Common Grace 1.11

Last updated on: September 24, 2019 at 8:00 am by Coyle Neal

Common Grace 1.11 2019-09-18T11:21:48-06:00 Coyle Neal

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Since this is the chapter where Kuyper begins to dig down most fully into government, this chapter gets its own post (I am a Political Scientist after all!).

Kuyper begins with the bold claim that if we take away capital punishment from Genesis 9:6, we weaken justice and undermine the authority of government. Ultimately, government must rest on God’s grace. Human will is too weak and shifting a foundation to build a government system on.

What we see when we examine the broad theories of government found among the political philosophers is that there are three main foundations identified for government:

Force, strength, and violence: the limitations here are obvious, and were clearly recognized by even the most ancient of political observers. This kind of government even at its very best lasts only as long as the military power it wields in its own defense–and that’s even setting aside the question of “justice” in the first place.
Free will/choice: this is where we start to run into modern theories of justice, including the modern liberal contract thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc). The idea is that governments are created by the consent of the governed. And while there is something both true and appealing about this theory, if it is the only one we hold on to, we end up with the shifting goalposts of the French Revolution. Consent is a mutable and vague thing in the best of times, and quickly leads down dark and destructive roads (especially for those who oppose the majority opinion).
Spontaneousness: the third view involves the view of government as a sort-of spontaneous eruption of order in history. This view has the benefits of being factually accurate (if we’re just looking at the timeline of facts of history, it does look like these things kind-of happen randomly and out of nowhere), but this impersonal impulse destroys religion and morality and just moves us back into that first category–the victory of the strong over the weak.

All three of these contradict what Christians see to be the truth: government is built on common grace, which in this specific context means: “God’s gracious arrangement whereby he created order amid the chaos of a sinful world and arrested the disruptive destruction of sin.” (95)

Common grace in this context has two components:

It establishes the authority of the government itself in the broad sense;
It establishes the authority of the specific people in power in a specific institution and at a specific time.

This is neither ‘divine right of kings’ nor theocracy. but rather is from people ruling over other people. Kuyper here assumes a sort-of divinely ordained popular sovereignty, whatever the nature of the government institutions in question may be.

Whatever government we live under, all governments are temporary institutions that exist as a result of the fall. God’s command in this setting should bind our consciences to a general position of obedience and submission to government.

This leads to the question of how actual governments are instituted in history. Our ancestors looked to Genesis 9:6 as interpreted through Romans 13. The conclusion here is that we by nature have authority over nothing, until God grants it to us. We see this by way of example when we look at the natural creation–God makes animals and plants and only then grants us authority over them. How much more so must that be the case over people?

What’s more, this authority establishes order by God’s ordinance in the midst of the chaos of conflicting wills. The establishment of Adam’s authority over Eve in Genesis 3:16. This too is a seed of government, though not in the same way as Genesis 9. Instead, we see no formal or direct divinely-ordained government authority prior to the Flood. It is only after the Flood that Genesis 9:6 becomes the foundation of government authority. Without reliance on such an ordinance, we’re setting ourselves up as God:

“All those who claim that people arranged it [government] this way among themselves and that no ordinance, no institution from God was necessary, simply repeat the sin of paradise. Just like Adam was not allowed to eat from any tree without permission from God, so too no government may rule over us people apart from God’s decree. And whoever ignores this is acting as Adam did when he ate from the forbidden tree, and together with Adam he is proceeding on the assumption that man himself can determine his own affairs without God granting him that right.” (101)

I find myself in the interesting position of basically agreeing with everything Kuyper says here, except for his Biblical reasoning. Government must exist on the decree of God, secular narratives are insufficient both on their own merits and relative to Christian theology, and Romans 13 is an excellent place to go. I’m just (still) not sold on Genesis 9. Anyway, I’ve carped on that enough on this blog, and there will undoubtedly be more carping as we continue through the book.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO

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