Steven Peterson sent me a link to an article by the Reformed theologian Richard J. Louw. It deals with vocation and the Two Kingdoms, but he comes at it from a completely different perspective than Lutherans do. He uses the concept of “common grace,” as well as Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty.”
In the early days of my Lutheranism, I referred to “common grace” and was chastized for it by a colleague in Concordia’s theology department, who explained that Lutherans reserve “grace” to refer to God’s unmerited favor by which He justifies sinners. For God’s blessings that He bestows on entire His creation, Lutherans use other terms, such as “God’s First Article gifts,” a term referring to the exposition of the Creation article of the creed in the Small Catechism. (But aren’t those gifts unmerited, and thus proceeding from a kind of grace?)
Read the article by Prof. Louw, linked after the jump. Does he arrive at the same place that Lutherans do, arriving at an objective truth from a different angle? Or is there a difference, however subtle, between the Lutheran and the Reformed view on these issues, one that comes from their different approaches and terminology?
From Richard J. Louw, Common grace in ivory towers and tractor companies | Acton Institute:
Most of the time, most of us make the linguistic transitions in our daily lives quite smoothly. We work alongside our colleagues, stop at the grocery store to make a purchase, go home to a family meal and then relax in front of our TV sets as spectators in the world of athletics. In all of that, we encounter different languages. How we talk at the workplace differs from our meal table conversations, and the vocabulary of the commentators on ESPN is yet another pattern of speech. We typically navigate all of that with no awareness that we have successfully made our way through a variety of Kuyperian spheres.
Sometimes, though, the boundaries between spheres are crossed only with great linguistic difficulty. This has certainly been true often in encounters among scholars in the academy and practitioners in the business world. As an academic who has often done some traveling between those two spheres, I can testify to the fact that communication between inhabitants of the two spheres has not always been easy. Sometimes it is simply a problem of understanding each other’s language, but frequently the difficulties are rooted in deeper problems.
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