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The Reality of the Divine Command

§4

THE REVELATION OF THE COMMAND

The truth of God is not a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. It reveals itself in the concrete event of our own conduct as our decision for or against the command of the good that is given to us.

If according to Pythagoras it is true that in a right triangle the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides equals the square of the longest side, this is a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. If it is true that the earth is a sphere slightly flattened at the two poles, or that the German Empire was founded in 1871, or that there has been an intermediate biological stage between man and a superior chimpanzee, or that we may shortly expect a revolutionary change in the whole surface of the earth which will necessarily have the most serious consequences for all of us, or that our life is determined at its most important points by the conjunction of the planets on our birthday, or that the whole cosmos is evolving from matter to spirit and God has achieved self-awareness in this process, then all these empirically demonstrable facts of nature and history, all these scientific hypotheses, all these speculative, metaphysical constructions, no matter how strict might be the differentiation between them, are both corporately and individually general and theoretical and consequently conditioned truths, like all other acknowledged or alleged truths on this level. They are general truths to the extent that I can assert them as such without the fact of my being this specific person having any significance; to the extent that in asserting them I must consciously ignore as far as possible my own subjectivity, which could only disrupt the objectivity of my knowledge. They are theoretical truths to the extent that I can best assert them with the participation of one who is as far as possible a nonparticipant, an onlooker, a spectator, a spectator even of my own life if they affect my own life; to the extent that in asserting them no act of my own is needed but that of calculation, observation, and syllogistic combination along with a bit of experience and intuition; to the extent that my own action consists only in contemplation and the actual assertion itself. They are consequently conditioned truths to the extent that their assertion is reached on the presupposition that I am “born to observe and ordained to see,”1 that the criteria of truth that I use in this act are true criteria of truth, that the significance of my assertion of these truths will not be hurt if it is conditioned by myself, by the ineradicable remnant of subjectivity without which there can be no objectivity, conditioned by my practice (as which even the purest and most passive theōrein must finally be claimed), conditioned by the question of truth which is obviously put to me and which challenges my knowledge of truth as such. There is no doubt that even in the shadow of this last question of truth which we ourselves link with its being conditioned, we can to a large extent be glad about our knowledge of general and theoretical truths, so glad that it might seem to be unprofitably scrupulous of us even to think of the shadow. But no matter what our view of it may be, all these truths are in fact challenged as such by the question of truth, the question of ourselves and what we do, the question which we would like to exclude as much as possible when we think generally and theoretically but which itself includes within itself our general and theoretical thinking. Whether we pay attention to it or not, this question is posed and it is the ethical question. |

The superior truth in question here, the truth of my conduct (including my theōrein and therefore the condition on which my assertions are assertions of truth), the truth of my life and existence is the truth of the good. All general or theoretical truth, from the truth that two and two make four to the boldest achievable knowledge of higher worlds,2 and no matter how clear and certain they may be in themselves, stand in the brackets of the question whether my life and therefore my action and therefore my theōrein has a part in the truth of a basically different and higher order, in the truth of the good. They thus stand in the brackets of the ethical question. It is so much a matter of the truth of another order that the inquiry which it implies in relation to the bracketed general and theoretical truths does not relate to their content (how two and two make four or how it stands with the final question that is directed to me as the one who asserts this truth). It is so much a matter of another order that a removal of the brackets in the sense of a general and theoretical answer to the question, in the sense of an extension of our general and theoretical knowledge by knowledge of this supreme truth is ruled out in advance. From the very outset those who deal with it with this in view deal with it in vain. With what right, however, do we refer here to the truth of a higher order? Because at best all general and theoretical truth cannot be more than clearly and certainly asserted being. But all being—no clear and certain assertion can evade this condition, as is most evident in the case of mathematics as perhaps the clearest and most certain of all the sciences—all being, as true being, as ontos einai,3 if we are not content merely to assert it, is not grounded in itself but in a hypothesis or presupposition of being which itself, if the same question is not to repeat itself ad infinitum, cannot be thought of as being but only as not being, cannot be thought of as the beginning or source or mother-ground of being but only as its negation and position, as the pure origin of its being which as that of Creator to creature stands in no continuity with it and which cannot possibly be sought on the level of general and theoretical, mathematical and physical, historical and psychological, or metaphysical and metapsychological truths, on the empirical or the speculative way. If it is sought there, no matter how sublimely, something other will always be found, perhaps another theoretical and general truth, but another truth which, significant though it may be, and absolute though it may be in our own thinking, is still a truth of being which stands in the same need of regress, of validation by another criterion, as all other truths of being, all other truths sought and found at this point. |

The question of origin shows itself to be such, to be the question of truth in truth, of superior, unconditional truth, not by the fact that we ascribe to its object this character of general and theoretical absoluteness—for in so doing we should admit that we do not know what we are about and show how unattainable this superiority is—but by the fact that it is understood as the question that is primarily put by the object to us, to our action, and undoubtedly to our theōrein, though not to a theōrein abstracted from our existence as contemplation, but to our existential theōrein, and beyond that to the fact of our existence in general, to our life-act. We are asking about the unconditional when we ask unconditionally as we do not do in general and theoretical asking, i.e., when our asking expresses the basic acknowledgment that we are asked. We see it as the question of the origin that precedes all being when we see it as being prior in order to the questions of our general and theoretical thinking. But we see it as being genuinely prior in order to these questions when we do not see it as our question—as such it could only be general and theoretical again—but when we understand and accept it as the question that is put to us, as the question which we cannot answer incidentally from the safe harbor of our self-consciousness as spectators of our own life, but which we can, which, indeed, whether we like it or not, we must answer only with our life itself, to which our whole active life and each of our individual acts, whatever it may be, must be viewed as the answer, in relation to which our whole existence takes on the character of answerability. The very thing, then, which general and theoretical thinking as such would rather hurry past, my very existence as an individual, as this or that person, the very subjectivity of my conduct, becomes important, becomes the important thing, the only important thing, when it is a matter of the unique knowledge of the unique truth of origin. It becomes important because this truth applies to me and at every moment I have to understand my existence in relation to it as responsibility and decision, whether the decision be for it or against it or be left open. It is decision and as such the revelation of this truth to us for good or ill. Knowledge of the good occurs as we do it or not. Ethics is understanding of the good, not as it is known to us as a general and theoretical truth, but insofar as it reveals itself to us in our doing of it or not, insofar as the concrete reality of our life-situation is decision for or against it. All ethics which tries to look beyond this revelation of the good in our own decision, this active revelation, to a being of the good or a goodness of being, and which tries to define good actions and duties and virtues on this basis, might in some circumstances kindle our interest in the same way as higher physics or metaphysics; but beyond what it can itself achieve it would at once make necessary an authentic ethics which has to ask about the origin of this being of the good or this good being, and to do so in relation to our own decision, to our existence in decision. |

The ethical problem is not a problem, i.e., not a general theoretical question to which a general theoretical answer can be given. The reality of ethical science—science presupposes the possibility of common knowledge—makes sense only when there is fellowship in this supremely special knowledge, a knowledge of the good which reveals itself for good or ill in our decision. Thus theological as well as philosophical ethics—the former directly, the latter, as we have seen, indirectly—presupposes the church, the church as the place where the common presupposition is the givenness of the question of unconditional truth that is put to man, and therefore the fact that man is questioned, and therefore the revelation of this truth in his existential decision. The truth is the fellowship of individuals precisely in and not in spite of their individuality, the particularity in which the good is known here. |

On the presupposition of the church, on whose basis alone ethical knowledge is possible, what is thought and said in common about the ethical problem cannot consist of its recognition as a problem, of making it general and theoretical, of treating it as one of the many human questions, of treating the answer to it as an evident truth. It can only aim at showing us how far the meaning of our life-situation, of the wholly unproblematical reality of our existence, can be the revelation, the becoming evident, of the good. This becoming evident of the good in the reality of our own existence is the divine act of sanctification. It is the thing from which we must not abstract in any way if we are to pursue theological ethics and not theological physics. The latter would happen if the extension of our general and theoretical knowledge were secretly or openly to control our ethical inquiry, if we were to ask about the unconditioned without wanting to ask unconditionally, i.e., with the strictest attention to our being asked, if we were to try to deduce what being ought to be from being itself, if we were thus to try to understand God as the supreme being instead of in the way that he reveals himself, i.e., in the act of his divine being. The place where God is revealed as the quintessence of the good, where the knowledge of God thus becomes the knowledge of the good or theological ethics, is the divine act of sanctification. It is thus the reality of our existence or our decision to the extent that in it, no matter how the decision may go, God has decided on our salvation.

As God sanctifies us, the truth becomes unconditioned special truth applying to you and me today and tomorrow, not the truth which I maintain but the truth which maintains itself over against me, which fulfills itself in me. We must not leave this place, or stop considering the answerability of our life-situation, if we are to know how far God’s command is real, how far, as we have been asking in this first section, it is revealed to us. It is revealed to us in the event of our own conduct understood as responsibility. We must now ask how far this is so.

The common formula for the ethical problem, and one which does justice to the depth of the matter, runs as follows: “What shall we do?” The question, then, is that of human conduct. The questioning “what” seems to indicate that the sought content of this conduct is not to be found self-evidently in our own range of vision. The concept “shall” implies that the good is this content that is sought. Since it is “we” who ask, we confess that this question applies to all of us and we must work together to find an answer. We thus find that we have to take very seriously both the terms which constitute the formula and with them the formula itself. We are thus directed at once by the problem to the reality of our existence as the source of knowledge of the divine command.

a. Is the “what?” in this question meant seriously? Are we as ready as it suggests to will what we should, not seeking the apparent glory of the “should” for what we ourselves will? It is not wholly self-evident that as we ask what we should do we are not long since bound by what we want to do, so that our ethical question will lead to self-demonstration which is not, of course, necessarily meant to be base or bad. Especially in times of a single, strong, and definite cultural will, as in the period from the beginning of the century to the first world war and well into the war itself, ethical reflection can easily not be meant very seriously in the sense that in it—one has only to think of the products of war theology in all countries—the content of the imperative that is apparently sought is fixed from the very outset in the form of specific practices whose goodness is no longer open to discussion, being known only too well, so that the factual result of ethical reflection is obviously the ethical justifying of a more or less compact: “This is what we will do.” A similar self-assurance on the part of the actual ethos might well have been the secret of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. Times and people who know all too well what they want must accept it if we accompany their ethical work relatively rather than absolutely from this standpoint, and with a certain mistrust whether they have properly investigated what we should do. The less this mistrust is in place, the more open the relation is between ethics and the actual ethos, and the more seriously the what? is meant, the more it means that a vacuum is created in the whole state of actual willing and doing, that there has to be questioning though not necessarily rejection. It was this vacuum that cost Socrates his life as an enemy of religion and morality—what was meant, of course, was the self-assurance of Athens after the age of Pericles. Between our self-evident desires and our self-evident action in their naive or ideologically enlightened givenness there comes the doubt whether this really is after all the good. |

If the ethical question is serious in this sense, it means at once and automatically that ethics becomes critical in another sense. We no longer have the time to wander in distant metaphysical regions in search of the good. We no longer have the time to try to contemplate it as being. This being somewhere above the “ought” is the infallible mark of an ethics that does not quite take the “what?” of the ethical question seriously, that gets its knowledge elsewhere from the actual ethos of the ethicist and his time and background, and that is really making no more than an appearance of asking. In a seriously questioning “what?” we confess that we ourselves are scrutinized in our own being or existence, that an eternal eye is focused on our acts, that what we will and do are measured. If we put the question: “What shall we do?” as those who really do not know and really need instruction, then we confess that we are attacked and questioned and laid in the balances in the reality of our own existence, in our own most proper this. The attacker who has come into the midst of our life and under whose criticism our this is set is the good itself, the command which is issued to us. A seriously meant “what shall we do?”—and it is for us to be clear whether and how far we know a seriously meant “what shall we do?”—is already a witness that we know the command. Only where the command reveals itself does there come about the shattering of the self-assurance of our ethos which is the presupposition of a critical ethics. Only there does the seriously meant question arise.

b. “What shall we do?” is the question. Are we seriously asking what we should do? It might be that here, too, a substitute has to be set aside before we can say that the question is seriously meant. It might be that we have not yet heard the metallic ring of the “shall,” that we have openly or secretly clothed this concept with the very different concepts of what is convenient or useful or valuable to us. From the hedonists of antiquity to Max Scheler, as is well known, the ethical question has often been put in this way and answered with an imperative that is formulated accordingly. There can be no doubt that the question of the orientation of our conduct, in virtue of which it is meant to be directed toward what is convenient, useful, or valuable, is not only a possible, and even in its own way serious question but also that its concern ought to be expressed in a comprehensive discussion of the concept of command and of what is commanded. (There will be an opportunity for such a discussion in the second chapter on the command of God the Creator.) It may be asked, however, whether we have really reached the concept of command at all, whether we may legitimately formulate imperatives at all, if, like Scheler, we simply ascribe to the concept of value a necessity that claims our conduct. For the highest value [is] seen being and the highest being has seen value.4 If we have this necessity in view, have we really asked what we ought to do? For in the concept of the “ought” do we not recognize again the concept of origin which fundamentally transcends being? Can we not talk of an “ought” only when it is a question of unconditional truth and not merely of truth that is or that is seen? No value, not even the highest, can claim to be unconditional truth, and least of all, one might think, when this highest value is to be found, as Scheler believes, in human personhood,5 since the concepts value, seeing, and being are all on the same level, the level where there is only conditional and not unconditional truth. How else can a value be validated but by being seen, experienced, asserted, and estimated by us as a value? Is it too much to demand that if an imperative or command is understood as a claiming of our existence, of our life, of the only life we have, it must qualify as such in some better way than this?

We are perhaps not challenging too sharply the seriousness that an ethics of material values, a kind of higher physics, might have as such, if we state that we cannot be content with this kind of seriousness when it is a matter of the concept of the “ought,” if we say that we can speak of an “ought” only when unconditional truth—truth of the first degree and not the second, like seen truth or the truth of being—is the necessity which impinges on human willing and doing, when by such an “ought” we understand a claim which does not need to be validated by my seeing and experiencing its validity but which is grounded in itself and comes to me in such fashion that without asking about what I see or experience I have to validate myself before it in respect of the question how far I can meet it. Assuming that I must take the concept of the “ought” more seriously than is possible in the framework of an ethics of values, and assuming further that I ask only on the presupposition of the serious content of the concept: “What shall we do?”, it is plain that my serious question is a radiant witness that I know the “ought.” But how? How indeed? Not from an experience of value, for in such a case I should not know it and my question would not be serious in the stricter sense. Obviously, then, from the fact that the “ought” has made itself known to me, that the self-grounded claim has come to me, and I have been placed under its standard. As I cannot ask about God, but only about an idol of my own heart, without confessing, not that I have seen, experienced, and grasped God, but that God has spoken to me, that I am known by him, so—and we are speaking here of one and the same reality—I cannot ask about the “ought,” but only about the substitute of a being of value or value of being, without confessing that I ought, that the command has been spoken to me and has been accepted by me. If I seriously ask: “What shall I do?”, I have already understood that my existence is claimed by the good and that this claim, the command of the good, is given to me. My question, then, does not mean that I am raising a theoretical problem, as the rich young ruler obviously did [cf. Mark 10:17–31 par.], but that I see that a practical problem has already been raised whose problem is my problem, so that I present and clarify it to myself and others, which is clearly the point of ethical reflection. Seriously asking: “What shall I do?”, I have directed myself away from general and theoretical problems to my own practical reality. It is here that the truth of the good is known or it is not known to all. It reveals itself to me in my own decision as I do it or not, as I am judged by it or saved.

c. “What shall we do?” is the ethical question. We shall now consider whether we mean it seriously when we ask about what we should do. This again is not self-evident. The question: “What shall we do?” can also be a question of curiosity which does not have to be an ignoble curiosity. Practice, too, can legitimately become the subject of theoretical interest. This happens in psychology. And psychology is not in itself a disreputable matter. It becomes this, as happens, only when it confuses itself with ethics or even with theology. Ethics, ethical reflection as theoretical inquiry for the sake of inquiry, with no orientation to what ought to be done, is, of course, an impossibility. We cannot simply want to know what is good. One wants to know with a view to doing it or not doing it the very next moment, with reference to the total seriousness of the decision that has to be taken the very next moment. Hence one cannot learn to know the good merely in order to form a judgment about it or to take up an attitude toward it. Often enough we all of us seem to be asking about the good, but we only seem to be doing so. We ask: “What shall we do?”, but again like the rich young ruler we do so with certain practical presuppositions which we do not regard as open to question, which we are resolved not to give up in any circumstances, and in relation to which we would rather restrict our freedom. We have not thought of asking about that whose doing or nondoing will at once mean our salvation or damnation. We ask frequently and attentively but we really ask, not “what shall we do” but “what can we do.” We ask so as to supply material for the second question whether we will do anything at all or whether we would rather do this or that. This ethical investigation, which may sometimes be conducted very carefully, this abstract reflection and consultation with others, takes place under the proviso that we may take a very different view from that corresponding to the results of the investigation, and on the assumption that it does not finally matter much what view we take, it will probably be the everyday ethics familiar to everybody. Why should not this type of inquiry find its right and seriousness along the lines of psychological research? The only thing is that we must have no illusions about its theoretical character, about the fact that fundamentally it is not ethics, and that we must not exchange its seriousness for that event of the literally intended question: “What shall we do?”

If we take this question literally, we do not have in mind what we might do after an intervening moment of free reflection but what we will in all circumstances do the very next moment—or what we will perhaps not do, but then under the whole judgment of nonfulfillment or transgression of the command. I have again no time at my disposal, no intervening moment, no neutral place in time where I might first consider the good in its being and take up an attitude toward it. I cannot put off the decisive decision, but it stands directly at the door. I know that I will now decisively decide. It is a matter of doing what I should. What I should, however, is the claim directed to me, not the good in essence but the good in act, the good that comes to me, in relation to which I must reply the very next moment and not the one after, in relation to which my next step will bring to light my adequacy or inadequacy. Asking what I should do, I know that it is not in my choice to give my act the character of decision but that whatever I do it always has this to my salvation or damnation, that my existence is the answer to the question, not a question that I put, but the question that is put to me. Here again, then, there is no room for the discussion of theoretical problems. If I ask what I should do, then I know that the very next moment I myself am the answer to this question. My putting of the question can again have only the point of making clear to me this situation of mine, of making me aware of the decisive character of the very next moment. Again, then, I have directed myself out of general and theoretical inquiry to the very practical reality of my decision. In it, in my doing or not doing of what I should do, I see the unconditioned truth that saves or judges me, the truth of the good. In it the revelation of the command takes place. If a purely theoretical interest in practice is forbidden me, if I can ask only with this seriousness, then that is a witness that this revelation has in fact taken place.

d. We can now briefly investigate the seriousness of the question by means of the emphasis: “What shall we do?” When I as an individual put the ethical question in the plural, then if I mean what I obviously say I confess that by the responsibility which I have to accept in my decision I understand the measurement of my action by a claim that is not valid for me alone but universally valid. The crisis of the “what?”, the seriousness of the “ought,” the urgency of the deed would not be perceived and the whole question would clearly be something other than the ethical question if the “what shall we do?” were merely a rhetorical cloak for a secret “what shall I do?” For although the good, when it reveals itself, undoubtedly reveals itself to me, in the event of my conduct, not to a collective we, not in the form of a mass experience; although it undoubtedly comes to me questioning everything, making an imperious demand, pointing to the very next moment; although no other and no society can take from me my own responsibility, nevertheless I have no less indisputably failed to see and hear its presence if my ethical reflection does not take my real situation into account, if I am not fully clear that the individual element which is the goal and to which there is a summons, my naked existence, is again something that I do not have for myself alone but in fellowship with all men, and that the summons, even as it comes very directly and specifically to me, sets me materially in a series with all others, that it aims at me and reaches me not merely as this particular person but as man. A demand is made on me, not as a personality or individual, nor as a member of this or that natural or historical collective, but as man.

Otherwise there would again be the threat that I might view the good as being, this time from the distance of my particularity, of my isolated case; that I might protect my individuality against the crisis in face of which there can be no assured “this,” against the seriousness for which the seriousness of my own special case is not really a match and over against the urgency which can know no distinctions between some people and others. There would again be the threat that I might make a conditioned truth out of unconditioned truth—a truth conditioned by my personal distinctiveness, by the special concerns which distinguish me from others. That unconditioned truth comes to me in a distinctive way, as it really does come to me, does not mean that I may treat it as conditioned by my distinctiveness. If it comes to me, I may not hide behind my distinctiveness but must confess that I am one among many others, simply man, so that my question—mine—can only run: “What shall we do?”—yes, in all the singularity of my person and case: “What shall we do?” If I seriously ask thus, I bear witness in so doing that I have given up the least possibility of trying to see the good as being, even this last and perhaps the most dangerous because the most natural and apparently the most honorable concealment. The “we” points to the inescapable decision which I must take—a decision which even my distinctiveness and that of my special case do not enable me to evade. In the very distinctiveness of my special case the command comes to man. It determines the special element in my special practical situation, whereas the assertion of my distinctiveness can only be again abstraction and theory. If I know this, if I know that everything depends on my doing or nondoing and not on whether I am this or that person, then I ask seriously: “What shall we do?” and I say therewith that I really know the command issued to me, that it revealed to me.

§5

THE COMMAND AS THE COMMAND OF GOD

The truth of the good that reveals itself in our conduct is the truth of the concretely given command which as such is the command of God.

We have shown in §4 how it is and must be with the revelation or knowledge of the truth of the good if there is such a thing, if the question: “What shall we do?” is seriously meant and put in all its parts. If there is such a thing—?! So long as we ask generally and theoretically whether there is such a thing, we can in fact only ask hypothetically. But the hypothesis ventured here is the thesis of the original unconditioned truth which, since it can appear only on the surface of general hypothetical thinking, indicates the limit of this thinking and also its own superiority. Hence the question whether there is such a thing cannot be answered generally and theoretically because, if it exists, it is not a general theoretical truth. How can anything general and theoretical be said, then, about its revelation and knowledge? The universal validity of this revelation and knowledge is the universal validity of the task and proclamation of the church, of the church in which there should be agreement that this truth, as the unconditioned truth which alone is universally valid, is not general and theoretical but practical truth, and that its revelation and knowledge can and will become real only in the event of man’s action. If there is a truth of the good in this sense, its revelation and knowledge cannot be the result of our reflection. We have not found it, for what we find is conditioned truth, conditioned by ourselves and having neither the right to raise a claim to our existence nor the strength to enforce such a claim. No, it has found us. The point of ethical reflection, then, cannot be to try to find the truth of the good but to give an account of what it means that we are found by it, to give an account of the character of responsibility that our conduct will always have in face of it. The moment of reflection can be filled only by preparation for the moment of action that immediately follows. It has no independent worth—a point overlooked in all ethics oriented to a supposed being of the good. Its worth, the worth of all ethical theory, can lie only in its relation to the very next moment. The worth of any ethical theory can lie only in its relation to practice. It is there that revelation and knowledge of the good take place. It is there that the good is real as the crisis of our willing and doing, whether good or evil [cf. 2 Cor. 5:10]. It is there in our decision that the good finds us and is then also found by us as one finds a judge. Knowledge of the good is knowledge of the judge who, as we decide, declares salvation or perdition to be our eternal destiny. |

One must say the same thing in reverse or negatively. Knowledge of the good is the self-knowledge in which we see that in our reflection on the good which precedes decision we are not ourselves judges and are in no position, through a choice of this or that act preceding our decision, to pronounce judgment on ourselves or to bring about our own determination for salvation or perdition. The image of Hercules at the crossroads which often forms a model even for Christian morality is a pagan image for a pagan thing. It presupposes that man possesses a standard for the goodness of the commanded good and the badness of its opposite. The application of this standard is then the business that occupies the moment of reflection. But how in the world can we acquire such a standard if the goodness to be measured is that of unconditioned truth? Like Hercules at the crossroads we could obviously consider, measure, compare, and choose only if it were not a matter of the unconditioned truth of the good but of the conditioned truth which we have power to establish as such. If, however, it is a matter of the unconditioned truth of the good in what man does, then man is precisely not Hercules. When the good reveals itself in his conduct, whether it be good or bad, he knows that he himself has not measured and chosen but instead he has been measured and either chosen or rejected, that his existence has been placed and weighed on the scales. He then knows that he is not at all his own judge of virtue and vice but has found his judge in the good. How could he ever dream, then, of occupying a superior throne from which he might recognize and choose the good as the good? How could he ever reach such an exalted place? The worth and point of the ethical reflection that precedes decision cannot be the pagan and irreverent illusion of a free choice on the basis of “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” [Gen. 3:5], but rather a readiness to recognize the good in what is absolutely commanded us in the choice that takes place in our act, no matter what the choice may be or how the act may be qualified by it. |

The righteousness that may be seen in our decision is that of a court against which there can be no appeal. Before we obey or disobey we are in no position to test the rightness of the claim made upon us, or the value of the good, or the obligatory character of the command. When Paul in Philippians 1:10 tells Christians that they must “approve what is excellent,” he certainly does not mean that they must first test what is divinely commanded and recognize it as such. In the New Testament sense to “approve” here means to set aside all irresponsible possibilities and to resolve on responsible action—action responsible to a court which must be acknowledged without test—whose goodness cannot be decided by man. Where there is room for testing the command, where an ethics of being can be pursued in some sense, the good, the command, the claim is undoubtedly present already but it is not recognized as such, its unconditioned nature is not perceived, nor is it realized that Romans 9:20 is applicable here: “But who are you, a man, to answer back to God?” In face of the good that is told to us [cf. Mic. 6:8] we have no recourse to a higher good that is not told to us but that we tell ourselves and whose superiority is obviously our own. The good that is told to us is the good itself, his good, not that of our own choice and not the excellence of a standard at our own disposal, even though finally our own excellence reveals itself in our decision and act. |

For this reason there is no possibility of putting off the decisive decision to the next but one moment, of interposing a neutral moment in which we can busy ourselves appealing from the given command to one that is not given, using the standard that is ready to hand, and thus acting as our own judges of good and evil and masters of our own eternal destiny. This will not do. There is no point in such activity. It can only show that we do not yet know that the good has no lord over it—least of all ourselves—but is its own lord; that we do not yet know that the very next moment will bring to us the claim that judges us and should find us, not dreaming as Hercules at the crossroads dreams, but watchful. The content of the present moment should be that we prepare ourselves to come before our judge with our actions. Prepared or not, dreaming or watchful, we will come before our judge with our actions. The one thing that we can meaningfully do on our own is to come before him watchful. This is the light or shadow which the revelation of the command always casts in advance on the present moment: the cry: “Watch—that the evil times do not suddenly come upon you”1—the time when as those we are—with what we do we fall into the hands of the living God [cf. Heb. 10:31]. In its own way the present moment is itself decision, action, and therefore the revelation of the good. But we may add at once that it is so as a prophecy of the one who comes, who is even at the doors, and hence the cry: “Watch. Watch and pray” [Mark 14:38, cf. Eph. 6:18]. The judge comes ineluctably, and then our whole pose of being Hercules with a free choice has been just a pose. What will be revealed will not be our own but God’s predestination.

Thus the truth of the good is the truth by which we are measured as we act, the verdict toward which we go. The point of ethical reflection is that we become aware of our responsibility to this superior court so that the very next moment we act in awareness of this responsibility, not having chosen and grasped the good—how could we, that would be foolish effrontery—but in awareness that we are making a response with our act; in awareness of the absolute givenness of the command, over or behind which there stands no higher general truth to which we can look apart from the command, or appeal beyond the given command, but the command which is itself the truth, the truth of the good. |

All this—we are simply analyzing—implies also that the truth of the good is always a concrete individual command, just as concrete as our existence will be the very next moment, or as our action—there is no resisting this—will be concretely and individually this action. So concrete and individual is also the command in which our action will find its judge. If we take seriously the positive givenness of the command against which there is no appeal, then it cannot be just a rule, an empty form, to which we must give content by our action, so that the form of the action stands under the command and its content under our caprice. This idea seems to be unavoidable wherever the court which we obey or disobey in our moral decision, whether it be the moral law, or the idea of the good, or the more or less categorical imperative understood in Kant’s or some other sense, or the will of God, or our own conscience—wherever this court is thought of as something that is indefinite in content, wherever it is made into a purely formal concept whose truth has first to be investigated. On this view the idea of a necessary and obligatory form of the will is what is described as the revelation of the command and its definition and content—which are moral decision—arise on the basis of free choice controlled by the concept. On this view we mysteriously acquire from somewhere the knowledge that the doing of the good stands under an unconditionally valid rule and must always have the form corresponding to this rule, but assuming this rule to determine what the good is, what we should do is our own affair, and no matter how we act we can count on doing what is good so long as we conform to this rule. This view, too, is thinly disguised paganism and it is one that is quite impossible. On it our action would be free as such and would not be set under the command. It would be a doing of what we want and in relation to the claim that is made upon us, our concrete decision would be a decision for ourselves. We should have our own say about what we regard concretely as good, about what we pour into the empty vessel of one of those formal concepts, about what we happily (only too happily) give the form of a claim which we supposedly obey, although in reality we are our own lawgivers. If we take this path, how can even those generalities, those formal concepts, be really understood as command?

Is not the good again robbed of its originality, is it not thought of as placed in the lower order of being, if it is possible to regard it as a form which has still to be filled, if it is possible to differentiate it as an intrinsically general and abstract good from the definition that arises only with our own decision, if we can have knowledge of it without what we will and do being automatically determined by it in advance?

A general, formal, and abstract command is obviously no command but an object of theory like any other. If the good is indeed unconditioned and therefore not general and theoretical truth; if it is command, claim, a claim made upon us and not just a statement of our own thought that is given the rank of claim; then it is concrete, individual, definite command [a command] whose content is not under our control, but which is controlled with the same unconditionality as is proper to its form, a command which comes to us already filled and definite in content. It is then for the first time clear to us that the good is a question which is directed to us and which we must answer with our act, with an act which for its part is always concrete and individual. Nor will this answer be one that we have given ourselves, so that with our act we shall simply confirm and repeat it, thus remaining faithful to the choice and preference that follows our knowledge (and therefore to ourselves), or at worst being again unfaithful to them (and therefore to ourselves). This agreement or nonagreement with ourselves, which is confirmed by our act, may be an interesting matter but it has nothing whatever to do with obedience or disobedience to the good; if by the good we do not uncritically mean our own goodness but are clear that the good means the challenging of our own goodness.

We clearly misunderstand the meaning and scope of those general concepts, the moral law, the idea of the good, the categorical imperative, the will of God, etc., if we try to find in them the good or the command that is given to us. The moral law or the idea of the good is, as the name says, conceptualized being, the concept of the good, of morality or the command. It is the good projected on to the plane of being and the knowledge of being in a way that cannot be avoided in thinking about the good. It is the good as the ⌜real⌝ thought of a norm that unconditionally claims our will and conduct. Even ethical reflection is thinking and as such theory. To limit that plane concretely by the very different plane of practice, to push on to the thought of the norm which is not one of being but is original, which is not conceptualized but real—to do this it must first enter that place unafraid. How else can it leave it with the ostentation that is needed? But as ethical reflection arrives at the thought of the original and real norm, it negates its reality as simply a thought norm, maintaining that only the command which is issued to us and not a concept of it, not an idea, ⌜not a real conceptualized being⌝ of the good, is the court which we must obey or disobey in moral decision. |

The same is true of the categorical imperative. It may be understood in the purity in which Kant understood it as a formula for the unconditionally binding character of the idea of the good.2 Or to the purely formal content of the Kantian imperative there may be preferred the post-Kantian one which includes some general content. Either way, and even in the ethics that is proudest of its content, we can have only a formula for the concept of command which is abstracted from the reality of the given command, not the command itself. Command, a truly categorical imperative, can arise only on the far side of ethical reflection, when the course is over and the ethicist concerned, setting aside a general formula, has the courage and perhaps the right to come to this or that man and tell him in God’s name, as a prophet, what he should do in this or that specific situation or question of life. What he can say before when he is generally formulating the concept of the imperative is not the imperative itself but at best an insight about it. This is something quite different. Precisely with his strict formalism Kant is perhaps further away than his followers or critics or supposed improvers from the idea that his imperative or one of his formulae for it is the imperative itself, the real command which comes to man and claims him. When the command comes to man, it does not say: “Act in such a way that your action can be the principle of general legislation,”3 or something similarly abstract and general. It says: “Do this and do not do that in this unique situation which will not be repeated.” In this wholly concrete: “Do this and do not do that,” and not in its formal distinctiveness as an imperative or as an attempt to grasp in general the fulness of concretions, the possibilities of the this and that, it is a real imperative. Conversely, to the extent that what encounters man is only the formal phenomenon of an imperative, no matter how categorical, or only what is ultimately the equally formal phenomenon of a formula for what might perhaps be regarded as concretions, to that extent it is certainly not the command that encounters him. The good point about general definitions abstracted from the real command, whether they be formal or material, is that they can be reminders of and pointers to the command which really has been and is issued. They are not even that, however, but “morals” in the worst sense, leading to the illusion in which man himself wills to be good instead of letting the good be good, if they pretend to be the real command, as has happened often enough under the dominion of a rather naive understanding of Kant. |

The same misunderstanding obtains where conscience is made the court which man must obey or not obey in moral decision. Conscience is the totality of our self-consciousness inasmuch as it can be the recipient and publisher of the command that comes to us. It has the promise that it can. But this “can” falls in the category of eschatological concepts. Only in the light of coming perfection, the hope of redemption, can conscience be addressed as the organ of the crisis that overtakes our willing and doing and therefore of our participation in the good. It is not a given factor. But the command that conscience can hear and validate to us by binding our existence to it is an absolute given factor. It does not first become this through our conscience, nor does it first acquire concreteness through our conscience, but it either has this in itself or it is not the real command, and our conscience can only witness to its givenness and concreteness. Hence our conscience is not the command. |

Least of all is the concept of the will of God adapted to be played off against the concreteness and particularity of the given command as the real command behind and above it, or to be explained as the empty form that needs to be filled out as we see best. The concept of the will of God brings fully to light the impossibility of the abstraction of the good in general from the good in particular as revealed in the specific acts of specific people. In the third subsection of the present section we shall have to draw the line more precisely between the concepts “command” and “God.” It ought to be clear already, however, that if one would and could and perhaps should equate the good and therefore the command with God, then the good cannot be understood as a schema at whose filling out by ourselves God is present as a spectator to exhort, console, and finally reward. Even less can the concept of God as the concept of a real imperative be united with the distance presupposed there between form and content, with the division of roles between the good and ourselves. In the same way we must be on guard when, in place of the concept of God’s will, A. Ritschl, for example, extols that of the kingdom of God4 or when without express reference to the idea of God the concept of righteousness or of love is exalted as the good. |

Against all such constructions which relate to a general formula for the good we object that the unconditionality of the truth of the good is very seriously damaged by the idea that the good is simply a divided foolscap page whose columns have to be filled by our application of the general rules, by our deliberations on the special cases that occur. If this synergism in ethics is right, then one must admit that in ethics, too, there can be only conditioned truth. Obviously because people either will not or cannot abandon this synergism which makes man a rival of the one who commands, which makes him one who also commands and who secretly commands alone, almost every ethics, even though it pretends to be ever so idealistic, is obviously an ethics of being, an ethics of conditioned truth, and therefore an ethics of empty concepts. It is so because it is an ethics of free choice. For what fills the empty concepts, the source of concreteness, and consequently the criterion of good and evil, is the freedom of human choice, or, in other words, man himself. Those who want to continue in this direction should at least be clear about this connection. We maintain, then, that the very unconditionality of the command does not, as a shortsighted understanding of Kant believes, exclude the concrete and specific determination of the content of the command. On the contrary, it includes it. In moral decision it is a question of obeying or disobeying this or that command which apart from our acceptance of it as such is precisely this and this and runs thus and thus. Decision does not lie in deciding the question whether this or that is the good, whether the command wants this or that of me, whether I should do this or that. An ethics which asks questions like this makes no more sense than a dogmatics which asks whether there is a God. The question to be decided in moral decision is whether I will be found obedient or disobedient in my action when confronted with the command at its most concrete and specific. It is not a matter of my freedom of choice but of the divine predestination in moral decision.

To conclude our discussion of this side of the issue, we now have good reason precisely in a theological ethics to make a very special demarcation on this side. It is in keeping with all that has been said that the command addressed to man, as it is present in the message of the Bible which the Christian church accepts and proclaims, almost always occurs as a concrete command and therefore as a plenitude of commands. Jesus does not merely say to the rich young ruler: “You know what you should do,” but: “You know the commandments” [Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20]. You know, then, that in this concrete way you stand in decision. |

It will be well to establish as unequivocally as possible the relation between the concreteness of the unconditioned command and the concreteness of the biblical commands. Obviously neither the totality nor a selection of the biblical imperatives, nor any one of them, is in itself the unconditioned concrete command that comes to you and me today. This neither can nor should be said either of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, or the imperatives of the admonitory chapters in the epistles. Precisely for the sake of a proper understanding of the authority of the Bible we must not confuse the issue by an overhasty biblicism. All the biblical imperatives—and we do not say this to impugn the authority of the Bible but to define it—are addressed to others and not to us, and they are addressed to others who differ greatly among themselves, to the people of Israel in different situations, to the disciples of Jesus, to the first Christian churches of Jews and Gentiles. Their concreteness is that of a specific then and there. Again, as we now have them, they are not ⌜for the most part⌝ wholly and absolutely concrete commands addressed to these and these specific people. Their concreteness is relative. ⌜Even⌝ formally they are at least in part—we have only to think of the familiar saying in Matthew 7:125—not wholly unlike the general principles that we discussed earlier. They are in the main general summaries of the commands issued then and there to specific people. They are—and I am expressly including the Sermon on the Mount—witness to the absolutely concrete command received by Israel, the disciples, and the primitive church. It is in this specific form of witness to the absolutely concrete real command that they come to us and can and should apply to us as the absolutely concrete real command. This means, however, that no biblical command or prohibition is a rule, a general moral truth, precisely because it comes to us as witness to the absolutely concrete real command. How can it be a general moral truth if it is witness to the command that God has really issued and issues? As such it would conceal and deny what it is supposed to attest. If it were a general moral truth, if, e.g., the command not to kill [Exod. 20:3] or the command to love one’s enemies [Matt. 5:44] were seen as a rule that we have only to apply, then obviously in relation to the biblical imperatives, too, we should have to distinguish between their general validity and their validity for us, again filling them out concretely for ourselves—for which of them is so clear and concrete that this is not necessary?—exactly as we do with the principles discussed earlier. The commands not to kill and to love one’s enemies are oriented to the absolutely concrete command but are themselves only relatively concrete. Concretely different things may be commanded in line with this orientation, although it would be hazardous to say of the differences that they are irrelevant for the qualifying of our action and that selection among them is left to us. Yet even if the selection is not a matter of indifference, but decision takes place in it, nevertheless, assuming that the command is really meant and treated as a general truth, the good is our good choice among the possibilities it offers and not the command itself. A biblicism which thinks it sees the direct command to us in the relatively concrete biblical imperatives, whether individually or collectively, is ineluctably compelled to make use of the same method of the secret autonomy of those who are apparently subject to the law as an ill-advised philosophical ethics usually does with the help of its freely constructed principles.

To be sure, a secret lawlessness rather than “legalism” is the proper charge to bring against a biblicist ethics such as that of the Anabaptists of the age of the Reformation. This has become perfectly clear in the continuation of this approach in Tolstoy.6 Over against the arrogance which for a change uses the Bible to place man’s free choice on the judgment-seat concerning good and evil. ⌜and which makes man and his so-called “best judgment and conscience” the arbiter between two or three different and competing divine commands,⌝ we have to remember that throughout the Bible the biblical commandments are not simple and direct revelation, but like the whole Bible they are witness to revelation, and it is in this specific sense which excludes their use as general moral truths that they are God’s Word to us. This means, however, that they are not themselves the direct, definite, individual command to us which is alone the real command. Then and there, as specific people heard it, the real command was very different from the recollection of it which, in the form of the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, bears witness to us today of the way in which the ⌜divine⌝ Logos, the good, claimed people then and there. In their relative concreteness, however, they point us, as the whole Bible does, to the event of that claiming of men by the ⌜divine⌝ Logos which will be unavoidably the meaning of our own action.

This indication is made with imperious force. Through this witness to God’s command the command itself is heard by us, by God’s church. This is why the church proclaims it as it receives the biblical witness to it. This is why it gives instruction in the good by means of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It does this on the presupposition—and with this presupposition the church stands or falls—that here and not elsewhere the command of God is to be heard. But to be heard as the command of God—which means hearing for ourselves what we are commanded by this command as we ourselves are concretely claimed by the command attested in the Bible. And if too much attention cannot be paid to the fact that the biblical witness to God’s command almost never speaks abstractly in real proximity to those general principles but almost always speaks with at least a relative concreteness, we shall note not only that the finger we see pointing there points us toward the wholly concrete command of God but also in what direction it points us. For awareness of the responsibility that we must accept with our acts it is not a matter of indifference but one of urgent importance that ⌜at the decisive point⌝ the command is not that we should kill but that we should not kill, that the Sermon on the Mount does not invite us to take up the attitude of the rich but of the poor in spirit [cf. Matt. 5:3], and that Pauline exhortation does not focus on the concept of the superman but on that of sacrifice and humility. We shall agree that even if the great Old and New Testament command to love God and our neighbor is not the real command, nevertheless it tells us very clearly about it. And beyond that we shall always take into account that this and this definite biblical imperative itself becomes directly the most concrete command—why should it not, would it not be a bad thing if it did not?—so that in and with the wording of the biblical witness to God’s command the command itself is given that judges our action. When this takes place, however, there is no transforming of the biblical imperatives into general moral truths. How could we be taking seriously the Word of God that is heard there if by the detour of ethical biblicism we were again to set ourselves on a judgment seat of the knowledge of good and evil?

To sum up, when people reached by God’s command stand in decision, it is a particular and definite command that has reached them. Moral generalities of any kind, ⌜even though they be biblical and in the exact words of the Bible,⌝ are not the command, for over against them we ourselves secretly are and remain judges and masters. The good is this or that command that is given to me without choice or determination on my part. It is given to me, and I cannot first ask whether it might be given to others also either with reference to them or to my own action. We stand alone7 knowing that we do not stand on ourselves and cannot be our own judges and masters. Primarily and fundamentally moral fellowship can mean only that we know—and this is the knowledge of the Christian church—that we are together and in the same situation to the extent that we know that we are mutually under the real command that is concrete and specific. Moral understanding means at root a common respect for the command which is a special and definite command for each individual. We should not think and say too hastily that this involves the negation of moral fellowship. It is tempting to say this, but if we do we speak superficially. General moral truths, from which we usually expect moral fellowship, do not have, as shown, and no matter what their derivation, the force of the true command, for in them the decisive choice between concrete possibilities is still according to what seems best to us. With this secret centrifugal effect, how can they have the power to build fellowship? Precisely under the lordship of general moral truths we cannot be united but can only become constantly disunited. But we find ourselves together and enter truly common ground when in the will and act of others we respect the revelation of the command, the good, which may, of course, be imparted only to them. It may perhaps be given only to us and not to any others. It may perhaps judge us as it does not judge anyone else. But in the very particularity as the command that is given to us it is the one command that judges all. We can and will ask ourselves whether others have heard aright what is said to them—having first put the same question to ourselves—but we trust, and this trust is the act that establishes moral fellowship, that in fact there is also said to them what they have heard either well or badly. We do not reckon them good—how can we, we do not, it is hoped, reckon ourselves good—but we reckon that the same participation in the good is granted to them as we reckon to be granted to us. We enter the ground of moral fellowship, then, when instead of proclaiming moral generalities and thereby introducing the seed of disruption into what may be an existing moral fellowship, we mutually agree that no one is in a position to judge the servant of another, for “it is before his own master that he stands or falls” on the confident presupposition with which each of us must approach his own judgment: “And he will stand, for God is mighty to make him stand,” [Rom. 14:4]. But again it cannot be ruled out—though we cannot begin here, it must first be discovered, and it will be when it is to be, though only and precisely on this ground—that several or many may see that they are placed simultaneously under the command and claimed by it in the same specific way, so that in the same definite and specific way they are called to reflection, to common ethical reflection. |

The actualizing and sustaining of a narrower moral fellowship in this sense will depend, however, on our leaving not to ourselves but to our commonly acknowledged Lord the freedom to encounter each of us with a specific and definite command without being tied to the fellowship that has been set up between us in this extraordinary way. It will depend on our recognizing and acknowledging that we are not so much bound to one another as to the Lord who commands us. If another can comfort and encourage me by telling me that he stands with me under the same command—and there is no greater comfort or stronger encouragement on earth than awareness of this common bond—nevertheless no other can be responsible for my proper hearing of what is commanded of me. Nor can any other bind my conscience. The other is set there to arouse my conscience and I must always be ready to pay heed to him. But he cannot bind me. He neither can nor should judge me by appealing to what he has heard. And although on the basis of what is said to me I can and should be my brother’s keeper [cf. Gen. 4:9] and not a spectator, I neither can nor should take from him his own responsibility for hearing properly what is commanded of him. It means liberation from a nightmare that with the best intentions we have made for ourselves when we see that we are neither called nor in any position to alter or improve one another or to set one another on the right path. With such good intentions we persistently judge one another. The wisdom which as an inalienable axiom must underlie all common ethical reflection (in the broadest sense) runs as follows: “Judge not” [Matt. 7]. All narrower moral fellowship that may arise from time to time, all common ethical reflection, can only be a summons that each should hear aright what is and will be said to him. There is no mutual recognition apart from the presupposition of a further and deeper recognition of the mutual agreement with which each believes of the other that something more will be said to him and that he will hear it in his own way. Anything else would not only violate the freedom of the other—this good is not the supreme sanctuary of the good that must be respected here—but it would also quench the Spirit [cf. 1 Thess. 5:19], drive oneself and others away from the Lord who commands, and in this way most assuredly destroy the fellowship. It is in this freedom and responsibility of the individual that the Christian church, if it knows what it is doing, accepts and understands and proclaims the real, divine, and biblical command. The command hits home to the individual; he himself is unable to hit upon the right. It comes to him as a definite command; he himself does not have to define it. It is one command and for each person it is always a concrete command.

Thus far we have more or less taken it for granted that the command with which we have to do in the reality of moral decision is God’s command. We are in fact only adding precision and confirmation to what we have said already when, having equated the good with the command, we further equate it with the divine commanding, i.e., with God himself. We may question whether we have heard properly what is commanded of us, whether the revelation of the command finds us open, ready, and willing, whether we are clear about the meaning of the decision that we must always take, whether we submit to the judgment that is passed on us in it, whether it is for us a summons to go watchfully toward our Lord and Judge, who will meet us again in the decision of the very next moment. But we cannot question the fact that the command under which our decision stands and by which it is measured as obedience or disobedience is God’s command, the command of the absolutely sovereign Lord who reveals himself to us and acts with us through his address and claim, through his Word. Thus far we have believed that we should understand the real command as commission, direction, order, i.e., as an act of command. If we had understood it as general moral truth we should have had to equate it now with the content of an absolute body of law. Somewhere and in some way it would have to be true in itself. But according to our previous deliberations it cannot be equated with this kind of corpus—even the Bible with its commands, as we have seen, can never be viewed as such. What makes this view impossible is that it ascribes to man the dignity of judge. The good, the command, is not true but becomes true as it is spoken to us as the truth, as it meets us speaking as truth. We thus stand directly before the concept of God; indeed, strictly speaking we have already achieved the concept. We may thus dismiss as childish the question how we have come to make the equation between the command and the command of God, i.e., God himself. The answer is that it is not at all the case that we come to this. If we know what the revelation of the good is in moral decision, if we know the strictly concrete character of the good which reveals itself to us there, then we know therewith and therein that God has come to us. We know that we have not first to begin to speak about him but that from the very first we have already been spoken to by him. Where the real command is, there is absolute, personal, living will distinct from ours. If this can be shown in analysis, then reserving all further definitions—this whole course of lectures can only be one big attempt to make these further definitions—we have the right to understand this will as the divine will and therefore the command that meets us as God’s command, i.e., as God himself.

a. Where there is real command, there is an absolutely imperious will. We have seen how with the seriously put question of the good we have recognized the presence of an absolute “ought.” I would not advise that this recognition be described as an “absolute position”8 or the like. Its significance is rather that we, for our part, renounce all absolute positions and simply see that we are claimed, i.e., claimed, if the claim be valid, in our relativity. The positive content of this knowledge of ourselves, which as such can be described only negatively, the thought of the one who so confronts us in this relativity of ours that we can no longer detect any desire to name any absolute beyond for ourselves, this thought is the thought of God. If the true imperious command encounters us, therewith and therein God encounters us.

b. Where there is real command, there is a will distinct from our own. Everything depends on whether the command is understood not to be in any way secretly present in us, but always to imply disruption and questioning for us. And this in turn depends on our having to understand it as act and not as being. We are so in control of an object which we can contemplate that even its absoluteness will finally attest and reflect only our own absoluteness. But if the command, the good, is act, this means that we are not in control of it. It is not a criterion at our own disposal but a criterion under which we stand, which we cannot apply but which is applied to us. This is to think the thought of God’s command. The step from Kant to Fichte, the true fall of German Idealism, is then impossible. We can only see ⌜with Kant and⌝ better than Kant that moral knowledge is unattainable without transition to worship.

c. Where there is real command, there is a personal will. Command is claim. In all cases it is speech, word, logos; not influence, effect, impression. A thunderstorm or earthquake may shake and startle a man and become part of his experience. To be addressed is something different, and it is with this something different that we have to do in the real command. But there is more to it than this. At a pinch a flower or waterfall or work of art might be a form of address. The command, however, claims us. It addresses our conscience. It makes our conscience, the totality of our self-consciousness, an instrument to bind our existence, to put it under obligation. This obligation again is not just a general one. The real command, as shown, always wills something specific from us. All this characterizes our encounter with the command as a personal encounter comparable to the encounter with a man, except that the claim at issue here is inescapable. By this distinction the person with whom we have dealings in the command that reaches us here is shown to be the incomparable divine person. When we think through the thought of the personal nature of the real command, we have again arrived at the thought of God, [the thought of] the eternal Logos.

d. Where there is real command, there is a living will. The concreteness of the command is not grounded in the concreteness of our own life. It is not as though man were first alive and then the command of God followed him into the richness of his existence. No, God, the one unchangeable God, is the rich and living God, and the command is at every moment this and this specific command because he has dealings with us, because it is not that a body of law is set up by whose sections we are to be guided, but a ruling Lord is present who never lets the initiative out of his own hands. It may be asked whether Psalm 119, which is so often blamed for its monotony, does not, with its 176 verses in praise of the law, see more clearly than many an apparently more perspicacious thinker the living nature of the law which is finally coincident with the living nature of him who gave it. The inexhaustibility with which our deciding constantly becomes the theater of revelation characterizes this revelation as the revelation of God.

We draw to a close. The absolute, personal, and living will of God which is distinct from our own is the will of God. The decision in which we live every moment is a decision for or against God. Responsibility to him is its point. His judgment is passed on us in it. As we seriously ask about the good, we recognize that we are not on our own but have a Lord, this Lord, the Lord. We “have” him, as we “have” a master, to the extent that we have his command, that here and now we, you and I, hear his command, that in virtue of this Word of his he “has” us. It might be added that we cannot have the Lord, we cannot have God, in any other way. Talk of God apart from the question of the good, apart from the command that is given here and now to you and me, is not talk of God even though it pretends to be confession of God or denial of God. God is he in virtue of whose Word my decision is decision for or against the good. He is this God and no other. He is the Judge toward whom we go or he is not God at all.

§6

THE COMMAND OF GOD AS THE JUDGMENT OF GOD

As God reveals his command to man, he judges him. But God’s judgment and therefore man’s sanctification by God is that God has loved, elected, and declared to be his possession the one whom he has taken up by his command, that God shows his whole decision and conduct to be a transgression of the command, that God for the sake of his own goodness accepts the sinner as a doer of his Word, and that in so doing God orients his sinful conduct to the work of obedience.

In this section we come to the true substance of the first chapter and of theological ethics in general. All that has been said thus far has been just a preparation for what has to be said now. And all that will have to be said later can be only a descent from the peak that has now to be won. “Has to,” I say, for it would be vanity and even presumption to promise that the decisive word will actually be said and the peak won. The task before us is to give a recapitulatory presentation of the whole doctrine of the appropriation of God’s grace to man on the special assumption that this appropriation consists of the placing of man under God’s command. This task, if any in theology, is in many respects a venture for both teacher and students. The honorable titles “doctor of theology” and “theological student” sound somewhat dubious when we see what kind of a noetic task confronts us here. In addition, however, we stand directly at the point—it has long since given intimation of itself but can no longer remain invisible—where every theological discipline both begins and ends as such, but which it has neither the strength nor the permission to posit, prove, deduce, or even maintain, which it can only recognize to be posited as it continually starts with it and returns to it. We stand at the point where theology must fight for knowledge in such a way that it lays down all its weapons and unreservedly accepts and acknowledges how threatened is its claim to want to know. This claim is threatened by the fact that knowledge occurs here only in so far as its object gives itself to be known, that it is thus an event over whose occurrence we have no control. This is a situation which threatens theology alone among the sciences and we are now at the point in theological ethics where this situation—which determines the whole and not just this part of the whole—is now acute, where it is no longer possible not to think about it explicitly. In §4 we fixed the point where God’s command is to be known as command. In §5 we tried to show further how the command is to be understood as God’s command. If we seriously intend to describe the reality of the command of God we must now go on and try to reach some understanding of the event of the divine commanding as such, of the act of the divine claiming or sanctification, without which all talk of command and God’s command is left up in the air. It is clear, however, that we now really seem to be left up in the air, since obviously all understanding of this event presupposes that it really occurs; yet its occurrence does not seem to be a factor on which we can count, but we can bring it into our discussion only as a factor in the most literal sense, i.e., as doers. If the decisive word is truly said here as a conclusion to what has preceded, and if the peak has really been won as the presupposition of all that follows, i.e., if we really understand the event of sanctification as such, then by way of introduction we must say that this cannot be the result of a dialectical achievement. No matter how it approaches this factor, no theological dialectic can at root achieve more than is achieved if we are content to make a simple reference to the name of Jesus Christ and to leave it at that. If we choose the more involved way of theological dialectic, this is not in order to do something more effective; but in order to summon us to awareness that we stand before the factor which must speak for itself if all that we can do is not to be done in vain. Because this insight is clearer when we make the reference in the harder rather than the easier way, because this insight not only threatens theology but also offers a basis for it, at this point where we must choose between a very simple and a more difficult way, without pretending that we are doing anything better, we opt for the latter.

I have entitled the section “the command as the judgment of God.” It thus corresponds to our deliberations thus far. The event to which all theological ethics refers, God’s claiming of man, sanctification, the act of establishing, revealing, and validating the divine command, implies the judgment of God. The point of all ethical reflection is that at every moment of life, including the very next moment to which our reflection relates, we have to respond by our action, i.e., by our existence in that moment no matter what its concrete content might be; that our action, as it occurs, is measured and judged and set under an eternal determination. At every moment our action means crisis, not a crisis we bring on but a crisis in which we stand, which is brought upon us by the good, the command, God the Lord. We are put on the scales. By the fact that we are put on the scales now we are called upon to consider that we will immediately be so again, that life is an unbroken transition from being weighed to being weighed again. To the extent that the Word of God heard today is this call, the saying is true: “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” [Psalm 119:105]. Being unable to anticipate the result of our being weighed, we have no choice between good and evil. But we may be awake or asleep. We may live responsibly or irresponsibly. To be mature is to act with awareness of the responsibility of our acts. This is not less but more than that choice. As we come to reflect on the fact that we are weighed and that our acts in some way mean responsibility, we recognize that we will be weighed and therefore that we will be responsible the very next moment, so that it is high time to awake out of sleep [cf. Rom. 13:11], because the meaning of the very next moment will again be the judgment of God. It is at this event of the very next moment that all theological ethics, starting out from the event of the present moment and its call, is aiming.

The first and basic statement that we have to make in relation to this event is obviously that God accepts us in it. Even though we weigh too lightly on his scales, nevertheless he puts us there. We may not stand according to his measure, but we are still measured by it. It may be that his judgment means our conviction and condemnation but something worthy of a different judgment might at least have been expected of us. Summoned to give an account to him we are basically and primarily summoned (no matter what the account may be) to recognize that in some sense he counts us his, shares with us, and holds fellowship with us. Unable to avoid the insight that we have him as Lord, we confirm thereby the further and materially superior insight that in some sense he regards and treats us as his own, as his possession. As his command becomes the crisis of our conduct, he tells us, as Calvin says (Inst. III, 6, 1), that he does at least ask concerning the symmetry and harmony of our decision with his own will. Under the influence of the polemic in Romans and Galatians against a dialectically understood concept of the law, and even more so under that of Luther’s use of this polemic and his to-some-extent-objectionable absolutizing of it,1 it may easily be overlooked that the origin of the establishment and revelation of the law is undoubtedly God himself and the love of God. The law should not be so unequivocally grouped with the devil, sin, and reason, as it sometimes is in Luther, nor should it be understood in a relation to God’s wrath that is so clearly taken for granted.2 While one may emphasize the distance and even the antithesis between God and man which the revelation of the command and the occurrence of the crisis manifest, one must still remember above all that this event does at least mean encounter with God. And while one may with horror take note of the element of God’s holy wrath that characterizes this encounter, nevertheless it must be perceived above all that the fact of this encounter is in itself a proof of the love of God, a love which is perhaps displayed as wrathful love, yet still God’s love. As God as Commander meets us along the way, he tells us that he does not want to be God without us but that no matter who we are he wants to be “God with us,” Immanuel. This is love, and as God’s love it must not be furnished with a restrictive “only,” just because the event also means more than this. This must be regarded as the thing which dominates everything else. We have a poor view of the crisis in which we now stand, and our reflection on it lacks seriousness, if we will not understand that we move toward, and with our acts have to give account to, the one who counts us his, who does not treat us as strangers but as members of his household [cf. Eph. 2:19], as his possession, who has loved us and will love us no matter how our encounter with him may go. As he gives us the command, indeed through the command itself, he tells us that he will be our God and we shall be his people [cf. Lev. 26:12, etc.]. That we let ourselves be told this absolutely positive thing is the presupposition of all true maturing. Hear the command, we are told. But even as this “hear” sounds forth, it tells us already that God has accepted us. The saying is not: “Hear, O Moab, Midian, or Amalek,” but: “Hear, O Israel [cf. Deut. 6:4, etc.]. “Hear” is not said to Moab, Midian, or Amalek. Where it is said, there is Israel, i.e., there is love, election, calling, the covenant, grace, faithfulness, above all God. When Israel forgot and rejected the love of Yahweh and the fact of its election from among the nations, when as a lost virgin it played the harlot with the Baals of the Gentiles as though Yahweh were not the husband who had eternally affianced her to himself [Hos. 2:21], then it forgot and rejected the commands too. Hearing the commands, without which there is no obedience, means hearing the love in the command, the election which reveals the givenness of the command, the absolutely primary Yes which God says to us through the command. If we do not hear this gracious Yes in the command, we do not hear the command at all. It is a theological hardness of heart that sees a lower stage of religion in the Old Testament because it does not know the abstract differentiation of law and gospel which, even in face of the jubilation with which again Psalm 119 and other passages sing about the gift of the law, dares to operate with the catchword of legalism, or which, according to the same schema, would find in Calvin’s joy in the law a relapse into Judaism. How can one really refute the statement of Calvin that the law is from the very outset “graced with the covenant of free adoption” (Inst. II, 7, 2)? Is not the final point of the law, of the command of God that judges us, God’s promise, the promise of his covenant with us? Can one hear it as command or place oneself under its judgment without recognizing this final point which is also the first one? Are we really mature, do we really know our accountability, so long as we do not know our election?

That God judges us means above all that he loves us. We have to think two thoughts together here: judgment and love, law and gospel. But in these two thoughts, if we think them aright, we think the one ineffable truth of God. Love is before judgment and above it. Law is simply the concrete form and voice of gospel. As such, however, it, too, has force and worth. The law has “come between” (Rom. 5:20) and is a “taskmaster” (Gal. 3:24), according to Paul’s polemic, only as the abstraction of a “Thou shalt” which is something different from the form and voice of an original “Thou mayest,” in which lies hidden the fact that first and foremost God has bound himself to man and man to him. In this sense it is the “law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). In this sense it is the law that is not really heard as God’s law. Yet the law is not as such overthrown but upheld (Rom. 3:31). It is “holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). It is “the law of the spirit of life” (Rom. 8:2). Given law means fulfilled promise: the promise that God has bound himself to me, that I am loved by him. Prior to my decision, before it has become true in my act (as measured by his will) that I am his servant, before it has also become true that I have been found an unprofitable, unfaithful, and treacherous servant, before all this, God’s decision about me has been made, and even though the mountains depart and the hills be removed his grace will never depart nor will the covenant of his peace be removed [cf. Isaiah 54:10]. The love of God manifested in the givenness of the command means a decision of God which stands substitute for mine to the extent that, as it is the final point of command that comes to me and judges me, so it also anticipates the final point of my decision, or of the judgment in which I stand with it. In it—and the same is to be said of my decision—satisfaction, and indeed full satisfaction, is already done in advance to the command under which I am placed and by which I am judged. If God is for us, then no command, even when and as it judges us, can be against us. In virtue of the decision of his love manifested in the givenness of the command, I cannot be one who is condemned by this command. In the decision of his love, the symmetry and harmony of my decision with his command is presupposed and promised, no matter what else may have to be said about it.

In the decision of his love I have the righteousness which his command requires of me and which avails before him. This revelation of God’s love in the givenness of the command is the gospel. It must not be separated from the command. Only through it does the law acquire truth and weight. Without it I have not heard the law as God’s Word, as the Word that truly binds me. I see the law as the Word that binds me only as I know it to be God’s law. But I know it as God’s law only as I see God’s love and my own election in it. And I see God’s love in it only as I let myself be told—the gospel tells me—that God’s love is unconditioned love, that it is not conditioned by my decision but is a love that precedes it, the love of eternal election. It is as one who is unconditionally loved, as one about whom a decision has been made, that I am summoned to move on to decision the very next moment, i.e., to be the one I am, not to elect but to be elected and to confirm my election, to fulfill in my decision the decision that has been made about me, to be the one whom God loves in my own decision in virtue of God’s decision. What this means will have to be the subject of further discussion.

This, however, is the fundamental and all-controlling and conditioning thing that God’s judgment by his command always implies. This is the circle within which there takes place man’s sanctification, his claiming by God’s Word. In all else that we have to say we must remember that it can be said aright only in the light of God’s love, faithfulness, grace, and election. Everything would be abstraction and confusion which meant stepping even for a moment outside this circle.

I think it has already become clear in making this first and basic point that it was not superfluous to issue an express reminder in the first subsection about the uncertainty of the path on which we find ourselves when it is a matter of laying the decisive foundations of theological ethics. To find God’s love in his judgment prior to all its other determinations, to see the gospel in the law, is either a nonsensical paradox or it is an appeal to the reality of God himself in his revelation in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Clearly it cannot be the achieving of a synthesis but only the recognition of a synthesis already achieved if we have recourse to the decision of God’s love which in principle precedes our decision and stands substitute for it. This is not a truth on which we have a handle or which we can deduce from some other truth. It is the truth of revelation, i.e., a truth which strictly is true only as it reveals itself, as it itself speaks to us. This is God’s eternal counsel and its execution in the incarnation of his Word and the outpouring of his Spirit. We have to reckon with no less than this if we are to speak correctly about sanctification. But how can we reckon with it? Like dogmatics and theology in general, theological ethics can never give a theoretical answer to this question. It can answer only by doing, by doing as basically and carefully as possible, yet aware also that it has no guarantee but the reality of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It can answer, then, only with the counterquestion whether the one who asks should not know this reality.

The command that is given to us becomes our judge by showing us totally and irrefutably that our decision is as such transgression. By the law—this is the first concrete element in sanctification—is the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20). We shall try to clarify this in three complementary discussions.

a. We begin with the fact that we have found the reality of the command in the concrete and specific command. As such the command is that which necessarily and unconditionally condemns us as we act and decide. If instead the command were to be understood as a general idea of what is commanded, which we have to fill out concretely for ourselves, then it would be easy, and fundamentally it would always be possible, to view our decision as in conformity with the command and to regard ourselves as justified. For if the filling out and the fulfilling of the command were in our own hands, would it not be simply unavoidable that we should fill it out from the very first in such a way that we would and could later fulfill it, or that having fulfilled [it] as we would and could we should later correct the filling out in accordance with the fulfillment? The imperative falsely substituted for the command, general moral truths taken from the Bible, formal and material general truths of morality, always constitute a focal point for the righteous who need no repentance [cf. Luke 15:7] because they are at peace with the law. They are at peace with the law because they mean by it a general truth that one can accept as one accepts the truth that two and two make four, and when the point is reached where there must be concrete action instead of theoretical acceptance, they are their own lawgivers who do not act according to the law, but like the scribes and Pharisees act according to their exposition of the law, which at its most concrete means according to their own caprice. Is it any surprise that with this identifying of the legislative and the executive they did not see themselves as transgressors? One can here be at peace with oneself and it can even be an unnecessary whimsicality not to try to do so. They correctly appeal to their good conscience. A good conscience is possible so long as it is not concerned about the self, so long as it is not smitten by the real command that is not set up by ourselves but established over against us. This real command, as we have seen, is not a general framework of demand but the most concrete and specific command. The concreteness of the real command spoils our little game of filling out and fulfilling in which we are on our own. It also pitilessly ruins our good conscience. Obviously, in face of it our acts are always deviation, addition, or subtraction. They are always different from the acts that are commanded us. They are thus a nondoing of what is commanded us. We may in good faith regard what we do as commanded, for we may perhaps do it in truly well-intentioned exposition of a general moral truth. We may perhaps think that it was commanded once before or might be later on. We may believe that even now it is commanded of others, perhaps of all others. These possibilities, however, do not alter the fact that we certainly do not act as those who are really commanded now. In this connection, in relation to the question how we stand before the command that is issued to us now, it makes no difference whether in our acts we are far or less far from what is commanded. If sometimes we are far from it, this should make it clear to us that we do deviate from it, which is not perhaps so clear when without being any the better for it we are not so far. It is a dreadful thing to wake up with the discovery that we have wandered far from the command, but what we then realize is truer than what we may perhaps dream to be our harmony with the command when we are less far from it. If we measure our decision by the real command that is given to us, then we see that it is not imperfect obedience but real disobedience. For our acts are really decision when placed under the command. Decision, however, is a matter of either/or, all or nothing, not more or less. Björnson’s mountain parson rightly saw and said this.3 We constantly find ourselves to be those who, in greater or smaller distance from what is commanded, do not do what they should, so that even though they are at great peace with themselves and their conscience is ever so good, they are in conflict with the law, i.e., with God. Our decision always means that we are disobedient.

b. We begin also with the fact that the command that is given to us is God’s command. As such it condemns us. This would not be so if we could think of it as a law of the natural or spiritual world, as the power of our destiny, written perhaps in our stars, or as the power of the historical situation or process in which we have a part. We might clash with these powers too. We could suffer under them. We could be broken on them. They might crush us. But they could not put us in the wrong. They could not condemn us. For in the last resort we owe them no obedience. Even in the event of the severest collision with them we could still be deeply at peace with ourselves and with them too, even confronting them as superior forces. None of them can indeed demand of us that we recognize it as lord over us, that we cease to be our own, that we really place ourselves under its direction. They want to be respected, but only as powerful, even overwhelmingly powerful partners in the game of life. We ourselves can always be the other partner. No matter how badly we have played, why should we not be finally peaceful, secure, and cheerful? The strange thing about human creatureliness is that according to Psalm 8:5 man is made so “little less than God” that, even though he is the weaker partner who yields and falls and submits in the game of life, he can still defy the gods and assert himself, so that come what may he does not have to fear anything in the whole world, not even fate or death itself. “If the vault of heaven broke and fell on him, the ruins would smite him undismayed.”4 He can stand erect against all things and everything, even though he has become guilty before all in everything. The tragic hero finally triumphs, defying the world, or even blessing it in spite of everything, even in his downfall. He is a type, a respectable type, of man’s own upstanding righteousness. The Zarathustra of Nietzsche and the Prometheus of Goethe and Spitteler,5 like the Prometheus of the ancient Greek story, are figures that have the fear of death and fate behind them, figures that obviously do not stand under accusation, and we must be clear that real life stands behind them. Why are they not accused even though they are so assaulted? Because there is for them no command, no command of God that cannot be escaped, as one can escape even the sharpest accusation of the world of nature and spirit or as even on the ruins one can escape the attack of the whole cosmos. There is no true assault where there is no sin. But there is no sin where there is no command of God beyond the command of powers and forces and the law of gods and demons. God’s command reveals sin. God’s command condemns man. It does so because it smites man at the very point where the tragic hero is strong and good, because it constantly surprises man in his act with the demand that instead of asserting himself he must surrender himself. The command of God wills that we regard God as an unconditioned Lord. We do not want to do this. We do not do it. Whatever our decision may be, finally it is always self-assertion. Our sensuality and spirituality, our love and hate, our prayer and cursing—they are all self-assertion. We want to live. We want to be ourselves. Always, perhaps even with God’s help, we want to thrust ourselves forward. It is with this true and deepest program of ours that in each of our decisions we stand even against God and precisely against God, as though God were one of the gods whom it is a laudable thing for the tragic hero to encounter. We always deal with God on the basis of a supposed credit. Even when we decide for the ostensible good we always decide as our own masters. We never act as those that are truly bound. This is transgression, sin. The Pharisee in the temple, who unlike the publican has put everything straight and thanks God that he is himself and not like these others [cf. Luke 18:11], is the true sinner. Again there are distinctions. It is one thing to assert oneself so wildly and defiantly, to play the superman, the god-man, as directly as Nietzsche did.6 It is another to rebel in so moderate and perhaps so highly Christian a form as did that good-natured model child, the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son [cf. Luke 15:25–32]. Yet we must not deceive ourselves. The distinction is irrelevant in this context, namely, in the question how we stand before God. We must see that whether crude or refined it is the same revolt: disobedience. The one is not disobedience and the other imperfect obedience. Both are disobedience. Our action is decision and decision is either/or. Our decision as such undoubtedly means that even at best what ought to be done is not done.

c. We begin finally with the fact that the command is not given to us without the promise that we are God’s elected covenant-partners whom he loves. It is as such that it condemns us. This is the obviously contradictory description of the even more contradictory fact that precisely the revelation of God’s love, as which we must finally understand the command, unmasks us as those who love neither God nor the neighbor in relation to whom our love for God must show itself in concrete decision. Again it would not be too difficult to regard our decision as good and ourselves as justified if we had not to remember this final point of the command, the revelation of God’s love. God comes so uncannily close to us that he loves us; that he wants not just our work or our obedience or ourselves, but ourselves in our own freedom, ourselves not merely in our creaturely dependence but also in our creaturely independence; that he does not will to be without us. If he did not love us, the command would not be the question of our response of love. We should be merely effects of a superior cause or slaves of a powerful lord instead of children of an eternal Father. God’s lordship would not be most glorious in the fact that he is this Father. In face of the command it would be just a matter of factual observance, of the fulfillment of this or that outer or inner act or attitude, not of God’s heart and our own heart. Why, then, should we not be able to satisfy his command? Along such lines there is so much that we can do and that people have actually done. There have been those who in observance of God’s command have offered high things, perhaps the highest, perhaps the final thing of all, their lives. But it is a question of love for God (demonstrated in love for neighbor). And loving means freely wanting to be in all things, not without but with the one whom one loves in the same self-evident way as one cannot be without oneself. It is thus that God loves us and calls us to love him in return. In our decision however, in every moment of action, we find that we are those who do not love him in return. Remember that here again it cannot be a matter of more or less. Love is not a quantity. It is a quality that is either there or not. And when do we see ourselves to be those who have this quality? When do we not see ourselves instead as those who realize with shame that in the last resort they would rather be without both God and neighbor, if we are not to say even more clearly, with Question 5 of the Heidelberg Catechism, that we are prone by nature to hate God and our neighbor?7 We cannot escape the judgment of this question by pointing to the attitude and acts of individuals whose unselfishness, dedication, and readiness for sacrifice seem to rule out the assumption that they do not really love God and their neighbor but actually hate them. It must be remembered that we have to do here with the question which we must put and answer, not for others or with reference to others, but strictly with reference to ourselves. Even if we were among those saintly people, even if we gave an impression of perfect love for others, could we and would we say to ourselves that we have even partially fulfilled the command of love and are justified before God in virtue of this love? This is the question. True saints have not done so, we should have to say. Knowledge of the judgment passed on us by the command always means, even and precisely for saints, knowledge that we are not loving people, that God deals with us in a way that is qualitatively and not just quantitatively different from the way we deal with him, that something meets us in his love for which we are absolute debtors to him, not just partially but totally, not just in our worst moments but in our best as well. Certainly there may be important differences between the different debtors to God’s love and between our levels of indebtedness at different times. But there are never any final or decisive differences and we are never nondebtors. Of no one can it be said that he has rendered imperfect obedience, but still obedience. There are no favorable moments in which an individual can appeal at least to a minimum of obedience. From this standpoint our decision is again a faulty and corrupt decision. Our sanctification is precisely that, precisely as those who are loved by God, we find ourselves to be those who are unworthy to be loved, who have deserved wrath instead of love, and what meets us in this discovery, this unveiling of our hearts is in fact wrath, the wrathful love of God.

We must pause for a moment, however, to consider the great epistemological caveat with which we opened this section. Here, too, it cannot escape us that the way of thought that we are pursuing is not a secure one except in the reality of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Can we not conceive of very serious and even passionate objections to all that has been said here? Is it true that our acts, so far as may be seen, are deviations from the concrete command that is given us? What are we to say if someone steps up to assure us that he himself, perhaps as one who knows and possesses spiritual realities and gifts, believes he has in fact fulfilled, and does so continually, the concrete command that is given him, and that he thus regards himself as justified? Again, is it true that we can stand upright against the world, death, and destiny, but are always unrighteous before God? How can we reply if someone says that in the best part of him he does not finally know that irresponsibility and rebellion of man against God but does know a deepest basis of his nature in which he is always at peace with God, gives God the honor that is his due, and is therefore justified before God? Again, is it true, is it not a misanthropic exaggeration, to say that we never attain to the deepest meaning of the command of love for God and neighbor, and that placed under the command we recognize that we do not love at all and are thus condemned by the command? What are we to answer if someone tells us with the friendly but triumphant laugh of the worldling or even the Christian that he is not as bad as all that but does love God and neighbor and is sorry we cannot say this about him? And beyond this general contradiction, what are we to say if someone rejects the established either/or, the alternative of obedience or disobedience, and tries to tell us that in the gentle middle between the two there is such a thing as imperfect obedience, and that the relative differences of deviation, which we have not denied, imply from the opposite standpoint relative stages of perfection whose higher half is no longer covered by the statement that “through the law comes knowledge of sin” [Rom. 3:20]? |

It is tempting to answer rather angrily these objectors, who in fact are to be found not only among Roman Catholics, with Anselm’s dictum: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”8 Does it not seem obvious that we have here the sleep of the overrighteous? Will not such objectors finally be driven to wake up and see and admit their real situation, so that at least in the hour of death they will no longer be able to find comfort in their supposed fulfillment of the law? Perhaps even now we can really awake these sleepers with a powerful summons, though only if our summons does not represent a perverted Pharisaism, that of the publican, of villainy, but is a witness to the majesty of the divine command to which God himself says Amen. If we realize this, then we will be just as restrained with our charge of a deficient sense of the seriousness of sin in other people as we are with all charges. The statement that we are always sinners [cf. Rom. 3:23] cannot be victoriously asserted and demonstrated by emotional or rational means. Like the statement that the command declares God’s love to us, it cannot be forced on anybody, but can only be an appeal to the reality of the divine Word itself and to the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, to the reality which itself bears witness to itself where it is known. Calvin expressed this in the almost intolerably strict formula that “there never existed any work of a godly man which, if examined by God’s stern judgment, would not deserve condemnation” (Inst. III,14, 11). In this formula, however, there should be noted not only the cautious “if examined” but also the fact that the judgment is God’s judgment. The statement speaks truth, but highly particular truth, not general truth: truth that may be discerned only in this special case. This case, however, obviously cannot be created by speaking either to or about people, nor can anyone put himself in this case in which his work is really measured by God’s stern judgment. This case arises when the judgment takes place. Then man, even and precisely the godly man, does recognize, of course, that his work deserves condemnation. Then, having seen his face in a glass (James 1:23f.), he can no longer go away and forget what he has seen. Then he knows that he is done for. But he has as little accepted or attained this knowledge on his own as he has the knowledge of the love of God and his election. As little as the latter does it rest on his profound experience and great earnestness, and as little as the latter can it become an object of possession or a matter of a habit. He knows because and to the extent that he stands under the fatherly discipline of God. Discipline, however, is revelation. And revelation is the act of God. What we can know by revelation, however, is not suitable for use by us to silence others, even though they be the most stupid and unperceptive of objectors. It obstinately refuses to be used in this way. If we really understand the statement that all have gone astray, that all are wicked [Rom. 3:12], that God’s people is always the people of the lost, then we will pay almost more careful attention to that perverted Pharisaism than to the usual variety, knowing that this is not our own insight and that we cannot ourselves triumph with it. How can we indeed utter such a statement except with an awareness of the great risk with which every true theological statement is made? It might be that the insight, hidden from human eyes and ears, is much more genuinely present when the fatal objection is made than when the statement about man’s plight is perhaps affirmed too readily to be really affirmed under the discipline of the Holy Spirit, just as knowledge of the love of God can be much more genuinely present when the statement at issue is perhaps questioned and contested than when it is uttered as though we had its content in our pocket and the suspicion is aroused that perhaps we have said it to ourselves more than we should. As the command itself is grace, so it is grace when, through the command, God shows all our deciding and doing to be transgression of the command. As knowledge of sin by the command is God’s work of sanctification, so it escapes our grasp and is an act of our life that is hidden with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3]. We evade the truth if we try to evade the caveat with which alone we can speak in this regard.

As my decision comes into God’s judgment, it is—as my decision—condemned. It is, as my decision, measured by God’s command, apostasy, treason, and revolt. I do not do the good before God but—there is no third possibility—I do the bad. Yet as my decision comes into God’s judgment, as what I do is done before God, the “my” and “I” are radically called in question. Certainly it is my decision and I do what is done, but that my decision and deed are a last word, that they create a definitive situation, that I can make an eternal choice, is challenged by the fact that I come into God’s judgment and my deed is done before God. Certainly the command of God reveals to me what I have to think of my decision, how I am to understand myself, and as self-knowledge the revelation that I am a transgressor is the truth behind or above which there is no higher or deeper truth, no self-knowledge in which I find myself to be anything better than a transgressor. But that my self-knowledge or self-discovery exhausts the truth about my existence is denied by the same command because it is God’s command. To stay with my self-knowledge even though final clarity may have been given to it by the command, to refuse to be told more about myself than I can and must tell myself when instructed by God’s command, is something I am forbidden to do by the same command because it is God’s command. According to the revelation of the command I stand in God’s judgment and I do what I do before him. This means, however, that he speaks the last word by his decision and act, that he creates the definitive situation, that I am fundamentally known by him beyond my knowledge of myself, that I am known in a fundamentally different way from that in which I know myself, the fundamental difference being that, even in my apostasy, treason, and revolt, he who for his own reasons has bound himself to me from eternity sees me in the quality in which I am elected, loved, and blessed by him. His decision and act is the free good-pleasure which he has found in me by seeing me in Christ the second and obedient Adam, by imputing Christ’s righteousness to me as my own righteousness. In this decision of his, in virtue of this free divine good-pleasure, I have the quality in which I am worthy for all my unworthiness, of being the one he has elected, loved, and blessed. Before I chose what is corrupt, supra lapsum (before the fall), I was elected in Christ. Before I did not love, I was loved in Christ. Before my unsatisfactoriness came to light, satisfaction was perfectly done for me by Christ. God’s faithfulness was not overthrown by my unfaithfulness [cf. Rom. 3:3]. If God’s command reveals my unfaithfulness, the same command, if I hear it as God’s command, reveals God’s faithfulness. The thing which, beyond my self-knowledge, even beyond all the self-knowledge illumined by the command, I must let myself be told by the command, by the law that is “graced with the covenant of free adoption,” or by the gospel that is not to be separated from the command that is really given us, is that God was and is and will be faithful to me, that God has reconciled the cosmos to himself [cf. 2 Cor. 5:19]. It is still true, of course, that God knows me—and I have to let myself be told that he does—as I myself never know myself in any continuation, extension, or deepening of my self-knowledge. In my self-knowledge as such I must stay with the truth which in the area of self-knowledge is the truth, God’s truth. In this area I look in vain for any quality in which I am worthy to be elected, loved, and blessed by God. According to my knowledge, my decision, my existence will never be pleasing to God. If I may and should know that God has elected me, in face of what I know about myself through his command, I can regard the basis for this act of his only as a miracle, as sheer mercy.

It is not true, then, that I know myself as God knows me—in 1 Corinthians 13:12 this is expressly called an eschatological reality—but what is true is that I have to let myself hear this and be told it. God knows me without my being able to invoke the corresponding findings of my self-knowledge as witness thereto. This knowledge of myself, which is exclusively God’s knowledge, which cannot in any sense be translated or dissolved into self-knowledge, by which the truth of my self-knowledge under the illumination of the command is not abrogated, in which this self-knowledge of mine is rather comprehended and empowered—this knowledge is my justification in the judgment of his command. It is God’s knowledge of myself in which my self-knowledge under the illumination of his command, unaffected, unbroken, and unchanged, holy, just, and good, is confirmed in its judging and condemning force, so that out of it no possibility of self-justification arises but all such possibility is now definitively shattered. For in face of the fact that God justifies us we stand as those who are not justified by themselves and cannot justify themselves. Divine justification means as such an alien or forensic righteousness and not in any circumstances a native righteousness of our own. My justification in the judgment is that God knows me better than I know myself. It is not, of course, as though I know myself better than I find myself to be when placed in the light of his command. It is not as though, beyond this finding, I can say more consoling and pacifying and encouraging things about myself than that I am a transgressor. It is not as though somehow, at some time, I come into a position where I can turn the verdict which is passed on my decision and my existence by God’s command into a verdict that absolves me. The truth is always that God knows me better than I know myself. If my justification is real justification, it neither can nor should have anything whatever to do with even the sublimest form of self-justification. Even the most refined self-justification means evasion of the sentence imposed on my decision by the command. It means evasion of the command itself and therefore of the voice of God. I am justified when I listen to God’s voice, not when I maintain it with my own voice. All that I maintain with my own voice is either the asseveration of an illusory and supposedly better and more favorable self-knowledge or—“we are now justified by faith,” [Rom. 5:1]—a witness to the knowledge of myself which is exclusively heard through God’s voice and which is exclusively God’s. Paul’s assertion is not that we are just but that we are justified, and the continuation runs: “by faith,” which means that the reality as well as the knowledge is, with the same exclusiveness, ascribed to God, man’s role being to acknowledge by faith this reality and knowledge that are exclusively God’s. |

No logical difficulty should lead us astray on the point that this acknowledgment of the knowledge of God involves no self-knowledge and cannot mean either any reference to myself as the subject that knows in faith or any change in the result of my self-knowledge. Faith is the apperception in which human receptivity consists absolutely of hearing and obeying in the face of the divine spontaneity, of a hearing and obeying which certainly claims human spontaneity for itself but not a spontaneity correlative to the divine spontaneity. The gospel without which the law does not really reach us as God’s law, the theme and content of faith without which there is no obedience, is that my sin, my decision that is shown to be corrupt by the law, is forgiven sin. What is meant by forgiven sin? Not sin that is overlooked, forgotten, no longer accused by the command, and therefore not sin which in my self-knowledge is no longer sin for which I must repent before God in dust and ashes; but sin, the corrupt decision, in which God does not drop me but accepts me just as I am, just as I am in my self-knowledge, sin for whose corruption his decision intervenes, making good what I have done amiss. Sin is thus a wicked thing which I myself, illumined by his command, must always recognize to be wicked, which I must guard against changing into a good thing, but which, in face of his superior and not arbitrary, but righteous and free good-pleasure, is good before him, which, in his eyes, because he sees me in Christ and not in Adam, is in the symmetry and harmony with his will which I myself could only deny and for which I can only pray: “Forgive our debts” [Matt. 6:12]. Sin that is forgiven for Christ’s sake is sin which stands under the judgment, the judgment of the wrath of God, but which, even as such, as the corrupt decision which it still is in my own eyes, is accepted for God’s sake, not mine, as obedience and righteousness. This is justification. |

I myself never can or should see myself and my work in this new predication. I can and may see the justification of my wicked deeds only in Christ, as an alien righteousness and not my own. This means that I can and may only believe it as my justification. Believing means seeing oneself as one can do only when looking away from self to Christ, to God’s revealed Word in the totality in which it is law and gospel, and, of course, without looking back again as Lot’s wife did [cf. Gen. 19:26], without looking back again to self. To look back is to see only a city that is burning, that is burning down; it is thus to be turned into a pillar of salt. I do not have my justification as I have myself, but as I have God, or concretely, as I have Christ through his Word and Spirit, i.e., as God has me, as he gives himself to me, as he reveals himself to me, as in free and majestic disclosure and condescension he is my God. I have my justification as grace, invisible, hidden, grounded only in God’s good-pleasure, always coming to me and coming into force for me by his resolve. If I had it visibly as I have myself, then I could lay my hand on my work as a good work which I have done and whose goodness is my goodness, and the honor of my justification would be at least God’s honor and mine. The honor of the justification which I have only by faith as invisible grace in spite of my wicked work, the honor of forensic justification, is obviously God’s honor alone. The command comes to me as a revelation of him who alone will have the honor. Thus faith in the forgiveness of sins, in justification, is my Yes to God’s goodness as I completely look away from any past, present, or future goodness of my own, including that of my act of faith. I will not see in the human spontaneity of this act of faith a correlate of what God’s does for me, a merit. Faith is subjection to the sentence imposed on my work, which is the last word of my self-knowledge and which embraces the act of faith too. It is not as though faith were the missing good work, the pure act of obedience that finally comes on the scene. I know of my faith nothing other or better than what I know of the rest of my deeds. Our faith as an act of our own spontaneity is notoriously enmeshed in the corruption of our decision. That my faith is accepted as true faith is something that again I can only believe—believe as I believe in the miracle of the divine mercy. How can it be anything other than a miracle that it is true that through the weak, childish, insincere, and partial faith that we find in ourselves we have the forgiveness of sins and justification? I am justified by faith to the degree that in the darkness of my heart, as which I have also to understand my faith, Christ dwells and is enthroned; to the extent that in him the work of God, the act of the Holy Spirit, takes place. To that extent I am really justified, so that being justified has to mean that against all my knowledge of myself, and as I can know myself only as one who is accused and condemned, I am a doer of the Word. For I do God’s Word to me in the decision of my act when I allow that God is right in face of myself and my deeds, when I cling to the fact that this God who opposes me in his command does not let me fall in my unrighteousness any more than a father does his child, but counts me his even in my unrighteousness, so that both in allowing that God is right and also in clinging to him I affirm his goodness and not my own. In this way my action, my decision, is the doing of his will.

It is perhaps not superfluous to back up this summary of the doctrine of justification with some widely scattered voices of the Christian church from very different historical backgrounds. We begin with two Russian Orthodox theologians: Constantine Aksakov (d. 1860): “Every Christian is sinful as man but his way as that of a Christian is right,” and Alexei Chomiakov (d. 1860): As the church “is conscious of its inner union with the Holy Spirit, it gives thanks for all the good of God who is the only good, ascribing to itself and man nothing but the evil which in him opposes the divine work, for man must be weak in order that God may be strong in his soul” (Östl.Chrt. I, 93 and 168).9 We then turn to Luther

Thus are works forgiven, are without guilt, and are good, not by their own nature, but by the mercy and grace of God because of the faith which trusts on the mercy of God. Therefore we must fear because of the works, but comfort ourselves because of the grace of God.

(EA, 20, 211).10

It is no accident that precisely at this point on our way I need to quote, i.e., to confess that not alone but only in the consensus of the Christian church do I adopt the position I do. Here if anywhere it is appropriate to note again the great caveat with which alone one can present and hear the doctrine of sanctification, i.e., the recollection that in this doctrine we appeal absolutely to the only valid authority, to that which in the thesis at the head of the first chapter we called “the reality of the divine command.” This must speak for itself if we are to speak aright here. If it did not, our most zealous concern to speak aright could achieve only a construct that is weaker than the weakest house of cards. Even more boldly than [when] we spoke of the original electing love of God and the divine uncovering of human transgression, we must here presuppose the mercy of God which does not remove but brackets our human condemnation. We must presuppose the vicarious satisfaction of Christ and his righteousness that is imputed to us. We must take into account the faith which takes with full seriousness that condemnation and accepts the alien righteousness of Christ that is promised to it. We must take into account our own faith in which we can never believe in ourselves but only against ourselves. To take into account the Word and Spirit of God is to take grace into account, as we here do in a particularly pregnant way. As far as we are concerned in relation to grace, it is thus to pray. The Word is God’s Word, the Logos eternally made flesh, yet not on that account given up into our power. And the Spirit is God’s Spirit, blowing where he wills [cf. John 3:8] and not where we will. And the faith which, when it is a matter of hearing the gospel in the command, seems to offer the key to the whole, is not for everybody [cf. 2 Thess. 3:2], not only because even as our own weak and feeble act it is the greatest and most difficult work of all, nor because, seen from outside, it always seems to be an absurd grasping after the impossible, but also and even more so because, as the faith that really justifies, it is no more and no less than the all-decisive event of the love of God which he owes to no one, ⌜and because through it⌝ Christ ⌜is⌝ in us in the Pauline sense of the phrase. |

We can and must remember that grace is assigned to us, that we need no arts or ruses to participate in it and thus to hear and say as truth all that we have said and heard. It is a matter of grace, however, and even though it would make no sense to look about for complicated ways to lay hold of it, this does not imply that we need to use only some simple means but rather that there are no means at all, that it is pure gift, and that as such it comes to us with the full freedom of the giver.

We can and do also remember that we are not alone when we venture to count on the Word and Spirit of God as witnesses to the truth of what has been said and heard. In venturing it we stand with the Christian church, which is none other than the community of justified sinners, of sinners justified in Christ, and in which we do not make the venture in our own name but by command and under promise. The Christian church is the place where we must at any rate make the venture—it remains a venture even when made in obedience—to follow the summons: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ [cf. Acts 16:31]. The Christian church cannot guarantee what obviously has to be guaranteed here, namely, the sanctifying reality of the divine command itself. Even in the Christian church no one can believe for another, no one can safely lead another past the dark abyss of offense, unbelief, disobedience, and the despair that does not hear the gospel but only the law, which without the gospel is certainly not the true and divine law—the despair that might always be a mark of our rejection, since God never owes it to anyone, never owes it to us, to elect us instead of rejecting us. Precisely in the church we know that deep down at the decisive point we can appeal only to the Lord and not to the church. |

We can and do also remember that in counting on the Word and Spirit of God we do no other than take seriously our baptism as the sign of promise which is given to each of us personally and truly as a sign of promise for our thinking, and therefore with epistemological significance. In this respect the gift of baptism is that I may and should regard myself as one to whose existence it belongs, no matter what may be his experiences or the results of his self-knowledge, to make a comforted beginning with grace, i.e., with the knowledge of God, and with the same comfort to think from that starting point. The comfort, however, again cannot mean power over the Lord of baptism, as though in baptism we were placed in some kind of “it” and not placed in the hands of a “he.” Nor is baptism fulfillment, for in it we are commended to the grace of God. Grace means, however, that we should hear the word of fulfillment through it. |

When we hear this word through it, then we must always remember that he who stands there must see to it that he does not fall [cf. 1 Cor. 10:12], or, in other words, that all hearing is a summons to hear again and not simply to be content to have heard. Certainly the evident truth is heard here. But what is evident is a participial and therefore a verbal form. Here the truth becomes evident. Like the manna in the wilderness it is a good thing that is given to be received and enjoyed, not conserved and stored away. When some people left part of it until morning, “it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted” (Ex. 16:20f.). So it is with the evident truth of grace. We cannot lay our hands on God’s Word and Spirit as they are given to us, but we live by the fact that God does not withdraw his hand from us. This is what I mean when I say that we must reckon here with the Word and Spirit of God in such a way that we can think and reflect only as we pray. That our thinking is not without an object but has an object can only be—if we ask how this can be—a matter of the answering of prayer. Without the answering of prayer we could understand theology at this central point only as a vessel with no content. In prayer alone is our membership of the church, our baptism, so powerful that the freedom of the Spirit to blow where he wills [cf. John 3:8] does not alarm us and we need not be afraid, just as God’s people in the wilderness did not have to be afraid when they went forward to each new day with empty hands. It need hardly be said, I hope, that this too, and this precisely, is a direction that we cannot follow unless it is given us to do so from above [cf. John 3:27].

God’s command justifies us as it judges us. For God’s command, the sentence that it imposes on us, is included in God’s promise that even and precisely as those that are condemned by him we are just before him, we are not repulsed by him because of our sins but upheld by him, we are not let fall in our corruption but carried by him. “Jesus receives sinners”11 [cf. Luke 15:2] and “as you are, you may come.”12 This is the gospel which comes to us in and with the command. Yet we have not fully described the reality of the divine command if we do not engage in a final act of reflection and state expressly that this gospel comes to us only in the command and through the command. God’s command, as, recognized or not, it meets us at every moment of our action as the judgment under which we are set, says two things about us according to what we have stated thus far. First, it says that we are in the wrong before God, and second, it says that as those who are in the wrong before God we are just before him. Since God by his command primarily claims us as his own, counts us his, sees us as those who belong to him and are loved by him, two things are necessarily included. First, as those who are thus claimed by him we cannot help but see clearly how totally we fail to meet this claim. Second, in spite of this failure we cannot help but see in the same claim God’s inconceivable and unmerited good-pleasure in us. The two statements, however, spring from the same root, and for this reason we cannot be content to understand them as mere statements. What God’s Word says about us in this twofold sense it says to us. It is not just truth but truth spoken and heard. As it meets us, it does not continue standing over against us but grasps at us and determines us. Existence in the decision of our act, whose point is God’s decision about us, existence under the twofold statement made concerning us, is a highly determined existence, an existence determined not by us but by God’s Word. This determination of our existence by God’s Word is according to our presuppositions the essence of our sanctification. It makes sense to subsume election, the knowledge of sin, and justification under the concept of sanctification, as we have done, only if what we are aiming at in all this is the determination of human existence by God’s act as thus described, the grasping at us that takes place in and with all this. |

We could not in fact speak either of the knowledge of sin or of justification, and certainly not of God’s love and our election, if we did not think of the faith in and for which all this takes place. And if in so doing we have reached the point where the reality of the divine command can only speak for itself, there can be no doubt, we hope, that, when it speaks for itself in its unique sovereignty, it speaks to us, that real faith, even though we can understand it only as God’s work on and in us, is our own faith, our absolutely miraculous being with that reality in a way that does not derive from our self-determination, our obedience. Election, the knowledge of sins, and the forgiveness of sins, in a word, grace, becomes an event when we say Yes to it. Since this Yes of ours is the last and greatest miracle of grace itself, we do well to see to it that before ourselves and others we ground this Yes of ours at only one point, derive it from only one point, and with it stand only at one point—the point where we do not understand ourselves, where we do something which seems to call in question all our other acts as it itself seems to be called in question when seen from the standpoint of these other acts, and yet which is still undoubtedly our own Yes. And if it were not spoken, if our faith were not obedience, the obedience of faith, yet still obedience, it would not be faith at all, and all that we have thought and said about election, the knowledge of sin, and the forgiveness of sin, would be without object. That we obey in faith and say Yes to God’s Word is the determination of our existence by the command of God which meets us in the decision of our acts and decides concerning us and judges us. As God’s Word determines us in this way, determines us for obedience, it is our sanctification. By this Yes of ours we do not in any way gain control over God. There is no cooperation here, no going to meet God, no merit on our part. It is in our hearts and on our lips [cf. Deut. 30:14], it is a characterization, modification, and orientation of our sinful existence and act by the reality of the divine command itself, which does its work by and of itself alone. It is the act of the Word and Spirit whose honor we cannot even partially, even the least little bit, snatch away for ourselves. But in virtue of this act of the Word and Spirit it is our Yes, and this Yes is our sanctification. |

This Yes is to God’s grace, as it is itself grace. But it is to God’s total grace, i.e., not just to the gospel, but with the gospel to the law of God too. The grace of God is total in this way. The claim of God goes out with this totality. As we believe that God claims us, we accept the gospel. In all circumstances, even though our sin were as scarlet [cf. Isa. 1:18] and his law condemned us to hell, it is peace, joy, and blessedness to be claimed by God. But how can we believe without obeying, without affirming the law, without affirming that this God of the gospel claims us, that that grasp at us is made, that that hand is laid on us? I formulated this final meaning of sanctification as follows: “God establishes our sinful action as the work of obedience.”13 Two statements are needed to elucidate this. According to what we said in subsections 3 and 4, sanctification means the knowledge and forgiveness of sin: knowledge obviously by the law and forgiveness by the gospel of one and the same Word of God. What does it now mean that our sanctification takes place in our own Yes to this whole Word of God, to this total grace? What does this affirmation mean? At root it obviously means that we affirm our forgiven sin as known and our known sin as forgiven. In this respect the meaning of the concept “affirmation,” i.e., “obedience,” obviously shows itself to be a two-sided one. As we believe in the concrete unity of the divine judgment, i.e., as we see our life under the divine judgment in this unity; as, seeing it, we live it; as, placed under the divine judgment in this unity we proceed from the decision of this moment to that of the next, we obey, we are sanctified.

a. Our forgiven sin is known. Only of my forgiven sin do I know that it is known, that it is sin. As it is forgiven me I know it. To be justified by God is to be awakened from the sleep of the view that my act is or can be justified by itself. To have peace by and in God’s grace is to have no peace in self. It is God’s goodness that calls us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Far from making the knowledge of sin an outdated or less serious matter, the gospel is the very thing that makes it serious. We have seen that sin takes place when, loved by God, we do not love him in return. The gospel is the confirmation of God’s love even in the midst of our corrupt decision. If I hear that in my sin and treason I am the child God loves, I then come to realize what an apostate and traitor I am. How could I know that I sin without knowing against whom I sin? I know this, however, only as God’s Word is gospel, as my sin is forgiven me. Then I do know it, however, and I do so with the qualified knowledge in which I know my own reality, so that my knowledge of sin is also the confession of my guilt and need; the confession that I see myself accused and mortally imperilled by my transgression of the command; the confession that my sin pains me in the double sense that I repent of it as my guilt and bewail it as my need. And beyond both these things the confession that I cannot myself remove it, that there is in me no Archimedian point from which I can master it, that I have no resources with which to escape the disquiet into which it plunges, not something in me but myself, that I am referred instead—kyrie eleison—to the mercy of God. In other words, that I know that I need the forgiveness that is given to me, that in face of the corruptness of my decision I have no option but forgiveness if the corruptness and its consequences are not to take their course. When it is truly heard, the gospel forces me to take my transgression seriously as guilt and need, and also to take myself seriously as a transgressor, i.e., as one who of himself can be only a transgressor. To take sin, and myself as a sinner, seriously, is not something that I achieve of myself but something that is thrust upon me by the gospel. It is one side of the determination of my existence by God’s Word, of the characterization of my sinful act by the command that encounters me, of my own movement as this is started by the divine judgment in which I say Yes to the grace of God. This Yes means taking the place that is proper to one who can be helped only by mercy, who has a choice only between condemnation and forgiveness, and who then comes to realize that it is not his own choice if he is forgiven. The peace of God creates, not an idle and futile lack of peace in us, but one that is necessary and salutary, the whole distress that Paul depicted in Romans 7. It sees to it that we are not released from it, that we are plunged into this disquiet, that we move forward to the decision of the very next moment. As it thus sets us in repentance, my sinful action is established as the work of sanctification. A good work is always a work of penitence, a work that is done in that repentance and distress and with that cry for mercy. The work of my very next moment is a sanctified work when it is a work of penitence in this sense, when it is the work of one who, just because he has received forgiveness, has accepted the verdict passed on him.

b. Our known sin is forgiven. Only of known sin do I know that it is forgiven me. As it is seen, I know it. Real condemnation by conscience takes place when there is real pardon by God. Real lack of peace in self takes place when there is peace through God’s grace. Through God’s total grace, we must emphasize. Peace through grace cannot mean the abolition, but only the establishment of the law, of the law that judges us by holding out before us what God wills from us. That we are forgiven does not mean that it ceases to hold this out before us, but rather begins to do so. To be set in penitence, as happens precisely through forgiveness, is thus again to be awakened out of the sleep of a false opinion, this time the opinion that the corruption of my decision is a kind of final necessity. Though my self-knowledge knows no word that can lead me beyond the fact that I failed, and fail, and will fail, the gospel tells me of a knowledge beyond the limits of my self-knowledge by which what the law holds out before me has another aim than that of forcing me into repentance. The forgiveness without which there is no penitence is God’s denial, his nonacknowledgement, of sin. We accept this divine No when we really accept the judgment passed on us by God’s command. God’s nonacknowledgment of sin means positively the establishment of his good will. God affirms this will by not imputing our sin to us [cf. 2 Cor. 5:19]. If my sin is forgiven me, this means that I am recognized and acknowledged as one who is free, and summoned to do God’s will. |

Our acceptance, then, is more than acceptance of God’s judgment. It denotes a movement of our existence that is not adequately covered by the word “penitence.” The Greek word metanoia expresses the missing second aspect. Because only forgiven sin can really be recognized and confessed sin, the recognition and confession, if they are to be serious, are not possible without conversion. We have understood the law badly if we have not understood that, as it humbles us, it summons us to change from a corrupt decision to a correct one, to readiness to do better next time. It really humbles us only through the gospel. But the gospel, which in spite of our corruption calls us to fellowship with God, tells us about God’s antithesis to our corruption, about the miracle of the holy one who comes down to the unholy. In face of this miracle, if we truly grasp it as such, in face of the mercy shown us if we have understood it as such, in face of the very different place which is obviously that of the God of the gospel who calls us to himself by the gospel, we cannot possibly be content with our known sin but are set in conflict with it, i.e, in conflict with ourselves, since we always find ourselves to be sinners, in conflict for God against ourselves. However it may be with us and whatever may be the limits of our self-knowledge, the law comes into force as a demand that we satisfy God’s will, as an order to make a better decision, to deny ourselves as we have been, to put to death—mortification—the old man, ourselves as we know ourselves, in order—vivification—that the new man that I am in Christ, not in myself, may live. Contrition of heart and oral confession would undoubtedly not be real metanoia, real obedience, real determination by the divine command, if there were no satisfaction of works, no halt, disruption, or break in my sinful action; or, positively, if there were no intimation of the life of the new man, of my hidden life with Christ; if the same law that convicts me of my corruption did not hold out before me the right which I should do instead of the wrong and for which, no matter what else may be said about me, I am claimed; if I did not know that this right is required of me; if my action did not bear witness to this knowledge. Here again we have that qualified knowledge, ⌜practical (like all theological knowledge) and⌝ not intellectualistic, in which I really know my own reality and which as such cannot possibly be an idle knowledge. This is the knowledge that because I am forgiven I can have no part in sin; I am as much sundered from it as is God himself who forgives me. Or, positively, it is the knowledge that I belong to God so that my will is pledged to God’s will. “We are not our own, we are God’s” (Calvin).14

This knowledge of my obligation, or of my freedom for God and against sin, is my conversion, or the satisfaction of works, which is the unavoidable other side of real submission to God’s command. It, too, is not an act of self-reflection or self-determination, but, as I am forgiven by the gospel the law comes into force with its demand and puts me in this new position in which I must deny the final necessity of my own corruption and affirm a final freedom for my righteousness before God, not on the basis of a discovery that I have finally made in myself, but on the basis of the order which I am given by the law that has gone forth with the gospel, and which I have to take just as seriously as what the same law tells me, by means of my self-knowledge, about my inability to do anything good. This order does not point me to myself, of course, but to Christ. In him I am no longer the old man who must sin, but I am claimed as the new creature, the free man. Knowing myself in him, I must in fact let myself be told by the law: You can because you should! Letting myself be told this is the other side of the determination of my existence by God’s Word, of the characterization of my sinful act by the command, of my own movement by grace. Grace does not just discipline me but puts me under discipline. Accepting this discipline, the discipline of the law, is the other side of the Yes to God’s grace in which grace comes to completion. It means taking the place which belongs to one who has been shown mercy. It means going on to the decision of the very next moment as one who has accepted the order. Good works, then, are works of conversion, works done on hearing the appeal to the new man that I am, not in myself, but in Christ. When our action is done in this hearing, as sinful action it is established as the work of obedience. And as thus established, even though we cannot deny its sinfulness, it is sanctified work, work by which God will be lauded and praised as it is his will that he be by justified sinners.15

At this last point in our train of thought we must not omit to note in conclusion that all this has been said on the assumption that the reality of the divine command speaks for itself. Neither the knowledge nor the forgiveness of sin is given to us apart from this reality, nor is our faith, our obedience of faith that says Yes to grace, to our penitence, or to our conversion. The determination of our existence by the command, our new life in sanctification in which we move on from the decision of this moment to that of the next, is a being in relation to this reality. We have no control over the reality, nor have we, therefore, over its relation to our existence. Our sanctification, our new life, is, all along the line, hidden with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3]. Its manifestations are as such unequivocally manifest only to God, as they are really its manifestations only by God’s act. The new life cannot be abstracted from the free, giving act of God: “in him we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28]. This life cannot be reinterpreted as a being, having, and doing of man distinguished from direct knowability from all his other being, having, and doing. We cannot be too cautious in handling all the concepts that might denote a third sphere between God and man and common to both. The Bible knows no such sphere. It knows only the event of the incarnate Word and the quickening Spirit. In this event God is and remains the one who acts, the one who acts, of course, as the one who is. I have in mind the concept of “pneumatic reality.” If this relates to the reality of the Holy Spirit, then it is as well to say that it never appears with direct knowability as a second reality of man alongside his secular reality. It is a qualification of the secular reality of our life but strictly a qualification from above, by God, and therefore one that bears witness to itself as a divine act but cannot be said to be our possession or attribute or position. If it is our position, if it is so in this way, i.e., by God’s grace, then I speak factually on this basis, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear. But the statement or assertion that I speak out of pneumatic reality is an impossible one. In this connection we have already at an earlier point expressed our doubts about the too direct use of concepts like Christianity, Christians, and Christian.16 To be Christian is to be en Christo and the term can be used to qualify human persons, things, and acts only if it is remembered that it refers to the relation which exists only as the reality established by God. The same applies—the same point is at issue—to the concept of the sanctified and the saints. In the Old and New Testaments holy denotes a divinely established relation in which man stands when he is determined thereto by God. Holy in the Bible does not mean devout or virtuous but separated by God.

It is divine separation when our action is sanctified, not a quality immanent in the action itself. Knowing the divine act of sanctification we can and should offer our action to God as penitence and conversion just as a sacrifice is offered (Rom. 12:2). But this offering, the work of the very next moment, is no less subject to the divine crisis than everyday acts. Cain, too, brought an offering [cf. Gen. 4:3–5]. Pagans also sacrifice on the basis of having heard something, but what they have heard is not God’s command. In no case is it our intention that makes our action holy. ⌜Even the highest and purest sacrifice is not holy in itself nor is its offering as such.⌝ Sacrifice becomes holy by the fact that God accepts it. If we have seen the concept of sanctification come to fulfillment in our own Yes to grace, we must emphasize again that it is grace when we say Yes to grace, grace that we do say Yes, and grace that we really say Yes to grace, that our action is not without an object or does not relate to some other object. If we want to abstract our penitence from God’s acceptance of it, over which we have no control, then we have no means to differentiate its salutary disquiet from the useless disquiet of our own self-knowledge when this is left on its own. With our penitence as such, be it ever so sincere and serious, we cannot force the mercy of God which alone gives it meaning. Similarly, if we wanted to take our conversion alone, apart from God’s acceptance of it, as obedience in disobedience, how could it be anything but self-deception to think that we are really converted? It is not at all true that God’s mercy comes to us as we convert ourselves. The Word and Spirit of God guarantee the existence of the relation between the divine Yes and the human Yes. They are the guarantee as they themselves are the relation. The existence of the relation is not guaranteed directly but indirectly—indirectly inasmuch as we must always go back to God’s own gracious will and take refuge in prayer to find it guaranteed. On the question whether there might also be a direct guarantee of the relation, the ways of Roman Catholic and Protestant thinking divide, although in the course of centuries the distinction has become suspiciously blurred on the Protestant side. Instead of being content to seek the reality of sanctification in the eternally hidden act of divine election, many have thought, and still think, that they should seek it and can find it in some supposedly real saintliness of man which can be perceived and guaranteed directly apart from prayer and the answering of prayer. We should know what we are doing when we play around with possibilities of this kind, when we think along lines such as these. It is hard to see how we can come to do so except on the ground of Roman Catholic presuppositions about God, man, sin, grace, and, above all, the church. On that ground everything is clear when we do it. For everything is in advance, in a masterly way, posited on the direct guarantee of hagiōsynē which supplements if it does not replace the guarantee by God. Among us everything is unclear when we do not dare to follow the reformers any more in radically renouncing any such direct guarantee and thus being all the more certain of the indirect and only true guarantee. |

Karl Heim in the introduction to the second edition of his Glauben und Leben, pp. 29f.17 brings against the theology represented here the objection that its system of coordinates is incomplete, since it does not have alongside God and man, eternity and time, the third dimension in which there is put on certain men and actions the note or accent of eternity, the concrete speaking of the Holy Spirit as witness is borne to this in the New Testament. Now I believe that I, too, see this problem of the third dimension. I could have described (§§5 and 6) the problem of certain men and actions more clearly than Heim does as the problem of theological ethics and theology in general. But in reply I should have to say that theology has not so much to answer this problem as [rather] to recognize that it is posed—posed by the fact that God himself has given and gives and will give the answer here with unrepeatable truth and uniqueness. Theology itself certainly cannot give this answer since it is not the Holy Spirit and has not been appointed the vicar of the Holy Spirit. Precisely because it is a matter of the speaking of the Holy Spirit in this third dimension, I fail to see how we can come to concern ourselves with this coordinate which is the point of intersection of the other two. It is God’s act alone to draw this third coordinate and thus to posit the point of intersection of the other two. All philosophy, and all theology too, can only point thankfully to this act by bringing to light the first two coordinates, if this action for which it is empowered by revelation is not to be without object. Things can be different only if we think that the concrete speaking of the Holy Spirit, the accent of eternity on certain men and actions, is given directly in the reality of the church or—and this surely cannot be Heim’s view—in the secret inspiration of individual believers. If we believe the church and if we believe the communion of saints as the place and means of revelation but not as revelation itself, then all that theology can do is confess the hiddenness of revelation, the hiddenness of our life with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3], by refraining from trying to speak into or out of this hiddenness, by being fully content to bear witness in the two-dimensionality in which men can speak of God, by leaving the concrete speaking of the Holy Spirit to the Holy Spirit himself. How can theology, however much it might be a theology of faith, ignore the caveat that all that it says out of that reality is in vain if God does not add his Amen to it, ⌜that it cannot establish and certify what it says by claiming that it says it out of that reality? It is established and certified thus when God adds his Amen to it, but not otherwise. We cannot link a claim to this Amen with what we say.⌝ Is the caveat unimportant then? Is not the divine Amen itself revelation? When we observe the caveat—and what Protestant theology will refuse to do so?—do we not admit that only revelation itself speaks out of that reality, that the concrete speaking of the Holy Spirit cannot be repeated, that we can engage only in a respectful, loving, and relevant speaking around it? If it is true, and we have heard it said often enough in recent years, that the essence of Protestant theology in distinction from Roman Catholic theology is to be a theology of the cross and not a theology of glory, not a theology that thinks it can inform itself about the mystery of God and speak the Word of God itself, then precisely in the question of that relation, which becomes a burning one in sanctification as nowhere else, it must not become a theology of impatience. ⌜Our counterquestion to the theology of pietism, then, is whether it is not a theology of impatience and we believe that Protestant theology⌝ has to recognize18 that seeing the coincidence of the divine Yes with the human Yes is an eschatological reality, Jesus Christ himself, whose action does not finally denote a third coordinate but the end and also the beginning of the first and second coordinates of our thinking about God and divine things.

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