dogmatics considers all the detailed statements of the Christian faith and shows that the essence of Christianity established in the symbols corresponds to the ideal that religious philosophy has generally demonstrated to be the nature of religion, thus indicating that Christianity is a religion of revelation. Ethics offers a similar proof in relation to the effect of Christianity on the shaping of historical life. A historical manifestation of a particular form of historical life must always represent the outworking of the nature or essence proper to this form. As ethics describes these outworkings, which can be understood only as outworkings of the essence of Christianity, and as it thus describes the essence of the Christianity that produces them, it, too, shows that Christianity is the religion of revelation. Now even assuming that this demonstration is a meaningful enterprise, and even assuming that it is possible to place oneself with Schleiermacher on the elevated platform from which Christianity can be seen as a specific form of historical life and by means of an ideal concept of religion measured against other such forms of historical life, we ask how one can establish in theology—our objection to Stange is the same as to all the rest—the continuity between the “manifestation” and the “essence” of this particular form of historical life. Does the revelational nature of Christianity transfer itself so naturally to the manifestation, to its historical outworking, that without further ado one can simply read off the former from the latter? How can an ethics which turns truly and honestly to the manifestation establish any claims to be called theological ethics?
We regard all these attempts at a methodological distinction between dogmatics and ethics as ethically suspect because with great regularity there takes place in all of them a suspicious change in direction, a suspicious exchange of subjects, namely, of God and man, as may be seen at its crassest in the formula of Schlatter. This suspicious exchange, however, rests on the suspicious hypothesis that revelation puts theology in a position to speak of God and man in one and the same breath, and to do so wholly to man’s advantage, a glance at the holy God being followed by a second glance at holy man. On the basis of this presupposition the early church, as we have seen, did achieve a theological ethics, although not without borrowing from Cicero and Aristotle. But this hypothesis and the exchange based upon it involve quite simply the surrender of theology, ⌜at any rate of Christian theology.⌝ Theology is ⌜Christian⌝ theology when and so far as its statements relate to revelation. Revelation, however, is the revelation of God and not of pious man. If there is a shift of direction, even with an appeal to revelation, so that theology is suddenly looking at believing spontaneity, at what we are to become and to make of ourselves, at the outworking of the essence of Christianity, or however the formula runs, then there is in reality a turning away from revelation and it ceases to be theology. The supposed expansion of the subject means in fact its loss. This is illustrated by the incidental definitions of dogmatics, which we cannot go into here but which may be shown to be just as mistaken as those of ethics. Inevitably when ethics is defined as it is, it drags dogmatics and all the rest of theology down into the same plight as itself.
Theology is a presentation of the reality of the Word of God directed to man. This presentation involves it in three different tasks. As exegesis theology investigates the revelation of this Word in holy scripture. As dogmatics it investigates the relation of the content of the modern preaching of the church to this Word revealed in scripture; as homiletics it investigates the necessary relation of the form of modern preaching to this Word. The tasks of these three theological disciplines differ. The first has an essentially historical character, the second an essentially dialectico-critical, and the third an essentially technological. But the orientation and subject are the same. Exegesis whose theme is the pious personalities of the prophets and apostles, or even of Jesus himself, and dogmatics whose object has really become the piety of the preacher and his congregation, have ceased to be theology. They have lost from under their feet the ground on which theology is given a special theme in a special way. For the definition of theology cannot equally well be reversed. |
Theology is not the presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man and also the presentation of the reality of the man to whom God’s Word is addressed. This is also a reality, of course, and it need hardly be said that in none of its main disciplines can theology ignore it. Theology knows the reality of the Word of God only as that of the Word of God addressed to man and it cannot for a moment abstract itself away from this determination of its theme. One may thus say that not just dogmatics but theology in general includes from the very first and at every point the problem of ethics. But the man to whom God’s Word is directed can never become the theme or subject of theology. He is not in any sense a second subject of theology which must be approached with a shift of focus. When this transition takes place, when such questions can be asked as what we are to become and to make of ourselves, death is in the pot (cf. 2 Kings 4:40). For even though theology neither can nor should lose sight of it for a single moment, the reality of the man whom God’s Word addresses is not at all on the same plane as the reality of the Word of God, so that there cannot be that coordination of looking upward and downward which is envisaged in the above-mentioned formulae of modern writers. Receptivity and spontaneity, gift and task, the inward and the outward, being and becoming can certainly be coordinated, but not God and God’s Word on the one side and man on the other. It is not true that this second reality stands like a second pole over against the first and in a certain tension with it. It is not true that pious man has to work at the coming of the kingdom of God. [He has to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God—but this is something different.] It is not true that he is related to God’s Word as subject is to object. All these are notions that are possible only on the basis of the idea of a synthesis and continuity between nature and supernature—an idea which ruined the ancient Catholic Church and which signified a repenetration of the church by paganism. |
The reality of the man who is addressed by God’s Word relates to the reality of God’s Word itself as predicate relates to subject. Never in any respect is it this reality in itself. It is it only as posited along with the reality of God’s Word. It may be discovered only in terms of that reality and discussed only as that reality is discussed. There are Christians only in Christ and not in themselves, only as seen from above and not from below, only in faith and not in sight, and not therefore as there are Mohammedans, Buddhists, and atheists, or Roman Catholics and Protestants. |
When we speak of Christians and Christianity and Christendom in the latter sense—and if only for the sake of brevity we often cannot avoid doing so—we should always be aware that we are speaking of the Christian world, which is truly world or cosmos (in the sense of John’s Gospel) as the rest of the world is. We are then speaking in typically untheological fashion. Why should we not speak untheologically of Christianity instead of Christ? Undoubtedly the pious man, even the Christian, can be in himself a rewarding, interesting, and instructive object of academic research. There is even a whole series of auxiliary theological disciplines, and one that is indispensable to exegesis, dogmatics, and homiletics, namely, church history, in which the Christian as such is ostensibly, dialectically, and for the sake of instruction the theme of theological research as well. But willynilly church history makes it truly evident that the Christian as such is not the man addressed by the Word of God and that there can never really be any talk of his patent holiness even though he be an Augustine or a Luther. This discipline is precisely the one which shows that the Christian and Christianity are phenomena in the cosmos alongside many other phenomena. Precisely with its dialectically intended untheological questions, it makes it clear that there have to be theological questions and answers if the Christian is to be understood as something other than a portion and bearer of the cosmos. |
This is what obviously happens when the question of the goodness of human conduct is raised in theology. In the first part of the section we saw that this question radically transcends the questions of psychology, history, and law. It obviously has to do this in theology too, where goodness must be understood along the lines of the concept of conformity to God. For in theology too, in methodological continuation of the line in church history and in analogy to the profane disciplines referred to in the first subsection, we also find the auxiliary disciplines of religious psychology, folklore, and church law. If there is to be ethics in theology, if in some sense the question of the goodness of human conduct has to be put
