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V

ET IN JESUM CHRISTUM, FILIUM EIUS UNICUM

WITH these words we step into the great centre of the Christian Creed. And here decisions are made. For instance, our understanding of the second Article decides whether we rightly understand the first and the third, and therefore whether we understand the whole as Christian creed in its true nature and distinct from all other actual and possible creeds. Whether a sermon and proclamation in word or writing have rightly or wrongly a place in the Christian Church is decided by their relationship to the second article. At this point Dogmatics, as watchman, cannot be too wide-awake. Besides, even its own fate is here decided, namely, in the question whether it is genuinely Church Theology, because bound to the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures as witness to revelation, or on the other hand a Philosophy, working with Biblical and Church materials under another sovereignty altogether. The decision that is here made is of course not a human, but a divine and therefore ultimately hidden, decision. That is the proviso under which human, even Christian judgment will here also have to bow. Even by the decisive clauses to which we shall now turn, we are called neither to be judges over ourselves nor to be judges over others, but we are called to watch. That proviso does not one whit alter the fact that here in a special way decisions are made. Just on that account we shall here also have to be in a very special sense awake.

The arrangement of the three Articles is not to be understood genetically, i.e. it does not represent the way in which faith gets its knowledge. If that had been intended, then undoubtedly the second Article would have had to be the first. Perhaps there were very old forms of the symbol which actually had this structure. In 2 Cor. 13:13, we hear the sequence: “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the communion of the Holy Spirit”. If the symbol in its later form, according to Matt. 28:19; Rom. 1:1–4; 11:33; 2 Thess. 2:13, puts it differently, it is clearly intended to set forth the essential order, the way of God’s condescension, which is the content of revelation: in the first Article God who, as Father, is over man, in the second, God Who, as Son, Himself becomes man, in the third, God Who, as Holy Spirit, is with man. But even if this that the symbol sets before us is the essential order, the second Article belongs to the beginning of the order of our knowing. The “Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth” Who, according to the first Article, is over man, is none other than the Father of Jesus Christ; and likewise God the Holy Spirit Who, according to the third Article, is with man, is the Spirit of this Father and of this Son. If God had not become man, as is recognised and confessed in the second Article, then everything we could conceive and say to ourselves about God over man and about God with man, would hang in the air as arbitrarily, as mistakenly and as misleadingly, as the corresponding ideas which, in the long run, have been fashioned about God and man in all religions and cosmic speculations. And therefore the fact to which the second Article bears witness, namely that God became man, must be absolutely determinative for us for the interpretation of the first and third. As there is no special and direct revelation of the Father and Creator as such, so also there is no special and direct revelation of the Spirit. But the revelation of the Son is as such at once the revelation of the Father and of the Spirit.

The second Article begins by naming as object of the credo a man, “Jesus,” and at once goes on to identify this man, by means of the designation, “Christ,” with the prophet, priest and king of the last days, expected by the people of Israel, in order then, by means of the expression “God’s only Son,” to place Him in the closest relationship, indeed, in unity, with God Himself. Here above all we shall have to marvel if we are to understand. What does Jesus here signify? What does he signify here as Messiah of Israel? What does he signify, this Jesus, the Christ, in proximity to God and as apparently second object of the credo? Here it is justifiable, here we are bound to wonder. In the first Article we heard of the concealment of God: here we are told that He has form and indeed a quite definite form. We heard there of His omnipotence; here we are told about a special act of God on the narrow strip of human history upon which a prophecy given to the people of Israel is to reach fulfilment. We heard there that God is the Creator; here we are told, if we only rightly understand, that He Himself is creature too, that He is not only Lord of our existence, but that He is here with us and like us. We heard there of His unity; here we are told of a difference within this unity, namely, of a unique Son of God, unique in the sense that He clearly exists as such uniquely, and that He only is so to be named. One surprise and difficulty here follows on the heels of another. And again, anyone who perhaps understood the doctrines of divine omnipotence and creation as abstract truths—that is, abstracted from the fact that the Almighty Father and Creator is the Father of Jesus Christ—would no doubt be brought to a halt here, and, either, in face of what is here said, refuse to go on, or, on the other hand, would have to reinterpret what is here said with the utmost violence, in order to make it acceptable to himself. But even if we go on together, and indeed go on together without reinterpretation, we shall at all events have to say: Here actually begins a second, another, an amazing new Article of the Christian knowledge of God.

In order to answer the question here put to us, reference can, and indeed must, be made to the abyss of that enigma which we briefly touched on at the end of the last Lecture with the words sin, evil, death and devil. The second Article—it would then be said—is the testimony of revelation and Christian faith in face of this enigma. It speaks of the reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God; accomplished in His passion, death and resurrection, in execution of His Messianic office as prophet, priest and king, the reconciliation of sinful man, i.e. man who has fallen from unity of will with his Creator and who has thereby fallen under the sway of evil and death and finally under that impossibility in person, the devil. That is actually the case; the second Article does speak of this reconciliation; and therefore the attempt has again and again been made of old and in recent times to establish and explain the doctrine of Jesus Christ and thereby the decisive centre of the Christian creed on this basis, namely, by reference to the negative precondition of this reconciliation, by opening up as sharply, emphatically, seriously as possible the gulf between God and man which has been bridged by Jesus Christ as reconciler. The misery and despair of man, who has become guilty before God and who therefore stands under God’s judgment, give the light by which are to be recognised what grace is and Who Jesus Christ is, namely, God’s only Son. But it will be necessary to have at least a very good idea of what one is about, in saying that, and so in seeking to establish and explain the revelation of Christ on that basis. The first thing that must strike us as remarkable is that the Creed itself has not considered it necessary to prefix to the doctrine of Christ, by way of basis and explanation, a special doctrine of sin and death. In that it follows Holy Scripture, which likewise neither in the Old Testament nor in the New speaks at the outset abstractly of the misery and the despair of man, in order then to show against this background that God is gracious to man and how gracious He is. Although undoubtedly Creed and Scriptures alike are of the opinion that God’s grace in Jesus Christ is the answer to this misery and this despair! Yet they speak really and properly solely of that answer, and only incidentally of the question—only incidentally of man’s sin and punishment, strictly speaking, however seriously they regard them. Jesus Christ is the background from which man’s misery and despair receive their light and not vice versa. What is the significance of that? Clearly this: there is, so to speak, an unfruitful knowledge of sin, of evil, of death and the devil, that succeeds in making it hard for a man to have happy and confident faith in the Almighty Father and Creator, but without making possible for him, or even bringing nearer, faith in Jesus Christ as reconciler. To gaze down into that abyss, as far as it is possible for us to do that of ourselves, does not in itself help us in the least, so frightful is the abyss! How frightful it is no man has ever yet fathomed of himself. What man has in this respect fathomed of himself has been nothing but puppet sins and puppet distresses, that are far removed from being the actual problem of Theodicy in all its awfulness. Grace must come first, in order that sin may be manifest to us as sin, and death as death; in order that, with the Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 5), we may confess that we are by nature prone to hate God and our neighbour, and therefore, with Luther, that we are lost and damned men. We cannot of ourselves know what our misery and our despair, our guilt and punishment really are; that becomes manifest to us in the fact that Christ has taken them upon Himself and borne them. But if that does become manifest to us—namely, in the answer which God has already given to our state, before we ourselves knew of it, in the Cross of Jesus Christ, in the depth of the mercy that is shown to us in Him—if we come into the judgment of grace, which alone has the power to install the law (as Gal. 3:24 puts it) as our pedagogue, then we will recognise and praise this pedagogy of the law, given and revealed to us by grace—this pedagogy that is the way into despair and out of despair into consolation, the way to the knowledge of our guilt and punishment, and, with this knowledge, into the place of God, out of the power of the devil into the power of God—we shall recognise and praise this pedagogy, not at all as our self-pedagogy, not as our way but as God’s way. And therefore it is not from any arbitrary absorption in our own wickedness and distress that we expect knowledge of Jesus Christ, but on the contrary it is only from knowledge of Jesus Christ as the “author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2) that we look for knowledge of the law and with it wholesome knowledge of our sin, guilt and punishment. Sin scorches us when it comes under the light of forgiveness, not before. Sin scorches us then by becoming visible as our enmity against God, and therefore by compelling us, as our thoughts start out from that, at last to put the question properly: How is that possible which the second Article states? If it can appear to us almost impossible that the Creator became creature, it must appear to us absolutely impossible that the Holy One, Whose burning wrath we have evoked, became man in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us. If He has really done that, and if this is the central content of Christian faith, then we cannot explain and establish it from elsewhere and least of all by an analysis of our distress and despair; then we can understand it (and consequently the central content of the Christian faith) only as the occurrence of a revelation of grace, which is beyond all our understanding because it makes possible what is absolutely impossible, to which our knowledge cannot attain, and from which it can always only derive.

It is in this way and in this sense—that is, deriving from an occurrence that cannot be understood from elsewhere but only out of itself—that the Creed begins the second Article. It is in this way and in the same sense that prophecy in the Old Testament, and its fulfilment in Jesus Christ in the New Testament, are attested. If the attempt is made to understand and interpret the witness of apostles and prophets in the light of human ideas as human explanation of human action, then even in a purely historical-exegetical treatment one self-deception and aporia follows another. They themselves at any rate did not so understand it. Even when they used the language of human ideas and were looking at a human action, their intention was to speak of a divine initiative among men, something that was to be understood as such and not as human action and human idea. The Old Testament calls this divine initiative the making known of the name of the Lord. The New Testament names it Jesus Christ. Yes, indeed, here is cause to marvel. Here the hidden, the eternal and incomprehensible God has taken visible form. Here the Almighty is mighty in a quite definite, particular, earthly happening. Here the Creator Himself has become creature and therefore objective reality. Here in His Son, in the revelation of His Name and Word, the one God has shown Himself as differentiated in Himself, so that we can hear Him, so that we can say “Thou” to Him as to one of ourselves. It is revelation in this strict, firm, literal sense that Scripture and the Confession mean when they bear witness to Jesus Christ. And the sense of this revelation becomes even stricter and firmer when this too is added—that here the abyss is bridged, that here, in and with this revelation, our reconciliation is accomplished, that this Jesus Christ is God for us, for us His incarnation, for us His existence as true God and true man, for us everything that later is said of Him from His birth of the Virgin Mary up to His return in judgment. In fact, what we are concerned with is that absolute impossibility, that the Holy One, Whose wrath we have provoked, became man, in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us, to bear this wrath Himself and in our place, accordingly to suffer in our place His own burning wrath, to give satisfaction Himself in our place, in order in that way to be our God (and that means, to be good for us in a way that we have not deserved and cannot comprehend), He Himself, directly and personally our Prophet, Priest and King. Again, neither historical facts nor ideas nor even their insight into the depth of human wickedness and distress, made the prophets and apostles, if we are to trust themselves, witnesses to Jesus Christ, but simply and solely this concentrated event of revelation and reconciliation that could not be prognosticated from anywhere because it was unexpected and in its divinity only to be acknowledged. Even the knowledge of the abyss between God’s good creation and our actual state was for them included as a supplementary cognition in and only in that event. In the mind of the prophets and apostles, then, the question of faith in Jesus Christ cannot be the question of the Why? of this event, but only the question of our decision as its actuality confronts us.