of basis and explanation, a special doctrine of sin and death. In that it follows Holy Scripture, which likewise neither in the Old Testament nor in the New speaks at the outset abstractly of the misery and the despair of man, in order then to show against this background that God is gracious to man and how gracious He is. Although undoubtedly Creed and Scriptures alike are of the opinion that God’s grace in Jesus Christ is the answer to this misery and this despair! Yet they speak really and properly solely of that answer, and only incidentally of the question—only incidentally of man’s sin and punishment, strictly speaking, however seriously they regard them. Jesus Christ is the background from which man’s misery and despair receive their light and not vice versa. What is the significance of that? Clearly this: there is, so to speak, an unfruitful knowledge of sin, of evil, of death and the devil, that succeeds in making it hard for a man to have happy and confident faith in the Almighty Father and Creator, but without making possible for him, or even bringing nearer, faith in Jesus Christ as reconciler. To gaze down into that abyss, as far as it is possible for us to do that of ourselves, does not in itself help us in the least, so frightful is the abyss! How frightful it is no man has ever yet fathomed of himself. What man has in this respect fathomed of himself has been nothing but puppet sins and puppet distresses, that are far removed from being the actual problem of Theodicy in all its awfulness. Grace must come first, in order that sin may be manifest to us as sin, and death as death; in order that, with the Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 5), we may confess that we are by nature prone to hate God and our neighbour, and therefore, with Luther, that we are lost and damned men. We cannot of ourselves know what our misery and our despair, our guilt and punishment really are; that becomes manifest to us in the fact that Christ has taken them upon Himself and borne them. But if that does become manifest to us—namely, in the answer which God has already given to our state, before we ourselves knew of it, in the Cross of Jesus Christ, in the depth of the mercy that is shown to us in Him—if we come into the judgment of grace, which alone has the power to install the law (as Gal. 3:24 puts it) as our pedagogue, then we will recognise and praise this pedagogy of the law, given and revealed to us by grace—this pedagogy that is the way into despair and out of despair into consolation, the way to the knowledge of our guilt and punishment, and, with this knowledge, into the place of God, out of the power of the devil into the power of God—we shall recognise and praise this pedagogy, not at all as our self-pedagogy, not as our way but as God’s way. And therefore it is not from any arbitrary absorption in our own wickedness and distress that we expect knowledge of Jesus Christ, but on the contrary it is only from knowledge of Jesus Christ as the “author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2) that we look for knowledge of the law and with it wholesome knowledge of our sin, guilt and punishment. Sin scorches us when it comes under the light of forgiveness, not before. Sin scorches us then by becoming visible as our enmity against God, and therefore by compelling us, as our thoughts start out from that, at last to put the question properly: How is that possible which the second Article states? If it can appear to us almost impossible that the Creator became creature, it must appear to us absolutely impossible that the Holy One, Whose burning wrath we have evoked, became man in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us. If He has really done that, and if this is the central content of Christian faith, then we cannot explain and establish it from elsewhere and least of all by an analysis of our distress and despair; then we can understand it (and consequently the central content of the Christian faith) only as the occurrence of a revelation of grace, which is beyond all our understanding because it makes possible what is absolutely impossible, to which our knowledge cannot attain, and from which it can always only derive.
It is in this way and in this sense—that is, deriving from an occurrence that cannot be understood from elsewhere but only out of itself—that the Creed begins the second Article. It is in this way and in the same sense that prophecy in the Old Testament, and its fulfilment in Jesus Christ in the New Testament, are attested. If the attempt is made to understand and interpret the witness of apostles and prophets in the light of human ideas as human explanation of human action, then even in a purely historical-exegetical treatment one self-deception and aporia follows another. They themselves at any rate did not so understand it. Even when they used the language of human ideas and were looking at a human action, their intention was to speak of a divine initiative among men, something that was to be understood as such and not as human action and human idea. The Old Testament calls this divine initiative the making known of the name of the Lord. The New Testament names it Jesus Christ. Yes, indeed, here is cause to marvel. Here the hidden, the eternal and incomprehensible God has taken visible form. Here the Almighty is mighty in a quite definite, particular, earthly happening. Here the Creator Himself has become creature and therefore objective reality. Here in His Son, in the revelation of His Name and Word, the one God has shown Himself as differentiated in Himself, so that we can hear Him, so that we can say “Thou” to Him as to one of ourselves. It is revelation in this strict, firm, literal sense that Scripture and the Confession mean when they bear witness to Jesus Christ. And the sense of this revelation becomes even stricter and firmer when this too is added—that here the abyss is bridged, that here, in and with this revelation, our reconciliation is accomplished, that this Jesus Christ is God for us, for us His incarnation, for us His existence as true God and true man, for us everything that later is said of Him from His birth of the Virgin Mary up to His return in judgment. In fact, what we are concerned with is that absolute impossibility, that the Holy One, Whose wrath we have provoked, became man, in order, in spite of everything, to befriend us, to bear this wrath Himself and in our place, accordingly to suffer in our place His own burning wrath, to give satisfaction Himself in our place, in order in that way to be our God (and that means, to be good for us in a way that we have not deserved and cannot comprehend), He Himself, directly and personally our Prophet, Priest and King. Again, neither historical facts nor ideas nor even their insight into the depth of human wickedness and distress, made the prophets and apostles, if we are to trust themselves, witnesses to Jesus Christ, but simply and solely this concentrated event of revelation and reconciliation that could not be prognosticated from anywhere because it was unexpected and in its divinity only to be acknowledged. Even the knowledge of the abyss between God’s good creation and our actual state was for them included as a supplementary cognition in and only in that event. In the mind of the prophets and apostles, then, the question of faith in Jesus Christ cannot be the question of the Why? of this event, but only the question of our decision as its actuality confronts us.
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