Galatians against a dialectically understood concept of the law, and even more so under that of Luther’s use of this polemic and his to-some-extent-objectionable absolutizing of it,1 it may easily be overlooked that the origin of the establishment and revelation of the law is undoubtedly God himself and the love of God. The law should not be so unequivocally grouped with the devil, sin, and reason, as it sometimes is in Luther, nor should it be understood in a relation to God’s wrath that is so clearly taken for granted.2 While one may emphasize the distance and even the antithesis between God and man which the revelation of the command and the occurrence of the crisis manifest, one must still remember above all that this event does at least mean encounter with God. And while one may with horror take note of the element of God’s holy wrath that characterizes this encounter, nevertheless it must be perceived above all that the fact of this encounter is in itself a proof of the love of God, a love which is perhaps displayed as wrathful love, yet still God’s love. As God as Commander meets us along the way, he tells us that he does not want to be God without us but that no matter who we are he wants to be “God with us,” Immanuel. This is love, and as God’s love it must not be furnished with a restrictive “only,” just because the event also means more than this. This must be regarded as the thing which dominates everything else. We have a poor view of the crisis in which we now stand, and our reflection on it lacks seriousness, if we will not understand that we move toward, and with our acts have to give account to, the one who counts us his, who does not treat us as strangers but as members of his household [cf. Eph. 2:19], as his possession, who has loved us and will love us no matter how our encounter with him may go. As he gives us the command, indeed through the command itself, he tells us that he will be our God and we shall be his people [cf. Lev. 26:12, etc.]. That we let ourselves be told this absolutely positive thing is the presupposition of all true maturing. Hear the command, we are told. But even as this “hear” sounds forth, it tells us already that God has accepted us. The saying is not: “Hear, O Moab, Midian, or Amalek,” but: “Hear, O Israel [cf. Deut. 6:4, etc.]. “Hear” is not said to Moab, Midian, or Amalek. Where it is said, there is Israel, i.e., there is love, election, calling, the covenant, grace, faithfulness, above all God. When Israel forgot and rejected the love of Yahweh and the fact of its election from among the nations, when as a lost virgin it played the harlot with the Baals of the Gentiles as though Yahweh were not the husband who had eternally affianced her to himself [Hos. 2:21], then it forgot and rejected the commands too. Hearing the commands, without which there is no obedience, means hearing the love in the command, the election which reveals the givenness of the command, the absolutely primary Yes which God says to us through the command. If we do not hear this gracious Yes in the command, we do not hear the command at all. It is a theological hardness of heart that sees a lower stage of religion in the Old Testament because it does not know the abstract differentiation of law and gospel which, even in face of the jubilation with which again Psalm 119 and other passages sing about the gift of the law, dares to operate with the catchword of legalism, or which, according to the same schema, would find in Calvin’s joy in the law a relapse into Judaism. How can one really refute the statement of Calvin that the law is from the very outset “graced with the covenant of free adoption” (Inst. II, 7, 2)? Is not the final point of the law, of the command of God that judges us, God’s promise, the promise of his covenant with us? Can one hear it as command or place oneself under its judgment without recognizing this final point which is also the first one? Are we really mature, do we really know our accountability, so long as we do not know our election?
That God judges us means above all that he loves us. We have to think two thoughts together here: judgment and love, law and gospel. But in these two thoughts, if we think them aright, we think the one ineffable truth of God. Love is before judgment and above it. Law is simply the concrete form and voice of gospel. As such, however, it, too, has force and worth. The law has “come between” (Rom. 5:20) and is a “taskmaster” (Gal. 3:24), according to Paul’s polemic, only as the abstraction of a “Thou shalt” which is something different from the form and voice of an original “Thou mayest,” in which lies hidden the fact that first and foremost God has bound himself to man and man to him. In this sense it is the “law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). In this sense it is the law that is not really heard as God’s law. Yet the law is not as such overthrown but upheld (Rom. 3:31). It is “holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). It is “the law of the spirit of life” (Rom. 8:2). Given law means fulfilled promise: the promise that God has bound himself to me, that I am loved by him. Prior to my decision, before it has become true in my act (as measured by his will) that I am his servant, before it has also become true that I have been found an unprofitable, unfaithful, and treacherous servant, before all this, God’s decision about me has been made, and even though the mountains depart and the hills be removed his grace will never depart nor will the covenant of his peace be removed [cf. Isaiah 54:10]. The love of God manifested in the givenness of the command means a decision of God which stands substitute for mine to the extent that, as it is the final point of command that comes to me and judges me, so it also anticipates the final point of my decision, or of the judgment in which I stand with it. In it—and the same is to be said of my decision—satisfaction, and indeed full satisfaction, is already done in advance to the command under which I am placed and by which I am judged. If God is for us, then no command, even when and as it judges us, can be against us. In virtue of the decision of his love manifested in the givenness of the command, I cannot be one who is condemned by this command. In the decision of his love, the symmetry and harmony of my decision with his command is presupposed and promised, no matter what else may have to be said about it.
In the decision of his love I have the righteousness which his command requires of me and which avails before him. This revelation of God’s love in the givenness of the command is the gospel. It must not be separated from the command. Only through it does the law acquire truth and weight. Without it I have not heard the law as God’s Word, as the Word that truly binds me. I see the law as the Word that binds me only as I know it to be God’s law. But I know it as God’s law only as I see God’s love and my own election in it. And I see God’s love in it only as I let myself be told—the gospel tells me—that God’s love is unconditioned love, that it is not conditioned by my decision but is a love that precedes it, the love of eternal election. It is as one who is unconditionally loved, as one about whom a decision has been made, that I am summoned to move on to decision the very next moment, i.e., to be the one I am, not to elect but to be elected and to confirm my election, to fulfill in my decision the decision that has been made about me, to be the one whom God loves in my own decision in virtue of God’s decision. What this means will have to be the subject of further discussion.
This, however, is the fundamental and all-controlling and conditioning thing that God’s judgment by his command always implies. This is the circle within which there takes place man’s sanctification, his claiming by God’s Word. In all else that we have to say we must remember that it can be said aright only in the light of God’s love, faithfulness, grace, and election. Everything would be abstraction and confusion which meant stepping even for a moment outside this circle.
I think it has already become clear in making this first and basic point that it was not superfluous to issue an express reminder in the first subsection about the uncertainty of the path on which we find ourselves when it is a matter of laying the decisive foundations of theological ethics. To find God’s love in his judgment prior to all its other determinations, to see the gospel in the law, is either a nonsensical paradox or it is an appeal to the reality of God himself in his revelation in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Clearly it cannot be the achieving of a synthesis but only the recognition of a synthesis already achieved if we have recourse to the decision of God’s love which in principle precedes our decision and stands substitute for it. This is not a truth on which we have a handle or which we can deduce from some other truth. It is the truth of revelation, i.e., a truth which strictly is true only as it reveals itself, as it itself speaks to us. This is God’s eternal counsel and its execution in the incarnation of his Word and the outpouring of his Spirit. We have to reckon with no less than this if we are to speak correctly about sanctification.
