Common Grace, 3.57

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

Kuyper opens his first chapter on “Society” with a recap of the relationship between the church and particular grace and the state and common grace, as well as the family and its place in raising kids within society.

But what is “society”? There is no institution that is ” society”, though we often identify it with whatever the biggest/most important structure around is (the state, the church, etc). Trying to organize society leads us to the state, which is not “society.” In fact, the two compete with each other. The state uses law and force, while society uses custom and opinion and praise and blame. Which is not to say the two aren’t related, for example:

“The social life of a people requires there to be roads that bring the various cities and villages in contact with one another, and the state takes upon itself the maintenance of the main arteries among these connecting roads; it raises funds for their construction through taxation and decrees what rules will apply on these state highways. By contrast, society decides through custom whether we travel along these state roads in a [Norwegian style vehicle; English style vehicle; or Dutch style vehicle.]” (475)

So state and government are not the same, though they are tied together. The Government is God’s divine servant, and apart of the state. (And Kuyper is using some broad terms here, so I should note that by “state” at this point he seems to mean “nation,” with “government” meaning the much more specific term for the institutions that politically run the state.) The government must be the final authority in the state, if only for the purposes of foreign relations and practical reality.

We must avoid the “administrative state”, which would take functions that rightly belong to society. This is what the “social democrats” work for, and would wrongly place economics front and center. We must resist this tendency as well.

We see the state/government distinction further worked out in the difference between criminal law and civil law. [The former involves punishment for our actions, the latter governs interactions between citizens that don’t involve crimes.] The administrative state would collapse this distinction as well, making every breach of contract a crime (or even poorly written contracts in the first place).

By contrast,

We are all subject to God’s sovereignty first;
This protects society’s sphere, as does the doctrine of sphere sovereignty in general;
Localism and community freedom must stand;

So what is “society” We must not confuse the two meanings of the Dutch word. One means something like “company”, the other “society.” “Company” implies structure, which society does not have. No formal membership, no meetings, no headship. This is the same distinction we have talked about earlier between the institution and the organism in the church, where the organism has no real structure.

“…in social life there is the institutional aspect, on the one hand, which shows up in city councils and so on, and beyond this we observe the organic life of a nation that manifests itself in all kinds of ways that we describe as ‘society.’ Social life in this sense, therefore, is always a vague, floating, and ephemeral concept, if you will, because it is the very life of a nation itself to the extent that it is not restricted institutionally.” (479)

So social life is an intermediate sphere between the family and the institutional state. It is fluid–more so in the modern world with the speed of communication. Social life is increasingly a world-wide organism, though local characteristics remain. This means society is an intermediary between humanity and the family.

Society is everything outside the spheres of family, church, and state, and is the realm of common grace. It is waiting for us to influence it, but more on that in the next post.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO