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| Jan Davidz. de Heem: Festoon with Flowers and Fruits (1670) |
The significance of common grace in the reformational worldview can only be understood in the light of the radical antithesis that exists between the ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation and the ground-motives of apostate religions. Common grace is the opposite of the Roman Catholic motive of “nature.” In the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace, human nature remains a relatively autonomous factor over against the grace of Christ Jesus. The realm of nature here is the place where a synthesis is struck between the creation motive of Scripture and the dialectical ground-motive of the Greek world of thought.
The common grace of Scripture, by contrast, is the effect of the antithetical operation of the religious [ie ultimate root] ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation. Beginning with the promise made in Paradise, which was fulfilled in Christ Jesus in the fullness of time, this ground-motive has been at work in opposition to the principle of apostasy [ie rejection of Christ]. It has suspended the final judgment of our fallen world and held in check the unhindered effects of spiritual death that resulted from the fall into sin.
This grace is a common grace (gratia communis). It is not individual and not particular. It is not mediated through palingenesis [rebirth], but is a grace that is given to the whole human race and to the whole temporal cosmos that is religiously [ie “rootedly”] concentrated in this human race, without distinction between believers and unbelievers.
This common grace preserves human nature in spite of its apostasy from God. It also preserves individual gifts and talents; and it allows remnants of the original perfection to unfold, even in God’s fallen creation. Above all, it upholds the order of creation itself through the divine Word that created everything. Thus it maintains all the structures and ordinances that are founded in this creation order, which stand antithetically opposed to human hubris and force it to capitulate again and again.
There is no dualism between the divine Word that created all things and the incarnation of this Word in Christ Jesus, who brought redemption from sin. God’s Word remains the Word, even in its incarnation.
According to Emil Brunner there is an internal contradiction between God’s will as Creator and God’s will as Redeemer. In this he is obviously under the influence of the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace. Although common grace finds its origin in the Word of God, it can never be detached from Christ Jesus, the new life-giving root of the human race. Indeed, it is only in Christ that common grace truly becomes grace for mankind; and outside of Him it becomes judgment and curse. For this reason there can be no thought of a “separate domain of common grace” that stands opposed to a “domain of special grace” in Christ Jesus.
The ground-motive of the Divine Word-revelation contains no dualism. It was only because of the influence of the scholastic ground-motive of nature and grace that Reformed Christians detached common grace from the incarnate Word and denied it in its religious root.
If the antithetical principle of life is eliminated from the fallen cosmos, nothing remains but the decay and death of human nature. This antithetical life principle has a preserving effect upon humanity as it stands yet undivided in its apostate natural existence; and it regenerates, through palingenesis, those creatures reborn and renewed in Christ Jesus. But the church of Christ, as such, can only live out of palingenesis, which works all its regenerating wonders even in the fellowship of a common grace shared with fallen mankind.
The life of this church in this fellowship of common grace entails antithesis, incessant struggle, and ongoing reformation. Indeed, it is only in terms of palingenesis [rebirth] that we can understand the reformational dynamic, a dynamic which through its radically changed life-posture transforms not only our worldview, but also, and at its core, our scientific endeavor.
Kuyper’s grasp of this shows that he truly lived out of the Scriptural religious ground-motive of the Reformation. This was the deepest insight in his entire “weltanschauliche” or “worldview-ish” conception of reformational scholarship.
