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.
c
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
