what ought to be done is not done.
c. We begin finally with the fact that the command is not given to us without the promise that we are God’s elected covenant-partners whom he loves. It is as such that it condemns us. This is the obviously contradictory description of the even more contradictory fact that precisely the revelation of God’s love, as which we must finally understand the command, unmasks us as those who love neither God nor the neighbor in relation to whom our love for God must show itself in concrete decision. Again it would not be too difficult to regard our decision as good and ourselves as justified if we had not to remember this final point of the command, the revelation of God’s love. God comes so uncannily close to us that he loves us; that he wants not just our work or our obedience or ourselves, but ourselves in our own freedom, ourselves not merely in our creaturely dependence but also in our creaturely independence; that he does not will to be without us. If he did not love us, the command would not be the question of our response of love. We should be merely effects of a superior cause or slaves of a powerful lord instead of children of an eternal Father. God’s lordship would not be most glorious in the fact that he is this Father. In face of the command it would be just a matter of factual observance, of the fulfillment of this or that outer or inner act or attitude, not of God’s heart and our own heart. Why, then, should we not be able to satisfy his command? Along such lines there is so much that we can do and that people have actually done. There have been those who in observance of God’s command have offered high things, perhaps the highest, perhaps the final thing of all, their lives. But it is a question of love for God (demonstrated in love for neighbor). And loving means freely wanting to be in all things, not without but with the one whom one loves in the same self-evident way as one cannot be without oneself. It is thus that God loves us and calls us to love him in return. In our decision however, in every moment of action, we find that we are those who do not love him in return. Remember that here again it cannot be a matter of more or less. Love is not a quantity. It is a quality that is either there or not. And when do we see ourselves to be those who have this quality? When do we not see ourselves instead as those who realize with shame that in the last resort they would rather be without both God and neighbor, if we are not to say even more clearly, with Question 5 of the Heidelberg Catechism, that we are prone by nature to hate God and our neighbor?7 We cannot escape the judgment of this question by pointing to the attitude and acts of individuals whose unselfishness, dedication, and readiness for sacrifice seem to rule out the assumption that they do not really love God and their neighbor but actually hate them. It must be remembered that we have to do here with the question which we must put and answer, not for others or with reference to others, but strictly with reference to ourselves. Even if we were among those saintly people, even if we gave an impression of perfect love for others, could we and would we say to ourselves that we have even partially fulfilled the command of love and are justified before God in virtue of this love? This is the question. True saints have not done so, we should have to say. Knowledge of the judgment passed on us by the command always means, even and precisely for saints, knowledge that we are not loving people, that God deals with us in a way that is qualitatively and not just quantitatively different from the way we deal with him, that something meets us in his love for which we are absolute debtors to him, not just partially but totally, not just in our worst moments but in our best as well. Certainly there may be important differences between the different debtors to God’s love and between our levels of indebtedness at different times. But there are never any final or decisive differences and we are never nondebtors. Of no one can it be said that he has rendered imperfect obedience, but still obedience. There are no favorable moments in which an individual can appeal at least to a minimum of obedience. From this standpoint our decision is again a faulty and corrupt decision. Our sanctification is precisely that, precisely as those who are loved by God, we find ourselves to be those who are unworthy to be loved, who have deserved wrath instead of love, and what meets us in this discovery, this unveiling of our hearts is in fact wrath, the wrathful love of God.
We must pause for a moment, however, to consider the great epistemological caveat with which we opened this section. Here, too, it cannot escape us that the way of thought that we are pursuing is not a secure one except in the reality of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Can we not conceive of very serious and even passionate objections to all that has been said here? Is it true that our acts, so far as may be seen, are deviations from the concrete command that is given us? What are we to say if someone steps up to assure us that he himself, perhaps as one who knows and possesses spiritual realities and gifts, believes he has in fact fulfilled, and does so continually, the concrete command that is given him, and that he thus regards himself as justified? Again, is it true that we can stand upright against the world, death, and destiny, but are always unrighteous before God? How can we reply if someone says that in the best part of him he does not finally know that irresponsibility and rebellion of man against God but does know a deepest basis of his nature in which he is always at peace with God, gives God the honor that is his due, and is therefore justified before God? Again, is it true, is it not a misanthropic exaggeration, to say that we never attain to the deepest meaning of the command of love for God and neighbor, and that placed under the command we recognize that we do not love at all and are thus condemned by the command? What are we to answer if someone tells us with the friendly but triumphant laugh of the worldling or even the Christian that he is not as bad as all that but does love God and neighbor and is sorry we cannot say this about him? And beyond this general contradiction, what are we to say if someone rejects the established either/or, the alternative of obedience or disobedience, and tries to tell us that in the gentle middle between the two there is such a thing as imperfect obedience, and that the relative differences of deviation, which we have not denied, imply from the opposite standpoint relative stages of perfection whose higher half is no longer covered by the statement that “through the law comes knowledge of sin” [Rom. 3:20]? |
It is tempting to answer rather angrily these objectors, who in fact are to be found not only among Roman Catholics, with Anselm’s dictum: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”8 Does it not seem obvious that we have here the sleep of the overrighteous? Will not such objectors finally be driven to wake up and see and admit their real situation, so that at least in the hour of death they will no longer be able to find comfort in their supposed fulfillment of the law? Perhaps even now we can really awake these sleepers with a powerful summons, though only if our summons does not represent a perverted Pharisaism, that of the publican, of villainy, but is a witness to the majesty of the divine command to which God himself says Amen. If we realize this, then we will be just as restrained with our charge of a deficient sense of the seriousness of sin in other people as we are with all charges. The statement that we are always sinners [cf. Rom. 3:23] cannot be victoriously asserted and demonstrated by emotional or rational means. Like the statement that the command declares God’s love to us, it cannot be forced on anybody, but can only be an appeal to the reality of the divine Word itself and to the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, to the reality which itself bears witness to itself where it is known. Calvin expressed this in the almost intolerably strict formula that “there never existed any work of a godly man which, if examined by God’s stern judgment, would not deserve condemnation” (Inst. III,14, 11). In this formula, however, there should be noted not only the cautious “if examined” but also the fact that the judgment is God’s judgment. The statement speaks truth, but highly particular truth, not general truth: truth that may be discerned only in this special case. This case, however, obviously cannot be created by speaking either to or about people, nor can anyone put himself in this case in which his work is really measured by God’s stern judgment. This case arises when the judgment takes place. Then man, even and precisely the godly man, does recognize, of course, that his work deserves condemnation. Then, having seen his face in a glass (James 1:23f.), he can no longer go away and forget what he has seen. Then he knows that he is done for. But he has as little accepted or attained this knowledge on his own as he has the knowledge of the love of God and his election. As little as the latter does it rest on his profound experience and great earnestness, and as little as the latter can it become an object of possession or a matter of a habit. He knows because and to the extent that he stands under the fatherly discipline of God. Discipline, however, is revelation. And revelation is the act of God. What we can know by revelation, however, is
