Is common grace a biblical doctrine? Not everyone in church history believes that it is. Herman Hoeksema is perhaps the most famous opponent to the doctrine in the last century. I say most “famous,” not because you’ve likely heard of him, but because he has provided some of the most substantive arguments against the doctrine of common grace from within the Reformed tradition while also making disagreement over this doctrine the point of a denominational split.1
My aim is not to answer Hoeksema’s every point directly. Rather, my goal is to make sure that what we believe about the doctrine of common grace is truly the teaching of the Bible.
What is common grace? Common grace refers to the blessings that all people experience in this life regardless of their spiritual status. All people, whether they stand in right relationship with God or not, experience some earthly blessing in this life. Theologians have named the source of these blessings as God’s common grace.
How does Scripture develop the doctrine of common grace? As we consider this question, it is important to keep in mind that establishing a doctrine from Scripture is more than just locating words that relate to the topic. The words “common” and “grace” are found all throughout the Bible (the latter far more than the former), but the phrase “common grace” is never found in Scripture. Nor is it enough to look for passages that include the word “common” and the word “grace” and merely put them together side-by-side.
Rather, we are taking what Scripture on the whole teaches about several different theological categories (creation, mankind, sin, salvation) and then seeking to make comprehensive and coherent sense of these doctrines as they relate to our subject. The doctrine of common grace is the fruit of biblical exegesis and theological reflection on how those biblical passages fit together and apply to our present situation.
First, we must consider the creation of the world, for creation is the place in which common grace is expressed. Over the five days prior to his creation of humankind, God fashioned an earth of exquisite beauty and abundance, a world fine-tuned for animal and human life. Once this global habitat was finished, God populated the earth with an assortment of creatures that filled the sky, land, and sea. After a series of creative flourishes, God would step back from his project like a master craftsman and assess his work. “And God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:10).
Second, we must consider the nature of humankind, for it is humankind to whom common grace is expressed. We see first that humankind is created in God’s image (Gen 1:26). This creation in God’s image signals the completion of God’s creative work, as the Creator himself deems his workmanship now as “very good” (Gen 1:31). Included in this declaration of the creation’s inherent goodness would be man’s placement in the garden and his assignment to “work it and keep it” (Gen 2:15)2 as well as his union with Eve, his wife. Productive labor, marriage, and sexual intimacy are all deemed good at the point of their creation.
This divine evaluation of the created order is foundational for the doctrine of common grace. The inherent goodness of creation is established prior to the fall and is preserved in some measure as we transition into a post-fall world. God had originally created the world to be a place of exquisite enjoyment and pleasure. The goodness of the creation would have been immediately perceptible to the new humans and served as a source of God-centered delight. Yes, sin had a comprehensive effect on the creation, infecting every aspect of God’s masterpiece; yet the material world still retained an inherent goodness that could be enjoyed by both believers (see 1 Tim 4:4-5) and unbelievers (Acts 14:17).
Prior to Adam and Eve’s sin, they appropriated the creation and dwelt with one another in a way that only brought glory to God and joy and pleasure to themselves. It follows, then, that these elements of the creation—plant and animal life, material provision, aesthetic beauty, productive labor, marriage, and sexual intimacy—were good and were intended to be received as wholesome earthly blessings. It isn’t until the fall that the man and the woman experience anything unpleasant. Indeed, it is man’s sin that introduces a multitude of unpleasantries into Adam and Eve’s earthly experience.
Immediately upon Adam and Eve’s sin, a fracture develops in their relationship with God and with one another. Having broken God’s law, they were now unholy, unrighteous, and worthy of punishment. In their conscience, they recognize their guilt, so they attempt to cover their shame and hide from God (Gen 3:7-8). From this point onward, human beings are not able to enjoy God’s creation with unfettered delight; rather, while vestiges of the creation’s original pleasures remain, the man and the woman will be beset with physical pain, relational trouble, and difficulty in their respective callings to bring forth children from the womb and bread from the ground (Gen 3:16-19). Nevertheless, God will provide them with a complete atonement for their sin, prefigured by animal coverings he supplied for Adam and Eve to replace their fig leaves (3:20-21).
Although it is clear that sin has wreaked havoc on the created order, the basic goodness of the creation remains intact to the point that, despite the pain that comes with giving birth, children can still be counted as a genuine blessing from God (Ps 127:3-5). Even though one’s daily labors are now difficult, frustrating, and occasionally fruitless, the man can still find joy in his work and in eating what his hands have produced (Eccl 2:24-25).
The doctrine of common grace, therefore, is built upon six theological pillars: (1) The inherent goodness of the material creation; (2) God’s intention for the creation to serve as a source of legitimate delight for humankind; (3) the creation of humankind in God’s image; (4) the reality of sin and man’s guilt before his Creator; (5) the retention of creation’s inherent goodness despite the introduction of sin and the curse into the created order; and (6) the providence of God.
(1) The Inherent Goodness of Creation
In our brief study of Genesis above, I noted that God’s creation was inherently good. Contrary to Gnostic and Platonic teaching that views the physical creation as the product of a malevolent being and therefore intrinsically evil, the biblical position is that the material creation is good, as the creation narrative makes clear with the repeated refrain “and God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:10; 1:12; 1:18; 1:21; 1:25). The physical aspects of our existence were designed intentionally by God as a source of rich pleasure and satisfaction. The fall and subsequent curse, though comprehensive in scope and devastating in their effect upon this creation (e.g., Rom 8:18-25), did not overturn the fundamental goodness of the material creation so as to render it essentially evil, as in the Platonic or Gnostic scheme. And, as we will note below, the creation retains its inherent goodness despite the intrusion of sin and the God’s declaration of the curse.
(2) God’s Intention for Human Beings to Enjoy and Benefit from the Creation
Related to this first point is the explicit intention of God that his creation serve as a source of legitimate delight and pleasure for his human creatures. It is not enough to say that human beings are able to enjoy the creation, but that it was God’s express intention that they would.3 The existence of an inherently good creation flows from God’s nature as absolute goodness (Ex 33:19; 1 Kings 8:66; 2 Chron 6:41; Neh 9:25). God’s goodness is the source for both God’s motive in creation and the inherent goodness of the creation. God is essentially good; therefore, he created a good world for the express purpose of his creatures’ pleasure in that goodness.
As it pertained to the original creation, Genesis 2:16-17 makes clear that God created with human pleasure expressly in mind:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
While it may be easy to read this passage with an emphasis on the negative instruction (“You shall not eat,” emphasis added), it is crucial for a correct assessment of the physical world to note that God begins his command with a positive instruction to eat freely from the abundant provision of “every tree of the garden.” Actually, it was Satan’s strategy in his temptation of Eve to make it sound as though God was primarily a prohibitor of enjoyment rather than a promoter of it, which is why he framed his first statement negatively rather than positively: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’” (Gen 3:1; emphasis added)? It should not surprise us that false teachers often trade on arbitrary restrictions of legitimate earthly enjoyment (see Col 2:16-23; 1 Tim 4:1-5).
Also, implicit in the command to “subdue” the earth and exercise dominion over it is God’s intention that man should benefit richly from it (Gen 1:26-31). Grudem comments,
This responsibility to “subdue” the earth and “have dominion” over it implies that God expected Adam and Eve and their decedents to explore and develop the earth’s resources in such a way that they would bring benefit to themselves and other human beings….The responsibility to develop the earth and enjoy its resources continued after Adam and Eve’s sin, for even then God gold them, “You shall eat the plants of the field.”4
Even in a post-fall world, man still retains the responsibility and opportunity to use this resourceful creation for his benefit and the benefit of others. “The earth that God created is still ‘good’ in many ways,” Grudem contends, “It is amazingly resourceful because of the great treasures that he has placed in it for us to discover, enhance, and enjoy.”5 Now, part of this work of subduing the earth is to overcome the fallen creation, in some measure, to make it useful for people.
Part of our God-given task of subduing the earth and having dominion over it (Gen. 1:28) is inventing various measures to overcome the way in which nature is sometimes harmful to man and sometimes less than fully helpful. (Even in the unfallen world God told Adam and Eve to “subdue” it, implying that God wanted them to improve on nature as it was originally created—that is, God created it to be investigated and explored and developed!)6
Despite our sin as humankind, God still sustains this universe and enables all people, whether believer or unbeliever, to enjoy and benefit from the creation.
Did God Create for Our Pleasure or His Glory?
At this point it will be helpful to consider how God’s intention to create a world that his human creatures could enjoy relates to God creating the world for the sake of his own glory. One might object to speaking about God’s express intention to create the world for his people’s enjoyment because such an emphasis could lead to the idolatry of the creation and undermine the glory of God as the deepest motivation for all of God’s actions (e.g., 1 Sam 12:22; Ezek 20:14; Rom 9:17).
But we must be careful that we don’t create a false dichotomy that suggests we must prioritize God’s intention of creating a world that his human creatures could enjoy or his intention of creating a world for his own glory. What we find in Scripture is that these two divine motives for creation work in perfect tandem with each other. In other words, when the human heart is working in the way God designed it to work (in right relation to God, without sin, empowered by the Spirit), a human creature’s enjoyment of the creation is, at every point of the experience, a delight simultaneously in the thing itself and in the God who created it. That is why the psalmist can say, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8). In physical tasting there is, for the person who knows God, a tasting that experiences the physical delight and through that physical delight enjoys something of God at the very same moment.
This is not suggesting a kind of pantheism (where God is all things and all things are God). Rather, this is how the Creator has determined to be enjoyed through his creation—a creation that is nevertheless infinitely separate and distinct from the Creator. This means that the delight in any element of the creation is an asymmetrical enjoyment. Because the creation is finite and dependent upon God while God is infinite and not dependent upon his creation, any enjoyment of the creation must locate its final enjoyment in God himself.
Even so, it is a concurrent delight in both the created thing itself and an enjoyment of God through the created thing. This was Adam and Eve’s experience until they sinned (Gen 2:16), and it can be the Christian’s experience in a partial-yet-real manner while he or she is still on earth (1 Tim 4:4-5). In the new heavens and new earth, this simultaneous enjoyment of God through the creation will occur without a hint of idolatry and without interruption at every moment for all eternity.7
(3) The Creation of Man in God’s Image
The creation of man in God’s image is an essential component to the doctrine of common grace, not only because God has given this world as a gift to his image-bearers to be enjoyed (see above), but also because it provides the basis on how we are to evaluate intellectual contributions made by these image-bearers. Much of what we enjoy in this life comes directly by way of or is undergirded by beneficial intellectual contributions offered by men and women who are skilled in various areas of learning: political theory, physics, chemistry, architecture, education, software development, and so on. While the fall has tainted man’s intellectual contributions so that he now has bent toward self and can be led away into false assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality, mankind, and theological truth, he nevertheless is able to grasp much about the created order that is true and to harness that knowledge for the benefit of his fellow humans. But this truth must be quickly coupled to the truth expressed in the next section.
(4) The Reality of Sin and Man’s Guilt
As we also learn in the Genesis narrative, mankind sinned against God and immediately became liable to God’s just punishment. Post-fall, all humankind is sinful and worthy of earthly misery, death, and eternal punishment (Gen 2:16-17; 3:17ff; Rom 3:10-20; 6:23). The moment after Adam and Eve sinned, every current or subsequent member of the human race was now wholly unworthy of any pleasure or providential favor this creation had to offer.8 Indeed, due to our sin against an infinitely holy God, we are only worthy of immediate and eternal destruction.9 It is for this reason that “grace” has been used most often to define this doctrine: any legitimate enjoyment of this creation by any human being, however small or fleeting that pleasure may be, is a gift of unmerited favor that is enjoyed purely on the basis of God’s goodness, not the worthiness of the individual (see also Matt 5:44-49).10
The truth of man’s sin and guilt also guards us from becoming overly optimistic about the contributions of unbelieving humanity. Due to the pervasive nature of sin, every human contribution carries the potential for error and evil. We must constantly practice discernment to make sure that we are rightly identifying elements of God’s common grace in the creation.
(5) The Retention of Creation’s Inherent Goodness Despite Sin and the Curse
The doctrine of common grace also depends on the fact that creation has retained its inherent goodness in some measure despite the fall of humankind and a creation-wide curse. Despite the prevalence of Platonic dualism throughout the history of Western thought,11 the Scripture and the historic Judeo-Christian tradition has always held, more or less, to the idea that God’s creation, though marred, is still intrinsically good.
This is not to suggest that everything we experience in creation is good, for we have already argued that there is such a thing as evil in the world. Also, we know that creation itself is liable to becoming disordered so that, at times, the structures of the creation do not function the way they are designed to (Rom 8:18-25).12 Nevertheless, there is a continuity between the pre- and post-fall creation so that there still exists a recognizable good in the creation (1 Tim 4:4). This truth allows us to say that both believers and unbelievers can experience temporal blessings in this life because those blessings are grounded in God’s good creation.
This last point requires the introduction of another category. Because we are grounding common grace in the goodness of God and his original creation, we must discuss the idea of legitimacy. This category is essential because it is not enough to say that any enjoyment or intellectual contribution is a blessing of common grace, for this would link sinful activity and falsehood to God, his original creation, and his intentions for the creation.
For example, if a man finds pleasure in adultery, we cannot say that this pleasure is a gift of God’s common grace. If a worldview is espoused in a book that undermines human dignity, then those ideas cannot be classified under the heading of common grace. In both cases we have an abuse or a perversion of God’s gifts rather than a legitimate use of them. The doctrine of common grace, therefore, does not sanction sin. We can only say that common grace is functioning when a person is enjoying or benefitting from the creation in accordance with the way God has designed and ordered the world to work.13
(6) The Providence of God
Finally, the doctrine of common grace rests on the providence of God. It is God who actively provides for his creatures through his general oversight of the world. He is the one who provides the stable rhythm of fruitful seasons and food for people to enjoy (Gen 8:22; Acts 14:16-17). He establishes people in their places of habitation so they can partake in the blessings of family life, marriage, work, exploration, and a myriad of other temporal blessings (Gen 2:24; Acts 17:26; Matt 5:45; Ps 65:5-13; 104; 136:25). He establishes governments for and restrains sin for the sake of social stability (Gen 4:15; 11:6; 20:6; 2 Thess 2:7). He holds back his wrath (Matt 19:8; Acts 17:30; Rom 3:25). Unregenerate are able people to do good, or what theologians have called, “civil righteousness” (2 Kings 10:29-31; Luke 6:33). Unregenerate people can also know truth (Rom 1:20; Matt 23:3-4) and even experience the non-salvific blessings of the Holy Spirit (Num 22:1-24:25; 1 Sam 10:9-11; Matt 10:5-8).14
We will discuss each of these elements of God’s providence in subsequent articles as we examine the realms of common grace.
NOTES
1See Herman Hoeksema, The Protestant Reformed Churches in America: Their Origin, Early History, and Doctrine (Grand Rapids: n.p., 1947).
2I take Genesis 2:4-24 to be a detailed description of what occurred on day six, not a separate creation story that conflicts with the previous description of God creating man and woman in his own image. Genesis 2:4-24 acts as a zoom lens that focuses more precisely on what happened on the sixth day of creation. That is why we must include assignment of work and marriage within God’s designation of “very good” at the end of day six.
3John Calvin comments, “Now when he disposed the movement of the sun and the stars to human uses, filled the earth, waters, and air with living things, and brought forth an abundance of fruit to suffice as foods, in thus assuming the responsibility of a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us” (Institutes, I. 14. 2); cited in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, Revised Edition (Nashville: B & H, 2013), 210.
4Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 325.
5Grudem, Politics, 322.
6Grudem, Politics, 322
7For more on this theme, see Joe Rigney’s The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015).
8It should be noted that Adam and Eve were never positively worthy of the temporal blessings they received from God prior to their sin. Even their pre-fall existence was a gift of God’s grace, for they had done nothing to incite God to create them or bless them with life.
9While there will be positive afflictions meted out against the unrighteous in hell (i.e., eternal fire), one of the most despairing aspects of eternal judgment will be the removal of all that is good. This is one reason why eternal judgment is referred to as “death.” Life provides you the capacity in which you enjoy God’s good creation; death is the removal of life and therefore the removal of any capacity to enjoy God’s goodness. This distinction between life and death is found in the very first command of Scripture (Gen 2:16). Bruce Demarest writes, “Several Greek words metaphorically connote ultimate spiritual ruin, the loss of everything good, and perdition in hell” (The Cross and Salvation: The Doctrine of Salvation [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997], 31, emphasis added).
10John Frame prefers to refer to this doctrine as “common goodness,” because “grace” universally has redemptive connotations in the Old and New Testament. In other words, to say that “grace” has reference to that which someone enjoys short of salvation (i.e., common “grace”) seems to create a confusion in terms. Nevertheless, Louis Berkof observes that while “Some prefer to say that [natural blessings] are expressions of his goodness, kindness, mercy, or longsuffering, [they] seem to forget that He could not be good, kind, or benevolent to the sinner unless He were first of all gracious.” (Systematic Theology, New Combined Version[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996], 2:435).
11Dualism in this context refers to the idea that humans are made of a material component (the body) and a spiritual component (the soul or spirit) and that the latter is superior to the former. Because of our soul’s superiority to the physical body, it is man’s ultimate goal to shed the body and finally achieve a purely spiritual existence. This was the view of the Platonists and the Neo-Platonists and is usually the view of ancient and modern Gnosticism.
12Here I am thinking of diseases, human deformities, natural disasters, and so on.
13These distinctions assume that common grace is functioning when the creation is working according to its God-given telos (i.e., end, goal). For example, in the case of the man finding pleasure in adultery, his physical pleasure is possible because of the way God has designed the human body to function in the experience of sexual intimacy. Nevertheless, God did not design the human body to function sexually outside of the marriage relationship. Therefore, sexual intimacy in the case of adultery has not been enjoyed according to its telos and is therefore an illegitimate use of this aspect of God’s creation. In the case of a worldview that undermines the dignity of human life, we can see that God’s intellectual gifts are at work, but to the degree those gifts did not fulfill their God-given telos (they produced falsehood rather than truth), we cannot say that we have, in this case, an example of common grace.
14Portions of this list were adapted from John Frame, Systematic Theology, 247-48.