Theopedia

Common grace

He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

— Matthew 5:45

Definition

Common grace is the grace of God given to the whole human race without distinction between believer and unbeliever. It is “common” because everyone receives it and “grace” because no one earns it. Reformed theology distinguishes it from special or saving grace, which God gives only to those he has chosen to redeem: common grace restrains sin, sustains the natural and moral order, and enables whatever is good, useful, or admirable in fallen human life, but it does not regenerate anyone or make anyone acceptable to God. Herman Bavinck states the distinction at its simplest: after the fall, grace comes in two forms, “common grace with a view toward restraining [evil] and… special grace with a view to renewing [the world],” both united in Christ.1 Common grace explains why people who remain totally depraved - unable in themselves to please God savingly - still exhibit real civic virtue, sustain functioning societies, and produce genuine good in family life, the arts, and the sciences.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled “common grace,” so this section states what the confession does affirm that bears on the doctrine, rather than a confessional formulation of common grace as such.

The confession’s chapter on good works addresses the moral status of what unregenerate people do: “Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands, and of good use both to themselves and others; yet because they proceed not from a heart purified by faith, nor are done in a right manner according to the word, nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, nor make a man meet to receive grace from God.”2 This holds together the two things common grace is meant to explain at once: such works are genuinely “of good use” to the person and to others - real civic and moral good, not an illusion - while also being unable to save, because they do not proceed from faith or aim at God’s glory.

The confession’s chapter on free will supplies the other half. Fallen man retains natural liberty of will - he chooses without external compulsion - even though “by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.”3 Natural ability and spiritual ability are not the same thing: common grace works within and upon the first without supplying the second. And its chapter on providence grounds God’s continuing government of “all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least,”4 which is the confessional category providential common grace belongs to, even though the confession does not use that phrase.

Biblical Basis

Two Old Testament texts, echoed by Jesus and Paul, are the classic supports for common grace’s providential form. Jesus points to God’s indiscriminate care for the created order as the pattern believers are to imitate in loving their enemies: God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Charles Hodge reads this alongside Paul’s speech at Lystra, where Paul tells pagan Gentiles that God “left not himself without witness,” having “done good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17).5 Neither text distinguishes elect from non-elect recipients; both describe material blessing given because of who God is, not because of the worthiness of who receives it. Psalm 145:9 states the same point as a general attribute of God: “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.”

A second line of texts grounds common grace in the moral order rather than the material one. Paul writes that civil authorities have been “instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1) and are “God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:4), restraining wrongdoing even where those who hold office do not themselves know God. And in Romans 2:14-15, Paul says that Gentiles “who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires,” showing “that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” Hodge takes this as Scripture’s own statement that fallen human beings retain some functioning knowledge of right and wrong apart from special revelation - not a knowledge sufficient to save, but real enough to leave excuse-making impossible.6

Historical Development

Bavinck credits Calvin with the doctrine’s classic Reformed statement. Calvin distinguished “general” grace from “special” grace and explained “all the good remaining even in sinful humanity in terms of common grace” - the sensus divinitatis and semen religionis (“seed of religion”) God has implanted in everyone, which is why “people cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him.”7 On this account, common grace is not a late addition to Reformed theology but present in its founding figure, tied to Calvin’s account of natural knowledge of God rather than treated as a separate doctrine on its own.

Petrus van Mastricht, writing against both Roman Catholic and Remonstrant accounts of grace, held that whatever moral good or natural skill appears in an unregenerate person - his example is Bezalel’s craftsmanship in building the tabernacle (Ex. 31:2-3) - is worked “not by the strength of his free choice alone, but by the common grace of God.”8 For Mastricht this common grace never rises to the point of removing the barriers to saving faith; it accounts for real natural and civic good without implying any natural ability to turn to God.

The term became a formal point of controversy within Dutch Reformed theology in the early twentieth century. In 1924, the Christian Reformed Church in North America’s synod adopted a doctrinal statement on common grace - citing Mastricht’s Theoretical-Practical Theology in its support - amid a broader Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition (running through Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck) that had increasingly treated common grace as a named theological category in its own right, covering God’s restraint of sin, sustaining of natural order, and gifting of culture and the arts to all people. Ministers Herman Hoeksema and Henry Danhof dissented, appealing to Mastricht as well - “more than to Calvin” - against the synod’s formulation.9 Their refusal to subscribe led to their removal from office and, with the churches that followed them, to the founding of the Protestant Reformed Churches in America.

Alternative Views

Arminian and Wesleyan views. Both Calvinists and Arminians affirm some doctrine of undeserved blessings God extends to all humanity, but they draw the line differently. The Wesleyan tradition speaks of “prevenient grace” as a grace that, in some measure, offsets the effects of the fall in every person, so that fallen human beings retain (or regain) the moral ability to turn to God in saving faith if they choose to. Reformed theology denies this: common grace, on the Calvinist account, does not touch the will’s inability to choose spiritual good. Mastricht’s list of reasons is representative - the “natural” or unregenerate person “does not perceive the things of the Spirit… and cannot understand them” (1 Cor. 2:14), and “the fleshly mind… does not submit itself to the divine law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7) - so that no measure of common grace, however generously described, amounts to the ability to prepare oneself for saving grace.8

The Protestant Reformed rejection of common grace. Herman Hoeksema and the churches that followed him out of the Christian Reformed Church in 1924 rejected the synod’s “Three Points of Common Grace” and, with them, the concept of common grace itself as a favor of God toward the non-elect. On their account, what the “common grace” tradition attributes to a genuine, if non-saving, favor of God toward all people is better explained without positing any favorable disposition of God toward those he has not chosen to save. This was not a peripheral dispute: Hoeksema and Danhof appealed to the same historical authority (Mastricht) that the synod cited, arguing the confessional Reformed position was on their side, not the synod’s.9 Their view remains a minority position within confessional Reformed and Presbyterian theology, most of which - including the tradition this confession stands in - has followed Calvin, Mastricht, and the later Reformed orthodox in affirming some form of common grace.

Objections and Responses

Objection: if grace by definition saves, “common grace” is a contradiction in terms - a way of dressing up bare providence as something more. The response distinguishes the term’s use from its saving sense without denying the objection’s linguistic point. Common grace is undeserved favor, which is what “grace” means generically; Reformed writers who use the term have never claimed common grace saves anyone, and Mastricht’s careful list of what an unregenerate person still cannot do - perceive spiritual things, submit to God’s law, midwife his own regeneration - keeps the two senses of grace distinct.8 The confession’s own language in chapter 16 makes the same distinction without using the word “common” at all: works can be genuinely “of good use… to others” and still “cannot please God, nor make a man meet to receive grace from God.”2

Objection (from the Protestant Reformed side): if God is not disposed to save everyone, how can any of his dealings with the non-elect be called grace, even a lesser kind? This is the substance of the Hoeksema/Danhof dissent, and it is not answered by redefining “grace” so broadly that it loses force. The confessional answer, however, does not require common grace to be identical in kind to saving grace, only that it be truly undeserved favor - a real, positive good given to those who have done nothing to earn it, distinguished by degree and effect from the grace that regenerates and saves, not claimed as a step on the way to it.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 16, “Of Good Works,” para. 7. Text confirmed against an independent transcription of the confession. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” para. 3. Text confirmed against an independent transcription of the confession. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 5, “Of Divine Providence,” para. 1. Text confirmed against an independent transcription of the confession. ↩

  5. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XI. Providence,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 587. ↩

  6. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 265. ↩

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

  8. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 411-412. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Adriaan C. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Life and Work,” in Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 52. ↩ ↩2