by claiming that it says it out of that reality? It is established and certified thus when God adds his Amen to it, but not otherwise. We cannot link a claim to this Amen with what we say.⌝ Is the caveat unimportant then? Is not the divine Amen itself revelation? When we observe the caveat—and what Protestant theology will refuse to do so?—do we not admit that only revelation itself speaks out of that reality, that the concrete speaking of the Holy Spirit cannot be repeated, that we can engage only in a respectful, loving, and relevant speaking around it? If it is true, and we have heard it said often enough in recent years, that the essence of Protestant theology in distinction from Roman Catholic theology is to be a theology of the cross and not a theology of glory, not a theology that thinks it can inform itself about the mystery of God and speak the Word of God itself, then precisely in the question of that relation, which becomes a burning one in sanctification as nowhere else, it must not become a theology of impatience. ⌜Our counterquestion to the theology of pietism, then, is whether it is not a theology of impatience and we believe that Protestant theology⌝ has to recognize18 that seeing the coincidence of the divine Yes with the human Yes is an eschatological reality, Jesus Christ himself, whose action does not finally denote a third coordinate but the end and also the beginning of the first and second coordinates of our thinking about God and divine things.
The Command of God the Creator
§7
God’s command applies to me inasmuch as I exist as a creature. As he speaks to me, he acknowledges me to be alive. And as he wills something from me, he commands me to live. I cannot be told this without understanding that the life of the creature in general is ⌜willed by God⌝1 and is an object of respect.
1
In the first chapter we spoke about the reality of the divine command as such. We saw how it becomes manifest to us in the concrete decision of our acts. We saw that precisely as God’s command it is a very concrete and definite command. We saw to what extent its presence is our sanctification. We now take up the task of analyzing this command from the general standpoint that it meets us in the medium of our own human reality. We worked out in §3 a plan of approach to this task. In doing theological ethics here, we will keep to the same concrete understanding of human reality as emerges naturally from God’s Word. This Word is the Word of God as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer. We recall that this division is necessary on the one side because it denotes the categories above which there are no higher apart from God’s name in general. We also recall that the division can have only logical and not ontic significance. To understand God’s command as the command that is given to God’s man we have thus entered a definite and integrated path, but at every step on this path we shall have to understand the command as one and the same even though it meets us in specific forms at the three different points, for according to our deliberations in the first chapter there is only one real command, namely, that which is given to each of us in our own here and now. Ethics does not have to set up the command of God, this one real command. It has to see it as already set up on the presupposition that it is always set up in the life of a man. We do not have to show what is commanded us. In this regard no ethics can intervene between God and men. We have to show rather what the fact that we are commanded means, or, conversely, what it means for the fact that we are commanded that the command is given within our human life.
Man is the creature of God. This is where we start. If we know that we have to do with God, when in the decision of our acts we are set under the judgment of a command, then we know also that we have to do with our Creator, with him who is in such a way and so much our Lord that our existence over against him offers us no occasion to have even the least reservation about his lordship, let alone to oppose him as Prometheus opposed his Zeus. He does not meet us on the basis of a great or even perhaps the greatest power confronting a small or even perhaps the smallest power, but on the basis of power confronting absolute impotence. We exist, but only from him. He holds us over the abyss of nothing as truly our Creator out of nothing. It is his free goodness that we have our own reality, the reality of our life, alongside and outside his reality. This neither is nor will be, however, anything but a creaturely and therefore a secondary reality which originally is not ours but his, and which never for a single moment does not need the renewing of his free goodness. We do not know the command as command—and it is then no wonder that we do not know how seriously it judges us—if we do not understand it as the command of the Creator and do not understand ourselves, who are subject to it, as his creatures. The claim of the command is one of right, for we belong to him who commands from the very first. The claim of the command is inescapable, for we have no place where we might command, or co-command, ourselves, our mere existence being a witness to the majesty of him who commands us. The claim of the command is emphatic, for he who commands here is not tied to our existence but we are to his, and he truly exercises penal authority over us.
We should not weaken the significance of the command by forgetting that it is always the command of God the Creator and always applies to us also as creatures. It does not begin to apply to us as transgressors and as those who are reconciled again to God; it applies to us already as those who exist. Our existence as such is not a hiding place where, appealing to our ignorance of good and evil and free from God’s command, we think we can be left alone. The command obviously comes already to Adam and Eve in paradise before the fall. This is how it always is. The command already seizes us in our existence ⌜as such.⌝ It is inadvisable, then, to construct an antithesis between the command of the Creator and the command of Christ. In Christ we have to do with the Creator and in the Creator we have to do with Christ. What the Creator really commands is not a “natural” but a Christian command, and what is really a Christian command is an order of creation. All abstractions between the “natural” and the Christian command lead to a weakening of either the one or the other and therefore necessarily of both. In the shadow of an order of creation regarded as not Christian and a Christian order regarded as not natural the hubris of man usually flourishes, assuring itself of a sphere where man does not come into judgment. No such sphere exists and the area of creation is least adapted to provide one. The command of God always entails a question to the whole man, an attack on the whole man, a promise for the whole man. It is always to be understood as a defect of our hearing of the command, not a defect or division of the command itself, if the command of creation and the Christian command seem to collide. The goodness of God is one. So, then, is the goodness which causes us to exist and the goodness which opposes forgiveness to our transgression. We thus investigate the command of God the Creator with the expectation of hearing God’s total command. We may not hear it totally, but it will still be the total command.
It is the total command from the specific standpoint that we understand ourselves, those whom the command addresses, to be created by God. It applies to us even as such and already as such. We have to understand the command, too, to be directed to us as such. We realize that ethics is not called upon to establish what is commanded us. What is commanded us is and will be established by him who commands here, and no general moral truth, no matter where it comes from, must intervene between him and us with the claim to be this “what.” There are, however, unavoidable and generally valid components of this “what” which arise as the command is given to us, to man, and we must try to guard against caprice in selecting these components by seeking to grasp and structure the concept of man in terms of the Word of God directed to man. As, then, we start with man as the creature of God, we obviously run up against the concept of life as the first of the components of what is commanded. My own life is always included in what is commanded. There are, of course, limitations. There are more precise definitions which remind us that what is commanded comprises more than my life and
