Herman-Bavinck-Common-Grace

COMMON GRACE 45
sprung from Greece. The desire quickly arose to conquer Christianity,
with its strange and novel content, and to take it up in the service of the
philosophically cultured consciousness. The gnosticism of the second
century was an audacious attempt to introduce Christianity into the
great world-process and to melt it down into a great system embracing
all religions and philosophies. But disillusionment followed. In the midst
of proud speculation, the gospel of grace was lost.
Nevertheless, men still continued to strain their powers of thought in
an effort to lift faith up to the plane of gnosis and to prove or clarify the
dogmas of trinity, incarnation, and atonement with the light of reason.
These attempts continued long into the Middle Ages. Thus in the course
of time speculative thought was more and more driven to the conclusion
that these dogmas were incomprehensible mysteries beyond the reach
of thought. Reason might well accomplish a part of the task of rising
above the sensible and grasping a bit of the supernatural: the existence
of God, the immortality of the soul—these things at least were deemed
provable. But here too reason found her limit. Hence the distinction was
made between the articuli mixti (matters known by faith and reason) and
the articuli puri (matters known by faith alone), and between theologia
naturalis [natural theology] and revelata [revealed (theology)]. In essence
these distinctions already appear in the Church Fathers Irenaeus and
Tertullian, Augustine and John of Damascus. They could be properly
understood in the sense that the believer can discern in nature and
history the hand of the very God that he had come to know as the Father
of Jesus Christ. But in the course of Roman Catholic scholasticism, both
before and after the Reformation, this distinction developed and acquired
an entirely different meaning. Rome replaced the antithetical
relation of sin and grace with the contrast between natural and supernatural
religion. Upon this latter contrast she erected a system that
conflicted with the principles of apostolic Christianity.
According to the viewpoint of Rome, there exist in the divine mind
two conceptions of man and thus also a double moral law, two sorts of
love, and a twofold destination or goal. God first created man as an
earthly, sensuous, rational, and moral being in puris naturalibus [in a
purely natural state]. To be sure, to this he added the divine image, the
donum superadditum [superadded gift]; but this was soon lost through
sin. Original sin thus consists entirely or almost entirely in the loss of
the donum superadditum and in the reversion to the state of nature, in
puris naturalibus. Apart from the harmful influence of his social environment,
man is still born in a condition like that of Adam before the fall,
and lacking the donum superadditum. For even concupiscence is not in