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II

IN DEUM

IF the symbol begins with the decisive word, “I believe in God,” and if it is permissible for us to characterise this its first word as also the cardinal proposition of Dogmatics, then we must go on to establish the following: The relationship between this “in God” and what follows in the three parts of the symbol with regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot and must not in any circumstances be understood in the sense that this “in God” signifies, as it were, the specification of a general concept of known content which then receives in the three parts of the symbol its special historical ingredients, namely, the Christian filling out and elaboration. “God” in the meaning of the symbol—of the symbol which aims at giving again the testimony of the prophets and apostles—“God” is not a magnitude, with which the believer is already acquainted before he is a believer, so that as believer he merely experiences an improvement and enrichment of knowledge that he already had. When Paul says (Rom. 1:19) that what can be known of God (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ, cognoscibile Dei) is manifest to them, for God manifested it unto them, the whole context as well as the immediately preceding statement (Rom. 1:18) shows that Paul sees the truth about God “held down” among men, made ineffective, unfruitful. What comes of it in their hands is idolatry. And with Paul, as with all the prophets and apostles, idolatry is not a preparatory form of the service of the true God, but its perversion into the very opposite, to which therefore they, with their witness to God, do not attach but oppose their witness. The single point of contact—one that, it seems to me, is employed very ironically—is reckoned by Paul the altar of the unknown God (Acts 17:23). The word “God” in the symbol, therefore, must not mislead us into first giving consideration to the nature and the attributes of a being which, on the basis of our most comprehensive experiences and deepest reflection, we think we have discovered as that which this name may and must fit, in order thereupon, under the guidance of the historical statements of the symbol, to ascribe to the subject so conceived this and that definite predicate, behaviour and act. On the contrary, we have to begin with the admission that of ourselves we do not know what we say when we say “God,” i.e. that all that we think we know when we say “God” does not reach and comprehend Him Who is called “God” in the symbol, but always one of our self-conceived and self-made idols, whether it is “spirit” or “nature,” “fate” or “idea” that we really have in view. But even this admission, of course, cannot carry the meaning that in it we are proclaiming a discovery of our own. The “unknown God” of the Athenians, the God of the agnostics was, to Paul’s view, an idol like all the rest. Only God’s revelation, not our reason despairing of itself, can carry us over from God’s incomprehensibility.

In telling us that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the symbol, which speaks of God on the basis and in the sense of the prophetic-apostolic witness, expresses absolutely for the first and only time Who God is and What God is. God is God precisely and only in that being and action which are here, in a new and peculiar way, designated as those of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Only in this reality of His that bears on us is God God. All our preconceived representations and ideas of what from our own consciousness we think we are compelled to take for “God,” have, when we confess, “I believe in God,” not indeed to disappear—for they cannot do that; that would mean that we should have to remain speechless—but to give way before the utterance of revelation, to subordinate themselves to it completely and absolutely. They have to receive from it not only a new content, but also a new form. They are not only improved and enriched, but they are turned upside down. They are appointed to a service for which they have in themselves no capacity, for which they are absolutely unfitted and unequal, so that even now, namely, in the Confession of the Christian faith, we shall have to keep admitting that God remains incomprehensible to us, i.e. that we cannot comprehend to what extent we are now really speaking of God on the basis of God’s revelation, in using the language of our preconceived representations and ideas. It is not because we have already sought Him that we find Him in faith, but, it is because He has first of all found us that we seek Him—now really Him—in faith. Truly and only as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Who He has revealed and will reveal Himself to us, is God God—He is not also God in addition in the thoughts of our hearts and in the works of our hands. It is just the man who has received God’s revelation, who will ascribe God’s being present as God to him, entirely to His revelation and not at all to himself, entirely to grace and not at all to nature.

We shall return in other places to the three names and modes of existence of God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in their difference and unity, and in this Lecture dwell upon the formal—but yet only apparently formal—fact that “God” in the symbol is absolutely and exclusively He Who exists under these three names in these three modes of being, that is to say, absolutely and exclusively God in His revelation. If that is so, what does it mean to “believe in God”? Who and What then is God? Several answers are to be given to these questions, answers that will thereafter have to accompany us, warning us and directing us, on our whole way through the chief problems of Dogmatics.

1. He who believes in God in the sense of the symbol has the ground of a general faith in God (all of us as men always start out from that with its varied possibilities) taken away from under his feet in so far as he sees himself, in his confidence that man could of himself believe in God, confuted by God’s revelation. The very fact of God’s revelation signifies: Man cannot of himself really believe in God. It is because man cannot do that that God reveals Himself. What man of himself can believe in are gods who are not really God. When his confidence in his ability really to believe in God of himself goes to pieces, then the gods fall, in whom he really can believe. In the collapse of this confidence they are unmasked as gods who are not really God. But God is God in that we can know Him only on the basis of His revelation, not of ourselves, but only in opposition to ourselves, can believe in Him only by our becoming a miracle to ourselves. These are the indicatives that explain the imperative of the First Commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me! The grace of revelation compels the dethronement of the other gods by, first of all, forcing us ourselves down into the dust. He who believes lives by grace. He who lives by grace knows that he is forbidden to snatch at deity. He who knows that can indeed know the gods of the human heart, but he can no longer regard them as gods alongside of God. “I believe in God” therefore means: I believe in the one, the incomparable, the only God. The uniqueness of God is not a religious postulate nor a philosophic idea, but something that corresponds exactly to the uniqueness of God’s revelation.

2. He who believes in God in the sense of the symbol has from God’s revelation absolutely immovable ground under his feet when he thinks of God, reckons with God, speaks of God, points to God, abides by the name of God, and proclaims this name to others. He certainly does not believe in a God whom he has chosen for himself. Still less does he believe in the wisdom and power of his choice. He does not believe in his faith and consequently does not believe in himself. Therefore he cannot deal with God in the way in which we continually deal with our own ideas, hypotheses, convictions and opinions. They seem to us more or less certain. We can alter them and interchange them amongst themselves. We can drop them, take them up again and again drop them. They are the region of questioning, of doubt, of uncertainty, of dialectic. To this region God does not belong. In such a way one cannot deal with Him. Even the believer knows this region and lives in it. The believer, yes, only the believer, knows the despair that has the last word in this region. But the believer knows, beyond that, Him Who has chosen him, the man living in the midst of this sphere, and Who holds him over the abyss, all without his co-operation. This choosing and being chosen have no part in the dialectic of our choice. Grace is superior to nature and to all combinations of nature and grace, in that it makes the believer certain of what he is about, certain amid a thousand errors, weaknesses and vanities into which even he may fall, certain in the greatest uncertainty, but also certain in the teeth of all uncertainty. Faith in God, which is faith in God in His revelation and nothing else, has something of the specific gravity of the freedom, unchangeableness and self-sufficiency of God Himself. Not in the theoretical ascent from the finite to the infinite do we recognise these attributes of God, but in the proof of faith in God. They are counterparts of divine self-revelation.

3. He who believes in God in the sense of the symbol is, in the face of God, utterfully thankful. Not in himself, but in God’s revelation is the source of his having God, the source of all that he has in God, of his believing in Him, knowing and confessing Him. To him who, where God is concerned, can only receive, not take, God’s presence is eo ipso a reconciling presence that creates communion between God and man. The law that is imposed on him by the presence of God, whether it drives him to repentance or detains him where he received forgiveness, that also is grace. As grace also the wrath and the judgment of God meet him although and indeed because he knows that this wrath kills and this judgment is eternal. Grace would mean to him—and this is not saying too much—God’s presence, even in the midst of Hell, if it were not that faith would burst hell, conquer it and turn it into its opposite. In proportion as man would like in face of God to take to himself this and that, earn them, appropriate them by his own power—in the same proportion he could not be thankful, in the same proportion God’s presence would meet him as something else than grace, the law would necessarily offend and terrify him, and there would be no escape from God’s wrath, from judgment and hell. How vitally important it is that with the symbol we understand by “God”—“God in His revelation” might be made particularly clear at this point. To believe in God may and must—if we are content to understand God in the sense of the symbol—mean: to believe in God’s kindness. This is not that fictitious value, the summum bonum, not that maximum of what we consider good. It is that which, apart from all human opinions about good and evil, constrains the believer to thankfulness. Recognisable by faith as divine truth, it also is the counterpart to the action of God in His revelation.

4. He who believes in God in the sense of the symbol stands under God’s commands. That he resists them, that he keeps transgressing them, that he fails to give honour to God and that he cannot stand his ground before Him, that also is true. But it is still truer that he stands under God’s commands, that in his total foolishness and wickedness he is claimed by God, God’s prisoner, that he must again and again make a fresh start with the commands of God, and return to them. True, he has no starting-points and no aims in which he could independently, i.e. of himself, know God’s will. He could see in that only an arbitrary breaking loose into a freedom which does not become him. The freedom that becomes him is freedom from all other bonds. Believing in God, he is directed to God’s word, only to God’s word. Out of this bond he cannot completely escape either to please himself or others. It continually judges him, but it also holds him. Just because it is imposed on him without and indeed against his choice and volition, it is also comforting to him. In placing him in the ultimate responsibility, it takes from him the ultimate responsibility for his life, it is geniune guidance. To believe in God means to believe in God’s holiness. Even God’s holiness is not a truth that can be ascertained as such by an observer. A merely observable divine holiness would most certainly be no more and nothing better than the ideal of an ethical world-view. God’s holiness is apprehended in the fight of faith, in the sanctification of the believer through God’s revelation. Being counterpart to what God does, faith apprehends that God is holy.

We have given several answers to the question, Who and What God is for him who believes in God in the sense of the symbol, who therefore believes absolutely and exclusively in God in His revelation. They were, if you will, formal answers, because we have not yet entered upon the great theme of the symbol itself, “God in His revelation,” but have so to speak only touched it from outside from the point of view of its exclusiveness in relation to that theme that is very remote from the symbol, the theme “God in general”. But what is the meaning here of “formal” and “material,” “outside” and “inside”? In referring to the exclusiveness of this theme we have perhaps already caught a glimpse of the theme itself: the reality of God that has to do with man, the majesty of that God Who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Who cannot yield His honour to another. The indicative in the first commandment is indeed of a certainty no merely formal statement!