It may be asked whether Psalm 119, which is so often blamed for its monotony, does not, with its 176 verses in praise of the law, see more clearly than many an apparently more perspicacious thinker the living nature of the law which is finally coincident with the living nature of him who gave it. The inexhaustibility with which our deciding constantly becomes the theater of revelation characterizes this revelation as the revelation of God.
We draw to a close. The absolute, personal, and living will of God which is distinct from our own is the will of God. The decision in which we live every moment is a decision for or against God. Responsibility to him is its point. His judgment is passed on us in it. As we seriously ask about the good, we recognize that we are not on our own but have a Lord, this Lord, the Lord. We “have” him, as we “have” a master, to the extent that we have his command, that here and now we, you and I, hear his command, that in virtue of this Word of his he “has” us. It might be added that we cannot have the Lord, we cannot have God, in any other way. Talk of God apart from the question of the good, apart from the command that is given here and now to you and me, is not talk of God even though it pretends to be confession of God or denial of God. God is he in virtue of whose Word my decision is decision for or against the good. He is this God and no other. He is the Judge toward whom we go or he is not God at all.
§6
THE COMMAND OF GOD AS THE JUDGMENT OF GOD
As God reveals his command to man, he judges him. But God’s judgment and therefore man’s sanctification by God is that God has loved, elected, and declared to be his possession the one whom he has taken up by his command, that God shows his whole decision and conduct to be a transgression of the command, that God for the sake of his own goodness accepts the sinner as a doer of his Word, and that in so doing God orients his sinful conduct to the work of obedience.
1
In this section we come to the true substance of the first chapter and of theological ethics in general. All that has been said thus far has been just a preparation for what has to be said now. And all that will have to be said later can be only a descent from the peak that has now to be won. “Has to,” I say, for it would be vanity and even presumption to promise that the decisive word will actually be said and the peak won. The task before us is to give a recapitulatory presentation of the whole doctrine of the appropriation of God’s grace to man on the special assumption that this appropriation consists of the placing of man under God’s command. This task, if any in theology, is in many respects a venture for both teacher and students. The honorable titles “doctor of theology” and “theological student” sound somewhat dubious when we see what kind of a noetic task confronts us here. In addition, however, we stand directly at the point—it has long since given intimation of itself but can no longer remain invisible—where every theological discipline both begins and ends as such, but which it has neither the strength nor the permission to posit, prove, deduce, or even maintain, which it can only recognize to be posited as it continually starts with it and returns to it. We stand at the point where theology must fight for knowledge in such a way that it lays down all its weapons and unreservedly accepts and acknowledges how threatened is its claim to want to know. This claim is threatened by the fact that knowledge occurs here only in so far as its object gives itself to be known, that it is thus an event over whose occurrence we have no control. This is a situation which threatens theology alone among the sciences and we are now at the point in theological ethics where this situation—which determines the whole and not just this part of the whole—is now acute, where it is no longer possible not to think about it explicitly. In §4 we fixed the point where God’s command is to be known as command. In §5 we tried to show further how the command is to be understood as God’s command. If we seriously intend to describe the reality of the command of God we must now go on and try to reach some understanding of the event of the divine commanding as such, of the act of the divine claiming or sanctification, without which all talk of command and God’s command is left up in the air. It is clear, however, that we now really seem to be left up in the air, since obviously all understanding of this event presupposes that it really occurs; yet its occurrence does not seem to be a factor on which we can count, but we can bring it into our discussion only as a factor in the most literal sense, i.e., as doers. If the decisive word is truly said here as a conclusion to what has preceded, and if the peak has really been won as the presupposition of all that follows, i.e., if we really understand the event of sanctification as such, then by way of introduction we must say that this cannot be the result of a dialectical achievement. No matter how it approaches this factor, no theological dialectic can at root achieve more than is achieved if we are content to make a simple reference to the name of Jesus Christ and to leave it at that. If we choose the more involved way of theological dialectic, this is not in order to do something more effective; but in order to summon us to awareness that we stand before the factor which must speak for itself if all that we can do is not to be done in vain. Because this insight is clearer when we make the reference in the harder rather than the easier way, because this insight not only threatens theology but also offers a basis for it, at this point where we must choose between a very simple and a more difficult way, without pretending that we are doing anything better, we opt for the latter.
2
I have entitled the section “the command as the judgment of God.” It thus corresponds to our deliberations thus far. The event to which all theological ethics refers, God’s claiming of man, sanctification, the act of establishing, revealing, and validating the divine command, implies the judgment of God. The point of all ethical reflection is that at every moment of life, including the very next moment to which our reflection relates, we have to respond by our action, i.e., by our existence in that moment no matter what its concrete content might be; that our action, as it occurs, is measured and judged and set under an eternal determination. At every moment our action means crisis, not a crisis we bring on but a crisis in which we stand, which is brought upon us by the good, the command, God the Lord. We are put on the scales. By the fact that we are put on the scales now we are called upon to consider that we will immediately be so again, that life is an unbroken transition from being weighed to being weighed again. To the extent that the Word of God heard today is this call, the saying is true: “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” [Psalm 119:105]. Being unable to anticipate the result of our being weighed, we have no choice between good and evil. But we may be awake or asleep. We may live responsibly or irresponsibly. To be mature is to act with awareness of the responsibility of our acts. This is not less but more than that choice. As we come to reflect on the fact that we are weighed and that our acts in some way mean responsibility, we recognize that we will be weighed and therefore that we will be responsible the very next moment, so that it is high time to awake out of sleep [cf. Rom. 13:11], because the meaning of the very next moment will again be the judgment of God. It is at this event of the very next moment that all theological ethics, starting out from the event of the present moment and its call, is aiming.
The first and basic statement that we have to make in relation to this event is obviously that God accepts us in it. Even though we weigh too lightly on his scales, nevertheless he puts us there. We may not stand according to his measure, but we are still measured by it. It may be that his judgment means our conviction and condemnation but something worthy of a different judgment might at least have been expected of us. Summoned to give an account to him we are basically and primarily summoned (no matter what the account may be) to recognize that in some sense he counts us his, shares with us, and holds fellowship with us. Unable to avoid the insight that we have him as Lord, we confirm thereby the further and materially superior insight that in some sense he regards and treats us as his own, as his possession. As his command becomes the crisis of our conduct, he tells us, as Calvin says (Inst. III, 6, 1), that he does at least ask concerning
