Category Archives: Abraham Kuyper

Kuyper, Common Grace.19 (Original Righteousness Continued)

01 Tuesday Dec 2020

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The previous post in this series may be found here.

Kuyper continues on with the issue of original righteousness in Adam: Was righteousness a supernatural addition to human nature? In this chapter Kuyper examines the issue from a different direction: Whence disordered or rebellious desire in human beings?

He presents the contrast between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed understanding of the question. 

The Roman Catholic view (he cites to Bellarmine) explains it thus: The mater which makes up human nature is inherently subject to this defect. To create a human being is to create a being capable of defecting and such defection is an unavoidable consequence of making human beings from matter:

Bellarmine, the skillful Roman Catholic polemicist, who has argued the case for the Roman Catholic side of this doctrine most thoroughly, returns time and again to the point that the temptation to sin lies in the makeup of our nature. Thus he says among other things, “The desire of the flesh is at present a punishment for sin, but for man in his natural state this condition would undoubtedly have been natural, not as a given positive aspect of his nature, but as a deficiency, yes, even as a certain sickness of his nature, that flowed from the constitution of matter.”

If this is so, then there is something matter which is inherently contrary to God. If God could have created a human without this defect inherent in matter, then God could have/should have done so. That God did not create such a human being argues that God could not make such a being and still use matter. There thus must be something ultimately incorrigible in matter.

So, the “fountain of sin” lies in the very fact that we are human beings: which is a deduction Kuyper makes from Bellarmine’s understanding of human nature. Since this “fountain” bubbles up as its own accord, a sinful desire is not sinful. It only become sinful when the will consents to the desire. There must be a second move to turn a desire for sin into a sinful desire. 

He makes the observation that the Reformed and Roman Catholic positions differ not on the doctrine of the Trinity but on the doctrine of humanity. Our anthropologies differ: this is the place where the two diverge. Sin does not have its origin in something inherent in the physical body and the soul, but rather has its source in the spiritual (not the physical). Satan a pure spirt without body introduced humanity to sin. 

Human beings were created with original righteousness, not as a supernatural addition but as something inherent in humanity – but that this original righteousness exists in our dependence – not independence from God. 

Kuyper then draws out an implication from this fact of dependence: Human beings were not created with humanity as the end, the purpose of humanity. Human beings were created for God and God’s purposes. Human beings were specifically created to glorify God; God creates us for His glory. 

There is another corollary which Kuyper draws: If human beings have some purpose other than God’s glory, if there is some purpose, some end which we should/may achieve other than God’s glory, then God becomes an instrument to help us achieve that end. God becomes a tool in our effort to achieve our glory. 

God created Adam in such a way, with excellency and glory, because such an Adam was needful for God’s aim. God did not need Adam, but it did please God to create Adam and to work through Adam and to so sustain Adam by grace. 

Kuyper, Common Grace 1.18 (The Nature of Original Righteousness)

22 Thursday Oct 2020

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In the 18th chapter, Kuyper analyzes the nature of Adam’s original righteousness. He first considers the Roman Catholic position: In Adam’s pre-Fall state, he consisted of body and spirit, horse and rider. The body, the horse, was possessed by original nature of concupiscence: desire was in man by God’s creation:

This tendency, called concupiscence, was not itself sin, but could easily become the occasion and fuel for sin. (But cf. Rom. 7:8; Col. 3:5; 1 Thess. 4:5, Auth. Ver.). Man, then, as he was originally constituted, was by nature without positive holiness, but also without sin, though burdened with a tendency which might easily result in sin.

L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 209. Thus, to keep man in order God gave the spirit as a rider for the horse. But since this would easily let men fail, God also bestowed a supernatural grace upon man of righteousness. As Charles Hodge explains:

According to their theory, God created man soul and body. These two constituents of his nature are naturally in conflict. To preserve the harmony between them, and the due subjection of the flesh to the spirit, God gave man the supernatural gift of original righteousness. It was this gift that man lost by his fall; so that since the apostasy he is in the state in which Adam was before he was invested with this supernatural endowment. 

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 103. Thus, freedom of choice remained in humanity after the Fall:

But the capacity to choose by one’s free will nevertheless continued in the sinful part of the human spirit, and today free will remains the starting point of moving toward spiritual perfection, if not in the Pelagian sense then at least in the manner of the semi-Pelagians.

Thus, the conflict within the human being is a conflict between desire and reason; and it was by the addition of a supernatural grace that Adam was in a state of original righteousness. 

The Reformed view differs at this point. Original righteousness was part of the original nature of humanity; it was not added by supernatural power. The fall of the Fall was not the loss of supernatural grace but rather corruption. He cites to Lord’s Day question 7 of the Heidelberg Catechism, “hence our nature is become so corrupt.” 

Kuyper insists that it was not the loss of essence but the corruption of nature, the two terms being distinguished:

Essence and nature, so they maintained, must be distinguished. The essence is the abiding, while nature is the changeable, such that sin did change the functioning of the nature of man, but the essence of man has remained what it was, and will remain so, even if it descends forever into the place of damnation. In Satan as well, the essence of the angel remains unchangeably the same; only his nature has, with regard to its function, changed completely into its opposite. The same is equally true of mankind.

As he works through the warrants for these positions, Kuyper first notes that the Roman view implies that man was defective in that he needed an additional to be holy. The second argument is that man in and of himself was defective in this respect then some of a different kind must be added to keep him in line; as if an angel were given to protect him. 

There is an interesting implication of this distinction: is a desire toward something in and of itself. In Roman Catholicism a desire without acquiescence of the will is not sinful – because the capacity for such desire is inherent in the human being. As the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia explains:

From the explanation given, it is plain that the opposition between appetite and reason is natural in man, and that, though it be an imperfection, it is not a corruption of human nature. Nor have the inordinate desires (actual concupiscence) or the proneness to them (habitual concupiscence) the nature of sin; for sin, being the free and deliberate transgression of the law of God, can be only in the rational will; though it be true that they are temptations to sin, becoming the stronger and the more frequent the oftener they have been indulged.  

Bavinck explains the development of this position in Scholatisticism:

Scholasticism, furthermore, began gradually to distinguish between primo-primi, secundo-primi, and plane deliberati desires, that is, those thoughts and desires that arise in us spontaneously before any consent of the will and are not at all sinful; those against which the will has offered resistance but by which it has been overpowered and which are venial sins; and those to which the will has consciously and fully consented and which are mortal sins. Added to this was the fact that the conception of original sin was becoming ever weaker and original sin itself viewed as wholly eradicated by baptism. What remained, concupiscence, was itself not sinful but only a “possible incentive to sin.” Rome, accordingly, decreed that the guilt and pollution of original sin was totally removed by baptism, that though concupiscence remained, it does not injure those who do not consent to it and can only be called sin “because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.”

Herman Bavinck, John Bolt, and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 142–143. But in Reformed doctrine, the desire itself is sinful; such sinful desires are culpable before God:

The idea that original righteousness was supernaturally added to man’s natural constitution, and that its loss did not detract from human nature, is an un-Scriptural idea, as was pointed out in our discussion of the image of God in man. According to the Bible concupiscence is sin, real sin, and the root of many sinful actions. 

L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 236. This had an interesting playout in the Reformed world with the Revoice Conference. You can read about it here.

Kuyper, Common Grace 1.17: The Two Trees

18 Friday Sep 2020

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In chapter 17, Kuyper considers the nature of the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

He considers at some length the question of the trees being a symbol and the extent to whether they were given to strengthen faith and the nature of faith.

But the point which occupies the majority of this chapter concerns the dichotomy of the two trees: one tree of life, one tree of wisdom. He parallels the two trees to the two aspects of human life, a physical life and an intellectual or spiritual life.

The tree of life – in Paradise – would have stood as a pointer to an eternal life, which we will obtain in the New Earth. But in Paradise, Adam still needed to eat and sustain life. But there is a promise of something more than the maintenance of life.

The tree of knowledge was to provide another sort of good.

He here makes some fascinating observations. The pair in the Garden were expected to desire to eat from the tree to sustain their physical life. But, when it came to knowledge, they were explicitly forbidden to seek such knowledge from natural means. They were to refrain from that tree.

The knowledge which God had for them came first from refraining to take and obeying the command. They were too seek that knowledge not from the tree but from God.

Then, having fallen by their reversal of God’s instruction for the trees, they were faced with the prospect of continual physical life – should they have taken from the Tree of Life. That would have been a catastrophe beyond measure.

Where then does this leave us. Alone in the world, remembering those trees:

Today the extravagant sinner still grasps for all that nature offers him to strengthen his body weakened by sin, so that he can all the more freely indulge his appetite for sin. The urge to do this springs up of its own accord. Sin gives a feeling of weakness, also in relation to the body. And the first thing the sinner does is to seek not the welfare of his wounded soul, but the renewal of strength for his weakened body. And what then was more natural than that fallen man, feeling God’s wrath upon him and threatened in his existence, was in the first place intent on taking from the tree of life and seeking in its fruit the strengthening of his life?

This quotation reminds of how Nietzsche spoke of the “last man,” pathetic and obsessed with health:

The earth is small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest….

One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion.

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

And so the irony of our state: in seeking to be gods, we became small and weak — even the smallest strand of virus, a necklace of amino acids so small as to be incomprehensible may fell us. And we spend are small lives obsessed with health.

Kuyper Common Grace, 1.16

03 Thursday Sep 2020

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Kuyper’s 16th chapter concerns two related concepts: First, he considers the duration of human life and how that has changed since the Fall. Second, he considers the question, What would have happened if Adam had not sinned.

As to the first, he notes that human life has fallen off significantly in duration and vigor since the time of the Patriarchs. A matter unknown to Kuyper is that recent genetics research has demonstrated that human life has in fact degenerated.

The work of John Sanford on this point has been remarkable. He has coined the term “genetic entropy”. In short, as genetic material is duplicated (which is necessary for both our own continued existence and for the continuation of the species) it accumulates errors:

“What is Genetic Entropy?  It is the genetic degeneration of living things.  Genetic entropy is the systematic breakdown of the internal biological information systems that make life alive.  Genetic entropy results from genetic mutations, which are typographical errors in the programming of life (life’s instruction manuals). Mutations systematically erode the information that encodes life’s many essential functions.” 

And thus as we have continued on, rather than becoming stronger, we become weaker as individuals and as a species. That our life expectancy has decayed is simply a matter to be expected.

Lest one think that this is merely cherry picked creationist reading of the evidence I proffer, “That Classic Image Everyone Uses to Illustrate Evolution Is Actually Wrong” published on sciencealert.com, March 8, 2020:

Yet this is one of the most predominant and frustrating misconceptions about evolution. Many successful branches of the tree of life have stayed simple, such as bacteria, or have reduced their complexity, such as parasites. And they are doing very well.

In a recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we compared the complete genomes of over 100 organisms (mostly animals), to study how the animal kingdom has evolved at the genetic level.

Our results show that the origins of major groups of animals, such as the one comprising humans, are linked not to the addition of new genes but to massive gene losses.

This loss of information results in a degradation of human life. This degradation was not the original plan, but came in as the result of sin. Rom. 5:12.

What then would have happened had Adam not sinned? Perhaps he would not have died, but was the Garden simply the beginning and the end of the story of humans. Kuyper argues for a progress based upon a comparison of the Garden and what God has prepared for humanity in its culmination.

He notes the mutability of humanity and the possibility of sin which exists at the time of creation and Adam’s existence in the Garden. This is apparent from the fact of a test and a fall. This contrasted with the Kingdom to come, where “not only is there no sin, but any entering of sin is utterly inconceivable.“

Along this same axis of comparison, he notes that Paradise could be lost, but the eternal Kingdom will not fail; human nature could be corrupted in the Garden, but it will be established upon a sure foundation in the kingdom to come.

From this we can conclude that Garden, though very good was not the permanent condition.

Kuyper, Common Grace, 1.15

20 Thursday Aug 2020

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The previous post on Kuyper’s Common Grace made found here.

In chapter 15, Kuyper considers the how the environment of humanity has corresponded to our spiritual state. In a state of innocence, we lived in the Garden. Under sin, we live in a fallen world in a body subject to illness and death. Under damnation, we live in hell. But redeemed and restored, we are fitted for heaven. These correspondences of our body and our circumstance could be considered from the point of view of our desires and thoughts et cetera.

The original state of humanity, the Garden, is no more and can only be imagined – since it could not be found. When we think of the Garden must realize a few things: First, the Garden of Eden was a place; it was not the entire world. Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden. Second, the Garden was not what we might consider a Garden, not the least because four great rivers ran through it. Third, the Garden was no a place of quite, but rather a place of superabundant life. 

The only trouble of the Garden, for Adam, was that he was alone. The animals were with other animals; but Adam had no other like himself. But human beings were created for society – not for endless solitude. And thus, God made Adam, but he took Eve from Adam’s body. The connection there was so profound that a marriage can no only approximate and recall that original bonding, as he writes, “it is a weak effort to restore and redress what was lost through sin.”

There are two additional points of some interest in this chapter. First, he contends that animals were made in the image of human beings (thus reversing the Darwinian contention, that we came from animals). His argument at this point cannot be put more succinctly than has already put it:

When God created the animals, he already knew within himself the human being he would create, and he knew that human being in soul and body. And in order that that animal world would be suited to man and would not be too alien to man, but as it were, a part of his own life, God created the animal world in such a way that, in increasing measure, the bodies of the animals contained a clear foreshadowing of the body he had intended and ordained for man. We can also express this succinctly: God created the animals in the image and likeness of humankind.

His contention is clear and the argument makes some sense. But I am not sure that I would phrase it as Kuyper has done. That there is a sort of correspondence between human beings and animals is abundantly clear. There is a likeness between the two – and a likeness which is quite different than the similarities between human and spiritual beings mentioned in the Scripture. But I am not certain that “image of” is the correct way to capture that similarity. But anyway, there it is.

Second, a far more helpful point concerns the nature of human desire and aspiration. In Andrea del Sarto, Browning’s artist muses:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, 

Or what’s a heaven for?

Kuyper picks up the matter of aspiration as follows:

The heart virtually never strives after a higher ideal. But the heart should do that. We must not put the condition of our highest desire lower than God has ordained it for us. When we do that, we demean our life and surrender that which God has destined for us and has by grace ordained for us once again. It dulls us when we settle for less. We then miss less because we desire less. We make ourselves less sensitive, and therefore have less pain. But that impassivity then also brings us into a false situation, falsifies the standard whereby we measure things, and distorts our view of the past and of the future. And what we also must not forget is that our sense of guilt suffers from this, because when we do not clearly recognize from how high a state of bliss and heavenly overabundance we have fallen, we cannot gauge the depth into which sin has thrown us. It is therefore not an indifferent, incidental matter to clearly perceive in what state of bliss God had originally placed humankind. Only when we form the correct conception of this state of bliss do we understand what has been thrown away through sin and has been lost, and also what the ideal is toward which we reach in Christ.

In The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Thomas Shepherd contends a holy life in this world derives from just such a state of desire:

Let the reproach of earthly mindedness, cast upon the face of Christians, be wiped off by your carriage being heavenly, holy, loosened from things below. Art thou in heaven with an earthly heart Is not heaven good enough for thee? Cannot that content thee which many have desired to see, and could not see, even the Lord Jesus, the King of Glory in his beauty, in the assembly of the saints.

Thus, that desire for what is lost and what is to come orient us correctly in this world. To be too comfortable is to be lost; it is like being pleased with being in the airport lobby and not the destination. 

Kuyper on Common Grace, 1.14

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

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The previous post in this series may be found here.

In the fourteenth chapter of Common Grace, Kuyper emphasizes the historicity of the Genesis narrative. We must read this as both real and reliable history. It must have come to us in words real words of actual comprehensible meaning. It must mean what it says not merely in general but in specifics. 

We must conclude thus on two grounds. Without a truly speaking God, we do not have Scripture: This speaking by God is the great fact that is placed in the foreground throughout Holy Scripture, ceaselessly and with stress and emphasis. It is that which makes Scripture [to be] Scripture. The crucial point in Scripture is not what man thought or contemplated, but precisely that which God spoke. (120)

The speaking is true speech; not that it is sound made by a mouth and airwaves. Rather speech is the conveyance of the content of one mind to another mind, “speaking takes place only when from the consciousness of the speaker consciousthoughts are transferred into the consciousness of the hearer.”

We need this text of the speaking God because we need a basis upon which to understand the world and place within it. These narratives provide the basis upon which we can understand ourselves and our place in this world. Calvin beings the Institutes with the observation that true knowledge of ourselves must begin with true knowledge of ourselves in relation to God. Without the Genesis narrative we have no way of putting ourselves into that context. 

The distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian, the distinction between the Protestant the Roman Catholic lie in the way in which we understand these narratives: What is the image of God, what happened to that image with the Fall, what is the state of the human being past the Fall? The distinctions among human understanding begin here in the distinction of our understanding of Genesis. 

On this point, Kuyper singles out the doctrine of common grace as critical to a Reformed understanding of human history, and thus our preaching of grace and salvation. 

Kuyper on Common Grace 1.13 All life is grace.

04 Monday May 2020

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In chapter 13, Kuyper begins to specifically develop the doctrine of common grace. He notes that while the operation of common grace changed in the post-flood world, the fact of such grace – grace to preserve life rather than redeem from sin – was not new with Noah. He places the advent of such grace with the startling fact from Genesis 3 that Adam did not immediately die upon committing the transgression.

Kuyper then draws this conclusion, “If common grace is the means whereby Adam’s presence on this earth was unexpectedly extended, then it follows that your own life, your birth, your existence as a human being arises not merely from creation, but is an act that is rooted in grace.” (113). Kuyper puts this observation most plainly in the context of Adam’s continued existence, but the proposition holds true for all persons. Our existence, today, is the result of common grace, for all are under the sentence of death.

This seems perhaps more plainly true when the idea of death is so patently on the minds of all. A politician was giving himself and his efforts great credit for what was claimed to be a reduction in death. This unnamed politician (and perhaps not one you suspected), claimed this was not God, it was our work.

Yes, there are secondary causes. And yes humans have real agency. But, our continued existence while we live under a curse is purely a matter of grace.

Kuyper on Common Grace.12 (The Change at the Flood)

24 Friday Apr 2020

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Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace 12

In this chapter, Kuyper details both the continuities and the distinctions which take place before and after the Flood. Kuyper’s understanding of common grace underscores his understanding of the flood.

First, the fact of saving the entire human race – even though the race only consisted of one family – was an act of common, not special grace. Eternal salvation was not conveyed, only temporal. Moreover, it was not only human beings but animals and plants which were saved. Thus, it was common to all living creatures on the planet.

It is not that the church was saved in order to abandon everything outside the church to general ruin. But the grace shown here extends to the entirety of human life. Most surely the purpose was so that God’s church could find a place to set its foot, and also so that the church of the new covenant would gather together believers from all peoples and nations. But its purpose was also so that in a proper sense God the Lord would continue his work in that broad sphere of human life, not unto the saving of souls but no less unto the praise and glory of his great name.

Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World: The Historical Section, ed. Jordan J. Ballor, Melvin Flikkema, and Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas, vol. 1, Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; Acton Institute, 2015), 107.

Second, Kuyper notes some distinct physical discontinuities which took place at the Flood. The globe itself was changed, ground and atmosphere. The relationship between human and animals changed.

The nature of human life likewise changed. Following the flood, human life span significantly decreased. A fascinating observation, which is wholly consistent with this observation, is the problem of genetic entropy.

Kuyper explains this decrease in lifespan as a blessing because it limited the ability of the wicked to increase in skill. Likewise, the elect no longer need wait eight centuries until they can be with the Lord.

This new state of affairs would maintain regularly until the return of the Lord. And in this state of common grace, with the reordering of the world, the change in the relationship to the natural world, the decrease in life span as well as the institution of government, would permit the continued existence of the human race for the ultimate benefit of the Church and God’s glory.

Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace.11 (The legitimacy of government)

16 Thursday Apr 2020

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The previous post on this book by Kuypermay be found here:

Chapter 11 concerns the basis for the institution of government.  It is Kuyper’s contention that Genesis 9:6 forms the basis for the institution of government among human beings:

Genesis 9:6 (ESV)

6           “Whoever sheds the blood of man,

by man shall his blood be shed,

for God made man in his own image.

The argument proceeds as follows. First, Kuyper disposes of the three common theories for the institution of government. In this, he is looking for a moral justification, a moral legitimacy for government.

He begins with the age-old government by conquest: someone uses forces to kill and steal and by violence controls some territory and human beings. For as long as the conqueror maintains power, he maintains his position. After many years, the conquest becomes tradition and the murder is crowned with legitimacy. He notes the irony of giving a reward for murder for the sake of theft.  This is not real justice but rather a reward for sin.  And so, this cannot be a firm basis for true legitimacy in power.

Second, he considers the “social contract” theory: a group of free individuals contract with one another for the creation of the government. The sovereignty resides in the “people” who freely enter into a new arrangement. This runs into two problems: One, the initial social contracting event never took place. Two, even if such did happen, the contract has no power bind the children of these people who will then their own sovereign right to reject their parents’ decisions.

Third, there is the possibility of spontaneous design: governments just happen. And while this does take, it is an immoral pantheistic understanding of moral order. It is irrelevant how the government comes to be; only, it just does come to be.

None of these theories meet the moral case. Rather, Kuyper roots the fact of government in the common grace of God.

His construction of this argument is based upon the principle that authority derives solely from God:

We urgently request our readers to place all the requisite emphasis on this. The one true position that Scripture points out to us is that as people we by nature have authority over nothing. All authority belongs to God and God alone. All things belong to him and nothing to you. You have no authority over anything, no matter what it might be, unless God grants you this authority. (98)

Using the chapters of Genesis, he then lays out places were God grants authority to human beings: authority over the animals, authority to eat plants and later to eat animals, and so forth. He contrasts this with God’s withholding of authority to eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The fact that there are any government lies in the delegation of God’s authority in some measure to human beings. Governments are things ultimately appointed by God:

Romans 13:1 (ESV)

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

This does not mean that all authorities in existence are good, moral or right. But it does mean that as part of God’s common grace he has bestowed government into the world as a thing which can come into existence.

There are other questions, not addressed by Kuyper at this point, concerning the right use of that authority.

He then lays the original institution of the fact of human government into the world at Genesis 9:6.

There are two ways to understand God’s grant of authority in these instances. First, a grant of authority could merely be a matter of permission. For example God tells Adam that you may eat from this tree but not that tree. Adam has the physical ability to defy the law and to exceed the grant of authority. Whether Adam abides by the grant of authority.

A second way to understand the grant of authority to understand it as not merely permission but also possibility. When God grants dominion to Adam and Eve in creation, he did not merely grant permission but in the grant made the matter so.

Kuyper confesses the possibility that some sort of government may have existed prior to the Flood; but if it did so, it did so without a basis in a grant from God. The exercise of such authority would be similar to the rebellion in the Garden.

 

Kuyper, Common Grace 1.10

09 Monday Dec 2019

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The prior post in this series may be found here.

In Chapter 10, Kuyper considers the issue of governmental legitimacy. The question of legitimacy is of great importance in the matter of government. If a government is legitimate, then the population willing submits to the government and the government rightfully enacts and enforces law.

Most people never consider the basis for legitimacy; rather, we all just know that a government is legitimate or not. For example, in a monarchy, everyone knows that the child of the sovereign is the next sovereign. In a democracy, everyone knows that the winner of a popularity contest may enact law. In both cases, everyone knows that some random crank who declares himself sovereign – even with an elaborate ceremony – is just a crank and not a king.

Conversely, if everyone in a nation were to suddenly know that the leadership was illegitimate, the government would then be nothing other than bandits and tyrants.

How then does legitimacy come to be?

Kuyper considers and rejects three theories of legitimacy. First there the right of a conqueror. At the beginning, a conqueror’s power maintains as long as he is able to maintain sufficient military might to quell any opposition. However, after some time, the duration of rule itself becomes the legitimatizing basis of rule. The trouble here is moral: we don’t forgive a murderer because he murdered to rob and then was able to hold off anyone who attempted to prosecute him for his murder and robbery. Indeed, such a man would be considered peculiarly evil.

A second theory is the “social contract” model: whereby initially free people contract to form a government which has legitimate power based upon the concession of others. A primary trouble here is that such a claim is based upon a fiction: no such universal contractual decision has ever been undertaken by previously unruled individuals.

A third theory looks to spontaneous ordering: such spontaneous development theories appear more factual than the other theories: but this theory too appears as morally questionable. Kuyper raises two objections: (1) The theory cannot distinguish between a morally good and a morally bad order: cruelty and deceit or heroism and virtue could each lead to an actual government of some sort.

(2) Kuyper explains that such a theory is pantheistic: Rather than government be a determined act of God; authority would be something inherent in all that is. Thus, might would be right, because it is.

Having rejected these alternatives, Kuyper explains that what government does itself must be the result of a gracious act of God: not a peculiar saving grace, such as shown to the elect; but, a “common grace” to order the world in such a manner as to limit the effective scope of sin.

Thus, there is the effectuation of a government and the providential placement of a leader in position. Kuyper then explains the basis of legitimacy: if the leader and the populace both accede that God has created the structure, the structure is and all “are accountable to God for the things they know they have done for or against that authority.” Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World: The Historical Section, ed. Jordan J. Ballor, Melvin Flikkema, and Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas, vol. 1, Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; Acton Institute, 2015), 95–96.

How then is this authority known? It can only come from God, because humans by nature have authority over nothing. The authority granted in Genesis 1 is granted by God: it is not inherent in the creature. God had the authority to grant or forbid the Adam to eat of trees in the Garden – and the authority over all other actions of Adam.

Not having even the least of authority, we certain have no authority by nature over one-another. Kuyper concedes that some sort of pre-Flood governmental authority must have arisen; but such authority would have existed without divine sanction.