Common Grace for the Common Good: Shaping Our Theology of Work

In Jeremiah 29, the people of God in exile in Babylon are commanded to “pray for the city” and to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” by building houses, planting gardens, and getting married (Jer 29:5–7). The exiles are called to not merely pray for the city but to engage in the everyday, ordinary acts of cultivating the earth and creating community.

Yet it is a command paired with a profound claim: The exiles’ welfare is bound in and with the wellbeing of Babylon.

Cultural mandate meets exile

Within the context of the biblical story, this call echoes the commands God gave to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in Genesis to fill the earth (Gen 1:28) and to develop the creation by tending to it (Gen 1:28; 2:15). These resonances between Genesis and Jeremiah are not accidental. In the creation story and Jeremiah, God’s people are given the same charge: Create life and tend creation.

However, the location—not just physically but spiritually—is distinct. In Eden, carrying out God’s charge—commonly called the cultural mandate in the Reformed tradition—was free from the guilt, misery, and pollution of sin. In Jeremiah, God’s people are east of Eden (Gen 3:22–24), exiled both spiritually and physically from their home in God’s presence. Yet it is exactly in their exile that God commands them to continue carrying out their culture-making and creation-tending tasks.

The command to continue tending and creating while in exile is theologically significant. Exile within the biblical narrative is not merely an event brought about by the Babylonians but a motif used to communicate the spiritual reality of creation post-lapse. Adam and Eve are the first exiles, exiled from the edenic home. Post-fall, Scripture depicts humanity as exiled wanderers, longing for home. The restoration of humanity’s true home comes through Christ and the consummation of his kingdom in the eschaton (Rev 21–22).

Even though believers experience a foretaste of their final home in their union with Christ, they remain in but “not of the world” until the renewal of all things (John 17:14–16). In other words, exile remains a legitimate motif for God’s people on this side of the cross, which Peter himself identifies when he writes his letter to the “elect exiles” (1 Pet 1:1; see also 1:17; 2:11).

As exile remains a means to describe the people of God, so too God’s command in Genesis—echoed in Jeremiah—is upheld throughout the narrative of Scripture. The story of God’s people starts in a garden (Gen 2–3) and ends in a garden-city where God will dwell with his people forever (Rev 21:3). Moreover, as Richard Mouw writes in When the Kings Come Marching In, the New Jerusalem—the garden-city—will be filled with the refined gifts and developments of the nations.

Until that day, however, Christians—the elect exiles—wait in hope for the renewal of all things. However, they also are called to create and cultivate as they await their final homecoming.

Common grace meets the fall

While there remains more that can and should be said concerning the engagement with Scripture above, this tracing serves as fertile ground within which to articulate the relationship between the theological concept of common grace and work.

Common grace, originally developed by Neo-Calvinists Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), is the doctrine that affirms God’s gracious upholding of the created order after the fall. Drawing from John Calvin, Bavinck and Kuyper utilized common grace to develop a capacious theological vision whereby any good post-fall is due to God’s gracious action and his sustaining, patient love. For Bavinck and Kuyper, the effects of the fall were so pervasive that anything good, true, or beautiful after the fall was due to God’s gracious intervention to uphold the created order.

Any good post-fall is due to God’s gracious action and his sustaining, patient love.

Thus, for Bavinck and Kuyper, God’s command to his people in Jeremiah to create life and cultivate creation (Jer 29:5–7) is only possible because of God’s gracious upholding of created life. Prior to the fall, God upholds creation, but after the fall, his upholding is a gracious gift.

Cory Brock and Nathaniel Sutanto define common grace in Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction, in this way:

God’s common grace is the fact of his loving patience in preserving both humanity and the creaturely cosmos despite human rebellion and its polluting corruption for the sake of redemption. Common grace marks an era between the curse of the world and the second advent of Christ wherein God gifts moral, epistemic, and natural goods to the world, maintaining in high degree an organic creaturely unity despite the curse.

This does not mean common grace is redemptive; redemption, as Kuyper and Bavinck were always quick to point out, is a work of God’s special grace. However, common grace is a post-lapse, non-salvific work of God that upholds the creation and allows created goods to continue to operate—even if their operation is always marred by the effects of sin.

Paired with the Neo-Calvinist notion of the antithesis—accounting for the fundamental opposition between sin and grace, the kingdom of this world (the flesh, the world, and the devil) and the kingdom of God—common grace serves to formulate a nuanced theological account of divine action in creation post-lapse. While the goods of the created order are graciously upheld, the effects of the fall are pervasive. Thus, post-lapse, creating life and cultivating creation are still possible, but they are impacted by the fall (see Gen 3:14–19).

How common grace informs our theology of work

If the doctrine of common grace affirms that moral, epistemic, and natural goods are graciously upheld by God after the fall such that the command to “seek the welfare” of the city is possible, it also informs and guides our understanding of work itself. It does this in numerous ways. In what follows, I will highlight at least three.

1. It offers a capacious vision of work.
2. It invites Christians to seek common ground for the common good in their communities.
3. It encourages Christians to attend to ordinary acts as the primary locus of faithful response to God’s common and redemptive grace.

1. Affirms a capacious vision

First, the doctrine of common grace, in its affirmation of God’s gracious upholding of the created order after the fall, opens up a capacious vision of work that is as wide as creation itself and encompasses the whole of one’s life.

The doctrine of common grace is integrally linked to the doctrine of creation insofar as it affirms God’s upholding of creation in the era between the fall and Christ’s second coming (Col 1:16–17; Heb 1:3; Acts 17:28). Connected to the cultural or creational mandate, which understands creation as a gift to care for and develop as a worship-filled response to God, common grace allows that work to continue.

The effects of the fall are real and affect how human beings engage in their specific vocations, but the vocations remain possible because God has upheld the order of creation, including the moral and epistemic goods that are required to know creation and engage in it. Because God graciously upholds creation, this creation-wide engagement can continue, and specific vocations in the arts, sciences, politics, literature, etc., are all open to Christians as they “seek the welfare” of the places where they find themselves. This vision of work is a vision of a life-long vocation in which caring for, cultivating, and developing the good gifts of creation is an act of worship.

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2. Acknowledges common ground

Second, the doctrine of common grace invites God’s people to engage and seek common ground with others.

While God’s redemptive, special grace is particular, God’s common, upholding grace is general. Thus, it is not merely in his people that God upholds moral and epistemic goods.

This makes it possible for God’s people to find common ground with others and work for the common good. The actual practice of this is deeply complex, but it is possible. Common grace allows for God’s people to seek the common good of their neighborhoods, towns, and nations alongside others who are seeking the same thing.

Moreover, because the doctrine of common grace ascribes all good gifts after the fall to God’s creation-wide, intervening, and upholding act, all truth, goodness, and beauty after the fall is ascribed to him and his action. In Genesis 4, the descendants of Cain make music and make cultural tools (Gen 4:20–21). These acts of developing and tending to creation are to be celebrated as genuine goods, even if they come from Cain’s line.

Thus, God’s people can learn from others and delight in all good gifts post-fall. It does not eliminate discernment, for there remains a distinction between the goods of creation and the way they are developed after the fall. However, in the era between the fall and the final consummation of the kingdom, the genuine goods that come through humanity’s creation-developing and culture-making are genuine goods, whatever the religious (or non-religious) commitments of the ones who brought them about.

To return to and extrapolate from the story of the “elect exiles” in Babylon, the planting of gardens and building of houses did not require the exiles to create wholly new gardening methods or architecture skills. Rather, within the context of God’s gracious work, they could learn from and work with the Babylonians to garden and build houses. They did not need to focus on the constant creation of novel approaches in exile, but they could learn from the Babylonians.

However, at the same time that Jeremiah commends them to “seek the welfare” of the city (Jer 29:4–7), he also implores them to find their ultimate hope and comfort in God who will redeem and restore them (29:10–14). In Babylon, they are to care for the city while awaiting God’s redemptive action. So too, God’s people on this side of the cross are to care for their neighborhoods, towns, and countries and seek their welfare. At times, this may involve “learning to garden” or even “gardening” with others. But, just like the exiles in Babylon, God’s people now await his final restoration (e.g., Heb 10:10; 13:14).

3. Attends to the ordinary

Finally, the doctrine of common grace encourages God’s people to attend to their ordinary lives as the locus of their faithful response to God’s grace (e.g., 1 Thess 4:11–12).

Again, as common grace is a work of God’s upholding of creation, all of life remains in relation to him (Col 1:15–17). Thus, in upholding the world through common grace, the whole of life no matter how big or how small is to be lived before God. In light of who God is, nothing in this world is truly ordinary, but, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins notes, the world is “charged with the grandeur of God.” And, as God’s people engage in God’s good world for the sake of his glory and the love of his creation, every day, ordinary acts become extraordinary moments to behold and declare the goodness of God.

The whole of life no matter how big or how small is to be lived before God. In light of who God is, nothing in this world is truly ordinary.

As God loves the world by upholding it, God’s people are also called to love the world as they encounter and engage it in their work. However, post-fall, loving the world also requires seeing it clearly, which means that perceiving and attending to the impact of the fall on creation is also necessary. God’s common grace does maintain the good, the true, and the beautiful, but it does so in a fallen world. That means that in the everyday, ordinary work of God’s people to create life and tend creation, the impact of the fall will be seen, known, and experienced. Thus, the call is not to ignore these things. Rather, knowing the depths of sin, pain, and brokenness, God’s people are called to engage in love in the world.

This can and should include prayer, lament, and protest against evil, injustice, and oppression. These actions are fitting to the era in-between the fall and the consummation of the kingdom. To affirm common grace is to simultaneously claim that the world is not as it should be. Therefore, while capacious and generous towards others, the work and vocation of God’s people are also marked with a profound understanding of the fall and its pervasive effects.

Saving grace and a theology of work

Common grace is an aspect of God’s providential care for creation as he governs it towards its final end. Insofar as it is the means by which he upholds the created order, it is also a doctrine that forms and informs a theology of work. It yields a capacious theology of work in which common ground can be found for the common good in the ordinariness of creaturely life.

However, a theology of work, just as an account of God’s grace, is incomplete without a full account of how work is also formed and informed by God’s special (or saving) grace in Christ by which he redeems and restores. Exploring the full relationship between the two is for another time and article. It is enough to note here that the work of Christ goes “as far as the curse is found.”

As Bavinck and Kuyper consistently affirm in their work, common grace is the channel within which special grace flows. And insofar as Christ’s work is redemptive and restorative, that good news of the gospel extends far beyond the remission of guilt. As Bavinck writes in “The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church,”

Sin has corrupted much; in fact, everything. The guilt of human sin is immeasurable; the pollution that always accompanies it penetrates every structure of humanity and the world. Nonetheless sin does not dominate and corrupt without God’s abundant grace in Christ triumphing even more (Rom. 5:15–20). The blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, it is able to restore everything. We need not, indeed we must not, despair of anyone or anything. The Gospel is a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person but also for humanity, for the family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.

God is at work restoring and redeeming all things. Redemption, like creation and God’s upholding of creation, is a gift that comes from the sovereign God alone.

Furthermore, while the fullness of God’s redemption of creation is assured, his people await the final and full restoration of his kingdom in the eschaton. Thus, as God’s people are trained to be attentive to God’s work in the world, they are also formed to be a people of hope who are learning what it looks like to wait in expectation of the day when the old order of things will truly pass away (Rev 21–22).

God’s gracious upholding of creation and his work of redemption through Christ does not create a triumphalist theology of work wherein Christians are to dominate and “win the culture for Christ” through any means necessary. Rather, it is a call much more akin to the command God gives the exiles in Jeremiah in Babylon: Pray for the city, create life, and cultivate creation. This is a call for loving transformation, not triumphalist domination.

Resources on common grace and the cultural mandate

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