conclusions, but if at all only in the act of thinking structured according to these chapters. The good is what is commanded me, a man, as God’s creature, pardoned sinner, and heir of his kingdom. As I myself as this man see myself set under God’s command, I know the good. Hence I cannot know it except as I do it. And as I do it I know myself as this man: “from him, by him, to him” [cf. 1 Cor. 8:6]. Claimed by the divine self, I know myself in that cycle of knowledge, I see myself thrice claimed. My conduct in this thrice-understood claim is the conduct commanded me, my good conduct. In the second chapter, then, we shall speak of the commanding of God the Creator, in the third of the commanding of God the Reconciler, and in the fourth of the commanding of God the Redeemer, but never intending to say three different things, since the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer are one and the same God and “from him, by him, to him” denotes one and the same claiming by God. We have simply to say the same things three times in fundamentally different ways. In detail then, in the ordering of the content of the three chapters, the way to be taken has to be three times fundamentally the same, though different thoughts will have to be expressed at the different points. Here again, however, four elements seem to force themselves upon us with a certain materially grounded necessity and not without some support at least from classical models. |
It is clear first that at the beginning of each chapter it will be necessary to work out the uniqueness of the specific ethical standpoint, showing how far human action as divinely commanded in one sense or the other really does come each time under a special light that cannot be exchanged for that of the other standpoints, how far precisely from this standpoint it is claimed and therefore sanctified by God’s Word in an indissolubly distinctive way. |
Thus when we think of the special features of the command of the Creator as we need to do at the beginning of the second chapter, the particular aspect of the divine commanding is to be understood as the necessity of the life that is given us. As in the light of creation we understand the necessity under which we are set by the divine claim as the necessity of life, we are saying that what is commanded us, the good, is to be sought first in the reality of human existence because and in so far as this existence rests on God’s creation and therefore on his will. Where the divine claiming is known at all it truly wills to be known as one that begins with the fact that we are. We are not except as we are the Lord’s. As we live, we stand under the necessity of living to him. He is the necessity of our lives. We have simply to understand what life is and we shall also understand what is commanded us. |
The same claiming takes on a very different aspect when we view it from the standpoint of reconciliation. The same reality at the beginning of the third chapter has to be described as the necessity of law. We now see ourselves in our contradiction of God as sinners and also, of course, in the contradiction which God victoriously and supremely contradicts, as sinners, then, whom God in his grace has accepted in spite of their sin. Here the command, the good, obviously does not coincide any longer with our existing. It is set for us and opposed to us. It strives against our life because we are sinners. The reverse side of the grace that comes to us sinners is the judgment on us which precisely as recipients of grace we cannot evade. The crucial thing is that we should now understand the good in this strife against us, as the judgment on us that it signifies, as the law in its necessity. Over against us enemies to whom God has shown mercy, the divine claiming necessarily means the law whose validity cannot in any circumstances be called into question by our corruption, and which cannot be twisted or explained away no matter what may become of us.16 |
Finally the same reality, seen from the standpoint of redemption, is the necessity of promise. We not only have life as God’s creatures and law as members of the covenant of grace, but also as such we have promise. Our first point in the last chapter is that as God really claims us we are addressed as heirs of his eternal kingdom. The promise is the goal of our life which may be seen in and with the divine claiming. The promise is the consummation which is held out before us, pledged to us, and allotted to us in advance. As such it, too, is in its own way the divine claim. From this point, too, from the eschatological boundary, God meets us as the one who commands. The promise, too, sets our conduct under necessity. This is the same divine necessity that we also know as the necessity of life and the necessity of law, and it must never be absent for a single moment. We would not know the necessity of life and law if we did not know the necessity of promise, if, in addition to bidding us live and humbling us, the divine claim did not also summon us to consider a truly better future, if it did not mean also goal, fulfillment, and perfection.
To this first question of the distinctiveness of the specific ethical question there must then be added in all three areas the question of the distinctiveness of the specific knowledge of the divine claim, or, as we might put it, of the form of the divine command. |
We know the commanding of the Creator, the necessity of life, to the extent that we know our calling, not understood, of course, in the narrowest sense, but as the epitome of the necessity, the “commandedness,” of the concrete reality in which each individual exists as such. We do not live any kind of life according to our own caprice. As we know ourselves in God’s Word, we are oriented to our fellows and we live a life whose specific ends are totally determined and which actualizes that orientation in a particular way. As thus determined our life has a necessity by creation. Our life itself then becomes for us the divine command. |
Second, we know the commanding of the Reconciler, the necessity of law, to the extent that, biblically speaking, we encounter Moses, the divinely commissioned fellowman who is set before us in this sense, or, more generally, to the extent that human authority encounters us. The brokenness in which we [are] set under God’s judgment because of our sin and the reconciliation in which we exist by his grace mean concretely that our conduct, in so far as we know ourselves in God’s Word, is done on all sides not merely in that orientation to our fellows in the form of our calling, but under the contradiction, direction, and instruction of fellowmen who are superior to us because they meet us with authority, so that it is always conduct in specific forms of subjection and under an alien human law. As thus determined, the law of the good is necessarily the divine command which strives against us and which we cannot refuse to respect as such. |
Third, we know the commanding of the Redeemer, the necessity of promise, in the voice of our own conscience. Our determination for the life of the world to come, our eschatological determination, means concretely that the obligation resting on my conduct covers more than its determination by my calling and by the authority that encounters me. Beyond both of these there is in us recollection of the perfect as the measure of the good in relative independence of the command of calling and the command of the commissioned fellowman. As thus determined, the promise is necessarily the divine command for the final and eternal goal of our conduct. —— These are the deliberations on the ground of knowledge or the form of the divine command which in all three chapters will form the second development in our train of thought. |
A third development will clearly have to take place as we answer the question of the content of the divine commanding. What does God want in claiming us for himself? At this point we can turn at once into a well-known path of reformation theology, namely, the doctrine of the threefold use of the law in which not only Christian necessity but also the Christian content of God’s law can be very fully described. |
The command of God the Creator, the necessity of life to which we subject ourselves in obedience to our calling, is obviously in content the necessity and command of order. There is a political or civil use of the law, as earlier thinkers put it. In this sense the command means the external order of our life by which we are disciplined and human life is possible as life together. As we live according to our calling we recognize that we live in orientation to our fellows. We recognize that the necessity of our life is the community of life. We recognize that our conduct is bound by the fact that it takes place with this reference, by a rule which is valid both for my fellows and me and me and my fellows, which precedes in dignity both his ends and mine, both my ends and his. This obligation of an order of life is the necessity
