In an attempt to stave off Arminianism (a commendable task!) deniers of common grace have reasoned that God could in no way have any favor toward the reprobate. To say that God favors the reprobate is to introduce a contradiction between the eternal will of God and his works in history. God would be “two-faced.” He would will one thing, but then do another. Therefore, God is not gracious toward the reprobate nor does God genuinely desire for the reprobate to believe the Gospel and be saved. In this mode of theology, consideration of the eternal decree trumps how we are to understand God’s works in history.

One of the prominent proponents of this position was Herman Hoeksema. Van Til has much to say against his denial of common grace, but central to his critique is the following:

Hoeksema never answered adequately the charge that on his view the elect can never in any sense have been under the wrath of God and Christ need not have died for them in history. Hoeksema took no note. (Common Grace and the Gospel, 251).

Van Til’s point is that if we identify God’s attitude toward man in time with God’s predestination then we can never speak about the elect as ever having been under divine wrath. Hoeksema’s unqualified supralapsarianism has its center in the proposition that what happens last in the order of history comes first in the order of the eternal decree.[1] This means that God chose the elect and the reprobate quite prior to his decree to create or ordain the fall. Each person’s eternal destination is determined apart from all the means that lead there onto. The means are swallowed up in and by the end.

This means that the reprobate cannot have any favor with God. But – and this is Van Til’s point – the elect can never be said to ever have been under God’s wrath. In other words, the person who becomes a Christian later in life can in no meaningful way be said to have transitioned from being under God’s wrath to being under his grace. On the terms of Hoeksema’s supralapsarianism, the elect person was always under God’s favor, even as an unbeliever.

This also means that when Adam fell there was no real transition from being in an estate of favor to an estate of wrath. What about the reprobate who were “in Adam” before the fall? Can we say, biblically, that the reprobate in Adam before the fall were under God’s wrath despite the fact that humanity was still innocent? Furthermore, when Christ came to die on the cross we cannot say that – relative to the elect – there was any real transition from an estate of wrath to an estate of grace. In fact, on Hoeksema’s presuppositions, there really was no need for Christ to come and atone for sins at all. Election is ultimate, and the elect were chosen quite irrespective of God’s decree to redeem in Christ. Christ and his work become somewhat of an unnecessary afterthought.

And so what Hoeksema ends up doing is making history somewhat of a farce. Historical dynamics are not real manifestations of moving from grace to wrath or wrath to grace. God does not have any real interaction with even his elect. His elect can never be under his wrath before their conversion, nor can they come under God’s Fatherly displeasure after their conversion. Likewise, the reprobate can never experience the true and genuine favor of God, nor ever hear a true and sincere call to repent and be saved. God does not really desire the repentance of the wicked.

So, how then are we to understand the relation between historical transitions and God’s eternal decree? Van Til proposes a Christian idea of “limiting concepts.” Limiting concepts, understood Christianly, has its basis in a Christian idea of mystery. In other words, there are things we simply do not know. In revelation, we are given knowledge of certain things, but not all things. God and his decree remain always incomprehensible to us. And where God’s revelation ends, there we must be content with mystery.

God does reveal to us that he elects some unto eternal life and some unto eternal reprobation. God does reveal to us that he really and genuinely interacts with history, and that there are real transitions of covenant status among men. Now, how exactly those two truths relate is a mystery. But each (God’s eternal decree and real transitions in history) are truths God gives to limit our thinking from going to one extreme or the other.

Unfortunately Hoeksema did not have his thinking limited by the truth of real transitions in history, and therefore fell into a form of rationalism by prejudicing God’s decree at the expense of history. Arminianism also falls into rationalism, by prejudicing history at the expense of God’s sovereign decree. Both have tried to pierce into mystery, and therefore they have surrendered one limiting concept for the sake of the other.

And this is why Bavinck is absolutely correct when he says that mystery is the lifeblood of all true theology. Forsake mystery – and its correlate, “limiting concepts” – and rationalism is the inevitable result.

[1] See Herman Hoeksema, The Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), 6:148; cf. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 241.

For instance, in Common Grace and the Gospel Van Til says:

In the first place it means that we cannot join Karl Barth in reducing God as He is in Himself to a relation that He sustains to His people in the world. Barth virtually seeks to meet the objector’s charge that Christianity involves a basic contradiction by rejecting the idea of God as He is in Himself and of God’s counsel as controlling all things in the world. He says that Calvin’s doctrine of God’s counsel must be completely rejected. Only when it is rejected, is the grace of God permitted to flow freely upon mankind. And that means that God’s love envelops all men. To be sure, for Barth there is reprobation but it is reprobation in Christ. The final word of God for all men, says Barth, is Yes. It matters not that men have not heard of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. For Jesus of Nazareth is not, as such, the Christ. All men are as men, of necessity in Christ. All grace is universal or common grace.

From the historic Christian point of view this is simply to say that the concept of grace is so widened as no longer to be grace at all.

How truly Herman Bavinck anticipated, as it were, this most heretical of heresies of our day when he pointed out that in the last analysis one must make his choice between Pelagius and Augustine. The grace of God as Barth presents it is no longer distinguishable from the natural powers of man. All men to be men, says Barth, must have been saved and glorified from all eternity in Christ.

This is how Barth would meet the objection against the idea of the sovereign grace of God. There is no longer any sovereign God and therefore there is no longer any grace. (pp. 154-155)

What Van Til says here takes some unpacking. I will do so in several points.

First, Van Til notes Barth’s rejection of Calvin’s view of God’s eternal decree (cf. CD II.2, 67-76). Calvin affirms an absolutum decretum. This is the view that God, from eternity past, has elected some onto eternal life and some unto eternal damnation (i.e., double predestination). Barth believed that this was abstract theology, beginning as it does with an abstract decree of God-in-himself. Barth proposes instead a thoroughly Christological revamping of God’s decree. The idea is that Jesus Christ himself forms the two sides of election. In his humanity he is the elected man, and in his divinity he is the electing God (CD II.2, 76). And it is this relation-in-act which constitutes God’s being as it is. As he will later say, God’s “being is decision;” i.e., his decision to elect humanity in Christ’s humanity (CD II.2, 175).

Second, this means that God’s grace is to and for all of humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The humanity of Jesus Christ, in the eternal decision of election, is the vicarious humanity of all humans. In other words, because his humanity is the object of God’s electing grace and since his humanity represents all of humanity, that means all of humanity receives the electing grace of God. All humans are elect. God’s grace is – as Van Til says above – permitted to flow to all mankind. That means that God’s grace is universal. Or, we might say, common. It is given to all men, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves Christians. Grace is common to all – believer as well as unbeliever.

Third, Van Til says that Barth’s position is that God’s being as well as man’s being is constituted by relation to one another. There is no abstract God, or God-in-himself. God’s being is a being-in-relation (to man). Likewise, man’s being is a being-in-relation (to God). This relation is found in Jesus Christ who is himself the relation between man (his humanity) and God (his divinity). Man’s being then is a being of grace. Humanity is elected man and therefore is “full of grace.” This applies not just to his status as elect, but to his very being. Van Til is troubled by this, in part, because if everything is grace then nothing is grace. If every man is a recipient of grace then grace has lost its meaning. Grace can be understood as grace only over against condemnation. And while Barth affirms Christ is both the elect man and reprobate man, yet no man is actually reprobate. All are elect. That turns what Calvin regarded as special grace into common grace. Common grace and the Gospel are confused in Barth.

Fourth, as he said earlier, this makes Barth’s position almost indistinguishable from the analogia entis of Scholasticism. Van Til notes

For it is of the essence of the analogy of faith … that the ideas of God and man be thought of as correlative to one another. God is then nothing but what He is in relation to man through Christ, and man is nothing but what he is in relation to God through Christ. If the idea of correlativity between God and man was already involved in the analogy of being, it came to its full and final expression in the idea of the analogy of faith. (Common Grace, 130)

In other words, just as man and God are related to one another by the common idea of being (something the two share), so likewise with Barth’s view of analogy. God and man are related, they are as Van Til says elsewhere, “correlative” to one another in the eternal decision of God in election in Christ. For Thomas it was being that served as a common ontological notion which God and man have in common. For Barth it is God’s act of electing grace which holds them in common. But in either scenario God becomes dependent on something other than himself in his existence. God’s being as the electing God depends on his relation to man, just as man depends on his relation to God in Christ for his being. In God’s Time for Us I argue that this relation occurs in the “time” of God’s grace in Christ. This “time” serves as a substitute for a metaphysical notion of being. But whether we are talking about time or being, either way there is an ontological tertium quid which serves as an abstract ontological commonality relating God and man.

Barth, no less than Thomas, fails to properly maintain the creator-creature distinction. And with that, he – no less than Thomas – fails to properly maintain the antithesis between believer and unbeliever (since grace is common to all). This gives the unbeliever a certain kind of autonomy and libertarian freedom to believe as he wants about God. Barth, in some ways, out-scholasticizes and out-rationalizes even Thomas himself! If nature is grace for Barth then all theology is natural theology, even while it is at the same time gracious theology. If Barth were consistent with his theology, then there really could be no Nein! to natural theology, but only a full and unequivocal yes and amen.