The Battle for Sovereign, Particular Grace and the Birth of the PRCA

Last Fall (2024) the faculty of the PRC Seminary held a conference marking the 100th anniversary of the common grace controversy in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) that led to the expulsion of three of her ministers and the birth of the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) in 1925.

This year (2025) -- in fact, next week, June 2-6 at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI -- the PRC will be celebrating her 100th anniversary. The most recent issue of the PR Theological Journal contains in written form the speeches given by the PR professors at the Fall 2024 conference.

In this post we want to call attention to the speech by Prof. B. Huizinga in which he dealt with the first point of the CRC's common grace doctrine adopted in 1924. His speech was titled "God Giving Good Things to All People: Grace?" We quote a portion of it here, encouraging you to read it all as part of the PRC's ardent defense of God's sovereign, particular grace to His people in Jesus Christ.

"...Nevertheless, the doctrinal issue is not merely negative. It is not true that the PRCA exists only to wage war against the doctrine of common grace and that we would disappear if we could no longer continue this fight.1 Existing only to deny something is a pathetic existence.

This issue is positive, as all of God’s truth is. The PRCA stands positively for grace, the grace of God, the grace revealed in Christ, the grace communicated by the Spirit, the grace taught in Scripture, the grace woven through the Three Forms of Unity, the grace that we believers experience as sweet and amazing. There is nothing common about this grace! Grace is always particular, to the elect alone. It is always sovereign and saving. Into all eternity no one will ever be able to find one example of a recipient of divine grace who perished. Hell will never admit through its gates any upon whom the God of all grace has poured out His grace. The triumphant note of the gospel that we in the PRCA love to sound is: God’s grace never fails to save! Think of the refrain repeated throughout Psalm 136 as versified in the 1912 Psalter, “His grace abideth ever…His mercy faileth never.”

Second, the issue addressed in this article is a theological issue. I do not mean “theology” only in the broad sense of a study and presentation of all the doctrines of Scripture organized into six loci, but “theology” in the narrow sense as the first locus of Reformed doctrine. Theology proper is the study of God. There are certainly important implications for the other five loci of Reformed doctrine (treating mankind, Christ, salvation, the church, and the last things), but the issue addressed in this article is theological from beginning to end. In this article, I am not interested in the human being and whether there is any restraint of sin in him, whether he can do what is truly good, and how his cultural products relate to God’s redemptive purposes. I am concerned with God—His nature and character.

... Being theological, the issue is not ecclesiastical self-preservation or promotion. Rejecting common grace is not a Protestant Reformed thing that Protestant Reformed people do simply to maintain their own denomination. The issue here is the truth of God, and we are convinced that faithfulness to God and His revelation of Himself in Scripture demands our rejection of common grace.

Third, the issue addressed in this article is a relevant issue. There is widespread, almost universal acceptance of common grace in evangelicalism and in Reformed and Presbyterian churches. If it is not explicitly taught, this doctrine is tolerated. But does the average believer, even in Reformed churches, know what common grace is, or that there was and is a controversy over it? Among those who have heard of common grace, how many simply take it for granted as being orthodox without ever having given it any serious, much less critical, examination? Where common grace is explicitly mentioned, is under stood, and is taught, it often functions as the engine driving the hugely popular neo-Calvinist push for the redemption and Christianization of culture. Yet, even in those circles does the average person in the pew stop to consider what the doctrine of common grace is all about? One hundred years after the Synod of 1924, people (still) need to know.