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.
b
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,
