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:
“... 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 ...”
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“So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.”
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“... there has been a very special man in my life for the past year. All I’ll say about him is that he’s kind, warm, mature, someone I can trust—and he’s not a politician.”
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“He prayed more deeply for simple selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling an uprush of grace in the very intention, shed the night in his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)