All That God Cares About Common Grace and Divine Delight Richard J. Mouw S Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 3 3/4/20 2:03 PM Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. God’s Complex Concerns 7 2. The Joys of Discipleship 13 3. The Divine Distance 18 4. “That’s Good!” 26 5. Assessing the Natural Mind 34 6. Is “Restraint” Enough? 40 7. A Pause for Some “Meta- Calvinist” Considerations 48 8. Resisting an Altar Call 57 9. A Shared Humanness 69 10. The Larger Story 74 11. But Is It “Grace”? 81 12. Attending to the Antithesis 87 13. Religions Now “More Precisely Known” 93 vii Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 7 3/4/20 2:03 PM Contents 14. Common Grace and “the Last Days” 104 15. Neo- Calvinism in America 117 16. How Much Calvinism? 126 17. Divine Generosity 144 Notes 157 viii Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 8 3/4/20 2:03 PM Introduction One of my favorite Italian words is aggiornamento— pro- nounced “ah- jyor- na- men- to.” My saying that, of course, does not really amount to much. Since I am not a speaker or reader of Italian, it is not as if I have chosen that word as my favorite from hundreds of others that I know. In my youth I went to public schools with some highly intel- ligent Italian- American kids, but I am pretty sure that I never heard one of them ever utter the word aggiornamento. I was introduced to that word in the early 1960s, as I followed with in- terest the reports coming from Rome about the Second Vatican Council. During the three years that Vatican II met, there was a lot of talk about aggiornamento. The word means “updating,” and that was what was happening as the bishops met in Rome. They made important changes to revitalize Catholic thought and practice for the late twentieth century. This book is my attempt to contribute to what I see as a much- needed neo- Calvinist aggiornamento. My effort here fo- cuses specifically on an updating of the doctrine of common grace as it was set forth by Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands in the last half of the nineteenth century. 1 Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 11 3/4/20 2:03 PM All That God Cares About I will also be doing a bit of personal aggiornamento in these pages. When I was invited to give the 2000 Stob Lectures, I immediately decided upon common grace as my topic. In pre- paring those lectures, I reviewed some of the debates—church- dividing ones— that had taken place during the first half of the twentieth century among North American Dutch Calvin- ists. When my lectures appeared in book form, though, I was pleasantly surprised by some positive interest from beyond the Reformed community. The comments and questions I received stimulated some new thoughts on the subject. The new thoughts were further enhanced and multiplied by what I have been learning from my PhD students at Fuller Seminary, especially since I have been able to devote more time to doctoral mentoring after retiring in 2013 from a twenty- year stint as the seminary’s president and becoming a full- time fac- ulty member again. As I am writing this book, ten of my stu- dents have successfully defended dissertations on neo- Calvinist topics, with a half dozen more making excellent progress. The majority of these students have been attracted to the thought of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck from non-Reformed backgrounds, and their enthusiasm for the subject matter and their fresh insights have provided me with an ongoing neo- Calvinist education. But my aggiornamento interests also have a broader focus. I am convinced that the neo-Calvinist perspective speaks in pro- found ways to our present cultural situation in North America. In my own personal theological-spiritual journey I have always described my identity as both “Calvinist” and “evangelical.” I still claim both labels. And while the latter term has come into some disrepute in recent decades because of the way it has come to be associated with a mean- spirited “politicizing,” I am convinced that some of the defects associated with this reputation can be remedied by drawing upon an updated—a recontextualized— neo- Calvinism. 2 Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 12 3/4/20 2:03 PM Introduction Protection versus Engagement Abraham Kuyper himself would have liked the idea that his theological insights needed to be updated in the light of new cultural realities. Indeed, it is precisely this aggiornamento char- acter of Kuyper’s thought that motivates many of us to call ourselves neo-Calvinists. Kuyper disagreed with John Calvin on some important points, especially relating to the Reformer’s views on church- state relations, and this led Kuyper to expand on basic Calvinist ideas in articulating his theology of cultural engagement. When he visited Princeton Seminary in 1898 to deliver the Stone Lectures, Kuyper introduced his perspective on the rel- evance of Calvinist theology to contemporary life by informing his audience that he had not come “to restore [Calvinism to] its worn- out form,” but rather to address the basic principles of Calvinism in a way that meets “the requirements of our own century.”1 In offering that assessment, Kuyper was sig- naling his enthusiasm for updating Calvinism— even revising it at some key points— as the Calvinist movement faced new cultural realities. This statement of purpose contrasted in a stark manner to remarks that had been made at Princeton twenty- six years earlier by the great theologian Charles Hodge, when on April 24, 1872, he addressed over five hundred people who had gathered to honor him for fifty years of his scholarship and teaching at Princeton Seminary. In those comments, Hodge articulated what a recent biographer describes as “the defin- ing, oracular statement of his life.” What he was especially proud of, Hodge declared, was that during his half century of service at Princeton “a new idea never originated in this Seminary.”2 To be sure, these quite different expressions of what it means to be faithful to the Reformed tradition are not fully 3 Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 13 3/4/20 2:03 PM All That God Cares About accurate measures of how Hodge and Kuyper actually went about their respective theological tasks. Hodge was obviously capable of breaking new ground. And Kuyper could certainly resist new theological thoughts, as he frequently did in some of the ecclesiastical controversies in which he was actively engaged. Nonetheless, the two expressions represent, in the abstract at least, differing dominant tendencies within the broad tra- dition of Reformed orthodoxy. One tendency is theological protectionism, a posture of resistance to significant theological innovation, while the other is what we can label creative engage- ment with new cultural realities. While both of these tendencies are meant to serve the cause of Calvinist orthodoxy, there has long been disagreement within the Reformed tradition regarding what exactly is re- quired by way of faithful subscription to the Reformed confes- sions. Some have insisted on “line- by- line” assent to each mode of formulation in each confessional document, while others have stipulated that sincere assent be given to the basic theo- logical principles affirmed by those documents. But in neither case has it been acceptable for a person to claim confessional fidelity and disagree with the details of what is clearly taught in the confessions. Within those boundaries, then, Hodge and Kuyper would have seen each other as obvious co-defenders of Reformed orthodoxy. My own theological sympathies are firmly on the Kuyperian side of the spectrum. We live in a time of rapid change—both in the larger cultures in which we spend our daily lives and also in our efforts to support the ongoing mission of the Christian community in the midst of that cultural change. The challenges are great, but I like to see them as providential opportunities to present the message of the gospel in a manner that is ap- propriate to the times and cultural contexts in which the church finds itself. 4 Richard Mouw, All That God Cares About Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _Mouw_AllGodCaresAbout_JZ_djm.indd 14 3/4/20 2:03 PM Introduction The Scope My primary purpose in this book is to clarify some of the basic themes of the neo-Calvinist perspective on common grace— along with the larger account that Kuyper offered of God’s intentions for cultural development in the context of the overall pattern of the biblical narrative. In pursuing my purpose here, I will not be providing a gen- eral introduction to neo- Calvinism. That kind of overview is available elsewhere—most notably in Al Wolters’s Creation Regained3 and, more recently, Craig Bartholomew’s Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition.4 And, even in focusing specifically on common grace, I won’t be attempting to provide a detailed exposition of the theological debates that have shaped the development of the common- grace doctrine over the past century and a half.