Common Grace, 1.41-42

This post is part of a series walking through the first volume of Abraham Kuyper’s Common Grace.

Just how did Noah’s three sons become all the races of man? Obviously three families can have multiple varieties of descendants–especially if their wives were of varied ethnicities…

However, we have to look at Babel. It seems that the nations after the Flood migrated as a whole people under organized leadership (some form of council of patriarchs?). The implication seems to be that they wanted to stay together and stay organized, so they built a city and a tower together to act as a beacon. This, however, was a sin, rebelling against God’s command to fill the earth. (Genesis 1:28, 9:1)

God’s words and their goals suggest that their plan for history was set against God’s:

“In God’s plan all powers and gifts with which he had endowed our race would gradually be brought to light to the glory of his name. But according to this selfish plan for building the tower at Babel, all this would have been smothered and destroyed. According to the plan of God, the overflowing measure full of kernels of wheat is scattered over the wide field, and soon the fields will shimmer with the golden waves of grain. But according to the plan of Shinar, the seed grain would be locked up in a musty cellar to suffocate and molder there.” (362)

If the response of God in Genesis 11:6-8 is odd to us, Kuyper thinks that’s because God is speaking with “anthropomorphic garb” (363), in contrast to the pagan stories about giants or titans storming the heavens.

This contrast is especially strong when we see God’s response: it is one that is filled with a “silent majesty that achieves the greatest goals with seemingly the most insignificant means.” (364) So far as we’re told, God doesn’t knock over a single brick. “God appears to do nothing.” (364)

Nevertheless, this confusion of language was a supernatural event that involved judgment on the whole generation of people then living, including God’s chosen people (whoever they were) at the time. If the line of evil men had gained ascendancy prior to the Flood, it seems at Babel that once again the rebels against God had gained ascendancy. Rather than again destroying mankind, this time God confused the languages and paved the way for a separating out of God’s people that would come with Abraham.

The Babel narrative further compels us to think about language itself–something we can’t do well without bringing Babel into the discussion. Specifically, we see that language is fixed, regular, and full of exceptions. We also see how earlier languages were related to each other yet are still mysteriously varied– a circumstance explicable only through the Scripture narrative.

Kuyper ends Chapter 42 with a reflection on two points. First, he notes that the principle of irregularity and “particularization” is inherent to language. Languages fragment over time, so we have lots of languages and dialects. Though mass media and the internet are taking their toll on the diversity of languages in our own day, we can still understand this principle even within the English-speaking world. Someone from Northern England sounds very different from someone from North Dakota, who sounds different yet again from someone from South Africa, etc.

Second, this fragmentation of languages is not the confusion of Babel. That was a division between groups of people (not necessarily between all people). It may even be that the major language divisions were based on the lines of Noah’s three children. More importantly, this confusion was neither external nor mechanical. Language is an organic part of us that falls under our reason. So different languages reflect different peoples–which is what God created here. Our organic physical and spiritual inner and outer unity was broken, which is only restored at Pentecost. Kuyper even speculates in a footnote that the language spoken on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 was the original language that was confused at Babel. The later “tongues” of 1 Corinthians 14, he argues “is a phenomenon that is weakened, an after-flowering that finally fades away.” (373) Hence the need for interpreters.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO