of objectors. It obstinately refuses to be used in this way. If we really understand the statement that all have gone astray, that all are wicked [Rom. 3:12], that God’s people is always the people of the lost, then we will pay almost more careful attention to that perverted Pharisaism than to the usual variety, knowing that this is not our own insight and that we cannot ourselves triumph with it. How can we indeed utter such a statement except with an awareness of the great risk with which every true theological statement is made? It might be that the insight, hidden from human eyes and ears, is much more genuinely present when the fatal objection is made than when the statement about man’s plight is perhaps affirmed too readily to be really affirmed under the discipline of the Holy Spirit, just as knowledge of the love of God can be much more genuinely present when the statement at issue is perhaps questioned and contested than when it is uttered as though we had its content in our pocket and the suspicion is aroused that perhaps we have said it to ourselves more than we should. As the command itself is grace, so it is grace when, through the command, God shows all our deciding and doing to be transgression of the command. As knowledge of sin by the command is God’s work of sanctification, so it escapes our grasp and is an act of our life that is hidden with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3]. We evade the truth if we try to evade the caveat with which alone we can speak in this regard.
4
As my decision comes into God’s judgment, it is—as my decision—condemned. It is, as my decision, measured by God’s command, apostasy, treason, and revolt. I do not do the good before God but—there is no third possibility—I do the bad. Yet as my decision comes into God’s judgment, as what I do is done before God, the “my” and “I” are radically called in question. Certainly it is my decision and I do what is done, but that my decision and deed are a last word, that they create a definitive situation, that I can make an eternal choice, is challenged by the fact that I come into God’s judgment and my deed is done before God. Certainly the command of God reveals to me what I have to think of my decision, how I am to understand myself, and as self-knowledge the revelation that I am a transgressor is the truth behind or above which there is no higher or deeper truth, no self-knowledge in which I find myself to be anything better than a transgressor. But that my self-knowledge or self-discovery exhausts the truth about my existence is denied by the same command because it is God’s command. To stay with my self-knowledge even though final clarity may have been given to it by the command, to refuse to be told more about myself than I can and must tell myself when instructed by God’s command, is something I am forbidden to do by the same command because it is God’s command. According to the revelation of the command I stand in God’s judgment and I do what I do before him. This means, however, that he speaks the last word by his decision and act, that he creates the definitive situation, that I am fundamentally known by him beyond my knowledge of myself, that I am known in a fundamentally different way from that in which I know myself, the fundamental difference being that, even in my apostasy, treason, and revolt, he who for his own reasons has bound himself to me from eternity sees me in the quality in which I am elected, loved, and blessed by him. His decision and act is the free good-pleasure which he has found in me by seeing me in Christ the second and obedient Adam, by imputing Christ’s righteousness to me as my own righteousness. In this decision of his, in virtue of this free divine good-pleasure, I have the quality in which I am worthy for all my unworthiness, of being the one he has elected, loved, and blessed. Before I chose what is corrupt, supra lapsum (before the fall), I was elected in Christ. Before I did not love, I was loved in Christ. Before my unsatisfactoriness came to light, satisfaction was perfectly done for me by Christ. God’s faithfulness was not overthrown by my unfaithfulness [cf. Rom. 3:3]. If God’s command reveals my unfaithfulness, the same command, if I hear it as God’s command, reveals God’s faithfulness. The thing which, beyond my self-knowledge, even beyond all the self-knowledge illumined by the command, I must let myself be told by the command, by the law that is “graced with the covenant of free adoption,” or by the gospel that is not to be separated from the command that is really given us, is that God was and is and will be faithful to me, that God has reconciled the cosmos to himself [cf. 2 Cor. 5:19]. It is still true, of course, that God knows me—and I have to let myself be told that he does—as I myself never know myself in any continuation, extension, or deepening of my self-knowledge. In my self-knowledge as such I must stay with the truth which in the area of self-knowledge is the truth, God’s truth. In this area I look in vain for any quality in which I am worthy to be elected, loved, and blessed by God. According to my knowledge, my decision, my existence will never be pleasing to God. If I may and should know that God has elected me, in face of what I know about myself through his command, I can regard the basis for this act of his only as a miracle, as sheer mercy.
It is not true, then, that I know myself as God knows me—in 1 Corinthians 13:12 this is expressly called an eschatological reality—but what is true is that I have to let myself hear this and be told it. God knows me without my being able to invoke the corresponding findings of my self-knowledge as witness thereto. This knowledge of myself, which is exclusively God’s knowledge, which cannot in any sense be translated or dissolved into self-knowledge, by which the truth of my self-knowledge under the illumination of the command is not abrogated, in which this self-knowledge of mine is rather comprehended and empowered—this knowledge is my justification in the judgment of his command. It is God’s knowledge of myself in which my self-knowledge under the illumination of his command, unaffected, unbroken, and unchanged, holy, just, and good, is confirmed in its judging and condemning force, so that out of it no possibility of self-justification arises but all such possibility is now definitively shattered. For in face of the fact that God justifies us we stand as those who are not justified by themselves and cannot justify themselves. Divine justification means as such an alien or forensic righteousness and not in any circumstances a native righteousness of our own. My justification in the judgment is that God knows me better than I know myself. It is not, of course, as though I know myself better than I find myself to be when placed in the light of his command. It is not as though, beyond this finding, I can say more consoling and pacifying and encouraging things about myself than that I am a transgressor. It is not as though somehow, at some time, I come into a position where I can turn the verdict which is passed on my decision and my existence by God’s command into a verdict that absolves me. The truth is always that God knows me better than I know myself. If my justification is real justification, it neither can nor should have anything whatever to do with even the sublimest form of self-justification. Even the most refined self-justification means evasion of the sentence imposed on my decision by the command. It means evasion of the command itself and therefore of the voice of God. I am justified when I listen to God’s voice, not when I maintain it with my own voice. All that I maintain with my own voice is either the asseveration of an illusory and supposedly better and more favorable self-knowledge or—“we are now justified by faith,” [Rom. 5:1]—a witness to the knowledge of myself which is exclusively heard through God’s voice and which is exclusively God’s. Paul’s assertion is not that we are just but that we are justified, and the continuation runs: “by faith,” which means that the reality as well as the knowledge is, with the same exclusiveness, ascribed to God, man’s role being to acknowledge by faith this reality and knowledge that are exclusively God’s. |
No logical difficulty should lead us astray on the point that this acknowledgment of the knowledge of God involves no self-knowledge and cannot mean either any reference to myself as the subject that knows in faith or any change in the result of my self-knowledge. Faith is the apperception in which human receptivity consists absolutely of hearing and obeying in the face of the divine spontaneity, of a hearing and obeying which certainly claims human spontaneity for itself but not a spontaneity correlative to the divine spontaneity. The gospel without which the law does not really reach us as God’s law, the theme and content of faith without which there is no obedience, is that my sin, my decision that is shown to be corrupt by the law, is forgiven sin. What is meant by forgiven sin? Not sin that is overlooked, forgotten, no longer accused by the command, and therefore not sin which in my self-knowledge is no longer sin for which I must repent
