All That God Cares About

J. Mouw Richard

Description

How do Christians account for the widespread presence of goodness in a fallen world? Richard Mouw, one of the most influential evangelical voices in America, presents his mature thought on the topic of common grace. Addressing a range of issues relevant to engaging common grace in the 21st century, Mouw shows how God takes delight in all things that glorify him--even those that happen beyond the boundaries of the church--and defends the doctrine of common grace from its detractors.

Sujets

• Calvinist
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Calvinism

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493423736
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Richard J. Mouw
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2373-6
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
With love to Dirk Mouw: son, friend, and—increasingly over the years—my teacher
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
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
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
Back Cover 166
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I have drawn from some materials that I presented at conferences during the past decade. I also make some use of two major lectures I delivered in the Netherlands: the 2015 Kuyper Lecture at the Vrije Universiteit and, in that same year, the first annual Bavinck Lecture at the Theologische Universiteit Kampen.
The 2015 Kuyper Lecture at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam was published as “Of Pagan Festivals and Metanarratives: Recovering the Awareness of Our Shared Humanness,” The Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 3 (2017): 251–63.
The 2015 Bavinck Lecture, “Neo-Calvinism: A Theology for the Global Church in the 21st Century,” is posted online at https://en.tukampen.nl/portal-informatiepagina/herman-bavinck-lecture-richard-mouw-2 .
I also draw at some points on material from these two published articles:
“The Bible and Cultural Discipleship,” Comment 30, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 23–29.
“‘In Him All Things Hold Together’: Why God Cares about Ancient Chinese Vases,” Crux 49, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 2–10.
I am grateful to have received permission to revisit my reflections from these earlier works.
Introduction
One of my favorite Italian words is aggiornamento —pronounced “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 intelligent 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 interest 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 focuses 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.
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 preparing 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 Calvinists. 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 faculty member again. As I am writing this book, ten of my students 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 profound 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.
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 character 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 relevance 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 signaling 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 defining, 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 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 tradition 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 engagement 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 required by way of faithful subscription to the Reformed confessions. 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 theological 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 Christia