Common Grace and the Gospel (review)

The Christian Philosophy of History

Metaphysically, we have all things in common with the unregenerate.  Epistemologically, we do not.

Universals of non-Christian thought are ultimately non-personalist.

For the Reformed Christian God’s counsel is the principle of individuation.

Paradox

God’s being and his self-consciousness are co-terminous (9).

Abraham Kuyper’s Doctrine of Common Grace

distinction between constant and progressive aspects of common grace.  

COMMON GRACE IN DEBATE

Recent Developments

Schilder on the importance of thinking concretely.  Common grace shows us the importance of seeing historical development and progression (31).

Danger of Abstract Thinking

Kuyper:  all creation-ordinances are subject to the will of God (35).    Kuyper was unclear on the relation between universal/particular.

• universals themselves exist as a system.  They are organically related to one another.  But how can they be related to one another and still remain universals?  Whenever universals “overlap,” they begin to admit of “change,” which seems to deny what a universal is.  This was Plato’s problem.
• Plato ascribes the transition between universals as “chance.”
• The Christian can begin to allow for transitions between universals because the universals are ascribed to the counsel of God.  No abstract staticism and no abstract change.
• Therefore, the Christian reasons analogically with respect to these relations between facts.  Facts never exist as facts;  they always exist as facts-in-relation (and this is where Hegel did have correct insight).    Reasoning analogically, if the being and self-consciousness of the ontological Trinity are coterminous, may we not also say that facts and universals are corelative in the counsel of God (40).  

Bavinck:  there is one principle in theology.

• What is the Christian notion of mystery?  For the Greeks “god” is abstracted to the point of an empty concept (moving up on the chain of being).  
• Bavinck does not fully break with this concept of mystery.  

Hepp: sought to build a general testimony of the Spirit

• Difference between psychological and epistemological.
• If we take the original human nature and the sinful human nature and realize that everywhere both are active, we are done with the natural theology of Rome.

Positive Line of Concrete Thinking

• Even prelapsarian man was confronted with positive revelation.  God walked and talked with him.
• Natural revelation is a limiting concept.  It has never existed by itself as far as man is concerned.
• To insist that man’s relation with God is covenantal is to say that man deals with the personal God everywhere.
• After the common comes the conditional; history is the process of differentiation.  It is a common-ness for the time being (74).  
  • The offer comes generally so that history may have differentiation.
  • Per Platonism, the conditional can have no real meaning.

PARTICULARISM AND COMMON GRACE

Socrates was correct: men and gods agree as long as we talk about general principles.

• Pace Aquinas, to sing the praise of being in general is to sing the praise of man as well as God.
• On the neo-Orthodox analogy of faith scheme, God and man are correlative.  

Interestingly, Van TIl says he does not reject Old Princeton’s epistemology; simply it’s apologetics (155).

SUmmary of Van Til’s Position contra critics (158-159):

• all facts in the unvierse are exhaustively revelational of God.
  • This is true of the environment, nature, and history.
  • This is true of man’s constitution (perhaps there is a correlation with Reid’s belief-creating mechanism).
• All men unavoidably know God.
  • natural knowledge and sense of morality are not common grace.  They are the presuppositionof Common grace
  • The “starting point” is not the absolute ethical antithesis, but rather the imago dei.
    • This image contains actual knowledge-content.
    • Protestantism is a matter of restoring man to his true ethical relation.
    • The immediate testimony of the spirit has to terminate on man.  It has to be mediated to man through man’s own consciousness (178).  
    • The Antithesis is ethical, not metaphysical.  
      • The Romanist (and others) cannot really grasp this point because on the chain of being there are only gradations, not separations.
• The Image of God in Man
  • Kuyper:  image in wider sense is the essence of man, which remains unfallen.  The image in the narrower sense consists of true righteousness, knowledge, and holiness.  It can be lost/marred/defaced.
    • Does this distinction really work?  Is the “narrower” sense so loosely/accidentally related to man that it can be lost without effecting that image at all?  This looks a lot like donum superadditum.
    • This is what happens when we use concepts like “essence” and “Nature” loosely.
    • The image must be used in an analogical sense (205).  
      • each concept must be subject to the whole of the revelation of God.

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