Miscellanies 15: Problems with Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck

I just read Jan Veenhof's essay Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, trans. by Albert M. Wolters. I appreciate Bavinck's critique of Roman Catholicism's Neoplatonic "grace supplements nature" thesis. As he points out, Scripture teaches that grace is God's answer to sin rather than an answer to a substantial insufficiency in the nature he originally declared "good." Bavinck instead teaches that "grace restores nature" in an ethical sense.

Grace does not serve to take man up into a supernatural order, but to liberate him from sin. Grace is not opposed to nature, but only to sin. Properly speaking, it was not necessary for Adam before the Fall, but has become necessary only because of sin; therefore, it is not necessary absolutely, but only per accidens. The physical opposition of natural and supernatural is replaced by the ethical one of sin and grace (13).

On the other end of the spectrum, Bavinck criticizes Pietism's Gnostic-like tendency to see "grace opposing nature," which leads to separatism and asceticism--again, thinking of nature in a substantial sense.

So Christianity did not come into the world to condemn and put under the ban everything that existed beforehand and elsewhere, but quite the opposite, to purify from sin everything that was; and thus to cause it to answer again to its own nature and purpose (17).

Veenhof goes on to show that Bavinck maintained the historic Reformed distinction between the ecclesiastical and civil spheres of God's sovereignty in the world. He then concludes with some practical consequences of Bavinck's thought writing:

We can observe that in this conception the independence of the different spheres is fully honored, while at the same time the salutary effect of the gospel in all these spheres is emphatically underscored. Family, society, and state arise out of creation, according to Bavinck, and exist by virtue of gratia communis. Bavinck evidently agrees fully with Kuyper's idea of sphere sovereignty. It is also his conviction that sovereignty in these "organic life-spheres" descends directly from God to created reality and that each has a God-given authority of its own (26).

So far I am tracking, as long as "the salutary effect of the gospel in all these spheres" is understood to be at best indirect. However, Veenhof continues:

This authority does not in the least imply that the spheres in question have nothing to do with the gospel. On the contrary, they have been corrupted by sin and therefore need the word of God as rule and guide (26-27).

At this point I see a couple problems, which may or may not be there (I am open to correction). First, it seems that "the gospel" has been equivocated with "the word of God." This is problematic because the word of God includes both law and gospel not just gospel. The civil sphere of human society is governed by the law alone. It's government is not directly impacted by the gospel. God's words to Noah recorded in Genesis 9:6, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed," are neither the gospel nor based on the gospel. They announce a penalty based on the the second table of the moral law. The civil government has been instituted by God and enabled by his common grace to administer justice not redemptive grace. Second, it seems, given that the civil sphere is governed by the moral law apart from the gospel, and the moral law is revealed to man naturally (c.f. Rom. 1:32; 2:14-15), the civil sphere does not "need the word of God as a rule and guide." Only the church needs the word as a rule and guide, which includes the law in its third use (i.e. the law administered in light of the gospel).