Common Grace, 2.88

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

In the last chapter, Kuyper argued that the church does not exist for the purpose of salvation, but rather for the purpose of glorifying God. Salvation comes from the Holy Spirit alone, and shows itself internally in our consciences and externally in “outward appearance.” (751-752) These two forms are based on the two realities: the present and the coming world. Some of the saved (i.e. infants) will show their regeneration only in heaven. Those of us who live to adulthood will show our regeneration increasingly on earth. This display of regeneration is tied to God’s work of revelation–else, He could have just translated us straight to heaven immediately when we were saved.

Such immediate translation into heaven would have denied the “reality of things in the created order.” (753) Sin will be fought by God in this world, as we see by the fact that our salvation was at first an external event–Christ died for us outside of us and in the world, not in our hearts.

Those who want to link conversion and regeneration fall flat when they run into the doctrine of the church. It is only when we see the need for a display of these external realities that we see why the church is necessary: it is not as if the Holy Spirit needs the church for the sake of regeneration. But here,

“God’s work is twofold: (1) the revelation and triumph of his justice and truth in the reality of created life, and (2) the regeneration of those who were dead in sin.” (754)

The church is only a part of (1) as we display God’s glory.

The church is also, however, a place where particular grace and common grace intersect. The two flourish together or atrophy if kept apart. And here Kuyper gives us another of his unfortunate cultural contrasts, claiming that one particular culture is a clear example of the superior mingling of common grace and particular grace, as compared with another culture that did well under common grace but eventually atrophied from the lack of particular grace. More broadly, we see three scenarios:

The place where common grace exists alone (Kuyper uses the example of China, ~1900);
The place where particular grace and common grace grow together (Kuyper uses the example of the Netherlands, ~1900);
The place where particular grace dominates (i.e. the church).

This gets complicated, with different varieties of Christianity and different kinds of churches and cultures mixing and mingling and separating and so forth. His broader point is that historically we’ve failed to properly account for common grace in our theology, and so have made serious mistakes.

With right theology, we see three things:

“life proceeding from particular grace is found only in the church, and that this is the distinguishing characteristic of Christ’s church on earth;
life springing almost solely from sinful natural life exists only where the influence of common grace remained very weak; and
life outside the church could enjoy a higher level of flourishing only where particular grace influenced common grace through the church’s instrumentality and thereby brought it to full development.” (765)

And here, Kuyper argues, is where we can use the language of “Christian nation” or “pagan nation.” By “Christian nation” or “Christian culture” or “Christian art” or whatever, we only mean that particular grace has heavily influenced common grace in that land.

“The adjective Christian, therefore, does not say anything about the state of the soul of the inhabitants of such a country…” (756-757)

This influence has social effects as well, and simply cannot be unleashed by mere preaching of “higher morality.” (757-758) Obviously differences of interpretation of particular grace will affect the influence a church has on a nation, and Kuyper will turn to this in the next chapter.

And we have yet another place where I agree and disagree with Kuyper–increasingly “disagree”, but more on that as we go along as well.

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