Common Grace Quotes

“Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Work done by non-Christians always contain some degree of God's common grace as well as the distortions of sin. Work done by Christians, even if it overtly names the name of Jesus is also to a significant degree distorted by sin.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Human generosity is possible only because at the center of the solar system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free energy day and night without stop and without complaint and without the slightest hesitation.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

“Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.”
― Timothy Keller

“If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a canyon and seen the birds swooping below you and the clouds stretched out over your head, or if you’ve ever stood in a field and felt a tiny rush of fear as you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in over the horizon, then you know what this means. There is something about the grandeur of creation that calls out to the human heart, saying, “You are not all there is!”
― Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel?

“Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.”
― John Mark Reynolds, The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

“That which is good in fallen man by the dogma of common grace”
― Abraham Kuyper

“Sin, indeed, is an absolute darkening power, and were not its effect temporarily checked, nothing but absolute darkness would have remained in and about man; but common grace has restrained its workings to a very considerable degree; also in order that the sinner might be without excuse.”
― Abraham Kuyper

“The purest confession of truth finds ultimately its starting-point in the seed of religion, which, thanks to common grace, is still present in the fallen sinner; and, on the other hand, there is no form of idolatry so low, or so corrupted, but has sprung from this same semen religionis. Without natural Theology there is no Abba, Father, conceivable, any more than a Molech ritual.”
― Abraham Kuyper

“Sin unbridled would have resulted forthwith in the total degeneracy of human life. But God arrested sin in its course in order to prevent the complete annihilation of his handiwork, which naturally would have followed. By his common grace God restrains the working of sin in the natural man. By common grace he tames men as wild animals may be tamed and become attractive as domestic animals.”
― Abraham Kuyper

“Indeed, man is incapable of doing any good. Are all unbelievers then wicked and repulsive men? Not at all. In our experience we find that the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find pages that you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by his noble tone and stirs in you holy sentiments…It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the splendor of talent, which excites your pleasure in the words and actions of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness, and their sense of honesty. Who of us has not been put to the blush by the virtues of the heathen? It is thus a fact, that your dogma of total depravity by sin does not always tally with your experience in life. Well, my friends, by its doctrine of common grace Calvinism can hold on to both what the Bible teaches on human depravity and to what experience teaches about the virtues of the heathen.”
― Abraham Kuyper