Dear Forum Members,
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Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. It will interest you to know that Mrs. Hanko and I are once again in Singapore. The Covenant Evangelical Reformed Church was greatly in need of help once again; one of the pastors of this church, Rev. Lau Chin Kwee, is still recuperating from major surgery. He had a rare genetic disease and the only life-saving measure was a heart-liver transplant. This was the first operation of its kind in all Asia and only the 17th in the whole world. It was performed by a team of 50, of which ten were doctors. He is recuperating well and could possibly return home this week. His surgery has attracted a lot of media attention, and the family has been greatly bothered by this. Pray for him and his family in this difficult time.
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I have finished the discussion of the history of common grace, giving particular attention to the history of the gracious and well-meant gospel offer. The time has come to begin a discussion of the doctrines themselves, the Biblical proof offered in support of them and the evaluation of them from a Biblical and confessional perspective.
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Before I enter a detailed discussion concerning the doctrine of common grace, I should make some general remarks.
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The doctrine of common grace has implications for many other doctrines of the Reformed faith. By virtue of the fact that common grace deals with grace, it touches on and significantly modifies these doctrines that historically have been called “the doctrines of grace”. These doctrines of grace are usually defined as the “Five Points of Calvinism.” Common grace has implications for at least four of the five points of Calvinism, and perhaps all five: unconditional election, particular redemption, total depravity, and irresistible grace, and perhaps the preservation of the saints. While a consideration of this aspect of the subject surely has benefits, and while I intend to demonstrate in passing how common grace modifies these doctrines of grace, I will be concentrating on the doctrines of common grace themselves.
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I say, I will be concentrating on the doctrines (in the plural) of common grace. Common grace itself is one doctrine that teaches that God is gracious to all mankind, and not only to the elect. But included in that general doctrine are at least four other doctrines. That is, God is said to show His favor to all men and not only to the elect in at least four different ways. Briefly, they are: God’s attitude of favor towards all men shown to them by gracious and wonderful gifts in creation; God’s work of restraining sin in the hearts of the unregenerate by His Spirit so that unsaved people are not as bad as they could be and would be apart from common grace; the ability of the unregenerated man to perform good works by the power of the Holy Spirit; and the gracious and well-meant offer of the gospel.
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Although the four doctrines that form parts of the general doctrine of common grace are separate doctrines, and although they may clearly be distinguished form each other, the similarity and relationship between these four doctrines lies in the fact that all are manifestations of God’s grace or favor to all -- although that grace is worked in different ways.
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It is important to remember, as I have pointed out before, that the word “grace” has basically two connotations in Scripture. The first one is God’s unmerited attitude of favor to the elect. No one does anything to merit that favor, but rather forfeits it with all he does. Favor is always gratuitous. The second meaning of the word “grace” is a work of God in the heart of the sinner that brings God’s blessings upon the object of grace and spiritually changes the recipient of that grace. In the elect, God’s grace is the power within men that bestows on them all the blessings of salvation, spiritually alters them so that the regenerated child of God can be called “a new creature” (Gal. 6:15); enables them to walk as God’s people in the world, gives them strength to bear the trials of life, and leads them infallibly to their eternal destination. But if one teaches that God shows grace to the reprobate, this grace to the reprobate is also both an attitude of favor and an internal work of God, a bestowal of benefits internally given that change a man, though that change is not conversion or salvation. We must keep this in mind.
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There is a point here that needs to be made. Although common grace is defined as an attitude of God towards all men, that attitude is not simply objective, out there somewhere, an attitude of which the object is unaware, an attitude hidden in the heart of God. The object of common grace may despise God’s gracious attitude towards him, but he does know it and experience it and his rejection of it is the proof that he knows it..
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The objective attitude of God’s favor towards all men becomes subjectively man’s experience in two ways. The first is simply that the object of God’s attitude of favor is made aware of this favor of God and what it means for him personally.
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The well-meant gospel offer is one part of common grace that stresses the knowledge the sinner has of God’s gracious attitude towards him. The gospel itself expresses to him in a gracious offer, that God wants very much to save him and is willing to do all that is necessary to make salvation possible for him. In fact, it is God’s intention to save him and the only reason he is not saved is because man himself puts up obstacles to God’s work that are not overcome by God.
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This consciousness of God’s favor that makes the unregenerate sinner aware of this gracious attitude of God towards him is very important. What good does it do if the sinner is unaware of how greatly God loves him? A young man may like very much a young lady, but shyness keeps him at a distance and she never becomes aware of it. However, he may gain courage and send her a dozen roses on her birthday, or he may find the courage in himself to express his feeling towards her. Then she knows, whatever her own reaction might be.
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So God also makes known to the sinner that He is favorably inclined towards him. He does this in more ways than through the gracious gospel offer. In giving a man the Holy Spirit who restrains sin in him, the man knows this comes from God. Just as a sick man knows he is made better by the skills of a physician, the sinner knows he is made better by the divine physician. This gift is impressed upon the consciousness of man by God Himself. God gives man this gift because God loves him – so the common grace advocate teaches.
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It has frequently been said that man is conscious of God’s goodness towards him because of what has been called in Reformed theology, a sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity), or semen religionis (seed of religion). This sense of divinity is indeed a reality, as Scripture and our confessions teach. But it is a serious mistake to claim, as some do, that this sensus diuvinitis is also the fruit of common grace. We shall consider this more in detail at a later point.
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Hence, man cannot escape knowing, so claim the advocates of common grace, that God loves him, shows mercy to him, truly shows kindness and benevolence toward him and is very much interested in saving him and making him blessed. Through all God’s works man comes to know that God is indeed favorable towards him.
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Grace involves all the communicable attributes of God. Grace is, in that sense, a broad term, a generic term that includes many different attitudes of God. Grace includes love, mercy, kindness, benevolence, longsuffering and the like. For example, if God gives him grace, God loves the reprobate, according to common grace. Some defenders of common grace are quick to point out that this love of God for the reprobate is not the same kind of love, perhaps not as intense, not as strong, but love nonetheless, which God shows to the elect. The same is true of the other virtues of God. He is compassionate to the wicked; He is merciful to them in their misery; He is sympathetic to them in their troubles; He enjoys nothing so much as to see them happy and does all that He can to make them happy. And so common grace is God’s favor upon the wicked of which they are conscious, and the benefits of which grace they experience every day.
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But this is not all. The defenders of common grace also teach that grace, subjectively bestowed on the sinner, involves a subjective and inner change in the sinner, although not a saving change. This lies in the nature of grace. When the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of the sinner to restrain sin and to enable the sinner to do good works, that powerful grace modifies his total depravity, lessens the power of sin in a man, and leaves an unsaved sinner no longer totally depraved. I know that defenders of common grace, in defense of this position and intent on trying to remain Reformed, speak of a distinction between total depravity (one of the Five Points of Calvinism) and absolute depravity. Apart from common grace, so they say, man is absolutely depraved, but through common grace he becomes totally depraved. It is obvious that this is a mere playing with words. In the thinking of those who promote common grace, the term “total” does not mean “total,” but partial.
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The same is true of the well-meant gospel offer. Because it is a gracious offer, it is a vehicle whereby God gives to everyone who hears the gospel a subjective grace by means of which a man has the power to accept or reject the gospel. In fact, as we shall see, that grace that never saves, gives sufficient power to the sinner to see his own sins, see the just punishment of God that is his lot because of his sins, see the blessedness of escaping from sin by fleeing to Christ; and yet he refuses to go to Christ for salvation. We shall discuss this at a later date. It was known among Puritans as the doctrine of preparationism.
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That there is this internal working of God in the hearts of the unregenerate that changes him is made clear in the writings of Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch theologian and contemporary of Abraham Kuyper. Bavinck, though brought up in the tradition of the Secession of 1834, and though he became professor of Dogmatics in Kampen Seminary, the Seminary of the Secession Churches, nevertheless, moved to the Free University, Kuyper’s pride and joy, to take up the position of professor of Dogmatics there. The Secessionists never quite forgave him
for doing this..
Right: Dr. Herman Bavinck
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Bavinck, in his book, Our Reasonable Faith discusses common grace from the viewpoint of general revelation and speaks of general revelation as a manifestation of common grace. (Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith [Grand Rapids: Wm B, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1956] chapters 3 & 4.)
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He first makes a point of it that the content of general revelation and special revelation are the same: But though they have the same content, they are to be distinguished from each other. “And, however essentially the two are to be distinguished, they remain intimately connected. … The general revelation is owing to the Word which was with God in the beginning, which made all things, which shone as a light in the darkness and lighteth every man that cometh into the world. … The special revelation is owing to that same Word as it as made flesh in Christ, and is now full of grace and truth …”(37, 38).
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This relationship between general revelation and special revelation is described as follows: “It is common grace which makes special grace possible, prepares the way for it, and later supports it; and special grace, in its turn, leads common grace up to its own level and puts it into its service” (38).
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That this common grace is also worked internally in the heart of man is Bavinck’s conviction: “After all, the revelation of God in nature and in history could have no effect upon man if there were not something in man himself that responded to it. … And so too the revelation of God in all the works of His hands would be quite unknowable to man if God had not planted in his soul an inerasible (sic, inerasable is correct) sense of His existence and being. … God reveals Himself outside of man; He reveals Himself also within man. He does not leave Himself without witness in the human heart and conscience” (42, emphasis belongs to Bavinck).
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And, of course, general revelation is, in the mind of Bavinck, common grace. And so the fruits of common grace in general revelation are many: “It is owing to general revelation that some religious and ethical sense is present in all men; that they have some awareness still of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, justice and injustice, beauty and ugliness; that they live in the relationship of marriage and the family, of community and state; that they are held in check by all these external and internal controls against degenerating into bestiality; that within the pale of these limits, they busy themselves with the production, distribution, and enjoyment of all kinds of spiritual and material things; in short that mankind is by general revelation preserved in its existence, maintained in its unity, and enable to continue and to develop in history” (59).
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That all these things are true of mankind we do not doubt. That they are the fruit of general revelation, much less, common grace, is quite another matter.
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With warmest regards,
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Prof. Herman Hanko
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