Richard J. Mouw - All That God Cares about: Common Grace and Divine Delight

One of my favorite Italian words is aggiornamento pronounced ah-jyor-na- men -to. My saying that, of course, does not really amount to much. Since I am not a speaker or reader of Italian, it is not as if I have chosen that word as my favorite from hundreds of others that I know.

In my youth I went to public schools with some highly intelligent Italian-American kids, but I am pretty sure that I never heard one of them ever utter the word aggiornamento . I was introduced to that word in the early 1960s, as I followed with interest the reports coming from Rome about the Second Vatican Council. During the three years that Vatican II met, there was a lot of talk about aggiornamento . The word means updating, and that was what was happening as the bishops met in Rome. They made important changes to revitalize Catholic thought and practice for the late twentieth century.

This book is my attempt to contribute to what I see as a much-needed neo-Calvinist aggiornamento . My effort here focuses specifically on an updating of the doctrine of common grace as it was set forth by Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands in the last half of the nineteenth century.

I will also be doing a bit of personal aggiornamento in these pages. When I was invited to give the 2000 Stob Lectures, I immediately decided upon common grace as my topic. In preparing those lectures, I reviewed some of the debateschurch-dividing onesthat had taken place during the first half of the twentieth century among North American Dutch Calvinists. When my lectures appeared in book form, though, I was pleasantly surprised by some positive interest from beyond the Reformed community. The comments and questions I received stimulated some new thoughts on the subject.

The new thoughts were further enhanced and multiplied by what I have been learning from my PhD students at Fuller Seminary, especially since I have been able to devote more time to doctoral mentoring after retiring in 2013 from a twenty-year stint as the seminarys president and becoming a full-time faculty member again. As I am writing this book, ten of my students have successfully defended dissertations on neo-Calvinist topics, with a half dozen more making excellent progress. The majority of these students have been attracted to the thought of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck from non-Reformed backgrounds, and their enthusiasm for the subject matter and their fresh insights have provided me with an ongoing neo-Calvinist education.

But my aggiornamento interests also have a broader focus. I am convinced that the neo-Calvinist perspective speaks in profound ways to our present cultural situation in North America. In my own personal theological-spiritual journey I have always described my identity as both Calvinist and evangelical. I still claim both labels. And while the latter term has come into some disrepute in recent decades because of the way it has come to be associated with a mean-spirited politicizing, I am convinced that some of the defects associated with this reputation can be remedied by drawing upon an updateda recontextualizedneo-Calvinism.

Protection versus Engagement

Abraham Kuyper himself would have liked the idea that his theological insights needed to be updated in the light of new cultural realities. Indeed, it is precisely this aggiornamento character of Kuypers thought that motivates many of us to call ourselves neo -Calvinists. Kuyper disagreed with John Calvin on some important points, especially relating to the Reformers views on church-state relations, and this led Kuyper to expand on basic Calvinist ideas in articulating his theology of cultural engagement.

When he visited Princeton Seminary in 1898 to deliver the Stone Lectures, Kuyper introduced his perspective on the relevance of Calvinist theology to contemporary life by informing his audience that he had not come to restore [Calvinism to] its worn-out form, but rather to address the basic principles of Calvinism in a way that meets the requirements of our own century. In offering that assessment, Kuyper was signaling his enthusiasm for updating Calvinismeven revising it at some key pointsas the Calvinist movement faced new cultural realities.