Common Grace Conflated

Part 1 of 2 to Debating the Noahic Covenant

We begin with a debate from almost exactly one-hundred years ago among the Dutch Reformed in America. Its chief antagonists were one Klaas Schilder (1890-1952), who leaned back on the thought of the aforementioned Abraham Kuyper, and, on the other side, Herman Hoeksema (1886-1965), who founded the Protestant Reformed Churches out of the resultant split with the Christian Reformed Church. Interestingly enough, Cornelius Van Til was said to take something of a middle position between these two.

At any rate, Hoeksema’s problem with the church itself was that he could not affirm its Synod’s Three Points:

Concerning the first point, touching the favorable attitude of God toward mankind in general, and not alone toward the elect, the Synod declares that it is certain according to Scripture and the Confession, that there is, besides the saving grace of God, shown only to those chosen to eternal life, also a certain favor of the grace of God which He shows to his creatures in general …

Concerning the second point, touching the restraint of sin in the life of the individual and society, the Synod declares that according to Scripture and the Confession, there is such a restraint to sin …

Concerning the third point, touching the performance of so-called civic righteousness by the unregenerate, the Synod declares that according to Scripture and the Confession the unregenerate, though incapable of any saving good … can perform such civic good.1

A useful exercise whenever people are speaking past each other is to observe a taxonomy of the words involved. That means arranging the concepts by genus and species, and coming to see what is the difference between the relevant species. That is really what a definition is. It is the genus and difference combined into a concept.

There are three relevant terms for our purposes: common grace, the image of God, and even the notion of good. In fact, this will make up our outline today. This week we must keep the genus “grace” in our mind from what we saw previously with respect to Adam before the fall. The modifying adjectives “common” and “particular” will refer to our species. But it seems to me that these—these senses of grace, the image of God, and the notion of good—should be treated in the reverse order, so that we end with something of a finished picture of common grace.

(i.) Good and goods: conflated and then distinguished again.

(ii.) The image of God: conflated and then distinguished again.

(iii.) Common grace: conflated and then distinguished again.

Good and Goods: Conflated and then Distinguished Again

Goodness is, first and foremost, an attribute of God. It is in this sense that Jesus meant the words, “No one is good except God alone” (Luke 18:19). And yet theologians also rightly classify goodness as a communicable attribute of God, meaning that this is something that the creature reflects in a finite manner. A few verses will be helpful

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4).

The relevant properties of these created goods in the latter passage is that they are (1) objective, (2) postlapsarian, and (3) to be received with thanksgiving. That third one may seem only to reference believers, as the audience of Paul’s words there. However, the same Apostle tells us in Romans 1 that one of the main reasons for guilt in mankind after the fall is that they did not give thanks (Rom. 1:21). That raises the obvious question of how someone could be guilty of not giving thanks if they had nothing to give thanks for. In fact, the three points are inseparable—the objective good in created things is that for which all should give thanks. To conclude that the reprobate will not in fact appropriate these things as good for them is true enough, but it evades the question. Are these things good in themselves: irrespective of how they are treated?

Perhaps the most overarching heresy in the early centuries of the church was Gnosticism. It was actually the mother of several other heresies. For example, the heresies we call Marcionism and Docetism were applications of the fundamentals of Gnosticism to the issues of Scripture and the humanity of Christ. The Gnostic assumption was that the world is ontologically evil. Nature is not good. One Marcion of Sinope began to reason that: Since the Old Testament God worked through this fleshy people called Israel and gave them a law pertaining to behavior in this world, the Old Testament deity must be, they reasoned, the false god of this world. In fact, the Old Testament books cannot be divinely inspired Scripture. It was a short leap from there to deny any New Testament books that spoke too favorably about the Old Testament books or its God of “good nature.”

The second error, docetism, was so named because it taught that Christ only appeared to take on flesh, from the Greek word for “to appear” (dokein). Now what was the premise behind this? Recall that physical flesh is evil. It is inherently corrupt. No further distinctions can be made between good and evil. They are simply polar opposites, so that flesh itself—matter itself, nature itself—is inherently evil. So both the Scriptures (in Marcionism) and Christ’s humanity (in Docetism) followed the Gnostic premises to their nature-reducing conclusions.

The crucial distinction to make is simply this: The goodness of a good thing may be viewed in itself or it may be viewed for the good of two different peoples, or even in the good use of two different peoples. The first is entirely objective. The second has an objective component, but it is also subjective in that the individual performances with that good are in view.   

At any rate, let us apply these distinctions to the good things provided for in this Noahic covenant. These promises to ‘never again curse the ground’ and ‘[n]ever again strike down every living creature’ (8:21) are certainly good things that are undeserved by anyone born to the race of Noah. On the one hand, these are goods in themselves. On the other hand, they will issue forth into the experiential blessing of the elect and the experiential curse of the reprobate. They will have two opposite ultimate experiential values: redeeming good for the elect, bitter judgment for the reprobate. Whether we can make a further distinction between ultimate blessing and proximate blessing is something we can return to. For now, we simply note that rain for crops and the sunrise to awaken human beings are goods in themselves.

And what is true of natural objects is also true of moral actions. Just as I am not a sunrise or a raindrop, so too, I am not a kidney surgery. A reprobate may donate a kidney and earn precisely nothing in himself before God in salvation. Nevertheless, the life-saving medical procedure is a good in itself. To use another example, I am not the conviction of a violent criminal. A reprobate may become a judge and finally succeed in putting away a twenty-time offender and so save the lives of his would-be future victims, where the previous judge had enabled such violence. In so doing, that reprobate judge will have earned nothing in himself before God. Nevertheless, the conviction of that would-be murderer is a good in itself, even when the judge is reprobate.

Finally, it should be pointed out that guilt for sin rises in proportion to the goodness is the thing abused, or the glory of God in the thing trampled upon. Paul’s more famous description of sin as a falling short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23) presupposes particular goods in which that glory would be displayed by the opposite of sin. Or else, we can think of the verse already addressed, about the Gentiles failure to “give thanks” (Rom. 1:21). Not only does this presuppose that there was good for which thanks could be given. The greater the good in the thing, the more heinous the sin in its abuse or neglect. Thus wrath is stored up all the more when that goodness rejected is a greater good.

The Image of God: Conflated and then Distinguished Again

While the Reformed orthodox spoke with one voice about the image of God—at least with respect to the distinction between essential and accidental—there were certainly outliers among the wider Protestant world. In the second generation of the Reformation, a Lutheran named Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575), after studying at Wittenberg in the last few years of Luther’s life, began to teach that “the substance of man is destroyed” in the fall, and that the whole substance of human nature is sin and, in fact, “transformed into the image of Satan.”2 In Lutheran circles, this became known as the Flacian Controversy. It was not perhaps so general or universal, in the sense of the typical Lutheran position, as Hodge seemed to indicate.3

Calvin distinguishes between natural and supernatural gifts, and by means of a series of contrasts shows that while the former is now corrupted, only the latter is eradicated. For example, “since reason, by which man discerns between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be entirely destroyed.”4 In his commentary on the Genesis 9 passage, he says,

Should any one object, that this divine image has been obliterated, the solution is easy; first, there yet exists some remnant of it, so that man is possessed of no small dignity; and, secondly, the Celestial Creator himself, however corrupted man may be, still keeps in view the end of his original creation; and according to his example, we ought to consider for what end he created men, and what excellence he has bestowed upon them above the rest of living beings.5

The Belgic Confession parenthetically addresses the same distinction: “he has lost all his excellent gifts, which he had received from God, and only retained a few remains thereof, which, however, are sufficient to leave man without excuse.”6

In the Canons of Dort, two summaries very near to each other supply the same balance:

Human beings were originally created in the image of God and were furnished in mind with a true and sound knowledge of the Creator and things spiritual, in will and heart with righteousness, and in all emotions with purity; indeed, the whole human being was holy. However, rebelling against God at the devil’s instigation and by their own free will, they deprived themselves of these outstanding gifts …

There is, to be sure, a certain light of nature remaining in all people after the fall, by virtue of which they retain some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral, and demonstrate a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behavior. But this light of nature is far from enabling humans to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him—so far, in fact, that they do not use it rightly even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways they completely distort this light, whatever its precise character, and suppress it in unrighteousness. In doing so all people render themselves without excuse before God.7

The Westminster Confession describes man’s nature in this way: “After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after his own image” (IV.2). What is less clear is how the ending with the image of God functions: whether it is being listed as one of the descriptions, or is summarizing what comes before.

Turretin distinguishes between “certain remains of it existing in the mind and heart of man after the fall (in which sense we understand Gen. 9:6 and Jam. 3:9)” versus that “which consisted of holiness and wisdom (usually termed original righteousness).” Therefore, when he poses the eighth question in the ninth topic of Volume 1 of the Institutes, namely, “Whether Adam by his fall lost the image of God,” he clarifies that it is in that latter sense “we treat of it in the present question.”8

Among the Reformed scholastics, Mastricht was perhaps most lucid on this point. By way of contrast he says,

The image of God which we have spoken about neither completely perished through sin, nor completely survived from sin. Therefore it remains in some measure (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9; 1 Cor. 11:7, where without doubt the topic is not the past state, but the current one). It remains, I say, to the extent that it consists: (1) in the very nature of man, of the body and soul. (2) In the natural faculties of the soul, in the intellect and will. (3) In certain gifts of the intellect and will, insofar as among the worst is still seen some use of reason, and also some propensity to good, even moral good (Rom. 1:19; 2:15; 1 Cor. 5:1). Furthermore, (4) in at least some remnants of original dominion (Gen. 7:2). However, the image of God perished with respect to its most excellent parts, namely: (1) original righteousness, insofar as we are all born as children of wrath, dead in sins (Eph. 2:1-3); (2) an immortality of every sort, of natural, spiritual, and eternal life; (3) the perfection of dominion (Rom. 8:20); and (4) the happiness of paradise (Gen. 3:23-24).9

Wilhelmus à Brakel refers to the image as “a faint resemblance to the communicable attributes of God,” and he makes an analogy of a painter and his work of art to this image. It implies a threefold concept: its basis, its form, and its consequence. For the artist, there is the canvas (or the wood if it is a carving), the painting (or carving) itself, and the view of those who see the finished product. Although Brakel was not as clear on the last part, the three stand for: first, the basis in the immaterial dimension of mind and will, including that light of nature that grounds them both (logic for reason and conscience for morality); secondly, the form is the impress itself, that is the spiritual “knowledge, righteousness, and holiness,” which was lost in the fall; thirdly, there was dominion, which Brakel wanted to keep distinct as an activity which followed, the consequence, and not internal to the soul.10

According to Jonathan Edwards also,

there is a twofold image of God in man, his moral or spiritual image, which is his holiness, that is the image of God’s moral excellency; (which image was lost by the fall;) and God’s natural image, consisting in man’s reason and understanding, his natural ability, and dominion over the creatures, which is the image of God’s natural attributes.11

R. L. Dabney made the term “image” restricted to the accidens and so what was lost, rather than man’s essence; but then he seems to allow for the broader division, saying, “The Reformed divines represented it as grounded upon man’s rationality and immortality, which make him an humble representation of God’s spiritual essence; but as consisting especially in the righteousness and true holiness.”12

Charles Hodge achieved the same clarity as Mastricht in saying,

While, therefore, the Scriptures make the original moral perfection of man the most prominent element of that likeness to God in which he was created, it is no less true that they recognize man as a child of God in virtue of his rational nature. He is the image of God, and bears and reflects the divine likeness among the inhabitants of the earth, because he is a spirit, an intelligent, voluntary agent; and as such he is rightfully invested with universal dominion. This is what the Reformed theologians were accustomed to call the essential image of God, as distinguished from the accidental. The one consisting in the very nature of the soul, the other in its accidental endowments, that is, such as might be lost without the loss of humanity itself.13

W. G. T. Shedd focused on the rational faculty of the soul, which is both immaterial and owing for its true insights on an eternal and immutable reason. So, he wrote,

When God creates a rational being, he makes him after his own image, but when he creates a physical substance, he does not create it after his own image, but as he pleases. This makes reason to be one and invariable in its essential properties, while matter is variable. We cannot conceive of God’s creating two diverse kinds of rational mind, but we can conceive of his creating many kinds of matter. All finite reason must resemble the infinite reason in kind.14

One implication is that if there is right reason at all, then there is that dimension of the image of God. No statement could be true if this were not true, because all truth is each true statement is a participation in the being of truth, as Augustine demonstrated in many of his writings.

Bavinck wanted to distance the Reformed view from that of Scholastics who maintained that, “While the supernatural qualities are lost, the natural ones still remain whole.” Yet while he constantly saw this same dichotomy in the Reformed orthodox, Bavinck refined his critique, saying that, “even where Protestants retained the expression ‘supernatural gifts,’ they meant something else by it.”15 The key contribution of Bavinck is his insistence that “The whole person [is] the image of God.”16 In other words, to say that the image of God was lost—without any further qualification—is to deny that human beings are human beings in any sense. Unsurprisingly, Bavinck sees the root of each of the commandments in the second table of the law—and therefore the one in Genesis 9:5-6—to be love of neighbor “because he or she is a fellow human being, an image-bearer of God.”17

Finally, Louis Berkhof wrote that,

the image of God is not to be restricted to the original knowledge, righteousness, and holiness which was lost by sin, but also includes elements which belong to the natural constitution of man. They are elements which belong to man as man, such as intellectual power, natural affections, and moral freedom. As created in the image of God man has a rational and moral nature, which he did not lose by sin and which he could not lose without ceasing to be man.18

Hoeksema, to his credit, begins his section on the image of God with the words: “The truth that man is totally depraved implies that man lost what is usually called the image of God in the narrower sense, as it consisted in true knowledge of God, righteousness, and holiness.”19 Even so, some will acknowledge this classical distinction and yet fall again into a conflating language about the good that man has to handle. So, later on, Hoeksema picks up on his correct language:

man nevertheless retained some remnants of his natural gifts and natural light. However, this means no more than that he remained a rational, moral being. The will itself was not lost, and his intellect he retained: even after the fall man could think, will, judge, and work as a moral creature … With these small remnants man can do no good. On the contrary, they belong to the capital that he possesses in order to be able to sin.20

Hoeksema’s focus is on the ground of sin. He is quite right that the intellect and will must have remained in order for the intellect and will to be blameworthy. So they do nothing but sin—they do. However, recall that his statement involves a less precise: “can do no good.” Here again, many take “good” only in its subjective sense. Yet it is not only moral motives and actions which are to be judged either good or evil in the subjective performance of the person; but also the moral action considered objectively in itself. To repay money that is owed, for example, is good in itself. That action in itself (in contradistinction to the refusal to repay) is good, and the refusal evil. The good does not become evil when the reprobate performs the act. His subjective action is what is still evil, but the act to be done is a good to which the image of God is duty-bound.

Common Grace: Conflated and then Distinguished Again

Common grace can mean different things to different people. Unlike the phrase “image of God,” the phrase “common grace” does not arise immediately from the text of Scripture. Nor has it ever been a consensus term in any tradition prior to the modern era. Having said that, the argument from history against the term at all suffers the same basic problem as a similar argument that is often made against biblical inerrancy. The argument is simple—The term is recent and therefore the thing is recent. Obviously if such an argument is faulty reasoning with the one, then it is faulty reasoning with the other: unless some additional reasoning can be shown that the thing itself is also recent. Naturally one can only do that by first examining the thing itself. When one does examine the historical record—much like the search for covenants in the Scripture, where we remember to do theology at the concept level and not merely word level—one will find that the classical and Reformed views speak with one voice on this common form.21

In a chapter entitled “Forms of Grace,” Kuyper clearly sets forth “two aspects [that] must be distinguished in this manifestation of grace:

(1) a saving grace that ultimately cancels sin and completely neutralizes its consequences; and (2) a temporarily restraining grace that stems and arrests the continued effect of sin. The former, saving grace, is by the nature of things particular and is connected with the elect of God. The latter is common and covers the entire sphere of our human life.22

I say that this is a clear statement, and it is. However, Kuyper opens our focus up to two points of conflating things again. First, he makes “restraint” of sin primary to the definition rather than secondary.23 This became a central focus of the debate for both Hoeksema and Van Til. Thus, in his Reformed Dogmatics, Hoeksema began his section on common grace with the jarring statement:

It is well-known that the theory of common grace denies that man died when he ate the forbidden fruit. According to this theory, sin and death were restrained immediately after the fall, and death was not inflicted on the very day that Adam fell and ate of the forbidden fruit.24

Whether this or that “theory of common grace” may so deny the total spiritual death of Adam, it certainly is not the case that the notion of common grace per se even addresses this.

Moreover, if we examine Kuyper’s words, he distinguishes between the penalty of death being enacted on that Day versus the “absolute effect,” encompassing physical death.25 Later on he meets the charge head on: “We do not assert that death did not set in, nor that death did not seize man who had become a sinner, and in him, all creation. We are claiming only that on the day of the first sin, death, instead of unfolding to its consummate effect, had a bridle put on it.”26 Kuyper is not as clear as I would like to be. He later on introduces this restraint as something also “done to Adam’s heart,”27 which lessened the results of sin and death. Herman Bavinck actually says the same:

Immediately after the fall, God delayed both eternal and temporal death. God also mitigated spiritual death in various ways. Spiritual death consists of the inability to do good and the inclination to evil, to live for sin and unto death. In many ways, God tempers this inclination to evil. From the fall onward, human life and humanity itself have come under the purview of common grace.28

As indicated, Kuyper introduces a second notion that throws more mud in the water. He divides that internal principle of common grace between “constant” and “progressive.”29 The latter is the field in which human culture may experience advance. That this idea is utterly unnecessary to the idea of common grace per se should be plain. My principle concern is not to defend Kuyper, but to more clearly distinguish between how common grace functions upon the nature of the world as such.

In the context of this covenant, it is, at the very least, a reference to those good things that God gave to all mankind in the original creation that mankind does not deserve. The common element refers to the field of its recipients: namely, all in common, or, all the offspring of Noah. The grace element refers to the fact that it is not deserved—and that would apply both to Adam, by virtue of being a creature, and to Noah and his line, by that same token as well as, now, being sinners. These are dimensions to a covenant which shapes mankind and gives temporal benefits for the old creation. Here again the genus and species analysis is useful. If we have already agreed that Adam received all that he did in the covenant of works by grace—i.e., that grace is simply unmerited favor—then there is no good reason to abandon that position now.

Bavinck explains,

The fruit of common grace—being allowed to retain something of what we by nature possessed in Adam—we must not forget, is a gift of grace; it is not ours by right or covenant. It is in this sense that we also speak of natural theology, natural morality, and natural law. Even though we retain them only as gifts, they are remnants, graciously left behind for us, of what we once possessed by nature … not a superadded gift, but a natural gift.30

It may be objected that this was only true of Adam before the fall. Noah is now sinful, and so grace presupposes sin. However, this does not follow given our essential definition. It may be that the sinful creature is doubly-undeserving of good by virtue of being a sinner, but it is still true that the creature is originally-undeserving of good by virtue of being a creature. In becoming a sinner, he did not become an un-creature. The only way someone could logically deny that this common reception of good should be called “grace” is to either deny that the good is really good (but we have already refuted this), or else to begin to focus on whether or not this good will be of any ultimate or lasting good to the reprobate.

However, it is not clear how this adjustment will fair any better. The reprobate is still undeserving of each sunrise, even each breath, under which he stores up more wrath. The reprobate does not get to make the sunrise and oxygen bad things in themselves. It may be poetic symmetry to say that with every breath, the elect inhales grace and the reprobate inhales wrath; but in more literal point of fact, this is only another way to reassert what we have already refuted. The objective goods “breathed in” are not in fact the person who breaths. They are distinct. The rain and sunrise and oxygen remain sunrise and oxygen. Their God-given natures are good. The reprobate’s use of the rain and sunrise and oxygen are what is bad and what will be condemnation to them.

What about those who have restricted this covenant to a furtherance of the covenant of redemption? Recall that some had seen two covenants; and Roberts held that both “were a renewed discovery and administration of the Covenant of Faith, touching sinners’ salvation by Jesus Christ.”31 Even this will not change what we will see here. Suppose that all of the original creation blessings and designs and mandates were reaffirmed here for the whole human race and that everyone that got off of that ark was considered to be “in the house” of Christ. What then? The answer is not much. The first apostasy here would accomplish the same as the first apostasy out of Adam and Eve’s house. Ham (or Canaan) would follow the way of Cain. That is all. One would still be looking at a covenant where the same complexity must be observed.

Kuyper gave his rationale when he summarizes the specific benefits of the Noahic covenant:

First, man is given moral supremacy over all the animals. Second, man receives permission to eat the flesh of the animals. Third, man is prohibited from eating raw meat with its blood. Fourth, God provides the establishment of government and the institution of the death penalty. These four items are to be understood as expressions of grace, and only in that way can they be correctly understood.32

Bruce Waltke defines common grace as “the Creator’s indiscriminate goodwill by which ‘He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Mat. 5:45).”33 We might also think about the place where Paul preaches to the Greeks at Lystra, “In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:16-17). We do not need to extract the good out of the rain and sunshine and crops in order to affirm that the reprobate will use all of this to their condemnation. The issue is twofold—first, whether these things are objectively good, that is, good in themselves; second, whether these things are deserved by all or undeserved—so that the answer when people conflate what is common and what is particular is not to agree with them in this conflation, but rather to distinguish.

Miles Van Pelt calls the Noahic Covenant “a universal, unilateral, nonredemptive administration of the covenant of grace restoring and securing the principle of common grace in this world that was suspended during the judgment ordeal of the flood.”34 What he means by that relates to the stay of execution between this flood and the final judgment. In between, there is a “stability of the natural world order,” which will be terminated when Christ returns. In fact, 2 Peter 3, which is often misunderstood as having said that God promised never to judge the world again. Far from it! He promised never to flood the world again; but then Peter goes on to make an analogy between that judgment and the final judgment to come (2 Pet. 3:5-7; cf. 1 Pet. 3:20-21).

Circling back to restraint of sin, this may be internal or external: spiritual as to essence or material as to effects. One obvious example of this comes when we reflect on Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Mount. When He taught that external murder is actually of the same essence in the heart, we understand (I certainly hope) that He was not teaching that restraining that murder makes no difference. Surely part of the lesson was that the seed of murder—namely, hatred—ought to be nipped in the bud before it flowers into the full flame of external bloodshed. From this it follows that a spiritual restraint of sin characteristic of the regenerate is not the only kind of restraint of sin.

The restraint of sin is often related to the orders of creation which are clearly reaffirmed in Genesis 9. In this context, clearly it is only the external and temporal sense of restraint that is in view. Consequently, when this sense is conflated with some “theory of common grace” in which sin is restrained in this deeper spiritual sense, we must reply that this is a non sequitur. It simply does not follow that because common good orders of creation restrain sin externally that this must mean the same thing as a common spiritual force of grace restraining the depths of sin internally. The former is addressing ethics and the latter is addressing soteriology.

To put it another way, the difference between even common grace restraint in the realm of the Noahic Covenant and an Arminian notion of common grace that may offer a spiritual restraint away from damnation or toward salvation—the difference between these is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. Let me illustrate with the difference between the way a police officer restrains sin and the way that the Holy Spirit restrains sin.

Van Til’s opening statement in his work on the subject is telling.

The subject of Common Grace was originally of interest to the present writer because it seemed to him to have basic significance for the subject of Christian Apologetics. Anyone holding to the Reformed faith is constantly required to explain how he can do justice to the ‘universalism’ of the gospel as presented in Scripture. How can he hold to election, especially ‘double election,’ without doing violence to the ‘whosoever will’ aspect of biblical teaching? How can he hold to ‘total depravity’ and yet find a ‘point of contact’ for the gospel among men in general?35

In short: I am interested in common grace because I am anxious about all these Arminians who conflate it with particular grace. Therefore, I will join them in conflating the two—they loving it and I hating it, but both of us agreeing to muddy the waters.

That is not the way forward.

Concluding Thoughts

It is high time that the Reformed tradition quietly bury this embarrassing chapter in our modern history so that we can get back to retaining thinking young men who will operate precisely on this ground of common grace, which is where doctors and lawyers, judges and journalists, philosophers and poets, generals and inventors, all must do their thinking before they do their work. The Reformed churches used to produce such men. In the twentieth century they entirely stopped, and this is to be laid squarely at the feet of those nature-hating systems of doctrine that cannot even affirm the objective goodness of God’s design in the permanent nature of things, in that moral actor called the image of God, and in that common sphere or stage where it is good for the actor to play his role, and where none of the opportunity granted to him is deserved.

Kuyper accurately summarized the outlook of modern Evangelicalism back into the biblical covenants and the consequences:

This is how people have become accustomed to viewing the series of covenants. The New Testament is in front, as the only one we need to maintain, and behind this, but having now become obsolete and pointless, were those covenants with Abraham and Israel. And then there is a third covenant, even much farther back beyond those two obsolete covenants, which is days long gone and forgotten was made with Noah and his sons. Precisely for this reason it has no other value for us except as a historical remembrance. And as a result of these notions, people want to know of no other covenant except one designed for saving the soul.36

This is a useful bridge to the second controversy that we will cover next time. We will move from Gnostic lines of reasoning to Pietistic lines of reasoning.

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1. “The Three Points of Common Grace” Advice of the Committee in General of the Synod of the Christian Reformed Church [1924], quoted in Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), 26, 27, 29.

2. Matthias Flacius Illyricus quoted by F. Bente, “The Flacian Controversy,” in The Book of Concord, XV.

3. cf. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II: Anthropology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 99.

4. Calvin, Institutes, II.2.12.

5. Calvin, Commentaries, I:296

6. Belgic Confession, XIV.

7. Canons of Dort, III-IV. Art. 1, 4.

8. Turretin, Institutes, I.9.8.3.

9. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, III:291.

10. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, Volume 1: God, Man, and Christ (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1992), 323-24.

11. Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume One (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2009), III.3 [279].

12. R. L. Dabney, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2002), 294.

13. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II: Anthropology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 99.

14. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 61.

15. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:549.

16. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:554.

17. Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume Two: The Duties of the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 417.

18. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1932), 204.

19. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, I:381, italics mine.

20. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, I:384.

21. According to Kuyper, “Pareus, Perkins, Mastricht understood it in this more restricted sense, and Rivet also uses an expression that seems to indicate that he was of the same opinion.” (Common Grace, I:21).

22. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:264

23. He says, “The restraining of sin and its consequences, which constitutes the real essence of common grace, is manifest immediately in what we read of Adam and Eve after their fall” (Common Grace, I:292).

24. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, I:378.

25. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:263.

26. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:272.

27. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:302.

28. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume One: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 149.

29. Kuyper quoted in Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 24.

30. Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, I:149.

31. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:515.

32. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:42.

33. Waltke, Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 291.

34. Van Pelt, “The Noahic Covenant of the Covenant of Grace,” 111.

35. Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, xlvii.

36. Kuyper, Common Grace, I:38.