Two Graces

Anyone following my oral and written rhetoric becomes aware that I believe firmly in both common and divine grace.  One of the duties of Christians is to integrate the two in order to achieve holistic context for mortality and immortality, right and wrong, success and failure, truth and falsity, peace and conflict, love and hate – for one life in all matters.  The factors of thought, faith and life may be extended, finding their ends in conduct that identifies the person somewhere along the double lined continuum until death, after which all meaning is in the grace of God.  All this is measured somewhere in the attributes of God’s nature, beginning with the love of God for all of his creation, even that functioning in negative context with him.

For the Christian the divine provision of grace is made practical by its personal application.  No other person than the individual is necessary to application.  Common grace is social – for the group.  In divine grace truth is not found in majority opinion, as it may be in common grace.  Majority opinion, in common grace, can be accepted as a factor in human governance, but does not assure the population that the human majority has hold of truth.  This concept is illustrated in the writings of Charles Colson in his book, God and Government, and in his other writings.  His career encircled both common grace interpreted by secular thought, and by his later submission to the biblical orientation of common grace in the divine.  It is my opinion, based on biblical tenets that common grace is given to help us make social life practical in mortality.  It protects the rights of persons, none of whom asked to be born.  We are at the neutral mercy of nature that serves us with both cursing and blessing.  Following common grace with care, mankind can triumph in nature.  Violating it there is impending tragedy, even collapse of world systems, followed by recovery, and the cycles begin for rise and fall.  War follows peace, error follows truth, repression follows freedom, and sin follows righteousness.  It all followed from affirmatives (rights) to negatives (wrongs).  God assists us by offering wisdom, leadership, principles, even his relationship found in Scripture, prayer, models, energy, and the meaning of the Church (Pentecost) – as he gave birth to the church (at Pentecost).

General society has found ways to conflict all this: by trying to reduce Scripture to literature only, rather than acknowledge revelation; by trying to reduce prayer to superstition or even to helpful meditation; by trying to reduce models to popular opinions and mechanisms; by trying to put energy into competition and forms of progress in the hope of prosperity and health; and, by turning the church into a hodge-podge of theologies, differences, opinions and secular segregation so as to make religion marginal to the society that may have lost human efficacy in common grace.  Church (spiritual) has become confused with church (institutional).  There needs to be understanding between the two on similarities and differences. (These pages attempt to identify the difference by using the capital ‘C’ for the spiritual Church, and the lower case ‘c’ for the institutional.  The spiritual is managed by God, the institutional by mankind.)

It is the duty and privilege of Christians to hold out for the meaning of common grace as God has it, not as mankind tries to distort and amend it.  Common grace is a subdivision of divine grace, with some similar results.  Followed, it will create a context in which God reveals himself more fully than in the humanistic turns that distort life context leading to the diminution, even loss of the good life (mortal).  The invitation to the individual to receive the whole of grace (common and divine) of God is liberating, problem solving, with hope and joy generating from the love of God – all of which offers peace.  The whole of it is peace producing, and weakens even disposes of fear.  In all this there is concern for others, a strong evidence of God.  It is a pattern of life made practical in the words, conduct, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and well reported by the Apostles who saw it at work in day-by-day experience.  The grace of God is offered as a gift, in graciousness, expressing a divine influence on the heart, and its reflection in life. The implication is gratitude, joy, liberality, pleasure – both in the giving of grace and in its reception.  It is clearly reported as possible during Old and New Testament periods.  God’s grace is revealed.