common grace ministry is an important contribution, might it hide a lingering trace of the old Calvinistic condescension toward the world outside? One consequence of common grace is that the children of this world are often wiser in their generation than the children of light. For this reason, the traffic between church and culture has to go both ways, and that demands a cultural receptiveness on the part of Christians as well as willingness to serve and to give. There, of course, lies precisely what worries those who retreat into what Mouw calls “cultural abstinence”—as though that could preserve them from error and sin! But the risk of giving and receiving has to be taken.

Second, won’t further conversation need to have another look at the fundamental presupposition of Mouw’s argument (see p. 38): that the divine decrees irrevocably divide the human community into the elect and the reprobate (or, more gently, the elect and the non-elect)? It is a particular merit of Mouw’s book that he calls not merely for recovering a neglected concept, but also for updating it. That, it seems to me, is the heart of what it means to do theology in the Reformed tradition. But the conversation about common grace must consider whether more updating is required than Mouw admits. He alludes to Karl Barth’s attempt to revise the doctrine of election and simply takes his stand with those “who are not convinced” (p. 72). I’m not convinced by all of it either, but the conversation on common grace will certainly need to examine Barth’s case for denying that the divine decrees divide humankind into the elect and the non-elect. In this respect, Barth was less original than commonly supposed. Friedrich Schleiermacher, uncompromising though he was in his insistence on the necessity for the new birth, had already argued that it is humanity that is elect in Christ, and in this he was followed (without acknowledgments) by Barth. The vestiges of Calvinist presumption are then eradicated, or at least minimized, and the true commonness of human being is affirmed. The only distinction we are entitled to draw is not between the elect and the non-elect, but between the regenerate and the not yet regenerate (Schleiermacher) or those who live as God’s elect and those who don’t (Barth). 

The Institute for Reformed Theology is an Associated Program of
Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Richmond, Virginia
All materials on this site are © The Institute for Reformed Theology, unless otherwise noted.

aaa