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Introduction

§1

Ethics as a theological discipline is the auxiliary science in which an answer is sought ⌜in the Word of God to the question of the goodness of human conduct. As a special elucidation of the doctrine of sanctification it is reflection on⌝1 how far the Word of God proclaimed and accepted in Christian preaching effects a definite claiming of man.

Ethics (from ēthos) is equivalent to morals (from mos). Both are the philosophy of customs (Sitten). The German Sitte (from the Old German situ) denotes a mode of human conduct, a constancy of human action. In general, then, ethics or morals is the philosophy, science, or discipline of modes of human conduct or constancies of human action. As generally defined in this way, however, ethics is not yet distinguished from three other sciences: 1. The psychology of the will investigates the natural constancies of human action; 2. the study of habits, the statistics of morality, or the history of culture enquires into the same constancies as they have achieved freedom and continue freely in history; and 3. the science of law studies them as they have received the guarantee and sanction of political society. Whenever the task of ethics is undertaken as a real task, however, it is understood as one that differs from the tasks of these other disciplines. |

Custom in the sense of the ethical or moral question is something other than the congruence of a mode of conduct with a discoverable natural law of human volition and action. Even the naive identification of natural law and moral law as this may be seen in Rousseau, L. Feuerbach, and E. Haeckel does not pretend merely to describe but also lays claim upon human volition and action.2 Among these three, and even more so among the true perfecters of ethical naturalism, M. Stirner and F. Nietzsche, this identification is a matter of passionate proclamation.3 One does not preach a natural law as the identity of natural and moral law was continually preached from Rousseau to Nietzsche. Where this is preached, identification in fact obviously means predication, which means that the distinction between the two is abandoned. |

Custom in the sense of the ethical question also differs from the congruence of human action with what is ordinarily called habit, i.e., with a more or less widespread usage. Though this congruence may exist to some degree, and though an ethical trend characterized by the names of Höffding and Paulsen4 has now and then nourished the identification of the two concepts, nevertheless no one has seriously attempted to dissolve moral philosophy in the study of custom or to contest that immoral customs on the one side and the moral breach of custom on the other are possibilities with which ethics has to reckon. |

Morality in the sense of the ethical question differs thirdly from congruence with existing state law or legislation. If state law with its palpable general validity is for Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) the most pregnant expression of the constancy of human action which ethics seeks;5 if morality according to H. Cohen may try to view itself as the power of legislation;6 and if an unending affinity between morality and law is the concept of many positivistic and idealistic ethicists, no one thus far has been able to establish a simple equation of ethics and jurisprudence. |

The ethical question would be at an end, or would not yet have begun, if we really tried and were able to unite it fully with the psychological, historical, and legal inquiries to which human action is also subject. The ethical question cannot in fact be asked without some attention being paid to the constancies of human behavior which these other sciences investigate. ⌜But it is the knowledge of the natural, historical, and legal constancies which can become a problem and call for ethical knowledge. The ethical problem cannot begin where the natural, historical, and legal constancy of human action has not become a problem. As this comes about, however, the question reaches fundamentally beyond natural, historical, and legal possibility and reality.⌝ It becomes the ethical question as the question of the origin of this constancy, of the correctness of the natural, historical, and legal rule, of the worth which makes a human action a style of action, which gives it a claim to be normative, to ask for repetition, to be a model for others. This question is not set aside by the reference to those other constancies but is posed precisely by the insight into them. Are they valid? That is the ethical question. The morality or goodness of human conduct which ethics investigates has to do with the validity of what is valid for all human action, the origin of all constancies, the worth of everything universal, the rightness of all rules. ⌜With such concepts as validity, origin, worth, and rightness we denote provisionally and generally that which transcends the inquiries of psychology, cultural history, and jurisprudence—the transcendent factor which in contrast is the theme of ethical inquiry.⌝

In this first section we have to make it clear in what specific sense we have to deal with ethics in the sphere of theology.

It is not self-evident that there is in theology a particular discipline which bears the name of ethics and addresses itself to the ethical task. It is not self-evident that in theology we have to pursue ethics as well as dogmatics. The question whether and in what sense this is to be established encyclopedically does not merely belong, as E. W. Mayer (Ethik, p. 192)7 rather disparagingly thinks, “to the ancient inventory of theological and ethical literature,” but as it is answered it is so significant for the character and direction of the handling of the discipline that we cannot avoid discussing it. We shall first learn and test the answers that have been given to the question in the past.

There has not always been theological ethics. It is true that in hints and directions on detailed and concrete problems, in exegetical and homiletical excursuses, at specific points in dogmatic investigations and presentations, the question of the goodness of human conduct has been raised and answered by theologians from the very first. ⌜Yet well into the second century there seem to have been obstacles to making this an independent question in theological thought and utterance. It is worth noting that one of the first from whom we have particular ethical tractates was the later Montanist Tertullian.8 And the author of the supposedly oldest Christian ēthika or collection of Christian rules of life was none other than the great theoretician and organizer of Eastern monasticism, Basil of Caesarea.⌝9 As a systematic work, kept separate from the development of the Christian creed, we may then mention Ambrose’s writing De officiis (c. 391).10 A feature of this is that in title, form, and content it is fairly close to the pagan classical model of Cicero. Another feature is that it offers direction not so much for the Christian as such and in general but rather for the future clergyman, so that we find in it (I, 73f.) such admonitions as that one should not dawdle along the street with the slowness of a transported idol nor rush along it with the speed of a startled deer. The presupposition on which an independent Christian ethics arose is obviously the concept of the possibility and reality of an evident human holiness, of a perfect Christian life which could be demanded from and ⌜realized by all Christians according to Tertullian and by the clergy and especially the monks according to Basil and Ambrose,⌝ and then of the need to describe this holiness and supply its norm. It is materially significant that in doing this there was a by no means arbitrary compulsion to follow the familiar channels of thought of Aristotle and Stoicism, ⌜a resultant phenomenon represented by the name of Gregory the Great, who could expressly work the four cardinal virtues of antiquity into his exposition of the Book of Job.⌝11 |

Medieval Christian ethics may be found in brief, not in a textbook, but in the famous rule of Benedict of Nursia (the end of the sixth century)12 or at the end of the Middle Ages in the Imitation of Christ ascribed to Thomas à Kempis.13 Even a comprehensive and purely scientific account of ethics such as one finds in the second part of the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas under the title of “Human Acts in General and in Particular” unambiguously has its basis in Aristotle and its crown and true scope in the religious life in the narrowest sense of the term, namely, the life of the clergyman and the monk.14 The tendency to raise the ethical question independently is undoubtedly present in Thomas but in him, too, there still seem to be obstacles to doing this, for in fact he presented it within and not outside his dogmatics and in subordination to the dogmatic inquiry. |

Luther with his Sermon on Good Works (1520)15 could hardly be claimed as a reformation example of independent ethics; and Calvin’s strong interest in the ethical question did not prevent him from embodying in his dogmatics his discussions of the regenerative significance of the Holy Spirit and faith and of the law and obedience to it.16 ⌜From Melanchthon, it is true, we have two versions of a philosophical ethics (1538, 1550, Corp. Ref. 16),17 but in his case, too, the Loci leave us in no doubt as to the systematic place of theological ethics.⌝18

It was the followers of the reformers who began gradually to see things differently. The Lutheran Thomas Venatorius with his Three Books on Christian Virtue (1529)19 may be mentioned first. He belonged to Nuremberg, was obviously influenced by Andreas Osiander, and thus described faith as the love, power, and virtue imparted to man in Christ (W. Gass, II, 107).20 Calvinism became Puritanism on the fatal slope on which Lambert Danaeus in Geneva wrote his Three Books on Christian Ethics.21 The Lutheran George Calixt followed him with his Epitome of Moral Theology (1634).22 In the seventeenth century, the age of the Jesuits in the Roman Catholic church, the Pietists in the Protestant church, the coming of Cartesianism into philosophy with its rediscovery of the creative role of the human subject, and the development of the baroque in art with the Faustian fervor of its will to express itself, interest in Christian morality begins to acquire a new importance among Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians. ⌜The dogmaticians now protest what the reformers had taken for granted, namely, that theology is not just a theoretical but also a practical discipline, indeed, that it is even more practical than speculative (F. Turrettini, 1, 7, 15),23 and as the result of many discussions⌝ the distinction between dogmatic and moral theology begins to be gradually accepted. |

In the eighteenth century moral theology unmistakably took over the lead. In Schleiermacher we again find doctrinal and moral teaching brought into a certain balance and mutual relation, but it should not be overlooked that this took place in the framework and on the basis of a fundamentally superior discipline which Schleiermacher again calls ethics,24 a view which a hundred years later is confirmed and readopted with some modifications by W. Herrmann25 and E. Troeltsch.26 By means of some simple comparisons K.I. Nitzsch and later Martin Kähler and H.H. Wendt, also in the nineteenth century, renewed the attempt to integrate ethics into dogmatics after the pattern of Thomas and the reformers.27 More typical of the thrust of the age was the reverse attempt of R. Rothe, in accordance with his theory of the gradual disappearance of the church in the state, to swallow up dogmatics totally in ethics apart from assigning to it the miserable role of presenting a theology of the confessional writings.28 It has yet to be seen—I have in mind E. Hirsch on the one side29 and F. Gogarten and R. Bultmann on the other30—whether the renewal of interest in the ethical task and determination of theology resulting from the Kierkegaard renaissance of the last ten years will not finally work itself out in the direction of R. Rothe.31

So much, then, for our sketch of the history of the problem. For the relative newness of the independence of ethics in theology and the ensuing tendency to swallow up dogmatics in it points to a problem. Assuming that in some sense and context theology has to discuss the goodness of human conduct, is it appropriate or advisable to do this in the form of a separate discipline from dogmatics?

First, the negative accent which dogmatics acquires with this distinction, as though it did not deal also and precisely with the goodness of human conduct, could very well mean an emptying out of the task of dogmatics against which the latter ought to appeal in all earnest. It was an insidious move when already in the middle of the seventeenth century theologians began to speak of the two “parts” of theology: first the knowledge (agnitio) of God and then the service (cultus) of God (Wendelinus, Prolegomena IV, p. 38).32 Those theologians showed more tact who did not work out this division in the form of giving dogmatics two main sections (so Wendelinus, P. van Mastricht33 et al.) but like the Lutheran J. Gerhard tried to make it fruitful point by point.34 What does it mean for dogmatics if De Wette (Lehrbuch, p. 1)35 is right when he says that in doctrine our knowledge soars up in faith and surmise to eternal truth while in morality the law is expounded by which our power of action achieves goals in life? Or if A. Schlatter (Ethik, p. 30)36 is right when he says that the dogmatician illumines our consciousness but the ethicist sheds light on our will? Or if G. Wünsch (Theologische Ethik, p. 66)37 is right when he says that dogmatics shows how we believe while ethics should show how we should act on the basis of the holy? If ⌜the knowledge of God is not in itself the service of God,⌝ if eternal truth does not include goals, if illumined consciousness is not in itself will and faith act—then what are they? Does not all this bring dogmatics under the suspicion of being an idle intellectual game? If it really accepts these and similar disjunctions, it has good reason to abdicate in favor of ethics. But it might well be that it cannot do so because it has to carry out a task which ethics with its question of the goodness of human conduct cannot take from it but which wholly and at every point embraces this concern of ethics, so that with Thomas and the reformers, and some more recent scholars who have followed them, it must resolutely contest the necessity and possibility of a theological ethics independent of dogmatics.

Second and conversely the positive accent which ethics acquires with the distinction can from the very outset prove to be a source of error for the way in which the goodness of human conduct can be a theme in theology. Those who radically distinguish dogmatics and ethics undertake to show how far different inquiries and methodologies really underlie the two. But so far as one can see, the result of this is highly suspect. ⌜I will give some illustrations from the more recent history of theological ethics.⌝

According to Schleiermacher (Chr. Sitte, p. 23)38 dogmatics has to ask what has to be because the religious form of the self-consciousness, the religious frame of mind, is, while ethics has to ask what must become of, and through, the religious self-consciousness because the religious self-consciousness is. We in contrast ask how it is possible in theology to posit the religious self-consciousness as being, as a given entity, as a given methodological starting point. And if this is done, will the description of what should become of and through the religious self-consciousness become theological ethics, the theological determination of the goodness of human conduct, or will it become something entirely different?

⌜According to Christian Palmer (Die Moral d. Chrts., p. 21f.)39 the difference between dogmatics and ethics is simply that between the divine and the human. Doctrine sets before us what God has done and achieved for us by his saving revelation, so that we do not first have to act, to bring offerings, or to do works in order to save our souls, but may simply accept what has already been fully done, placing ourselves and grounding ourselves on the foundation that has already been laid for all eternity. But the kingdom of God is also at the same time the result of human and morally free activity, every true moral act being just as much the work of man as of God. Ethics has to do with the human side of the kingdom of God mediated through the human will, i.e., through free human action. We ask whether the kingdom of God is really manifest to us in this sense as the act of man, or whether the shift of glance from the acts of God to the act of man does not necessarily signify a change to another genre which subsequently raises the question whether doctrine as thus coordinated is really dealing with the acts of God and not in the last resort with the Schleiermacherian analysis of the human self-consciousness.⌝

According to A. Ritschl (Rechtf. u. Vers, III4, p. 14)40 dogmatics covers all the stipulations of Christianity in the schema of God’s work, while ethics, presupposing knowledge of these, embraces the sphere of personal and corporate Christian life in the schema of personal activity. We ask how one can manage to embrace the Christian life as such in theology. We also ask in what sense human activity deserves to be called the theme of a true theological ethics.

According to T. Haering (D. Chr. L., p. 9f.)41 doctrine shows how the kingdom of God as God’s gift becomes a kind of personal possession by faith in Christ, while morals shows us that as this faith is a spur and power enabling us to work at the task enclosed in the gift, the kingdom of God will be realized, coming increasingly to us and through us, “here in time and then eternally.” We ask how it can be “shown” in theology that faith in Christ is a power and spur enabling us to cooperate in the actualization of the kingdom of God. Will not the spur and power which can be “shown” be something quite other than faith, and will not the ethics which confidently thinks it can “show” them be something other than theological ethics? |

According to O. Kirn (Grundr. d. E., p. 1)42 dogmatics looks at the Christian life in terms of its foundation on God’s saving revelation and therefore from the standpoint of “believing receptivity,” while ethics looks at it in terms of its active development and therefore from the standpoint of “believing spontaneity.” We ask how either dogmatics or ethics can look at the Christian life which, according to Colossians 3:3, is hidden in God, and whether a presentation of what we can indeed look at in the form of “believing spontaneity” really deserves to be called theological ethics. ⌜All these conceptions are variations on the old Augustinian theme that we must view together divine and human action in grace as two sides of one and the same event. The possibility of doing this, however, is more problematical than is conceded here.⌝ |

According to Schlatter (p. 30) the relation is as follows. We do dogmatics when we take note of what we have become and of what we perceive in us, while we do ethics when we clarify what we are to become and to make of ourselves. When the dogmatician has shown us God’s work that has taken place for and in us, the ethicist shows us our own work that is apportioned to us because we are God’s work. We ask what it means in theology to take note of, to perceive, to clarify, or to show. Does not the particularity of theological perceiving and showing mean that there can be no question of this kind of binding division of the problem into God’s work and ours, that the perception of what we are to become and to make of ourselves, the displaying of our own work (notwithstanding all the protestations that we ourselves are God’s work) can never lead to a theological ethics? |

According to Carl Stange (Dogm. I, pp. 50ff.)43 dogmatics considers all the detailed statements of the Christian faith and shows that the essence of Christianity established in the symbols corresponds to the ideal that religious philosophy has generally demonstrated to be the nature of religion, thus indicating that Christianity is a religion of revelation. Ethics offers a similar proof in relation to the effect of Christianity on the shaping of historical life. A historical manifestation of a particular form of historical life must always represent the outworking of the nature or essence proper to this form. As ethics describes these outworkings, which can be understood only as outworkings of the essence of Christianity, and as it thus describes the essence of the Christianity that produces them, it, too, shows that Christianity is the religion of revelation. Now even assuming that this demonstration is a meaningful enterprise, and even assuming that it is possible to place oneself with Schleiermacher on the elevated platform from which Christianity can be seen as a specific form of historical life and by means of an ideal concept of religion measured against other such forms of historical life, we ask how one can establish in theology—our objection to Stange is the same as to all the rest—the continuity between the “manifestation” and the “essence” of this particular form of historical life. Does the revelational nature of Christianity transfer itself so naturally to the manifestation, to its historical outworking, that without further ado one can simply read off the former from the latter? How can an ethics which turns truly and honestly to the manifestation establish any claims to be called theological ethics?

We regard all these attempts at a methodological distinction between dogmatics and ethics as ethically suspect because with great regularity there takes place in all of them a suspicious change in direction, a suspicious exchange of subjects, namely, of God and man, as may be seen at its crassest in the formula of Schlatter. This suspicious exchange, however, rests on the suspicious hypothesis that revelation puts theology in a position to speak of God and man in one and the same breath, and to do so wholly to man’s advantage, a glance at the holy God being followed by a second glance at holy man. On the basis of this presupposition the early church, as we have seen, did achieve a theological ethics, although not without borrowing from Cicero and Aristotle. But this hypothesis and the exchange based upon it involve quite simply the surrender of theology, ⌜at any rate of Christian theology.⌝ Theology is ⌜Christian⌝ theology when and so far as its statements relate to revelation. Revelation, however, is the revelation of God and not of pious man. If there is a shift of direction, even with an appeal to revelation, so that theology is suddenly looking at believing spontaneity, at what we are to become and to make of ourselves, at the outworking of the essence of Christianity, or however the formula runs, then there is in reality a turning away from revelation and it ceases to be theology. The supposed expansion of the subject means in fact its loss. This is illustrated by the incidental definitions of dogmatics, which we cannot go into here but which may be shown to be just as mistaken as those of ethics. Inevitably when ethics is defined as it is, it drags dogmatics and all the rest of theology down into the same plight as itself.

Theology is a presentation of the reality of the Word of God directed to man. This presentation involves it in three different tasks. As exegesis theology investigates the revelation of this Word in holy scripture. As dogmatics it investigates the relation of the content of the modern preaching of the church to this Word revealed in scripture; as homiletics it investigates the necessary relation of the form of modern preaching to this Word. The tasks of these three theological disciplines differ. The first has an essentially historical character, the second an essentially dialectico-critical, and the third an essentially technological. But the orientation and subject are the same. Exegesis whose theme is the pious personalities of the prophets and apostles, or even of Jesus himself, and dogmatics whose object has really become the piety of the preacher and his congregation, have ceased to be theology. They have lost from under their feet the ground on which theology is given a special theme in a special way. For the definition of theology cannot equally well be reversed. |

Theology is not the presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man and also the presentation of the reality of the man to whom God’s Word is addressed. This is also a reality, of course, and it need hardly be said that in none of its main disciplines can theology ignore it. Theology knows the reality of the Word of God only as that of the Word of God addressed to man and it cannot for a moment abstract itself away from this determination of its theme. One may thus say that not just dogmatics but theology in general includes from the very first and at every point the problem of ethics. But the man to whom God’s Word is directed can never become the theme or subject of theology. He is not in any sense a second subject of theology which must be approached with a shift of focus. When this transition takes place, when such questions can be asked as what we are to become and to make of ourselves, death is in the pot (cf. 2 Kings 4:40). For even though theology neither can nor should lose sight of it for a single moment, the reality of the man whom God’s Word addresses is not at all on the same plane as the reality of the Word of God, so that there cannot be that coordination of looking upward and downward which is envisaged in the above-mentioned formulae of modern writers. Receptivity and spontaneity, gift and task, the inward and the outward, being and becoming can certainly be coordinated, but not God and God’s Word on the one side and man on the other. It is not true that this second reality stands like a second pole over against the first and in a certain tension with it. It is not true that pious man has to work at the coming of the kingdom of God. [He has to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God—but this is something different.] It is not true that he is related to God’s Word as subject is to object. All these are notions that are possible only on the basis of the idea of a synthesis and continuity between nature and supernature—an idea which ruined the ancient Catholic Church and which signified a repenetration of the church by paganism. |

The reality of the man who is addressed by God’s Word relates to the reality of God’s Word itself as predicate relates to subject. Never in any respect is it this reality in itself. It is it only as posited along with the reality of God’s Word. It may be discovered only in terms of that reality and discussed only as that reality is discussed. There are Christians only in Christ and not in themselves, only as seen from above and not from below, only in faith and not in sight, and not therefore as there are Mohammedans, Buddhists, and atheists, or Roman Catholics and Protestants. |

When we speak of Christians and Christianity and Christendom in the latter sense—and if only for the sake of brevity we often cannot avoid doing so—we should always be aware that we are speaking of the Christian world, which is truly world or cosmos (in the sense of John’s Gospel) as the rest of the world is. We are then speaking in typically untheological fashion. Why should we not speak untheologically of Christianity instead of Christ? Undoubtedly the pious man, even the Christian, can be in himself a rewarding, interesting, and instructive object of academic research. There is even a whole series of auxiliary theological disciplines, and one that is indispensable to exegesis, dogmatics, and homiletics, namely, church history, in which the Christian as such is ostensibly, dialectically, and for the sake of instruction the theme of theological research as well. But willynilly church history makes it truly evident that the Christian as such is not the man addressed by the Word of God and that there can never really be any talk of his patent holiness even though he be an Augustine or a Luther. This discipline is precisely the one which shows that the Christian and Christianity are phenomena in the cosmos alongside many other phenomena. Precisely with its dialectically intended untheological questions, it makes it clear that there have to be theological questions and answers if the Christian is to be understood as something other than a portion and bearer of the cosmos. |

This is what obviously happens when the question of the goodness of human conduct is raised in theology. In the first part of the section we saw that this question radically transcends the questions of psychology, history, and law. It obviously has to do this in theology too, where goodness must be understood along the lines of the concept of conformity to God. For in theology too, in methodological continuation of the line in church history and in analogy to the profane disciplines referred to in the first subsection, we also find the auxiliary disciplines of religious psychology, folklore, and church law. If there is to be ethics in theology, if in some sense the question of the goodness of human conduct has to be put here, this question cannot be the same as that of religious psychology, folklore, or church law, nor, even methodologically, can it be put side by side with that of church history. Its object cannot be the Christain life as such, which is good because of its conformity to God. Instead, to take up again the concepts of the first subsection, its theme is the correctness of the Christian’s Christianity, its validiy, origin, and worth. The goodness of human conduct can be sought only in the goodness of the Word addressed to man. We should be doing neither theology nor ethics if we related the question to dogmatics, and let it be determined in the same way as the theological authors adduced—a way which is at all events readily suggested by the unfortunate history of the problem.

According to what is perhaps a more appropriate encyclopedic integration of ethics into theology, we find it best to answer the question by attempting an independent discussion of how and how far ethics really constitutes one of the tasks of theology.

We have defined theology as a presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man. We have seen that this theme cannot be divided into the two themes of God and man and that theological ethics cannot be grounded in such a way that when enough has been said about what God has done for and to and in us we have then to speak about a second topic, namely, what we have to do. We do not reject this second question out of indifference to what it has in view but because, when it is put in this abstraction as a second question over against the first, we cannot take it seriously either as a theological question nor indeed, as we have seen, as an ethical question. Yet we have to deal more fully with what it has in view.

Within theology the concern of ethics obviously emerges in relation to dogmatics. Dogmatics is the science of the content of Christian preaching, i.e., of the relation of preaching to God’s revealed Word. The concern of dogmatics is that God’s Word be heard in Christian preaching. It thus presents the reality of God’s Word, not directly, but as it is reflected in the many ways that the word of pious man is moved by its theme, in the dogmatic dialectic whose intentional point of origin, relation, and goal is the reality of God’s Word. Since the human word of preaching is also directed to man, how can it ever lose sight of the reality of the Word which at every point must finally speak for itself, the reality which is really heard by man, which really addresses and claims and seizes him?—not just thinking man but existing man, man who even as he thinks lives and acts and is caught in the act of his being. Only the doer of the Word, i.e., the hearer who is grasped by God’s Word in the very act, is its true hearer. Because it is God’s Word to real man, and because real man is man caught at work, in the act of his being, he hears it44 in and not apart from his act, and not in any act, but in the life-act, the act of his existence, or he does not hear it at all. He does not hear it in the distraction, be it ever so profound and spiritual, in which he imagines that, while it may be true, it does not apply to him, the reference being to some other or others and not to himself. Other than in this actuality of the Word that is truly spoken and accepted dogmatics cannot at any point on its long way present its object, although many times it must apparently (but only apparently) go far astray from the concrete reality and situation of man. |

Necessarily this topic must be expressly dealt with at a specific point on the path of dogmatics, namely, where dogmatics as the doctrine of reconciliation in particular has also to say that the event of the reconciliation of sinful man by God and to God is a real event which is effected on this man as he is, that God’s grace comes to him. If anybody—and this would be very suspicious—has not noted it already in the rest of dogmatics, ⌜in the doctrine of God or creation or christology,⌝ then at the very latest he must pay regard to it here where it has a personal application, or all the rest is nonsense. The Word of God whose reality we are trying to describe is not just spoken but is spoken ⌜for you,⌝ to you. You cannot think or say or do anything, you cannot draw a single breath, without a decision of some kind being made in relation to the Word of God that is spoken to you. |

In dogmatics we give the name of sanctification to this claiming of man as such ⌜which is basically fulfilled in God’s revelation, attested to in holy scripture, and promulgated in Christian preaching.⌝ As we understand the Word not only as the Word of God, not only as the Word of our Creator, not only as the Word of His faithfulness and mercy, not only as the Word that calls and justifies us, and not only as the Word that establishes the church and promises our redemption, as we understand it—all this ought to be enough, one might think—expressly and emphatically as the sanctifying Word, we have the right to state that the reality of the Word of God embraces the reality of the man who receives it and therefore gives the Christian answer to the question of the goodness of human conduct.

Good means sanctified by God. This is how we may briefly formulate the answer, bluntly challenging the need for special ethics in theology as we recall the strong total content of the concept of sanctification. To remember not only the ethical character of dogmatics in general but also the express answer to the ethical question that is given in the doctrine of sanctification is to ensure that ethics is not possible as an independent discipline alongside dogmatics. Not just in general, but also in particular, the concern of ethics is a proper concern of dogmatics.

It would be inadvisable, however, simply to accept this assertion and not proceed further. The ethical question is obviously not just one question among many others but is in an eminent sense the question of human existence. As we will, we are. What we do, we are. Man does not exist and also act. He exists as he acts. His action, his stepping forth or appearance (existere), is his existence. The question whether and how far he acts rightly is thus none other than the question whether he exists rightly. If, then, ethics inquires into the goodness of human action and dogmatics both as a whole and in detail aims at the statement that human action is good in so far as God sanctifies it, this point of coincidence is of very special significance for both parts. Let us first leave it undecided what it might mean for an ethics that is not radically and naturally theological ethics that here in dogmatics it is confronted by theology, by the voice of the church. For dogmatics, at any rate, it cannot be a matter of indifference that here in the concern of ethics as its own proper concern it comes up against the question of human existence. It is not at all true—I cannot approve of this intrusion of Kierkegaard into theology as it may be seen, if I am right, in Bultmann45—that the question of human existence is as much the theme of theology and dogmatics too. The theme of theology and dogmatics is the Word of God, nothing else, but the Word of God is not merely the answer to the question of human existence but also its origin. The question of human good which transcends all psychology, custom, and law arises, and arises with such sinister urgency, and arises like any genuine question out of a secretly preceding answer, because the Word of God is spoken to man, because the Word of God lays claim to his life.

The theme of dogmatics is simply the Word of God, but the theme of the Word of God is simply human existence, life, or conduct. Obviously this can be for dogmatics no more than a relational point, one locus among others, from which it can move on in the agenda once it has dealt with it and has said what is to be said about the doctrine of sanctification. For on the fact that it really has this point of relation depends the whole answer to the question whether its presentation of the reality of the Word of God will differ from a metaphysics which, developed in the attitude of a spectator, and depicting a reality that is not heard existentially, that does not come home to man or claim him or make him responsible, cannot possibly be the reality of the Word of God no matter how rich or profound its content might be. If God be understood apart from the relation to our existence, then even though he be the triune God of Nicaea or the God so fully described by Luther and Calvin, he is not God but a human idol, a mere concept of God. |

Naturally it is not in our own power to give dogmatics this relation to the reality of man just as it is not in our own power to make dogmatics a depiction of the reality of the Word of God. God alone does these things at his own sovereign good pleasure. But here as everywhere it is fitting that theological scholarship should be ready to serve God as he wills. As dogmatics can and does take measures to guard at least to some degree against the distraction of human thought which is constantly trying to avoid paying attention to the Word, so it can take measures to guard at least to some degree against the same distraction when it wants to forget that we are dealing with the Word that is addressed to man. First, it can make some effort to resist this distraction ⌜by always avoiding all pure speculation and positively by constantly observing and emphasizing that all its statements bear the character of decision.⌝ Second, it will not fail to present the doctrine of sanctification with the emphasis it deserves, for here the question of the theme of the Word of God is a burning one. Third, it will do well to remember that it is a human work, and to recall the classical model of the transition from Romans 11 to Romans 12, and therefore not to insist that all that is necessary has been said, but rather to leave room precisely at this point for an auxiliary discipline which independently can take up the doctrine of sanctification again and in its own context work out all its implications. |

Recognition of the need for this auxiliary discipline entails a practical confession of humility on the part of theology which is most appropriate at this specific point. In actually saying again, as though it had not already said it, its own decisive word about the hearing of the Word, it acknowledges that its decisive word is not the decisive word. By this repetition it shows that precisely at this decisive point all theology is not a masterwork but at very best an associate work, so that there can be no question of a dogmatic system that is in itself an adequate presentation of this lofty subject. However good it may be, it has not spoken from heaven but on earth, and therefore it must say again what only God himself can have said once and for all. |

The theological encyclopedia knows auxiliary disciplines at other points as well and it may be shown that all of them imply a similar reservation of theology in relation to itself. Thus we find that Old Testament and New Testament introduction, the history of Near Eastern and Hellenistic religion, and Palestinian studies are all auxiliary to exegesis; liturgical and catechetic studies to homiletics; historical and confessional history to dogmatics; and church history to all three theological disciplines. |

Ethics is an auxiliary discipline of this kind in relation to dogmatics. There must be no change into another genre here. We have seen that this is the error in the usual distinction between dogmatics and ethics and we must avoid it. Theological ethics is itself dogmatics, not an independent discipline alongside it. We obey only an academic necessity in treating it separately. Ethics, too, reflects on the Word of God as the transcendent meaning, theme, and bearer of Christian preaching in the form of criticism of the pious human word. It reflects especially on the fact that this Word of God which is to be proclaimed and received in Christian preaching claims man in a very particular way. It was most fitting—we are again thinking of the Pauline epistles and especially of Romans—when the early church devoted that qualified attention to the problem of ethics. Even in the modern emancipation of ethics from dogmatics there lay a justifiable concern, and in its overdevelopment a nemesis and historically understandable reaction to the fall against which no dogmatics is secure, a fall into spectator-metaphysics, into the luxury of an idle worldview. But it is high time to move away from this historically justifiable but materially very dangerous reaction against an unethical dogmatics. It is high time to try to do justice to that concern as can be properly done only in the sphere of the reformation churches, i.e., in such a way that the ultimately pagan introduction of a second standpoint, which will unavoidably result in the loss of the first and true one, is reversed, and in ethics, too, the sole inquiry, even if it has a specific edge, is not into a second thing but into the one and only thing that is necessary. Conducted in any other way the enterprise of theological ethics will finally mean the destroying and not the upbuilding of the church.

§2

THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS

Ethics is theological ethics to the extent that it sees the goodness of human conduct in the reality of the Word of God that sanctifies man. As on this presupposition it confesses the concrete revelation of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, it acknowledges the validity of another ethics which on the basis of the same Christian confession will as philosophical ethics seek and find the goodness of human conduct in the possibility, grounded in that reality, of human action that is rightly claimed by one’s fellowman.1

We have already said that ethics is not originally or self-evidently theological ethics. Always and still today the question of the goodness of human conduct arises in other contexts than that of theology. Historically considered, theological ethics undoubtedly signifies a kind of annexation comparable to the entry of the children of Israel, against which objections can obviously be made, into the land of Canaan, where other nations claimed to have, if not an original, at least a very ancient right of domicile. On the field of ethical deliberation, which is apparently open to all kinds of other possible investigations, and which has been long since lit up and worked over by a whole series of what are often very serious investigations, there takes place the entry, or, one might almost say, the invasion of a rival whose investigation differs in such an extraordinary way from all other possible and actual investigations that on their part doubt as to the legitimacy of this act seems almost unavoidable, especially as this rival is in no position to behave peacefully as one partner in discussion among many others. But, modest though its entry may be formally, and primitive though its intellectual equipment may perhaps appear, it advances the claim that it is the one that with its investigation has the last word which absorbs all others. |

When, as sometimes happens, the philosophical ethicist of any trend pays attention to theological ethics, he finds himself set in a strange world. What is alien to him here is a presumed and puzzling knowledge of the whence and whither of every ethical question and answer. What is a problem to him, the law or goodness or value which the philosophical ethicist seeks as a standard by which to measure human conduct, the problem of the truth of the good, seems to be no problem at all here. Instead, in the concept of God of a proper theological ethics, in the concept of the reality of the God who has dealings with man through his Word, this problem is the inwardly secure and presupposed starting point of every question and answer. Conversely, what is no problem for him, the real situation of man in the light of the ethical question and answer, his real commitment to the norm of the good, his real distance from any achieving of this norm, and the real overcoming of this distance, not by man, but by the truth of the good itself known as a reality, all this is here an acute problem, the goal of every ethical question and answer. What relation is there between an inquiry that is ruled by knowledge of the whence and the whither and that which he knows as ethics, no matter whether he espouses naturalism, positivism, or idealism? In the light of any system of philosophical ethics, will not the definition of the good that we gave in the first section, namely, conduct sanctified by God’s Word, cause him to shake his head? Can the philosophical ethicist fail to see that even though the same question of the goodness of human conduct is in some way at issue here as in the inquiry that he calls ethics, nevertheless the “in some way” is calculated to lead him to the decision that what is attempted is both impossible on the one side and insignificant on the other. It is impossible because a suspension of the fundamental rules of human thought is entailed if we simply start with the concept of God as the quintessance of the good, with the truth, regarded as a reality, of an absolutely transcendent and decisive Word of God addressed to man. It is insignificant because the question of the real situation of man, and concepts like conscience, sin, and grace, although they may have psychological and historical importance, can only hamper and confuse the question of ethics, the question of the true law, value, or good, the question of the quality of human conduct to be deduced from these criteria. This decision, the summary rejection of theological ethics as such, is at least a very natural one for the philosophical ethicist as such. |

This being so, it is on the other hand very natural for the theological ethicist to forget that he is in the situation of the attacker and not the attacked, that if he understands his own work he cannot stop to justify himself, that ipso facto as a theologian he enters the sphere of ethical reflection and cannot regard the supposedly original inhabitants of the land as a court to which he is commanded or is even able to give account. |

The protest or disregard with which philosophical ethics usually rejects theological ethics carries with it for the latter the temptation to enter into debate with the former in the form of apologetics. This is the first possibility that we must oppose here. Apologetics is the attempt to establish and justify theological thinking in the context of philosophical, or, more generally and precisely, nontheological thinking. In our own case it is the attempt to establish and justify the approach of theological ethics in the context of philosophical ethics.

Schleiermacher does apologetics when he maintains that, if not the Christian self-consciousness, at least the general religious self-consciousness which underlies it, is with its moral content or orientation an unavoidable element even in the inquiry of philosophical ethics, and when he thus aims at least indirectly to justify Christian ethics at the bar of philosophical ethics (Chr. Sitte, pp. 29, 75). De Wette does apologetics when he extols the Christian revelation from which Christian ethics derives as manifested and actualized reason (Lehrbuch, p. 2). Hagenbach does apologetics when he has philosophical ethics aiming at Christianity, in which alone it finds its fulfillment because belief in God is the supreme shoot of the moral life (Enzykl. 12th ed., p. 436).2 W. Herrmann does apologetics when he thinks that without further ado he can claim that every ethics that wants to deal not only with the concept of the good but also with its achievement by man must see to it that the Christian religion is understood as a morally liberating power and must itself at its peak become Christian ethics (Ethik, 4th ed., p. 3). G. Wünsch does apologetics when he wants Christian ethics to be understood as a possibility, foreseen in philosophical ethics, of reflection on values, as the affirmation of a particular position on values, namely, that the really acknowledged holy in the form of the personality is the chief value anchored in the transcendent, Christian ethics also commending itself to philosophical ethics because its formal criteria are identical with those of the latter (Theol. Eth., p. 59f.).3 Finally A. Schweitzer does apologetics when with reference to Indian ethics he thinks he can trace back the distinction between religious and philosophical thinking to the relative distinction between a more intuitive and a more analytical knowledge of the basic moral principle (Kult. u. Ethik, p. 24f.).4

These and similar linkages cannot achieve what explicitly or implicitly they are meant to achieve, namely, the establishment and justification of theological ethics in the framework of the inquiry of philosophical ethics. Two possibilities exist.

First, the linkages may be taken seriously on the assumption that it is fitting to measure theological ethics by philosophical ethics as its appointed judge, as the court where the question of truth must be answered, because from the very first the distinctive content of the inquiry of theological ethics, or the empty space for it, is contained in a superior and original way in philosophical ethics, and has to be brought to conscious development—this is the business of apologetic argumentation—in order that the desired validation of its existence might be thereby achieved. If the linkages are intended in this way, they simply mean that the distinctive content of the inquiry of theological ethics is surrendered from the very outset. What is intended, established, and justified is something other than this inquiry with its distinctive content. Apologetics may then succeed, but it has become irrelevant before it has even commenced. The philosopher who really thinks he knows a higher principle by which to ask and answer the question of the whence and whither, and who thinks he can meet the theologian as a judge in the question of truth, is absolutely right when he feels that in a true theological ethics he is in an alien world. He can really be annoyed here. Theological ethics is no longer a proper theological ethics when it falls into the disorder in which it can no longer irritate such a philosopher. The theological question of the whence and whither, and the answer to it, consists neither of a necessary moment in our spiritual life, nor of the actualization of human reason, nor of the achievement of the good by man, nor of even the highest position on values, even though it acknowledges the holy in the form of personality and anchors the latter in the transcendent, nor of the moral principle known intuitively for a change instead of analytically. It consists of the truth of the Word of God, which as such cannot be derived from any other word, nor measured by any other word, nor tested as to its validity, nor spoken by man to himself, but which can only be spoken to him, which perhaps he may not hear, but which, if he has heard it, he can have heard only in obedience, without being in any position to find out why he must obey. The enterprise of a real theological ethics would not be vindicated in relation to philosophical ethics by the proof that philosophical ethics in some way contains it in itself. The principle of a real theological ethics would be concealed by this proof. Working with this principle, it would still be irritating to the philosopher. Philosophical ethics could accept that apology, ⌜be satisfied with those conditions of its existence,⌝ and give to a ⌜pseudo-⌝ theological ethics the desired license without for a single moment feeling disturbed in its verdict that a true and proper theological ethics, which the apologetic renounces as such, is something impossible and insignificant.

The second possibility is that the linkages ⌜between the problem of philosophical ethics and that of theological ethics⌝ are not meant in such a way ⌜that the latter must be given a basis in the former but⌝ rest on the very different assumption that the philosophical inquiry contains the theological inquiry within itself to the extent that philosophizing takes place on the premise of the knowledge that characterizes theology, namely, knowledge of the revelation of God’s Word. Philosophy has here come down from its judicial throne and set itself and its questions and answers on the same ground as theology—the conflict of the faculties is childishness—sharing the whence and the whither with theology and yet not ceasing on this account to be philosophy. On this assumption all the linkages might be more or less significant, not as an apology for theological ethics—philosophy itself would decree that such an apology is not needed—but rather to show clearly the justification and even the necessity of philosophical ethics alongside theological ethics. A philosophy which with theology and just as well as theology—for why should theology have any precedence or advantage in this respect, since it, too, is a human work?—has the hearing of the Word of God as its presupposition, can come to the side of theology as an equal partner, and in regard to these and similar linkages can raise the question and offer some indication of the possibility of the concept with whose reality theology methodologically starts. Often, too, it may perhaps be its living conscience, e.g., when recollection of the possibility of this concept ought to be calculated to invite to knowledge, to new knowledge of the constantly forgotten reality. This is the definition of the relation between theological and philosophical ethics that we actually have in view here. But when the linkages are meant in this way, they cannot signify a grounding and justifying of theological ethics in the sphere of philosophical ethics. It is admitted on both sides that the annexation is right. How can the distinctive starting point and goal of theological ethics be grounded or justified in terms of philosophy when with theology, philosophy itself, as in its own way Christian knowledge, is not rebellion but obedience? The result of our first discussion, then, is that in no case can a serious debate between theological and philosophical ethics have anything whatever to do with apologetics. Theological ethics cannot spare the philosopher vexation at its own conduct, for it will always be strange enough even to itself. From the philosopher’s standpoint it is an unheard-of annexation. It cannot please him as though there were no danger in it. It cannot make its distinctive whence and whither innocuous in order to ensure for itself a place in the sun. By its existence as true theological ethics it has to put the philosopher, like the theologian, like everybody, before the decision whether its enterprise is to be rejected as impossible and insignificant or whether he will adopt the presupposition on which this enterprise rests. It can come to a meaningful and mutually fruitful agreement with him only when it is and remains determined to show its colors as true theological ethics. ⌜There can be no apologetic of theological ethics in relation to a philosophical ethics that sets itself with it on the ground of its own presupposition. A philosophy that does this does not ask for any such apologetic. Whatever philosophy may say to its efforts, from the standpoint of theology apologetic means a veiling of the decision in which alone theological statements can and will be valid.⌝

The apologetic attitude of theological ethics vis-à-vis philosophical ethics is not the only one against which we must safeguard ourselves. Alongside apologetics, there has commended itself to theology, in the attempt to maintain its own existence, the method of isolation, diastasis rather than synthesis. This does not come alone, but forms a kind of expansion, continuation, and crowning of apologetics in much the same way as war is the continuation of politics with other means. In spite of apologetics, theology has never so fully lost its recollection of the uniqueness of its task and activity that it does not somewhere suddenly rediscover its self-awareness, that the proof of the philosophical basis of its task and activity is not in some way completed in the proof of its independence, its distinction, its special character as compared with the task and activity of the philosopher. What is thought to be the need to give an account to philosophy would have succeeded all too well if its result were that theological ethics ceases to be something other than philosophical ethics. It obviously cannot lead to this, as it came close to doing in, e.g., W. Herrmann,5 but when the theologian has validated himself to the philosopher, he must now for good or ill show also at some point that he is not a superfluous figure, a mere alter ego of the philosopher. With some fervor a little superiority is now maintained in relation to the philosopher, a little extra and better knowledge, and some attempt is made to define this. To this extent we have to do here with a second attitude of theological ethics that differs from the first. Covered by the linkages, theological ethics must and will demonstrate its uniqueness, particularity, and independence. What needs to be said in this regard may be summed up in four trains of thought. |

1. With E. W. Mayer (p. 191) the so-called Christian religious consciousness may be laid down as the source of theological ethics and with F. Schleiermacher its task may be defined as the description of the mode of action that arises out of the dominion of the self-consciousness with a Christian determination (Chr. Sitte, p. 33). Instead of the Christian religious consciousess De Wette (Lehrbuch, p. 2), Kirn (Grundr. d. E., p. 2),6 and Wünsch (Theolog. Erh., p. 64) can also speak of revelation. In contrast, De Wette, I. A. Dorner (Chr. Sittenlehre, p. 21),7 and E. W. Mayer name reason as the source of philosophical ethics, Kirn names experience, and Wünsch names reason and empirical experience. In all these cases what is obviously meant is not the self-consciousness with a Christian determination. |

2. The place of theological morals, as Schleiermacher in particular sharply emphasizes (pp. 33f.), is the church understood as the fellowship of those who share a Christian disposition. The ethical subject of theological ethics according to Wünsch (loc. cit.) is the man who has been born again by conversion and to whom the knowledge of God has been imparted by illumination. Hence according to Schleiermacher (p. 29) theological ethics lacks a “universal historical tendency.” Its relation to philosophical ethics is to be defined as follows: What Christian morality requires is binding only for Christians; philosophical ethics makes a general claim, for it seeks to be binding for everyone who can raise himself up to perception of the philosophical principles from which it derives (p. 2). According to Wünsch the ethical subject of philosophical ethics is the rational man.8 |

3. The presupposition of theological ethics is to be found with I. A. Dorner and Hagenbach (Enzykl., p. 436) in the Spirit of God or Christ as the power that works in believers,9 or with Kirn (p. 3) in “the vital energy of the personality that is filled with the Spirit of God,” while the same authors find the presupposition of philosophical ethics in the moral or rational self-determination of man.10 According to Wünsch this ethics asks: “What must I do because the categorical imperative commands?” but theological ethics asks: “What must I do because God is?”11 |

4. The content of theological ethics may be found with Hagenbach (p. 435) in historically determined moral perceptions, especially in the personal divine-human manifestation of the life of the Redeemer, or with De Wette (p. 3f.) in positive laws,12 or with Kirn (p. 3) in the idea of the kingdom of God,13 whereas that of philosophical ethics is for Hagenbach the idea of moral personality which is valid for everyone who would be a rational being.14 ⌜According to I. A. Dorner the inner being, the individual personality, is the special stuff of theological ethics, whereas the universal side of ethics, social relations etc., are the special stuff of philosophical ethics (p. 22)⌝15 and so on. This is the position of diastasis. |

But is this not perhaps just as suspicious as the attitude of synthesis previously depicted? For what really happens under the sign of this ⌜more or less illuminating and⌝ ingenious antithesis? Again there obviously exists a double possibility. |

First, the intentional division of roles between the two partners is carried through seriously. The idea is that there is a serious theological ethics which in fact investigates only the conduct that arises under the rule of the Christian religious self-consciousness and in the sphere of the corresponding historical outlook, its norms being binding only for members of the church who are, of course, assumed to be believers in whom the Spirit of God is an effective force. There is also a serious philosophical ethics which can be traced back abstractly to reason and experience, which is satisfied with the idea of the moral whose final word is man’s self-determination, and which can make a claim as such to universal validity. |

We have two questions to put to this: (1) Can the theology of reason or experience or both together recognize an abstract content of truth, with universal validity, and then as theology, concerned equally abstractly with revelation or the expectorations of the religious self-consciousness, not worry about it any more but confidently commit it to its philosophical neighbor, “guarding its ancient traditions in dark caves like the condor,” as Christian Palmer mockingly put it (Die Moral d. Chrts., p. 18)? ⌜Is it really adequate as the doctrine of the cultivation of the individual personality?⌝ Is revelation the revelation of truth and the religious self-consciousness the consciousness of truth? Or are they something different, such as obscure sources of all kinds of religious notions which philosophy may confidently pass by and perhaps has to do so in a compact with theologians? Are they or are they not indispensable to the knowledge of truth? If theology is serious with its supposed knowledge of a whence and whither of all ethical questions and answers that is superior to all reason and empiricism, how can it take seriously a philosophy that lacks and even denies this knowledge? Instead of concluding with it a shameful peace should it not have the courage to call immoral a philosophical morality which is not just as much Christian morality as it is itself? |

We also ask (2) what happens if philosophy will not in the long run let itself be relegated to that airless sphere of the idea in which we theologians would like to put it? If it will not in the long run allow theologians to take from it the problem of actualization, of the concrete, of the factual situation of man, along with the problem of the transcendent presupposition of all actualization? Is it really part of the nature of philosophy that it usually takes evil, and therefore reconciliation, too lightly? (I. A. Dorner, p. 24)? If positivism and to a large extent Kantian idealism have left the sphere of this problem unoccupied, this does not prove by a long way that philosophy always does so. With what right may theologians forbid any crossing of the frontier presupposed in this antithesis? Or do they propose to greet philosophy on what they think is their own special territory with the attitude of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son? Do they secretly live by the fact that philosophy espouses the crassest Pelagianism and even atheism and by the desire that it will always be content with this so as not to make theology itself superfluous? These are the two questions that must be put to the first possibility. |

The second possibility is that the division of roles will not be meant so strictly. There is awareness here that all truth is enclosed in God’s Word and that whether it be rational or historical, secular or religious, ecclesiastical or social, it concerns theology and must be the theme of theology and cannot be accessible to philosophy either except through the same Word of God. Theology, then, does not refrain from speaking with the same universal validity as philosophy, and philosophy speaks as Christian philosophy. As a result theology loses the secret or open advantage with which it usually safeguards itself in that antithesis as though it were in a sanctuary from which philosophy is excluded. It will no longer pass on to philosophy tasks which it must itself reject as wrongly formulated, e.g., development of the false doctrine of the moral self-determination of man (as though what is wrong in theology could be right in philosophy), just as it will itself decline tasks that are passed on to it by philosophy. It will not look on askance and bewail the omission of its own terminology when a philosophy of practical reason may perhaps in its own way, without ceasing to be philosophy, make fruitful instead of rejecting the superior knowledge that characterizes itself. At a single word this means the end of the glory of a theological standpoint that is safeguarded against philosophy, but theology with its direct link with the church can again draw alongside philosophy with its indirect link. If proposals for the division of roles aim at fixing the relation between a Christian theological ethics and a Christian philosophical ethics, then they might not be without importance as proposals and pointers. But the attitude of isolation, as though theology knew secrets which philosophy, to be serious philosophy, neither knows nor ought to know—this attitude must be abandoned no less than that of apologetics.

If all this and all apologetics is set aside, if theology as such relentlessly fulfills its office, then its independence is thereby ensured and demonstrated and it need not be concerned any more to assert it. If it is sure of its subject, the transcendent Word of God, it cannot be upset if the same Word of God is also in another way the subject of philosophy. The distinction that as a science of the church’s witness it sees it under the category of reality, while philosophy as the epitome of the science of man sees it and makes it a criterion under the category of possibility, has no more significance than the difference in the colors of professorial robes about which it is inappropriate to enter into a battle of prestige. The burden of diastasis is bearable if it is perceived that the true diastasis is not between theology and philosophy but between both of them and their genuine subject and that they themselves stand alongside one another in the church and must not basically or finally reproach one another. There is no place left at all for the game of Pharisee and publican with which theology finds compensation for its disparagement by worldly wisdom, or for the mysterious insistence on a special relation of theology to the good Lord, whereas only the categorical imperative remains for philosophy, for the rational man. That this should be eliminated is a not unimportant ethical presupposition for the success of theological or any other real ethics.

We have still to come to an understanding about a third possibility in the relation between theological and philosophical ethics—a possibility which we have not discussed so far but which historically and materially merits the closest attention before we strike out on our own. I have in mind the Roman Catholic view of the matter.

To anticipate, we must praise this view at least for seeing the error of the attitudes of apologetics and isolation and for successfully avoiding them, notwithstanding all the ambiguities on both sides, and even within the great ambivalence of the Roman Catholic system as such. One cannot fundamentally accuse this view16 of either handing over theology to a philosophy that is recognized as a supreme norm in and in spite of its secularity or of arrogantly and inopportunely setting theology at a distance from philosophy. Here philosophical morals—the human soul is by nature Christian—is resolutely claimed, not as theological, but as Christian morals. It is recognized as such. It is treated as in its own way an equal partner of theological morals, whose voice is to be heard and which is not for a moment to be neglected, although it is also not for a single moment to be given the precedence. |

Moral philosophy and moral theology are mutually related to one another, presuppose one another, and are always basically united in the person of the Roman Catholic theological ethicist, but in such a way that moral theology forms from the very first the fulcrum of the eccentric wheel and can never lose this position. The problem of the relation of the two sciences is solved by a simple but consistent establishment of two different but equally valid spheres of problems which necessarily follow one another in a specific order, moral philosophy being on the lower rung and moral theology on the upper. Willingly letting itself be taught by experience and history, moral philosophy perceives the basic principles of moral action with the light of natural reason. Yet while these are rational principles like the laws of logic, the imperative being rooted in the being of man as such, it still derives them from revelation, since they would otherwise be subject to error. Finding it to be man’s determination to glorify the Creator by his existence as a creature, and thereby to prepare himself for eternal felicity, it also finds the moral good that is to be done in the four Aristotelian virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Adapted to the rational nature of man, this is the relative good, relative, that is, to the absolute good of the divine essence which is the idea of the good. In contrast moral theology draws directly on scripture, tradition, and the source of the church’s living teaching office. It thus makes the elevation of fallen man to the order of grace its presupposition. Its task is to depict the supernatural morality which alone can actually lead man to this goal, to unfold the positive Christian moral law and its implied duties, and at the peak to develop the three theological virtues of faith, love, and hope. According to Roman Catholic teaching, grace is a higher element in life, differing from man’s natural state. Its effect is sanctification, the renewal of nature from the disruption of sin, and the elevation of nature to the mysterious image and likeness of God (Mausbach, Kult. d. Geg., II, p. 540).17 Grace does not destroy nature but annexes and perfects it. The law of the new covenant which regulates the renewal is understood from the very outset as an excellent parallel of the law of nature (p. 523). |

When faced with this construction, this bold union of Aristotle and Augustine (p. 527), which was undoubtedly intimated in the early church, developed in basic outline by Thomas Aquinas, and in the course of the centuries constantly refined by the Roman Catholic church, we do not have to compare it with the confusion of the corresponding Protestant conceptions and in this way be forced to acknowledge that it is a classical, and as, we might calmly say, one of the most grandiose achievements in this whole field. What we have to learn from it is perfectly clear. In model fashion it states (1) that the final and true presupposition of theological and philosophical ethics, seen from the standpoint of the former, has to be one and the same, namely, the knowledge of God; (2) that theological ethics cannot in any sense take its questions and answers from philosophical ethics, with which it has a common origin in the same answer of truth; (3) that it cannot recognize as ethics a philosophical ethics that either lacks or totally denies this presupposition, but in view of what will always be at least some remnants of the presupposition it must claim all ethics, not as theological, but as Christian ethics, recognizing and taking it seriously as ethics in accordance with its own presupposition; and (4) that there can be only a relative and methodological but not a material antithesis between theological ethics and a theological ethics based on this presupposition. This form and these main features of the Roman Catholic construction correspond so closely to the results of our own discussions in subsections 1 and 2 that we cannot but regard them as normative for what follows. |

Nevertheless there can also be no doubt that the same theses necessarily have a different sense for us from that which they have in Roman Catholicism. Between the Roman Catholic view and our own stands a difference in the concept of God, of man, of the sin of man, and of the grace which comes to him. On this basis the intention and the whole character of the definition of the relation between the two disciplines are materially very different for all the formal agreement. |

The Roman Catholic view of the mutual relation between moral philosophy and moral theology rests on the fundamental Roman Catholic conception of the harmony, rooted in the concept of being, between nature and supernature, nature and grace, reason and revelation, man and God. The order of obligation is built on the order of being, ethics on metaphysics, which forms the common presupposition of philosophy and theology. In spite of the fall, imitative human knowledge is fundamentally able to master true being, the supreme good, i.e., God, even though because of the fall it needs special illumination by revelation to keep it from error. The fall has so hampered the knowledge of God that usually it cannot arise without God’s grace, at least in any depth. But it has not made it impossible. There is still a relic of man’s relation by creation to God. Fundamentally, even in the state of sin, man can still have without grace a knowledge of the existence, unity, spirituality, and personality of God. In relation to obligation and volition his free will in relation to God has only been weakened by sin. The soul is thus Christian and the light of natural reason is claimed as the principle of moral philosophy. The created order which remains in spite of sin is then the point of contact to which moral theology, which is founded on grace and draws on scripture and dogma, must orient itself, the only thing being that it is this which finally justifies that claim, which finally executes it, which has thus to precede it in rank, and for which, as the superstructure, it can only be the foundation. |

These presuppositions of the Roman Catholic construction, which G. Wünsch seems to have taken over unsuspectingly as the final conclusion of his theological ethics (§32, pp. 122f.), are at every point suspect and even unacceptable from our own standpoint. This is not the place to do more than sketch in short strokes the objection which even in this part of the problem Protestantism directs against Roman Catholicism as a whole. |

This objection necessarily starts already with the definition of God as the supreme being. For where and how is God knowable and given to us in his being and not in and as his act? If the God grasped in his being is an entity that man can master, with what right does this entity deserve to be called God? Is not this ambiguity suspiciously betrayed in the idea that on the assumption of a natural source of knowledge there is a partial and quantitative knowledge of God whose object is, e.g., the personality and not the triunity of God, ⌜creation and not reconciliation⌝? Does man really know God when he admittedly does not know him totally, in his nature, as the Lord in the pregnant ⌜and comprehensive⌝ biblical sense of the term? Is not metaphysics viewed as a basic discipline superior to both philosophy and theology, a relapse into apologetics in which both theology and philosophy can only lose their true origin and subject matter? As is well known, even the theology of the early church was to a large extent apologetically oriented. Later, of course, the Roman Catholic teaching on principles became infinitely more assured and refined. But when we measure it by the measure of what is described as the knowledge of God in the biblical documents, we are forced to regard it as a deviation in which we cannot participate. |

For this reason the construction of the order of moral obligation on the order of being is also for us an impermissible beginning. From what standpoint can we men verify this construction? When we who are not God but men accomplish this derivation of obligation from being, does it not entail a weakening and indeed a destroying of obligation as such? If there is a divinely ordered obligation, how can it be grounded for us except in itself? Does not its command have to be one and the same as the divine act of commanding; indeed, as the divine commanding itself? How can we look beyond this to an underlying divine being, and if we do, have we taken it seriously as obligation? |

If we are asked why we cannot unite the definition of God as being and the derivation of moral obligation from being with the seriousness of the concept of God and his command, we can only reply that it is because we can understand all man’s fellowship with God only as grace. Grace, however, rules out any attempt to snatch at God’s being beyond his act. Grace says that only by and in the divine act do we have fellowship with God and also knowledge of God. We could no longer understand grace as grace, i.e., we could only understand the event in which God meets us and gives us his command as actually another act which has nothing directly to do with God, if grace really shared its power with a capacity of our own nature and reason, if an ascent of man to God were really possible, and an order of obligation could exist, on the basis of a direct relation of man to God which grasps the divine being and thus bypasses his grace. If we thus divide the relation between the two factors of ⌜essence and grace⌝, grace as the supposedly second divine factor becomes a subject that we can master as we master subjects for which the concept of the divine is necessarily too good in our eyes. God’s grace—this is the Protestant axiom behind which we cannot let ourselves be pushed—is either full, total, and exclusive grace or it is not divine but at best a demonic power and wisdom. In the idea of a grace that can be bypassed and that serves only to kindle a previously existing light, we do not recognize the serious exclusiveness of the biblical concept of revelation and reconciliation in its analogy to the creation of the world out of nothing. |

With this insight, in the light of the sole efficacy and sufficiency of grace, we must also view—naturally as the second thing, not the first—the corresponding negation, the concept of sin, much more sharply than this Roman Catholic doctrine does. We cannot accept a purely relative, quantitative, and factual significance of the fall for the capacity of man in relation to God. Without being in Manichean fashion unmindful of the creation of man by God and man’s determination, by creation, for God, we must reject any fitness of man for cooperation with God on the basis of this orientation to him. This side of the fall, that orientation in itself and as such produces no possibility or reality of even a restricted fellowship with the living and true God. If, as we shall see later, grace and the divine command have an implication for the pure creatureliness of man as such, this is an implication of grace and not a presupposition of nature and reason. It was again an aberration when the early church from at least the second half of the first century18 began to seek and find the sources of Christian morality and moral teaching in both reason and revelation and consequently in both Cicero, etc., and the Gospels. The obvious reason for this aberration was that grace began to be understood as no longer grace and sin as no longer sin, and the reign began of an idea of the perfect Christian state which in §1, 2 we came upon with regret at the cradle of emancipated Christian morals. |

Justification and also sanctification are not the work of both God and man but of God alone, and theology cannot unite with a philosophy which would have things different in order that it may itself follow the same path as Roman Catholic theology does. The distinction between philosophical and theological ethics cannot mean that the two draw on different sources and even if in mutual fulfillment rest in different ways on the knowledge of God. For philosophy, too, grace cannot be a mere illumination and direction of human thought that in itself is already on the way to God. On the other hand, for theology, too, grace is not something that it can handle as its special preserve even if in only a relative antithesis to philosophy, so that on the basis of its special relation to it—mark well, on the basis of its special relation to God’s grace—it can and should claim precedence over philosophy. |

Is not this distinction of two different sources of ethics, and the resultant ranking of theology and philosophy, simply another relapse into the isolation of theology which in what is perhaps a fateful way compromises the strict validity of its own principle by passing on to philosophy another valid principle, and which will not satisfy philosophy itself, perhaps, and rightly so? If the “wisest of all intermediaries,” as Mausbach (p. 527) calls Thomas, cleverly avoided in fact the crass errors of apologetics and isolation which recent Protestant ethics has committed, does not the basic error which seems to be present in him frighten us all the more? What are finally the Protestant mistakes but coarser forms of the refined error that we must see in the union of Aristotle and Augustine as such? If formally and in its main structural outlines we accept the Roman Catholic definition of the relation between philosophical and theological ethics as a model, we must at least give to it a different basis and content corresponding to the Protestant view of God, man, sin, and grace.

The debate with the most important definitions of the relation between philosophical and theological ethics is now behind us. We have conducted it from a specific point assigned to us by our task, the task of theological ethics. It is obvious that when conducted from the standpoint of philosophy the debate would have other aspects. But if it were a matter of the philosophy which is alone at issue here, namely, that which shares with theology the latter’s final knowledge, the material result could not possibly be any different. In the rejection of the method of apologetics and isolation, and in the material rejection of the Roman Catholic construction along with an acknowledgment of its great formal significance, philosophy might argue differently but could only agree with us. With the same proviso and the same expectation we now address the task of giving our own answer to the problem indicated in the title of the present section. The proviso is that we do not presume to speak in the name of both theology and philosophy but are fundamentally leaving it to philosophy to speak the word that it ought to speak here. The expectation is that philosophy will speak very differently but will not in fact have anything different to say.19

The Common Christianity of Philosophical and Theological Ethics

Among the results of our deliberations thus far the concept of a Christian philosophy must have proved especially strange from more than one standpoint. In explanation we may observe primarily that “Christian theology,” if the term Christian is to have any significance, is a concept which is not in any sense any more self-evident. Just as well and just as badly as philosophy, theology is a human science. It knows, understands, and speaks on earth and not in heaven. If the word “Christian” is not to be simply a historical differentiation of this theology from similar phenomena in Buddhism or Islam, if the thought behind it is Christ, and therefore the revelation of the living and true God to man, and therefore a science that has as its theme, not one of the revelations of the demonic, which also exist, but the revelation of this the living God, then the question how this science acquires the predicate “Christian” is no less apposite than the question how philosophy, the science of man’s understanding of himself, comes to presuppose God’s revelation and therefore to have a claim to be called “Christian.” One might even consider whether theology’s claim to be Christian is not even bolder than raising such a claim for philosophy, whether the Christian element in philosophy, the revelation of God, cannot have at least the less striking significance of a decisive but unexpressed presupposition, and might not be applied to science as a whole, to art, to education, and finally indeed to any practical area, whereas the Christian element in theology, which is perilously isolated compared to all these fields, claims to arise precisely as the theme of human investigation, assertion, and presentation. Might it not be that for serious reasons there are more objections against the Christianity of theology than that of philosophy? |

We will begin with three negative statements: (1) If the Christian element is understood seriously as the Word of God, it cannot have even for the theologian the significance of a first and basic principle, a definition, which is then adapted to be the principle of further definitions and supposedly guarantees the Christianity of the whole. (2) The Christian element, seriously understood, cannot consist even for the theologian in a specific method, in the deduction of all statements from holy scripture or dogma, or even in the candid and sincere expression of the religious consciousness. (3) Again the Christian element cannot lie in the degree of depth and force of the personal Christian piety of the theologian concerned. Sought in any of these three directions, the Christian element would obviously be under man’s control and it need hardly be shown that it would then no longer be taken seriously as the Christian element, and in spite of the presence of perhaps all the qualities we should constantly have to reckon with the possibility that the theology is not Christian at all. |

Taken seriously, the concept “Christian,” even when applied to theology, can be no more than a pointer to the testimony: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” [John 14:6]. The Christianity of theology does not in any way rest upon itself but upon the revelation that is its theme. In this regard it should be remembered that the revelation is God himself. But God himself is our Lord from and by and to whom we are what we are. In an absolute sense we can have the way, the truth, and the life, the Christian element, only as and to the extent that it has us. “Not that I have already attained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” The one who speaks here is not a philosopher who, as we theologians like to think, has no knowledge as such of the joyful possession of salvation. It is the apostle of Jesus Christ who in Philippians 3:12 speaks thus of that joyful possession. It is thus that the possession takes place. Knowledge of God, as it takes place, is an absolute reality on its own, distinguished by the fact that it cannot be elucidated in any of the forms of human perception even though it always takes place in such forms. It itself apprehends man, not without human receptivity and even spontaneity, but precisely not in such a way that human receptivity and spontaneity take place on the same plane as its own action and might claim to be correlative with it, so that it would then make sense to talk of a religio-psychological circle, but rather in such a way that it can only be believed by man—the same apostle would rather talk of being known than of knowing [cf. Gal. 4:9]—and witness can then be given to it in obedience (“I believe and so I speak” [2 Cor. 4:13]). |

This is how it is with the Christianity of theology. To repeat our polemic against the Roman Catholic view, it is grace. Being identical with God’s Word and therefore with God himself, it is precisely not an instrument that is put in the hand of man. It can be real only in the reality of the act of the living and true God himself. Man can only bear witness to it in faith and obedience and the power of this witness is again that of God and not of man. Bearing witness to this reality of God which reveals itself and makes itself present to us is the office of the church and of theological science in the service of the church. Seen from above, its Christianity, its relation to God’s Word, is with God, while seen from below it stands in the faith and obedience of those who discharge this ministry. On both sides this means that the Christianity of theology is divinely certain but humanly uncertain. The Christianity of theological ethics lies, then, in the reality of God’s commanding, of God’s Word so far as it claims us men and finds our faith and obedience.

Theological ethics confesses God’s revelation in Christ through the Holy Spirit. In accordance with what has been said, this obviously does not refer to the content and form and religious fervor of any confessional formula. Nor is its Christianity guaranteed thereby. It cannot itself guarantee its own Christianity. It can only confess by its act its faith and obedience and its knowledge of God’s revelation. It can only bear witness to the Christian element. It does this when as theological ethics it presents the reality of the Word of God sanctifying and claiming man as God’s command. When it has done this which is its duty to do, then as a discipline auxiliary to dogmatics it must confess with all dogmatics that it is an unprofitable servant [cf. Luke 17:10]. The truth itself must then impress the seal of truth on its presentation. The Christian element must then speak for itself. But the truth is free and the Christian element is free, for the truth and the Christian element are not distinct from God. God, however, is the Lord who in the church and theology as well as his whole creation can be served only by those who are appropriated without being able to boast of having appropriated to themselves what is worth boasting about.

If we have first put theology in its proper place so far as its Christianity is concerned, it should not be hard to see that ⌜under the same conditions⌝ a Christian philosophy cannot be impossible. Again we do not seek its Christianity, or the Christian confession that we have expressly assigned to it in the thesis,20 in the content or form of fervor of a confessional formula. Indeed, we must explicitly say of philosophy in distinction from theology that if it is to be science in the strict sense it must fundamentally refrain from confessing whenever this possibility arises. We commend the celebrated passages in which even the sober Kant could not help preaching in his own way about the starry heavens above and the moral law within.21 But in such passages, even he, not to speak of someone like Fichte, transgresses the limits of philosophy. For the theme of philosophy in contrast to theology is not the Word of God that is to be proclaimed but thinking, willing, and feeling man that is to be understood. Philosophy would be guilty of shifting into another genre and neglecting its own proper function if more than very occasionally it were to become proclamation of the Christian element, which is the business of the church, and of theology within it. |

Philosophy is, of course, called to bear witness to Christian truth, which is truth itself. Nor is it called to do so, indeed, at a lower level than theology. Within the church there is no human activity that is not called to bear witness to Christian truth alongside the church’s proclamation, and again not at a lower level than this. All human action that has God’s Word as its presupposition is witness in this broader and no lesser sense. This applies to philosophy as a self-understanding of man in which man is not seen apart or in eminent abstraction from God’s Word, but in determination by it as the man who confronts and is apprehended and seized by its claim and promise; in which he is not seen and understood in general but specifically in the sphere of the church of pardoned sinners which has been instituted by Christ and is united in him; in which it is constantly noted that man belongs to God, not by nature and as a general truth, but on the basis of God’s manifested grace, and that in ethics he is thus to be measured by the standard of what is heard from God. A Christian philosophy of this kind will not have to utter a single statement of explicitly Christian content or speak any dogmatic or biblical word, just as Christian art does not have to produce only portrayals of Christ, oratorios, Christian novels, and the like. Knowing the witness of the Bible and dogma, it simply has to fashion its own statements according to the laws of its own subject, and in this way, with this indirectness, it will bear witness to the Christian element. It has a theme which expressly differs from that of theology. What is the theme of theology is for it merely (though what does merely mean here?) a presupposition. Yet this does not make it a secular discipline. A discipline is secular only to the extent that it departs from that knowledge. Theology itself can be secular. No discipline is secular that has that knowledge as its presupposition. |

One may well ask whether there can be a philosophy that shares with theology the latter’s final word. What are we to say to this question? Above all that on the basis of theology one has the right to put it only when it is directed with even greater sharpness to what is now called theology in our midst. There is Christian philosophy in the same sense as there is Christian theology, justified not by its works but by faith. The presence of Christianity in philosophy, too, is ultimately a question of the grace of God. Knowledge of the presupposition of a meaningful understanding of man by himself is in the last analysis a being known rather than a knowing and it again rests with God whether he will give the power of witness to the witness of a philosophy grounded in this knowledge. We are saying precisely the same thing when we call the presence of Christianity a question of faith and obedience. |

In relation to this side of the matter, to the human decision in which the grace of God can be seen, we may and must put to all philosophy the question whether it realizes how strongly “it is drawn into a deeper responsibility by the existence of the Christian revelation” (Knittermeyer, D. Phil. u. d. Chrt., p. 7), that “from the moment when a truth was proclaimed in Palestine which ousted the Greek Logos from its place of power in western culture and revealed a new salvation to man” it has been confronted by a force “of which we know that it has power over life and death and can kill off philosophy” (pp. 16f.). “The reality is now fundamentally different. World history is no longer world judgment by the idea but it stands in the reality of the Word which is proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ and which means God and the neighbor” (p. 27). “In the place of man and reason comes Jesus Christ the Lord and the faith that frees” (p. 27), an experience which philosophy cannot evade “any more than the whole life of man can evade the experience that the Word of Jesus Christ is proclaimed as the Word of salvation” (pp. 30f.). “To be able to maintain the claim of philosophy at all it is necessary continually to relate it afresh to man in his real state and that means primarily and finally to adjust it to the total change that has taken place with the proclamation of the Word of Christ” (pp. 35f., cf. 50).22 This is the question, the question of repentance, which the church cannot cease to put to philosophy, especially when it hears it in this way from within itself. This question, the question of Christ, is put to philosophy, because, as Knittermeyer rightly stresses,23 it is put to man as such. How can a scientific self-understanding on man’s part fail to take a very different direction when the seriousness of this question has been perceived? |

Here as elsewhere, however, we must be careful to say the right thing about whether this or that man, in this case this or that philosopher, is really a hearer and therefore a witness of the Word. We should again be misconstruing world judgment as world judgment by the idea that Christ has set aside, and instituting ourselves as judges of the world, if we were to arm ourselves with some norm of what is Christian and survey philosophical ethicists with a view to saying which of them belong to the sheep and which to the goats. In theology and philosophy, as everywhere where human work is done, the judgment whether human work has been done in God [cf. John. 3:21] is in God’s hands. Fundamentally we cannot press on beyond the questions that we have everywhere to put to its authors, and even when they cannot perhaps give satisfactory answers, we cannot arrive at a definitive statement whether a work is valid for us as witness or not. It might be that in one case we have evaded a witness by not hearing it as such and in another that we have wrongly lent our ears to the voice of a demon. The Christian and its opposite never meet us anywhere with the clearcut distinction of black and white but both of them broken up a hundredfold in both philosophy and theology. Our own deciding and dividing can take place only in faith and can be justified only in faith. It is enough for philosophy, as for theology too, that there is a grace of God and a space in the church of Christ for it, that it is summoned thereby to reflect on whether the object of its reflection is real man, i.e., man set in the light of revelation, and that the truth-content in any philosophy depends on how far it is indirect witness to revelation on the basis of this reflection. We do not really need to judge the servants of another [cf. Rom. 14:4] in order to achieve critical scientific certainty as to our own path.

The Word of God as Reality and Theological Ethics

We may be brief here, for we shall have to deal expressly with this matter in the third subsection of the Introduction when unfolding the task of theological ethics, and then again in the first chapter of our exposition in the strict and proper sense. It interests us here only by way of contrast to the issue of philosophical ethics.

Theology, too, is an act of human reflection and understanding. Unlike philosophy, however, it is not man’s reflection on and understanding of himself. In basic analogy to jurisprudence, natural and historical science, and medicine, it is reflection on and understanding of an object that is to be distinguished methodologically from inquiring man who is the subject of the science. Like all these sciences, theology has the object of its research and instruction contingently given to it. Among all sciences only philosophy (perhaps including mathematics) is pure self-reflection and self-understanding, inquiry and instruction “without an object.” In distinction from it theology is one of the positive sciences (or one of the three higher faculties as they used to put it). It arises in a very simple and earthly way out of the concrete demands of a specific sphere of human purpose, namely, the church, which does not want to teach without also learning and therefore does not want to take away the education of its ministers from the university, just as thus far the university has obviously not wanted to lose from the circle of its scientific investigations and answers the reflection and understanding demanded by this sphere. |

The basic object which characterizes the reflection demanded in the sphere of the church is the Word of God, God’s revelation to man. This object constitutes and validates the existence of the church and of theological science (as the function of both the church and the university). The existence of this science is on the one hand a confession of the church that it regards scientific questions and answers as necessary in relation to this object while on the other hand it is a confession of the university that it regards scientific questions and answers as possible in relation to this object. It would be all up with theology, ⌜and the abolition of the theological faculty would demand serious consideration⌝, if either the church could seriously lose interest in science or the university in this science. |

For philosophy the object of theology is fundamentally in question like the objects of all human thought and volition along with the man as such to which it directs its attention. It is one of the possible objects whose reality philosophy, which reckons only with the reality of man himself, does not have to deny but also does not consider—except, perhaps, as the presupposition of man himself, which is another matter. A theology which wants to follow it in this, treating the Word of God as a possibility that has still to be discussed, would obviously be just as pointless an enterprise as a jurisprudence that tried to treat as a problem that factual and necessary existence of the state and its laws, or a medicine that did the same with the fact and necessity of man’s physical life. The lawyer or doctor may perhaps do this to the extent that he has also minored in philosophy, but once he begins to think in terms of law or medicine the problem can no longer exist for him. Theology too, presupposing the reality of its object, may be only a possibility for philosophy, but it proceeds like any other positive science in its adoption of the church’s concern for truth. In the self-evident sense in which the same is true for jurisprudence and medicine and natural and historical science, its thought is tied to the reality of its object. If the theologian thinks freely as though he were a philospher—and even if he does so in a secondary way, then like the lawyer and doctor he must see to it how far this is compatible with his main function—he no longer thinks theologically and he can no longer demand that what he says from this angle, ⌜e.g., from the spectator standpoint of a historian or psychologist,⌝ enjoys any right of participation in the theological dialogue.

If he wants to be a theological scholar and teacher, faithful to his office both in the church and in the university, he cannot wander at large among all kinds of other subjects (as has happened very widely, for example, in the last decades or centuries with respect to the reality of ⌜human piety and its⌝ history, as though ⌜something of this nature⌝ could just as well be its object as the Word of God). He cannot abstract away from this object. He cannot act as though God had not spoken, or perhaps had not spoken, or as though it had first to be investigated whether he had really done so. He cannot permit theological thinking to be at root anything but thinking about this object (as object!). He must form its concepts as predicates of this subject and not (we have already had to guard against this possibility in the discussion in the first section) as a presentation of the pious Christian man who receives the Word of God. If with this alteration of the object it can undoubtedly be a science too, it ceases therewith to be theology. Above the demand that it be scientific, i.e., that it follow a method appropriate to a specific object, there stands for positive science, and therefore for theology, the demand that it be objective, i.e., that it be faithful to its particular object, for concretely it is only on this basis that it may be scientific. |

If theology is to include ethics, or a definition of the good in human conduct, we must not fail to note that God has spoken, speaks, and will speak to man, so that man is told what is good (Mic. 6:8). In no way, however, can this sanctifying reality of God’s Word be a problem here. In no way, again, can there by any question of listening to some other reality of nature and history instead of to this reality. In no way, as has been said, can obedient or disobedient man become the theme of the presentation. Without denying that scientific problems and, in their own way, urgent concerns are present here, we have to say that the existence of the church is constituted and validated by an object, indeed, by this specific object, so that theology, in so far as there is such, and with it theological ethics, must inquire into the relation of this object to human conduct, into the sanctifying reality of God’s Word, and not into anything else. According to the proclamation of the Christian church the true good of human conduct is this reality. Theological ethics, not in the least ashamed of being tied in this way, not departing for a single moment from this standpoint, nor replacing it by another, nor changing it into another, has the task of showing how far this is so. If it fails in this task, if it simply prolongs its existence by changing into another genre, e.g., that of religious science, then its enterprise as such, and the enterprise of theology as a whole, must be regarded as shattered. In such a case the church would do well to renounce the claim to science and the university would do well to renounce the claim to this science. ⌜The time for dissolving the theological faculty would then have come.⌝ So long and so far as theology takes itself seriously, it can set itself no other task than this, and so long and so far as theology is taken seriously as such, neither philosophy nor any other science can demand that it set itself any other task than this.

The Word of God as Possibility and Philosophical Ethics

A self-aware theology which bears strongly in mind its objective and scientific nature will be the very last to set itself its own task in such a way as to deny all other sciences, to view them as impossible, or even to discredit them as less valuable, and to condemn them from its own standpoint to a mere appearance of existence under the suspicion of pagan ungodliness. Theology does not really need to safeguard its own rank among the other sciences by a frenzied posture of absoluteness or by allotting to the others roles which it regards as less valuable in relation to its own. If Paul in Philippians 3:4ff. regarded all else as refuse in order that he might win Christ, it should be recalled that he did not say this against the usual intellectual arrogance of the children of the world but against the much more dangerous spiritual arrogance of Pharisaism. He certainly did not want to replace Jewish Pharisaism by a Christian and, more specifically, a theological Pharisaism. A theology that is set on its own feet can unreservedly acknowledge the justification and even the equal justification of other sciences. Human thought is necessarily shown its limits by the particular object of theology, by the Word of God. It is [reminded] how conditioned it is. It is thus liberated from the illusion of self-justification. It is also fundamentally liberated for an understanding of other tasks whose objects cannot be compared with this object, the object of theology, but which as human tasks, set for men by other spheres of human ends alongside the church, are to be tackled by men with the same seriousness and in the same weakness as theology displays in discharging its own office, so that they do not really fall behind the task of theology in worth. God’s Word does at any rate tell man also that he is a man, i.e., that he is a creature committed to different human ends and as a thinker to different objects. He who has learned from God’s Word what hard, the very hardest, objectivity is, cannot possibly—according to the principle that he who is faithful in big things will also be faithful in little things [cf. Luke 16:10]—fail to take other objects seriously, and no less so even though this object cannot be mentioned in the same breath with them. |

This recognition of nontheological sciences by theology cannot extend only to the positive sciences. If it lies in the nature of the human search for truth that in contrast to the positive, object-oriented sciences which are demanded by the various ends of human life, there should also be the disinterested self-reflection and self-understanding of thinking man without an object, namely, philosophy, theology will say, not last of all but first of all, that this is there by fundamental right. Or is theology to let itself be overtaken by natural and historical science in perceiving that man, who inquires into objective truth in the positive sciences, must always become a primary question to himself? Will not the seriousness of “know thyself,” which stands at the beginning of philosophy, be especially and with a very different urgency perceived by this positive science, in which man is confronted by God’s Word, than in those in which commitment to the object is accompanied by forgetfulness that knowledge without knowledge of knowledge is no knowledge? How can this be forgotten in theology with its commitment to this object and how can philosophy not be recognized and even demanded by it? |

Naturally it is a very definite philosophy, not that of a particular school or tendency, but one determined by its presupposition, that will be demanded by theology and acknowledged by it to be justified, to be equally justified. We have already said that the concept of a Christian philosophy, like that of a Christian theology, cannot be determined by any special material principle or any special epistemological principle or any special fervor—otherwise the Christian element in it would again be understood as a possibility at man’s disposal. It can be determined absolutely only by the knowledge of the Christian element, the Word of God, that precedes its self-reflection (which always in itself observes the limits of humanity). Its self-reflection will always be determined by this knowledge. This type of philosophy, no matter what philosophical school it might follow, will be distinguished primarily from every non-Christian philosophy by its awareness that in practicing that reflection it cannot say the last word that solves the question of man but that the question can be put in merely penultimate words only after and as the last word has been and is spoken. On the presupposition of the answer that has been given, not by theology or the church but by God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, it cannot evade but has to broach the real question, the problem of man’s questionability in his real life-situation. In this regard it is no less but more real philosophy than a non-Christian philosophy which betrays itself constantly by not staying with the question of man, but at some point, even if it be in a little apotheosis of the question, moving on to an answer, propounding a final reality in an absolutizing of thought or thinking or even thinking man, and thus pacifying both itself and man, so that instead of a philosophy it becomes a theology, albeit a pagan one. |

Christian philosophy, which starts by hearing God’s Word, can wait. It knows, as theology must also know, that the final reality cannot be posited by man as a means to answer himself and pacify himself. It sees that the egocentricity of all human attempts to posit a final reality is an error, or what theology would call a sin. Factually, of course, it is unable simply to get rid of the error, just as theology cannot get rid of the sin. Hence it cannot get by without a thesis, and as philosophical ethics it cannot get by without positive concepts such as goodness, value, purpose, duty, virtue, freedom, or idea. Without these it could only say nothing at all or pass over from self-reflection to proclamation, to theology (and then the “know thyself” would not be discussed as it ought to be). If, however, it performs its reflection in the form of self-reflection, as though the principle and reality of the good were man himself, or were in man himself, it realizes that this is not so, for it recognizes the limits of humanity and is thus aware that all such positings are provisional and relative and simply point to the good whose principle and reality are not really man and are not really in man. It takes and presents what is posited as a possible and not the real answer to man’s questions as to the goodness of his conduct and in so doing it is the science which first raises the question in all its seriousness. |

It cannot indeed view the good other than as obedience. An action is obedience, however, when its goodness obviously lies not in doing it or in doing it in a particular way but in doing what is commanded because it is commanded, only that being obedient ⌜which is done according to the command.⌝ It has perceived that that man is a liar and a ghost who by means of self-reflection, self-understanding, and self-responsibility wants to tell himself what is good. It is a summons to the real man who is addressed and contradicted in all the glory of his egocentricity, who may begin to speak but cannot finish, whose speech about himself can have truth only as broken speech, as a confession of its brokenness. It is a summons to the I which no longer thinks it can master the claim that encounters it, or that it can misuse this claim to strengthen itself—the last and greatest triumph of pagan philosophy—but which is set aside by this claim and only thus can find its true basis. It is a claim to responsibility in which man recognizes and confesses that he himself always falls short of what is required and is justified, not on account of his achievement, but only in the decision of obedience for him who requires it and for what is required. |

It is to be noted that philosophy cannot issue this summons by itself, representing and activating the reality of the Word and confronting the I of man with the Thou that lays this claim to him. Not even theology can do this, nor the proclaiming church, nor any man. Only God the Lord himself reads ethics in this sense ⌜and not either the philosopher or the theologian.⌝ Nor is it even the office of philosophical ethics to proclaim this reality as such. In this regard it differs from theological ethics. It shares with the church and theology the task of simply confronting man’s unprofitable and dangerous recollection of himself with the recollection of the wholly other who stands over against him, of pointing out that this wholly other himself speaks to man. For it, however, this wholly other cannot be God himself—it differs in this from the church and theology. Theology, of course, cannot proclaim the Word of God without recalling the neighbor, the brother, in whose claim upon us the Word of God comes to us. But one could not call this reminder the true task of theology. It is simply the great instrument that it uses when and so far as it is a matter of defining the Word of God as the Word that comes to us. This recollection, the changing of self-responsibility into responsibility to the Thou of the other man, is the true and concretely specific task of philosophy. To the extent that self-reflection, the “know thyself,” is at issue, the fellowman is the representative and bearer of the divine Logos who must call man away from all his dreams to reality.

Where the Word of God is heard, there this self-reflection takes place, and there the other man must be heard. His voice is the one that is missed in all pagan philosophy. Philosophy which will hear this word cannot possibly want to be a pagan theology positing ultimate reality. The claim of the fellowman, however, relates to God’s claim as possibility does to reality. The same Word of God is heard in both. In its reality the Word of God obviously cannot be the object of human self-reflection, but only the object of God’s self-revelation and therefore the object of faith and obedience, and in faith and obedience the object of proclamation. Men can only serve when and where God really speaks. But this human service is the possibility corresponding to the divine reality, posited with it, ⌜and grounded in it.⌝ Because the reality of the Word is not without this possibility, Christ is not without his church. Service of the Word is the human activity which is the essence of the church. The possibility of God’s Word coming to us is the fellowman who is commissioned by God and who serves his Word. This applies not merely to ecclesiastical office in the narrower sense but to the church as such. This is the new meaning, actualized in Christ, of the fellowman as brother and neighbor. The fellowman can bring God’s Word to us when God wills to speak his Word ⌜through him.⌝ We have to receive him because of this possibility. |

Philosophy cannot go beyond this possibility that is posited with the reality of God’s Word if it is not to go beyond the Word of God itself, if it is to be true to its own task, if it is not to become theology. It can no longer summon man to self-responsibility except as it teaches him to understand himself as standing in the responsibility which he owes to his fellowman when the latter is set before him as the bearer and representative of the divine Logos. That he is this belongs to another book and is not as self-evidently and directly true as Gogarten, for example, seems to assume.24 ⌜It becomes true whenever God causes it to become true.⌝ Philosophy can as little demonstrate the Thou that captures my I for God as theology can demonstrate the Word of God itself. Both can only bear witness, and the power of their witness is the power of the free God. Nevertheless, philosophy can bear witness when and so far as it has as its presupposition real knowledge of man, knowledge of the church, and knowledge of the fellowman who draws man to responsibility. With this presupposition it does not bear witness to the law but to the gospel and the grace which, of course, encloses the law. For it is grace if we have the fellowman who with his claim represents the divine claim, just as the law is also established hereby.

Undoubtedly we are on different levels of intellectual activity when theology speaks about God but not without reference to the brother, and philosophy speaks about the fellowman for God’s sake, when the reality of God’s Word on the one side and its possibility on the other side is the object of investigation, when the same Word of God is the theme here and the presupposition there. These differences are necessary differences in human conceptuality. As such they are rightly the principle of a sober distinction between theology and philosophy. But they are not more than that. They are not the principle of a distinction of rank and value. Philosophy is not ancillary to theology. With philosophy, theology can only want to be ancillary to the church and to Christ.

§3

THE WAY OF THEOLOGICAL ETHICS

The task of theological ethics is that of presenting the claiming of man by the Word of God. It has to depict (1) the event of the claiming as such and then its significance for man, i.e., (2) his claiming as God’s creature, (3) his claiming as a pardoned sinner, and (4) his claiming as an heir of the kingdom of God. Under 2–4 it must consider in each case (a) the uniqueness of the ethical standpoint, (b) the normative form of the noetic basis, (c) the decisive content of the ethical demand, and (d) the fulfilment of the ethical demand.

In relation to the results of the work to be done in theological ethics it is obviously not a matter of indifference that we should expressly discuss first the way in which questions are to be raised and answered. The matter of finding the right way or the right division is not just a formal one. Here as elsewhere it is no more and no less than the matter of finding the right basic concepts without which one may in some circumstances live well and happily but one cannot achieve a coherent thought and understanding when they are needed. Here as elsewhere, however, the criterion whether the concepts are right or not has to be that of appropriateness to the particular theme which seems to be at issue in theological ethics.

In the light of the conclusion reached in our first two sections we no longer need to explain but simply to state by way of demarcation what lines of inquiry and consequent divisions of theological ethics we must set aside.

On the basis of the relation that we have established between theological and philosophical ethics, we regard as useless all attempts to build the former on the latter or to derive it from it. Apart from the great classical example of Roman Catholic ethics, this is the way taken by W. Herrmann, O. Kirn, E. W. Mayer, G. Wünsch, at the start De Wette, and, in the form of express apologetics, T. Haering. It leads to a twofold division: e.g., 1. Natural Moral Life and Moral Thought, 2. Christian Moral Life (W. Herrmann);1 or 1. Ethical Principles, 2. Systematic Presentation of the Christian Moral Life (Kirn);2 or 1. Moral Philosophy, 2. Moral Teaching (Mayer);3 or 1. The Nature of Morals, 2. The Nature of Christian Morals (Wünsch).4 According to what has been said already we cannot approve either the methodological subordination of Christian morals to morals in general, the independence of morals in general alongside and over against Christian morals, or the assumed superiority of a theological moral teaching that draws from a special source. Hence we must reject this whole method. |

Looking back to what has been said about the relation between dogmatics and ethics we also cannot agree with ordinary theological ethics about the actual questions which usually underlie it either with or without a philosophical substructure. According to Schleiermacher’s ingenious conception theological ethics has to speak about the “purifying” action that takes place in the discipline of church and home and also in the state, about the “disseminating” action that takes place in marriage and both extensively and intensively in the church, and finally about the “representative” action that takes place in church worship, social life, art, and play.5 According to Hofmann it is a matter of the Christian disposition and its actualization in moral action in the relation to God, in the church, in the family, in the state, and in society.6 According to Herrmann it is a matter of the rise and development of the Christian life.7 According to Kirn it is a matter of the rise and development of Christian personality on the one hand and the practice of morality in society on the other.8 According to Haering it is a matter of the new life of the Christian as personality and of the Christian life in social circles.9 According to E. W. Mayer it is a matter of moral character, the nature of Christian conduct in the various forms of action and social life, its order and structure, and finally its result, the kingdom of God.10 According to Wünsch’s not wholly clear arrangement it is a matter (1) of the nature of God, (2) of the moral outcome of experience of God, (3) of Christian character, and (4) of some residual problems, among which Wünsch places the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount!11 An original and powerful approach is that of Schlatter, for whom the four Platonic virtues of justice, truth, happiness, and strength, related to the communion of will, knowledge, feeling, and life, constitute the schema of inquiry and presentation.12 |

We cannot go along here (even with Schlatter) because, as has been shown, there occurs a distinction between theology and ethics and a shift of focus from God to man which we cannot endorse. Against all these divisions we have to bring the objection that they are derived from something other than the matter itself and that they are not therefore brought and applied to the matter to its advantage. Schleiermacher certainly makes an acute observation when he discerns elements of criticism, construction, and play in human conduct, but does this really grasp and describe Christian conduct as such? That the fact of the Christian life confronts us with the problem of its rise and development (Herrmann, Kirn), or with the antithesis of disposition and activity (Hofmann), is certainly true in its own place, but are these distinctions really denotative of the Christian life?

The favorite distinction between individual and social ethics, which may be seen in varying degrees in Hofmann, Martensen, Haering, Kirn, and Mayer,13 may pass as possible and meaningful. (Schlatter in his Ethics, 1914, pp. 53f. had some noteworthy things to say against it, and it would hardly be commended to us by a good philosophical ethics.) In any case, however, one has to say that it carries with it the self-evident presupposition that Christian conduct is simply a special instance of conduct in general, so that if the correlation of individual and society is constitutive for the latter it must be for the former too. Similarly Schlatter’s derivation of Christian moral teaching from will, knowledge, feeling, and life, refreshing though it is alongside the rather arid dispositions of the Ritschlians, entails a simplistic adoption of what is perhaps a correct and perhaps also an arbitrary definition of human conduct as the schema for a presentation of Christian conduct.14 |

All these divisions and classifications are nontheological to the extent that according to the same methods (even presupposing that they are right) they could obviously apply just as well to a Buddhist, Socialist, or Anthroposophical ethics as to a Christian ethics when the same concepts are filled out in different ways. What we miss in them is a specific congruence with the specific matter at issue here, namely, the Christian understanding of the goodness of human conduct. To explain this do not things have to be said that cannot be said in the framework of a concept of human conduct in general? Is not a distinctive mode of understanding essential to this understanding? Are not severe truncations of this understanding unavoidable if we take it for granted, as is plainly done all the way from Schleiermacher to Schlatter, that we may enter and follow paths that can obviously lead us to other places too? Does there not avenge itself here the fateful distinction between ethics and dogmatics, the fateful shift of focus from God to man? |

If that distinction and shift are right, then in ethics man himself, or in this case the problem of human action, will have to be the measure of all things, the theme, and the framework within which the inquiry must take place. On this assumption it may and must be, as is clearly presupposed in those divisions and classifications, that man has to pose certain questions: How can he become and be a Christian? What does it mean to act as such? What is meant by Christian willing, knowing, and feeling? What does Christian conduct imply for human aspirations in life and culture, for society, state, and church, for marriage and family, for art and science, for work and recreation? Theological ethics supposedly has to answer these questions which are not raised responsibly in decision vis-à-vis the divine command that has really been issued. It supposedly has to say something to man when he himself can say the one thing that has to be said only with the act of his decision vis-à-vis the Word of God that has really come to him. At this point there can be no agreement.

Undoubtedly, as may abundantly be seen in the authors quoted, many profound, true, serious, and fruitful things, even things that call for decision, may be said in an ethics that replies in this way to man. But no less undoubtedly a basically untheological ethics which replies in this way to man throws a veil by its whole attitude over the true whence and whither of a theological ethics, over its relation to the Word of God which is really published—a veil which can only be regarded as impossible when the damage it does is perceived. Why should theological ethics accept the invitation to take up the position of a center of information on every possible subject? Why should it not put its own questions instead of having put to it from outside questions which theology does not really have to answer and concerning which it does not have, and out of its own resources obviously cannot fashion, any guarantee that philosophical ethics, to whose sphere of competence these questions plainly belong, can even acknowledge them to be correctly put? Why should it let itself be forced into the position and attitude of having to answer when even the most profound and true and serious and fruitful things it can produce are from the very first put on the wrong track and cannot be heard as a summons to decision, or can be heard as such only in spite of the untheological beginning? |

If, however, theology is fundamentally the science of Christian proclamation, then it does not have to reply to man’s questions in its statements but man himself is questioned by these statements. Its theme is God’s Word, not the Word of God that is claimed by man but the Word that claims him. It certainly claims man in the whole problem of his conduct. But the problem and the contribution that Christianity has to make to it cannot be the theme. It cannot let its questions be framed by the problem, just as it is a perversion if Christian proclamation does this. It cannot derive and divide them and achieve its basic concepts thus, unless it is content to be merely an inferior replica of philosophical ethics. Justice will be done to the special problem of Christian ethics which must occupy us here when we do not regard the Christian element as just a predicate but as the subject, as is appropriate in a discipline auxiliary to dogmatics; when we do not let human conduct as such be the center, the beginning, and the end of theological ethics, but allot this position instead to man’s claiming by the Word of God, to his sanctification, to God’s action in and on his own action.

If this determination of the way that lies ahead of us is right, the further question arises how we are to handle and structure in detail the task that is thereby set for us. A first step is fairly simply and self-evidently shown to be necessary. The Word of God must first be indicated and presented as the subject of the claiming of man, as the command that sanctifies him. We believe that in theological ethics we have to seek and find the goodness of human conduct in the event of an act of God himself toward man, namely, the act of his speech and self-revelation to him. Man does good acts when he acts as a hearer of God’s Word, and obedience is the good. Thus the good arises out of hearing and therefore out of the divine speaking. One may also put it in this way. Man does good acts when he is led by God to responsibility. To act in and out of responsibility to God is to act in a committed way. In this commitment the good is done. Thus the good arises out of responsibility and therefore out of the divine speaking to which man responds with his acts. One may also put it in this way. Man does good acts when he acts as a Christian. Theologically this means when he acts as one whom God encounters in his revelation in Christ through the Holy Spirit, so that his action takes place in this encounter or confrontation. To act in this confrontation is to act as one who is addressed. In this being addressed the good is done. Thus the good arises out of the encounter and therefore out of God’s speaking and the encounter in which the confrontation takes place. This is fundamentally the theological answer to the ethical question. Its characteristic feature is that in asking about the goodness of human conduct it understands man as one who is addressed by God and it thus points away from man to God and his speaking, or, more accurately, his commanding. The good in human conduct is its determination by the divine commanding. We shall have to consider more closely what this determination implies. But at all events a theological ethics can seek the good only in this determination of human conduct and therefore only in the divine commanding which produces it. It cannot seek it in human conduct itself and as such. Why not? For the moment we can only state the answer. The concept of the God who confronts man in absolute supremacy, the fact that God speaks to man and man is spoken to by him, is here taken so seriously that the question of the goodness of human conduct can be answered only with a reference to him who alone is good [cf. Mark 10:18], with an assertion of the absolute transcendence of him who is good, except that recognition that the God who alone is good is the one who commands, as an act relative to us and not as a transcendent being, means that his immanence, a highly actual immanence, is also perceived, and therewith, but only therewith, a positive answer to the ethical question is made possible. |

Thus the claiming and sanctifying of man by God, and therefore the goodness of his conduct, really lies in the reality of the divine commanding. How far this divine commanding is an event is the first thing a theological ethics will have to show and develop as a basic and comprehensive principle. In accordance with the doctrine of revelation in the prolegomena to dogmatics we cannot lay too much stress on the fact that the dominant principle of theological ethics, the sanctifying Word of God, is to be understood as an event, a reality which is not seen at all unless it is seen as a reality that takes place. In ethics no less than dogmatics God’s Word is not a general truth which can be generally perceived from the safe harbor of theoretical contemplation. Nor is it a being from which an imperative may be comfortably deduced. God’s Word gives itself to be known, and in so doing it is heard, man is made responsible, and his acts take place in that confrontation. The Word of God is the Word of God only in act. The Word of God is decision. God acts. Only with reference to this reality which is not general but highly specific can theological ethics venture to answer the ethical question. Its theory is meant only as the theory of this practice. But this practice presupposes that it is taking place and only on this presupposition does it dare to give an answer. In the same divine decision, in the same actuality, in the same knowledge of revelation, the knowledge which is itself revelation, the Christian church exists and there is faith and obedience in it. As this decision is taken man acts as a hearer and with responsibility, and to that extent he does good acts. For the decision is that God gives his command to him, the lawless one, and thus calls him out of darkness into his wonderful light [cf. 1 Pet. 2:9].

To understand things in this way is our first task. It will logically take the form of three questions concerning the occurrence, the context, and the significance or force of this commanding. This is the totally different material which in our first chapter must replace the doctrine of philosophical principles so beloved in modern theological ethics.

Obviously, however, this can be only the foundation, the general thesis. How shall we then proceed? When the reality of the divine commanding is presupposed, it has to be made clear how far this commanding applies to man, how far the divine decision about man takes place. The question suggests itself whether, when justice is done in the foundation to the concern for a theocentric orientation of ethics, it might not be appropriate to adopt as a framework for the necessary detailed demonstration one of the schematisms already mentioned, e.g., individual and social ethics, or the rise and development of the Christian life, or will, knowledge, and feeling. Might it not be in place to pick up the concept of personality and character on the one side, or sociological concepts on the other, as empty vessels into which the Christian element is to be poured? Might not the task of theological ethics have to be sought in a Christian illumination of the human microcosm and macrocosm, in a Christian answer to the questions of human life? If it is only a rather headstrong concern for a strictly theological orientation that stands in our way, or if it is in the interests of an attainable clarity to do so, why should we not yield, or at least be able to yield, and put our further questions in terms of the concept of man, especially if the possibilities of putting them in terms of the sanctifying Word of God seem to be already exhausted? But this is not at all the case. |

It is no mere matter of formal interest in a theocentric theology. If it were, then we could take a different course as Schaeder has long since shown that he can do.15 The simple question is whether theological ethics would really act even in the interests of man and his questions about life if it were to give up its birthright and abandon the standpoint which it has the task of making fruitful in the field of ethics. If it has rightly understood itself and its principle, the sanctifying Word of God understood as event, can it wrest the word from this Word and begin to speak about the Word in all kinds of applications? Must it not take seriously the fact that this Word itself will see to its application and above all that it wills to be heard to the very last? So far as their Christian illumination is concerned, will not personality and science and the state and any other conceivable area of human action fare much better if we give the word to the Word, if we let things work themselves out naturally in these areas as the Word is allowed to speak according to its own logic? It cannot serve the cause of clarity if we begin with the concept of the divine command and then try to continue with thoughts about the individual and society or the unrolling of a psychological schema or the variation of a table of Christian duties and virtues. For our basis of ethics can hardly serve as a basis for this, and the concept of the divine command as the basis of ethics can only be obscured by entry upon divergent paths of this kind. Nor are we compelled to take such paths as though we had said all that can be said about the Word of God when we have asserted its actuality. So far we have not even approached its content, so how can we have said all that there is to say about it? Precisely in relation to man, the theme of our present investigation, does it not have a specific and very rich content in virtue of which it may perhaps grasp and comprehend the whole problem of human conduct in a much more powerful and profound way than if we venture to move on to those applications and illuminations with the help of an alien schematism attached to it?—a content that we have simply to allow to speak if we are to come in the easiest and most appropriate way to the path that is needed for a perspicuous and truly exhaustive presentation of our theme. |

What, then, does God’s Word say? It is the Word of the divine creation, the divine reconciliation, and the divine redemption. One may also say that it reveals the kingdom of Christ the Lord as that of nature, grace, and glory. One may also say that it speaks to us about our determination for God, about the event of our relation to God, and about the goal of our fulfillment in God. These are not accidentally or arbitrarily chosen standpoints. As may be seen, they are the great orientation points of the whole course of Christian dogmatics. To build on them in an auxiliary discipline like ethics, which deals with the whole and recapitulates the whole, obviously makes sense. On the basis and presupposition of the development of the concept of God, which might be a better parallel for our first chapter of ethics than dogmatic prolegomena, dogmatics shows (1) how God the Lord is the Creator of all that is not himself and therefore [the Lord] of man, the epitome of all that he himself [is] not. It regards the world and man from the standpoint of this original divine lordship which is understood to be original and therefore absolutely superior to man’s own being. It shows (2) how God the Lord is the Reconciler of man, the God of the convenant whose faithfulness cannot be broken but only set in a clearer light by man’s unfaithfulness, whose majesty in face of man’s sin proves itself to be all the more powerful as grace. It thus sees man from the standpoint of this divine lordship which is maintained in spite of the reality of man. It sees him in the paradox of one who has fallen but is still upheld, who is an enemy but is still loved, who is a rebel and yet still a servant. It shows (3) how God the Lord is the Redeemer of man, the First who is also the Last, whose kingdom comes, the kingdom of the rift that has been bridged, of the new heaven and the new earth, of glory. It thus views man eschatologically, i.e., from the standpoint of this eternal divine lordship that has been promised and fulfilled to man as one who lives in time, who waits and hastens onward within a positive limit that is full of hope, who is both overshadowed by death as the removal of everything in this world and also illumined by the resurrection of the dead in which everything will be made new. It is only in appearance that we are indicating herewith three parts or steps of truth or knowledge. For in reality, just as in the doctrine of the divine triunity, which is the secret root of this order, here, too, the one total thing is said three times, and Jesus Christ, who is the very Word of God, stands at the controlling center of the thought of reconciliation, and is thus also the presupposition and quintessence of the thought of creation and the thought of redemption.

We are obviously in no position, however, to waive this threefold movement of our Christian knowledge or to state this thrice-determined Christian truth in a single word. The one Word is God’s own Word which we cannot speak but can only hear spoken to us. And what we hear is threefold. This is why we cannot make of it a system. If it were a system, we should have to be able to trace it back to one word. A system has a central point or cardinal statement from which all the rest can be deduced. The reality of God’s Word is, of course, the central point on which everything turns here. We, however, have no word for this reality. Naturally we can and must recognize it as such but we have only words relating to it and not a word for it. ⌜Exclusive of the statement “God is the Lord,”⌝ these words are creation, reconciliation, and redemption. They do not denote a system but a way. We have certainly not sought this way but found it with unfathomable contingency in God’s revelation, in its attestation by holy scripture, and in the dogma of the church. If we may assume that it has been correctly described, then we must naturally keep to it in ethics too, without trying to work with unguaranteed concepts borrowed from psychology and logic. |

The concept of man contained in God’s own Word understands him as God’s creature, as God’s pardoned sinner, and as God’s future redeemed. We see ourselves in these relations when and insofar as we see ourselves in God’s Word. In these relations we obviously have to ask about our sanctification, about the significance of the divine decision, of the event of God’s commanding. In these three relations we see ourselves as claimed by God’s Word. This is man—and we take as a basis, not a general and abstract concept of man, but the concrete Christian concept, when we say that this is sanctified man, who is the predicate and not the subject of the statements of theological ethics. Man is God’s creature, a sinner pardoned in Christ, the heir of God’s kingdom, because and to the extent that God claims him as such. In all these relations the divine commanding is the principle of the goodness of his conduct. It is plain that these relations, too, do not denote stages or parts of man’s being, and that these understandings of sanctification are not different stages or parts of God’s commanding, but that we are always dealing with the one whole man and the one whole command of God as this is given to him in God’s revelation. Here too, then, the differentiation can only be intended logically and not ontologically. It can denote only various points on the way of knowledge, only various angles from which to understand what is intrinsically one whole reality, not a division within this reality. But this one whole reality is God’s own reality whose unity we do not control and which as an absolutely actual reality cannot be used by us to form the unity of a system. The distinction is thus necessary as a logical distinction. We do not have at our disposal the synthesis which would remove it. God is the synthesis, but not a synthesis that we have made or can make. Thus the significance of the divine commanding is necessarily different as we understand it as that of God the Creator, God the Reconciler, and God the Redeemer, although these three are not three but one. How can we possibly understand his command in one word without that distinction if we can understand God himself only in the denoted movement of knowledge? |

The history of Christian ethics with its innumerable conflicts between types of thinking oriented to creation, reconciliation, or redemption, to nature, grace, or glory, shows us that in fact this movement has taken place in the ethical thinking of Christianity. If we understand that the Word of God is moral truth, we understand that the distinction which underlies this movement is necessary and cannot be evaded. Hence we not only see that the historical conflicts in their own way make sense but we can also express in the proper place the different concerns obviously intimated by them. In the proper place! We shall thus be able to avoid the rigidity with which one or other of the possible and justifiable standpoints has been adopted and treated as the one absolute standpoint. Yet we also cannot unite these different standpoints into a single one. This would be to forget the need to distinguish them and the fact that their unity only lies in the reality of God, which is not at our command. One can establish the validity of the different standpoints only as stations on a way. Thus the nature of Christian moral knowledge is to be sought and found neither in isolated preference for one or the other standpoint, nor in a construction that unites and harmonizes all three, but in the treading of this way in accordance with the divine act of revelation, in the act of traversing the three standpoints, in the basically single circle of the movement of knowledge described. |

To make this movement of knowledge is the task of the second special part of ethics, of our second, third, and fourth chapters, an exact repetition on a small scale of the same movement that dogmatics makes on a big scale, with the practical, not methodological, difference that ethics pays particular attention to the question of the claiming of man as such. Again, everything depends here, as in dogmatics, on whether or not we understand the relation between the three successive developments kinetically and not statically, just as the picture of a movement can be presented only in the sequence of all three stages and not by a delineation of the first or second or third stage nor by a recapitulatory depiction or grouping together of all three. We are asking about the good. We cannot expect to see the good, however, in the second, third, or fourth chapter, and even less in a summary of their conclusions, but if at all only in the act of thinking structured according to these chapters. The good is what is commanded me, a man, as God’s creature, pardoned sinner, and heir of his kingdom. As I myself as this man see myself set under God’s command, I know the good. Hence I cannot know it except as I do it. And as I do it I know myself as this man: “from him, by him, to him” [cf. 1 Cor. 8:6]. Claimed by the divine self, I know myself in that cycle of knowledge, I see myself thrice claimed. My conduct in this thrice-understood claim is the conduct commanded me, my good conduct. In the second chapter, then, we shall speak of the commanding of God the Creator, in the third of the commanding of God the Reconciler, and in the fourth of the commanding of God the Redeemer, but never intending to say three different things, since the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer are one and the same God and “from him, by him, to him” denotes one and the same claiming by God. We have simply to say the same things three times in fundamentally different ways. In detail then, in the ordering of the content of the three chapters, the way to be taken has to be three times fundamentally the same, though different thoughts will have to be expressed at the different points. Here again, however, four elements seem to force themselves upon us with a certain materially grounded necessity and not without some support at least from classical models. |

It is clear first that at the beginning of each chapter it will be necessary to work out the uniqueness of the specific ethical standpoint, showing how far human action as divinely commanded in one sense or the other really does come each time under a special light that cannot be exchanged for that of the other standpoints, how far precisely from this standpoint it is claimed and therefore sanctified by God’s Word in an indissolubly distinctive way. |

Thus when we think of the special features of the command of the Creator as we need to do at the beginning of the second chapter, the particular aspect of the divine commanding is to be understood as the necessity of the life that is given us. As in the light of creation we understand the necessity under which we are set by the divine claim as the necessity of life, we are saying that what is commanded us, the good, is to be sought first in the reality of human existence because and in so far as this existence rests on God’s creation and therefore on his will. Where the divine claiming is known at all it truly wills to be known as one that begins with the fact that we are. We are not except as we are the Lord’s. As we live, we stand under the necessity of living to him. He is the necessity of our lives. We have simply to understand what life is and we shall also understand what is commanded us. |

The same claiming takes on a very different aspect when we view it from the standpoint of reconciliation. The same reality at the beginning of the third chapter has to be described as the necessity of law. We now see ourselves in our contradiction of God as sinners and also, of course, in the contradiction which God victoriously and supremely contradicts, as sinners, then, whom God in his grace has accepted in spite of their sin. Here the command, the good, obviously does not coincide any longer with our existing. It is set for us and opposed to us. It strives against our life because we are sinners. The reverse side of the grace that comes to us sinners is the judgment on us which precisely as recipients of grace we cannot evade. The crucial thing is that we should now understand the good in this strife against us, as the judgment on us that it signifies, as the law in its necessity. Over against us enemies to whom God has shown mercy, the divine claiming necessarily means the law whose validity cannot in any circumstances be called into question by our corruption, and which cannot be twisted or explained away no matter what may become of us.16 |

Finally the same reality, seen from the standpoint of redemption, is the necessity of promise. We not only have life as God’s creatures and law as members of the covenant of grace, but also as such we have promise. Our first point in the last chapter is that as God really claims us we are addressed as heirs of his eternal kingdom. The promise is the goal of our life which may be seen in and with the divine claiming. The promise is the consummation which is held out before us, pledged to us, and allotted to us in advance. As such it, too, is in its own way the divine claim. From this point, too, from the eschatological boundary, God meets us as the one who commands. The promise, too, sets our conduct under necessity. This is the same divine necessity that we also know as the necessity of life and the necessity of law, and it must never be absent for a single moment. We would not know the necessity of life and law if we did not know the necessity of promise, if, in addition to bidding us live and humbling us, the divine claim did not also summon us to consider a truly better future, if it did not mean also goal, fulfillment, and perfection.

To this first question of the distinctiveness of the specific ethical question there must then be added in all three areas the question of the distinctiveness of the specific knowledge of the divine claim, or, as we might put it, of the form of the divine command. |

We know the commanding of the Creator, the necessity of life, to the extent that we know our calling, not understood, of course, in the narrowest sense, but as the epitome of the necessity, the “commandedness,” of the concrete reality in which each individual exists as such. We do not live any kind of life according to our own caprice. As we know ourselves in God’s Word, we are oriented to our fellows and we live a life whose specific ends are totally determined and which actualizes that orientation in a particular way. As thus determined our life has a necessity by creation. Our life itself then becomes for us the divine command. |

Second, we know the commanding of the Reconciler, the necessity of law, to the extent that, biblically speaking, we encounter Moses, the divinely commissioned fellowman who is set before us in this sense, or, more generally, to the extent that human authority encounters us. The brokenness in which we [are] set under God’s judgment because of our sin and the reconciliation in which we exist by his grace mean concretely that our conduct, in so far as we know ourselves in God’s Word, is done on all sides not merely in that orientation to our fellows in the form of our calling, but under the contradiction, direction, and instruction of fellowmen who are superior to us because they meet us with authority, so that it is always conduct in specific forms of subjection and under an alien human law. As thus determined, the law of the good is necessarily the divine command which strives against us and which we cannot refuse to respect as such. |

Third, we know the commanding of the Redeemer, the necessity of promise, in the voice of our own conscience. Our determination for the life of the world to come, our eschatological determination, means concretely that the obligation resting on my conduct covers more than its determination by my calling and by the authority that encounters me. Beyond both of these there is in us recollection of the perfect as the measure of the good in relative independence of the command of calling and the command of the commissioned fellowman. As thus determined, the promise is necessarily the divine command for the final and eternal goal of our conduct. —— These are the deliberations on the ground of knowledge or the form of the divine command which in all three chapters will form the second development in our train of thought. |

A third development will clearly have to take place as we answer the question of the content of the divine commanding. What does God want in claiming us for himself? At this point we can turn at once into a well-known path of reformation theology, namely, the doctrine of the threefold use of the law in which not only Christian necessity but also the Christian content of God’s law can be very fully described. |

The command of God the Creator, the necessity of life to which we subject ourselves in obedience to our calling, is obviously in content the necessity and command of order. There is a political or civil use of the law, as earlier thinkers put it. In this sense the command means the external order of our life by which we are disciplined and human life is possible as life together. As we live according to our calling we recognize that we live in orientation to our fellows. We recognize that the necessity of our life is the community of life. We recognize that our conduct is bound by the fact that it takes place with this reference, by a rule which is valid both for my fellows and me and me and my fellows, which precedes in dignity both his ends and mine, both my ends and his. This obligation of an order of life is the necessity of life properly understood. It is what God first wants from us. What occupies us here is materially the problem of the law of nature which is not set aside but confirmed and reestablished by revelation. |

The command of God the Reconciler, the necessity of law under which we stand as pardoned sinners in that concrete subjection to the commissioned fellowman, is in content the necessity or command of humility. The older writers spoke of the pedagogic use of the law. The law must put us where we belong. It is meant to lead us to repentance and faith where we can know only our own sin and God’s judgment and grace. As we subject ourselves, as we act as those who must be told something, we recognize that we have deserved to be contradicted and that we are helped by being contradicted. We recognize the alien majesty of the law in our life as our judgment and salvation. Our salvation is that we have been disturbed and attacked in our possession, our security, our self, and to grasp our salvation means yielding to the attack. This humbling, this dispossession, this giving up to death of the old man is what God the Reconciler wants of us when he sanctifies us. What meets us here is the specifically Old Testament side of the revealed command but one which forms an integral part of the New Testament witness too. |

The command of God the Redeemer, the necessity of promise under which we stand as heirs of God’s kingdom as we hear the voice of conscience with its witness to coming perfection, is in content the command of the necessity of gratitude. Earlier scholars spoke of a third use of the law, the didactic or normative use. Only as the recipient of the Holy Spirit does man really come under God’s command. As our conscience makes the perfect present, we recognize the necessity of free action in faith and obedience, the command of gratitude as the Heidelberg Catechism called this principle of the new Christian life oriented to God’s future. God’s command is not content to order our going and to push us into and keep us in the corner in which we can live only by God’s grace. As it does this it speaks to us as to God’s elect from and to all eternity. It demands our gratitude, or, very simply, ourselves. For obviously the only possible thanks for God’s election is that we should recognize our obligation, indeed, our having fallen forfeit to him. If it is not in our power to grasp the perfect, to put ourselves in God’s hand as he takes us in his hand, the point of our existence should now be that of sacrifice, of witness and demonstration that we have heard, that we have heard this last and strongest meaning of his Word. What we have to deal with in this context is the specifically New Testament side of the command of God to which witness is borne in the Sermon on the Mount and the ethics of Paul and John but which is also not unknown to the witness of the Old Testament as well. —— This, then, will be the third development in our train of thought in all three areas. In what will have to be said along these lines a certain resemblance may be seen to what is worked out in many ethical systems as a doctrine of “duties.” |

Finally, along a fourth line of thought, we shall be concerned to understand as truly good conduct the human conduct which is thus understood to be set under God’s command. We cannot forget that sanctification as well as justification is God’s grace, total, real and effective grace. The one to whom God is gracious, i.e., to whom he not only promises forgiveness of sin in Christ but whom he also claims for himself in Christ, whom he both justifies and sanctifies (and grace would not be grace were it not grace in this totality), this person—and we should not shrink from saying this even though we must weigh its meaning very carefully—this person does good acts. What will have to be shown at the fourth point in each area is how far a fulfillment of God’s command takes place in virtue of the same divine act of sanctification in which the command of God is set before man as a demand and in which man himself is set under the command. Again we can adopt a classical, and in this case a biblical, triad of concepts which seems to be ready to hand for this purpose. I have in mind the Pauline sequence of faith, love, and hope. All three of these are characterized by the fact that they describe a real attitude and action on man’s part, yet one which is in no sense man’s own achievment, but which—as man certainly stands or falls by his believing, loving, and hoping, as he is certainly called to do this—is in the strictest sense a work, or rather the work of God on man: faith (πίστις), God’s being faithful to himself; love (ἀγάπη), God’s free good will, as the one he is, to his own, no matter who or how they are, his free good will not to withhold but to give himself and all his benefits; and finally hope (ἐλπίς), the perfect comfort of the same God, as the eternal goal of their temporal existence, that God in all this fullness of his truth is our God. This is the subjective meaning of these three concepts. In this way they describe the fulfillment of the commands. |

Faith is the fulfillment of the necessity of life. God is the necessity of life. It is from God that we proceed, for he is the Creator of our existence, its Creator out of nothing. To do justice to the necessity of life is to do God’s will. It is to put ourselves under the order of his creation according to and in our calling. This takes place only so far as and as we believe, affirming without either knowing or seeing, but simply because it is said to us by God’s Word in Jesus Christ, that he is our Creator and the Lord of our life, that we belong to him, and that that is no life, therefore, which is not ready to be life under his command. This affirmation, this Yes, is the miracle of faith. Without faith we can only rebel. Without faith we live without necessity, we have no calling, we know of no order. If God decides for us in sanctifying us, claiming us, and putting us under his command, then faith is his inexpressible gift. |

Love is the fulfillment of law [cf. Rom. 13:10]. God judges and pardons us as he opposes the law to us like a rock on which we are inevitably broken, as he subjects us to human authority exercised in his name, as he forces us into humility. But this humbling of us is not an end in itself. The law is not fulfilled by our recognition that we are sinners who live by grace. In this plight God wills to be loved by us. In this plight which he prepares for us his love for us is concealed. Our humbling is complete only when we love him in return. Concretely the command which puts us there must also be the fulfillment. Again our fellowman is the specific other that is to be loved by us for God’s sake, in God’s place, and in demonstration of our love for God. The law would not have been fulfilled in us, it would not have discharged its deathdealing office, if love had not been spoken to us by it. Nor could we ourselves have fulfilled the law if we thought that we should be like God in holding up before our neighbor the law that judges him. In so doing we should simply show that we ourselves still stand under the unfulfilled law, that our contradicting of God is still unbroken, that our love for God has not yet awakened. That this happens, that we can love our neighbor instead of judging him, this Yes to God is again his miracle to us. If God decides for us, if he sets us under his command, this miracle takes place and love, our love, is his gift, just as faith is. We would love neither him nor our neighbor if he had not first loved us [cf. 1 John 4:19]. When, indeed, can our love be anything other than our being loved? |

Finally hope is the fulfillment of the necessity of promise. If it is true that God by the voice of conscience claims our gratitude and freedom, then beyond every existing order and in spite of the humility that we are given, our conduct acquires an orientation toward coming perfection. Faith affirms God, love rejoices in God, and hope seeks him. Beyond all that is present, hope expects everything from him. To that extent faith and love also live by hope. Hope would, of course, be mere fantasy and fanaticism if it were just an unrest of spirit. It is the fulfillment of the command, real gratitude, to the degree that it is not our own unrest but that of the Holy Spirit who as the Spirit of prayer will lead us into all truth [cf. John 16:13] and in whom, as the pledge of our inheritance [cf. Eph. 1:14], the eternal future is already present. Again this Yes to God, with which we seek God after and because we have already found him, after and because we are already found by him, is God’s own miracle to us. If God decides for us and sanctifies us by his command, it is his gift to us that we are those who hope. —— Thus faith, love, and hope are the good in human conduct and are therewith the answer of theological ethics to the ethical question—the goal that we have to reach in this last development of our thinking. Understood with a pinch of salt, this is our equivalent of teaching about “virtues.” After this brief preliminary notice we shall now address ourselves to the matter itself.

The Word of God as the Command of
	the Creator	the Reconciler	the Redeemer
means (standpoint)	life	law	promise
is revealed as (knowledge)	calling	authority	conscience
demands (content)	order	humility	gratitude
gives (fulfillment)	faith	love	hope

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