What Is Common Grace?

What keeps the world from descending into complete disorder? Today, W. Robert Godfrey explores the doctrine of common grace, addressing common misconceptions and why this truth matters for Christians.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Joining us this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast is the chairman of Ligonier Ministries, also one of our teaching fellows, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey. Dr. Godfrey, what is common grace and how is it sometimes misunderstood?

DR. W. ROBERT GODFREY: Well, common grace can be misunderstood in a variety of ways, like so many topics in life. Common grace usually is attributed to Abraham Kuyper. And Abraham Kuyper was one of the great Reformed theologians of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And one of his goals was to try to make Reformed theology a little clearer, a little more consistent in light of some of the challenges of earlier forms of theology. And one of the things that Kuyper wanted to oppose was what he saw as an approach to theology and culture in Roman Catholicism where a strong distinction was made between nature and grace.

And a lot of medieval Roman Catholic theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, wanted to stress that while the grace part of human experience required saving work of God from sin, nature was relatively unaffected by sin. And Roman Catholic theologians would debate exactly how much, but the Roman Catholics wanted to talk about part of life being relatively unaffected by sin and part of life radically needing grace.

And Kuyper thought that was a bad division of experience and thought, and he wanted to stress how sin had compromised and corrupted everything. And so, he denied that nature was somehow less corrupted by the fall into sin. But then Kuyper recognized that, in point of fact, as everyone knew, the world was not as bad as it could be. Sin is plenty bad, but the world could be worse. So, how do we account for the fact that the world is not as bad as it could be if we’re radically fallen into sin, if we’re totally depraved? And this is where Kuyper came up with the notion of common grace in place of the Roman Catholic teaching about nature.

And Kuyper said that it’s not that there’s some part of experience unaffected by sin, it’s that God restrains sin, that it’s God’s action, not our lack of corruption, that makes things not as bad as they are. And he labeled that common grace. So, he distinguished common grace, which restrains general human experience from becoming as bad as it could be, from saving grace, regenerating grace.

And that distinction came to be criticized by some of Kuyper’s critics, who didn’t want grace to have any general application or general benevolence, wanted grace to be exclusively used for redemption. And so, some have misunderstood Kuyper by not really seeing what he was after as a, we might say, cultural apologetic. And then some have taken the idea of common grace, that we sometimes call neo-Kuyperians, and have almost implied that common grace can become saving grace. And so, some of Kuyper’s critics contend it almost in a liberal direction by expanding on the application of common grace. And others of Kuyper’s critics can become almost sectarian in their denial of any general benevolence of God for creation as a whole.