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,
