Contrasted With Special Grace
Special grace, in Reformed theology, is the grace by which God redeems, sanctifies, and glorifies his people. Unlike common grace, which is universally given, special grace is bestowed only on those whom God elects to eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ. This special grace is frequently linked with the five points of Calvinism as irresistible grace or efficacious grace. Common Grace is God working in the heart of the sinner to emulate the Christian life but not effectually saving that sinner. This is a most important distinctive of Historical Calvinism as it is a distinctive made by John Calvin in his book the Institutes of the Christian Religion and by a number of Confessions of faith for Calvinistic denominations originally in Europe. It is also the distinctive made by later theologians such as Abraham Kuyper of the Netherlands and Louis Berkhof and R. C. Sproul. Following Kuyper, Berkhof sees three categories of common grace:
- Universal Common Grace, a grace that extends to all creatures;
- General Common Grace, that is grace which applies to mankind in general and to every member of the human race;
- Covenant Common Grace, a grace that is common to all those who live in the sphere of the covenant, whether they belong to the elect or not.
Read more about this topic: Common Grace
Famous quotes containing the words contrasted with, contrasted, special and/or grace:
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
—Henry David David (1817–1862)
“... when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination.—For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers ...”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”
—R.D. (Ronald David)
“But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,—which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)