Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Common grace in ivory towers and tractor companies
Common grace in ivory towers and tractor companies
Mar 18, 2025 5:54 AM

Excerpted from “Getting the trophies ready: serving God in the business world,” an essay which first appeared in the Journal of Markets and Morality, Spring 2015 issue. In this essay, Mouw discusses three “Kuyperian spheres” of service: academia, business, and the church.

Most of the time, most of us make the linguistic transitions in our daily lives quite smoothly. We work alongside our colleagues, stop at the grocery store to make a purchase, go home to a family meal and then relax in front of our TV sets as spectators in the world of athletics. In all of that, we encounter different languages. How we talk at the workplace differs from our meal table conversations, and the vocabulary of mentators on ESPN is yet another pattern of speech. We typically navigate all of that with no awareness that we have successfully made our way through a variety of Kuyperian spheres.

Sometimes, though, the boundaries between spheres are crossed only with great linguistic difficulty. This has certainly been true often in encounters among scholars in the academy and practitioners in the business world. As an academic who has often done some traveling between those two spheres, I can testify to the fact munication between inhabitants of the two spheres has not always been easy. Sometimes it is simply a problem of understanding each other’s language, but frequently the difficulties are rooted in deeper problems.

I can testify, wearing my academic hat, that we often have had difficulty talking to and about business practitioners because of a suspicion about what we think is really going on in the marketplace. Sometimes the suspicion has to do with a fort in the presence of wealth. Many of us have started our academic careers with significant financial debt, and we see ourselves as awkward financial managers. Sometimes the suspicion is more ideological in nature: To be trained in the academy is often to hear quite a bit of anticapitalist rhetoric, embodied in oversimplifications of petition and profit-making are all about. Understandably, then, leaders in the munity often avoid any kind of dialogue about business practices with the “left wing” intellectuals who inhabit their “ivory towers.”

Where those antagonisms prevail, it can be tough on the people who teach business in colleges and universities. Either they occupy some kind of fortable middle space, or they are forced to move in one or the other polarized direction. There has been much in our presentations and dialogues about how best to work in engaging in plex task together, and my assignment is not to add more content to what we have already received but to tie things together by reflecting a bit on what we have witnessed here, as well as to encourage us all to keep at the important task of kingdom witness in these important areas of human interaction.

Some of the most productive conversations I have had on the subject mon grace were with Bob Lane during his ten-year stint as the CEO of the John pany. Bob got in touch with me shortly after he read my book mon grace. Several times I traveled at his invitation to the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois, for some engaging theological discussion about the relevance of Kuyperian thought to the selling of bines, and other farm equipment. Bob had found in the theology mon grace a helpful fleshing out of a key insight he had learned in Arthur Holmes’ philosophy class at Wheaton College – the profound claim that Holmes also chose as the title for one of his books: “All truth is God’s truth.”

As the CEO of a large pany, Bob worked with a team of key managers who represented a wide variety of religious and worldview perspectives: Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, Christians, Jews, persons who claimed no religious faith at all, and many others. The theology mon grace allowed Bob to see this not simply as a diversity to be tolerated but as a positive blessing from the Lord. If that sounds a bit too optimistic to some of our theological ears, it is important to be reminded of John Calvin’s own perspective on these matters.

Many of you know that the doctrine mon grace has been much debated in the world of Dutch Calvinism. Those of us who defend the doctrine insist on going back to Calvin himself as the source of this important teaching. Even though the great Reformer had established himself as a defender of the doctrine of the “total depravity” of fallen humanity, he managed to express appreciation on many occasions for the contributions of non-Christian thinkers.

Before his evangelical conversion, Calvin had studied law, and he never lost his respect for the ideas he had gleaned from the writings of various Greek and Roman writers, especially Seneca. In his Institutes, Calvin observed that there is an “admirable light of truth shining” in the thoughts of pagan thinkers. This means, he said, that “the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness,” can still be “clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts.” Indeed, he insisted, to refuse to accept the truth produced by such minds is “to dishonor the Spirit of God.” For a punch line that we defenders mon grace especially like to quote, Calvin says that there is “a universal apprehension of reason and understanding [that] is by nature implanted in men,” and when we see this ability to understand important things correctly at work in unbelievers, we should celebrate this as a “peculiar grace of God.”

This goes well beyond the kinds of things that are usually associated with the idea mon grace: things like the fact that God sends rain to nurture the crops of both believing and unbelieving farmers, and that even very wicked governments often manage to do some things that promote human flourishing. All of that can be explained simply by the work of divine providence – God’s use of bent sticks to draw a few straight lines.

Calvin sees mon grace operating inside unbelievers. They actually think some correct thoughts and are – at least in some areas of human inquiry – lovers of truth. Kuyper nails down this idea of the inside dimensions mon grace in this wonderful passage: In addition to the purely external operations, he mon grace is at work “wherever civic virtue, a sense of domesticity, natural love, the practice of human virtue, the improvement of the public conscience, integrity, mutual loyalty among people, and a feeling for piety leaven life.”

In the business world, then, we need to recognize that we can discover insights into truth, stewardship, promotion of human good, healthy employee practices, and the like from those who do not name the name of Jesus Christ. Kuyper’s important emphasis is also affirmed by his younger colleague Herman Bavinck, who wrote that because mon grace there is “[s]ometimes a remarkable sagacity ... given to [unbelievers] whereby they are not only able to learn certain things, but also to make important inventions and discoveries, and to put these to practical use in life.”

That wonderful insistence on the reality mon grace, as a favorable disposition of God toward all human beings, is a blessing received from the Reformed tradition – although we can also find variations on mon grace theology in other theological traditions as well. For those of us who endorse the Reformed doctrine mon grace, however, it is important to keep reminding ourselves that it is not enough to approach the kinds of issues we have been wrestling with here as if we are the only ones who have access to the truth about the practical concerns and challenges of the human condition.

Richard J. Mouw is professor of faith and public life at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Want My Opinion?
  Want My Opinion?   By: Anne Peterson   Fools have no interest in understanding, they only want to air their own opinions.- Proverbs 18:2   I’ve been reading through Proverbs again. And I’m telling you, Solomon really has nuggets of wisdom for all of us. I hardly start reading and I need to stop and write down some of those verses, so I...
An Attack of Judicial Pragmatism
  Given the hoopla, the most striking thing about Chief Justice John Roberts majority opinion in Trump v. United States is how little it decides: Neither Congress nor an overzealous prosecutor can transform a president’s use of his removal power into a crime, since the Constitution makes the decision to fire an executive-branch officer the “exclusive and preclusive” prerogative of the...
Deference to AI?
  As courts and administrative agencies encounter uncertainty posed by the post-Chevron era, a few foundational principles remain in place and serve as guides through doctrinal disruption. For one, courts have the authority and capacity to say what the law is. Likewise, if Congress unambiguously mandates a specific agency action, including the means to perform that act, jurists and scholars alike...
Homelessness Hits Record High, Straining Rescue Missions
  It was 2:45 p.m., and people were lined up around the block in Tribeca, Manhattan, for the 3 p.m. intake at the emergency shelter of the Bowery Mission, a Christian nonprofit that has served New Yorkers since 1879.   Am I on the list? one woman called out to Lea Burrell, the Bowery manager. The woman had to get in a...
The High Cost of Political Capture
  Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows; it can also make self-dealing ones. A new study of the economic impact of the $787 billion 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is trying to tell us about the need to close the gap between intentions and outcomes by moving decision-making and accountability closer to the communities the federal government is trying...
A Comedian of Order
  Bob Newhart has died at the age of 94—the comic who was our last connection with mid-century America. He became famous with the live comedy album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1960), which was a big hit, selling more than 1,000,000 copies and winning him two Grammys: Best New Artist and Album of The Year.   He was 30 and...
A Scholar
  This term, the spotlight among both conservative and liberal Court watchers has been on Amy Coney Barrett’s not infrequent breaks from her fellow Republican-appointed justices. Liberal commentators have been quick to praise her, especially in contrast to those colleagues. Those encomiums bring to mind what Laurence Silberman (for whom Barrett once clerked) dubbed the “Greenhouse effect.” That’s the tendency of...
Of Presidents, Kings, and Ministers
  Classically, constitutions do two things. They allocate and distribute power, and they provide the means whereby the people can hold that power to account. Power and accountability are what constitutions are all about. In the modern age, a third function has been added—that constitutions also set out (or enumerate) the fundamental rights of citizens—but this third function need not concern...
Americans Are Still Inviting People to Church
  When churchgoers show up to their churchs worship service, theyre often hoping to have a guest with them.   A Lifeway Research study of US Protestant churchgoers finds 3 in 5 (60%) say they have extended at least one invitation in the past six months for someone to attend their church, including 19 percent who have made one invitation, 21 percent...
When We’ve Blown It
  Thursday, July 25, 2024   When We’ve Blown It   O Lord, hear me as I pray; pay attention to my groaning. (Psalm 5:1 NLT)   Have you ever been betrayed by someone you loved? Have you ever faced seemingly insurmountable odds? Has it ever seemed as though there was no way out of your dilemma?   If so, then you have a good...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved