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.
4
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
