All Truth Is God’s Truth

“For since all truth is of God, if any ungodly man has said anything true, we should not reject it, for it also has come from God.” -John Calvin, commenting on Titus 1:12

Common Grace at Work in Science and Scholarship

“Knowledge of earthly things is possible, and there is a yearning to find out the truth about them. This is the basis of science and scholarship (law, medicine, mathematics, literature, and the liberal arts). These are the natural sciences, with philosophy as their crown. These gifts of the Spirit should not be rejected or despised, for that would be to despise God himself. Pagans themselves admit that philosophy, the arts, sciences, and laws were gifts from the gods. We cannot read the writings of the ancients without great admiration. If by the Lord’s will we can be helped by the activities of evil persons in the study of nature, in logic, in mathematics, let us then use these things. Zwingli said that whatever the pagans said that is good and beautiful, we accept and convert to the glory of our God. We decorate the temple of the true God with the spoils of the Egyptians.” -Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics

The Challenge of Balance

Henri Blocher offers comments about the reality of common grace in the world, and God’s desire to maintain his original Creator/creature relationship to the fallen world. He then offers this wise thought:

“Our temptation may be to exaggerate the situation [of the evilness of the world] out of apocalyptic zeal; the more we condemn the world, the more prophetic we feel, or are considered.” Blocher, Illuminating the Riddle: Original Sin, pg. 89