here is materially the problem of the law of nature which is not set aside but confirmed and reestablished by revelation. |
The command of God the Reconciler, the necessity of law under which we stand as pardoned sinners in that concrete subjection to the commissioned fellowman, is in content the necessity or command of humility. The older writers spoke of the pedagogic use of the law. The law must put us where we belong. It is meant to lead us to repentance and faith where we can know only our own sin and God’s judgment and grace. As we subject ourselves, as we act as those who must be told something, we recognize that we have deserved to be contradicted and that we are helped by being contradicted. We recognize the alien majesty of the law in our life as our judgment and salvation. Our salvation is that we have been disturbed and attacked in our possession, our security, our self, and to grasp our salvation means yielding to the attack. This humbling, this dispossession, this giving up to death of the old man is what God the Reconciler wants of us when he sanctifies us. What meets us here is the specifically Old Testament side of the revealed command but one which forms an integral part of the New Testament witness too. |
The command of God the Redeemer, the necessity of promise under which we stand as heirs of God’s kingdom as we hear the voice of conscience with its witness to coming perfection, is in content the command of the necessity of gratitude. Earlier scholars spoke of a third use of the law, the didactic or normative use. Only as the recipient of the Holy Spirit does man really come under God’s command. As our conscience makes the perfect present, we recognize the necessity of free action in faith and obedience, the command of gratitude as the Heidelberg Catechism called this principle of the new Christian life oriented to God’s future. God’s command is not content to order our going and to push us into and keep us in the corner in which we can live only by God’s grace. As it does this it speaks to us as to God’s elect from and to all eternity. It demands our gratitude, or, very simply, ourselves. For obviously the only possible thanks for God’s election is that we should recognize our obligation, indeed, our having fallen forfeit to him. If it is not in our power to grasp the perfect, to put ourselves in God’s hand as he takes us in his hand, the point of our existence should now be that of sacrifice, of witness and demonstration that we have heard, that we have heard this last and strongest meaning of his Word. What we have to deal with in this context is the specifically New Testament side of the command of God to which witness is borne in the Sermon on the Mount and the ethics of Paul and John but which is also not unknown to the witness of the Old Testament as well. —— This, then, will be the third development in our train of thought in all three areas. In what will have to be said along these lines a certain resemblance may be seen to what is worked out in many ethical systems as a doctrine of “duties.” |
Finally, along a fourth line of thought, we shall be concerned to understand as truly good conduct the human conduct which is thus understood to be set under God’s command. We cannot forget that sanctification as well as justification is God’s grace, total, real and effective grace. The one to whom God is gracious, i.e., to whom he not only promises forgiveness of sin in Christ but whom he also claims for himself in Christ, whom he both justifies and sanctifies (and grace would not be grace were it not grace in this totality), this person—and we should not shrink from saying this even though we must weigh its meaning very carefully—this person does good acts. What will have to be shown at the fourth point in each area is how far a fulfillment of God’s command takes place in virtue of the same divine act of sanctification in which the command of God is set before man as a demand and in which man himself is set under the command. Again we can adopt a classical, and in this case a biblical, triad of concepts which seems to be ready to hand for this purpose. I have in mind the Pauline sequence of faith, love, and hope. All three of these are characterized by the fact that they describe a real attitude and action on man’s part, yet one which is in no sense man’s own achievment, but which—as man certainly stands or falls by his believing, loving, and hoping, as he is certainly called to do this—is in the strictest sense a work, or rather the work of God on man: faith (πίστις), God’s being faithful to himself; love (ἀγάπη), God’s free good will, as the one he is, to his own, no matter who or how they are, his free good will not to withhold but to give himself and all his benefits; and finally hope (ἐλπίς), the perfect comfort of the same God, as the eternal goal of their temporal existence, that God in all this fullness of his truth is our God. This is the subjective meaning of these three concepts. In this way they describe the fulfillment of the commands. |
Faith is the fulfillment of the necessity of life. God is the necessity of life. It is from God that we proceed, for he is the Creator of our existence, its Creator out of nothing. To do justice to the necessity of life is to do God’s will. It is to put ourselves under the order of his creation according to and in our calling. This takes place only so far as and as we believe, affirming without either knowing or seeing, but simply because it is said to us by God’s Word in Jesus Christ, that he is our Creator and the Lord of our life, that we belong to him, and that that is no life, therefore, which is not ready to be life under his command. This affirmation, this Yes, is the miracle of faith. Without faith we can only rebel. Without faith we live without necessity, we have no calling, we know of no order. If God decides for us in sanctifying us, claiming us, and putting us under his command, then faith is his inexpressible gift. |
Love is the fulfillment of law [cf. Rom. 13:10]. God judges and pardons us as he opposes the law to us like a rock on which we are inevitably broken, as he subjects us to human authority exercised in his name, as he forces us into humility. But this humbling of us is not an end in itself. The law is not fulfilled by our recognition that we are sinners who live by grace. In this plight God wills to be loved by us. In this plight which he prepares for us his love for us is concealed. Our humbling is complete only when we love him in return. Concretely the command which puts us there must also be the fulfillment. Again our fellowman is the specific other that is to be loved by us for God’s sake, in God’s place, and in demonstration of our love for God. The law would not have been fulfilled in us, it would not have discharged its deathdealing office, if love had not been spoken to us by it. Nor could we ourselves have fulfilled the law if we thought that we should be like God in holding up before our neighbor the law that judges him. In so doing we should simply show that we ourselves still stand under the unfulfilled law, that our contradicting of God is still unbroken, that our love for God has not yet awakened. That this happens, that we can love our neighbor instead of judging him, this Yes to God is again his miracle to us. If God decides for us, if he sets us under his command, this miracle takes place and love, our love, is his gift, just as faith is. We would love neither him nor our neighbor if he had not first loved us [cf. 1 John 4:19]. When, indeed, can our love be anything other than our being loved? |
Finally hope is the fulfillment of the necessity of promise. If it is true that God by the voice of conscience claims our gratitude and freedom, then beyond every existing order and in spite of the humility that we are given, our conduct acquires an orientation toward coming perfection. Faith affirms God, love rejoices in God, and hope seeks him. Beyond all that is present, hope expects everything from him. To that extent faith and love also live by hope. Hope would, of course, be mere fantasy and fanaticism if it were just an unrest of spirit. It is the fulfillment of the command, real gratitude, to the degree that it is not our own unrest but that of the Holy Spirit who as the Spirit of prayer will lead us into all truth [cf. John 16:13] and in whom, as the pledge of our inheritance [cf. Eph. 1:14], the eternal future is already present. Again this Yes to God, with which we seek God after and because we have already found him, after and because we are already found by him, is God’s own miracle to us. If God decides for us and sanctifies us by his command, it is his gift to us that we are those who hope. —— Thus faith, love, and hope are the good in human conduct and are therewith the answer of theological ethics to the ethical question—the goal that we have to reach in this last development of our thinking. Understood with a pinch of salt, this is our equivalent of teaching about “virtues.” After this brief preliminary notice we shall now address ourselves to the matter itself.
| The Word of God as the Command of |
