the same definite and specific way they are called to reflection, to common ethical reflection. |
The actualizing and sustaining of a narrower moral fellowship in this sense will depend, however, on our leaving not to ourselves but to our commonly acknowledged Lord the freedom to encounter each of us with a specific and definite command without being tied to the fellowship that has been set up between us in this extraordinary way. It will depend on our recognizing and acknowledging that we are not so much bound to one another as to the Lord who commands us. If another can comfort and encourage me by telling me that he stands with me under the same command—and there is no greater comfort or stronger encouragement on earth than awareness of this common bond—nevertheless no other can be responsible for my proper hearing of what is commanded of me. Nor can any other bind my conscience. The other is set there to arouse my conscience and I must always be ready to pay heed to him. But he cannot bind me. He neither can nor should judge me by appealing to what he has heard. And although on the basis of what is said to me I can and should be my brother’s keeper [cf. Gen. 4:9] and not a spectator, I neither can nor should take from him his own responsibility for hearing properly what is commanded of him. It means liberation from a nightmare that with the best intentions we have made for ourselves when we see that we are neither called nor in any position to alter or improve one another or to set one another on the right path. With such good intentions we persistently judge one another. The wisdom which as an inalienable axiom must underlie all common ethical reflection (in the broadest sense) runs as follows: “Judge not” [Matt. 7]. All narrower moral fellowship that may arise from time to time, all common ethical reflection, can only be a summons that each should hear aright what is and will be said to him. There is no mutual recognition apart from the presupposition of a further and deeper recognition of the mutual agreement with which each believes of the other that something more will be said to him and that he will hear it in his own way. Anything else would not only violate the freedom of the other—this good is not the supreme sanctuary of the good that must be respected here—but it would also quench the Spirit [cf. 1 Thess. 5:19], drive oneself and others away from the Lord who commands, and in this way most assuredly destroy the fellowship. It is in this freedom and responsibility of the individual that the Christian church, if it knows what it is doing, accepts and understands and proclaims the real, divine, and biblical command. The command hits home to the individual; he himself is unable to hit upon the right. It comes to him as a definite command; he himself does not have to define it. It is one command and for each person it is always a concrete command.
3
Thus far we have more or less taken it for granted that the command with which we have to do in the reality of moral decision is God’s command. We are in fact only adding precision and confirmation to what we have said already when, having equated the good with the command, we further equate it with the divine commanding, i.e., with God himself. We may question whether we have heard properly what is commanded of us, whether the revelation of the command finds us open, ready, and willing, whether we are clear about the meaning of the decision that we must always take, whether we submit to the judgment that is passed on us in it, whether it is for us a summons to go watchfully toward our Lord and Judge, who will meet us again in the decision of the very next moment. But we cannot question the fact that the command under which our decision stands and by which it is measured as obedience or disobedience is God’s command, the command of the absolutely sovereign Lord who reveals himself to us and acts with us through his address and claim, through his Word. Thus far we have believed that we should understand the real command as commission, direction, order, i.e., as an act of command. If we had understood it as general moral truth we should have had to equate it now with the content of an absolute body of law. Somewhere and in some way it would have to be true in itself. But according to our previous deliberations it cannot be equated with this kind of corpus—even the Bible with its commands, as we have seen, can never be viewed as such. What makes this view impossible is that it ascribes to man the dignity of judge. The good, the command, is not true but becomes true as it is spoken to us as the truth, as it meets us speaking as truth. We thus stand directly before the concept of God; indeed, strictly speaking we have already achieved the concept. We may thus dismiss as childish the question how we have come to make the equation between the command and the command of God, i.e., God himself. The answer is that it is not at all the case that we come to this. If we know what the revelation of the good is in moral decision, if we know the strictly concrete character of the good which reveals itself to us there, then we know therewith and therein that God has come to us. We know that we have not first to begin to speak about him but that from the very first we have already been spoken to by him. Where the real command is, there is absolute, personal, living will distinct from ours. If this can be shown in analysis, then reserving all further definitions—this whole course of lectures can only be one big attempt to make these further definitions—we have the right to understand this will as the divine will and therefore the command that meets us as God’s command, i.e., as God himself.
a. Where there is real command, there is an absolutely imperious will. We have seen how with the seriously put question of the good we have recognized the presence of an absolute “ought.” I would not advise that this recognition be described as an “absolute position”8 or the like. Its significance is rather that we, for our part, renounce all absolute positions and simply see that we are claimed, i.e., claimed, if the claim be valid, in our relativity. The positive content of this knowledge of ourselves, which as such can be described only negatively, the thought of the one who so confronts us in this relativity of ours that we can no longer detect any desire to name any absolute beyond for ourselves, this thought is the thought of God. If the true imperious command encounters us, therewith and therein God encounters us.
b. Where there is real command, there is a will distinct from our own. Everything depends on whether the command is understood not to be in any way secretly present in us, but always to imply disruption and questioning for us. And this in turn depends on our having to understand it as act and not as being. We are so in control of an object which we can contemplate that even its absoluteness will finally attest and reflect only our own absoluteness. But if the command, the good, is act, this means that we are not in control of it. It is not a criterion at our own disposal but a criterion under which we stand, which we cannot apply but which is applied to us. This is to think the thought of God’s command. The step from Kant to Fichte, the true fall of German Idealism, is then impossible. We can only see ⌜with Kant and⌝ better than Kant that moral knowledge is unattainable without transition to worship.
c. Where there is real command, there is a personal will. Command is claim. In all cases it is speech, word, logos; not influence, effect, impression. A thunderstorm or earthquake may shake and startle a man and become part of his experience. To be addressed is something different, and it is with this something different that we have to do in the real command. But there is more to it than this. At a pinch a flower or waterfall or work of art might be a form of address. The command, however, claims us. It addresses our conscience. It makes our conscience, the totality of our self-consciousness, an instrument to bind our existence, to put it under obligation. This obligation again is not just a general one. The real command, as shown, always wills something specific from us. All this characterizes our encounter with the command as a personal encounter comparable to the encounter with a man, except that the claim at issue here is inescapable. By this distinction the person with whom we have dealings in the command that reaches us here is shown to be the incomparable divine person. When we think through the thought of the personal nature of the real command, we have again arrived at the thought of God, [the thought of] the eternal Logos.
d. Where there is real command, there is a living will. The concreteness of the command is not grounded in the concreteness of our own life. It is not as though man were first alive and then the command of God followed him into the richness of his existence. No, God, the one unchangeable God, is the rich and living God, and the command is at every moment this and this specific command because he has dealings with us, because it is not that a body of law is set up by whose sections we are to be guided, but a ruling Lord
