it can take measures to guard at least to some degree against the same distraction when it wants to forget that we are dealing with the Word that is addressed to man. First, it can make some effort to resist this distraction ⌜by always avoiding all pure speculation and positively by constantly observing and emphasizing that all its statements bear the character of decision.⌝ Second, it will not fail to present the doctrine of sanctification with the emphasis it deserves, for here the question of the theme of the Word of God is a burning one. Third, it will do well to remember that it is a human work, and to recall the classical model of the transition from Romans 11 to Romans 12, and therefore not to insist that all that is necessary has been said, but rather to leave room precisely at this point for an auxiliary discipline which independently can take up the doctrine of sanctification again and in its own context work out all its implications. |
Recognition of the need for this auxiliary discipline entails a practical confession of humility on the part of theology which is most appropriate at this specific point. In actually saying again, as though it had not already said it, its own decisive word about the hearing of the Word, it acknowledges that its decisive word is not the decisive word. By this repetition it shows that precisely at this decisive point all theology is not a masterwork but at very best an associate work, so that there can be no question of a dogmatic system that is in itself an adequate presentation of this lofty subject. However good it may be, it has not spoken from heaven but on earth, and therefore it must say again what only God himself can have said once and for all. |
The theological encyclopedia knows auxiliary disciplines at other points as well and it may be shown that all of them imply a similar reservation of theology in relation to itself. Thus we find that Old Testament and New Testament introduction, the history of Near Eastern and Hellenistic religion, and Palestinian studies are all auxiliary to exegesis; liturgical and catechetic studies to homiletics; historical and confessional history to dogmatics; and church history to all three theological disciplines. |
Ethics is an auxiliary discipline of this kind in relation to dogmatics. There must be no change into another genre here. We have seen that this is the error in the usual distinction between dogmatics and ethics and we must avoid it. Theological ethics is itself dogmatics, not an independent discipline alongside it. We obey only an academic necessity in treating it separately. Ethics, too, reflects on the Word of God as the transcendent meaning, theme, and bearer of Christian preaching in the form of criticism of the pious human word. It reflects especially on the fact that this Word of God which is to be proclaimed and received in Christian preaching claims man in a very particular way. It was most fitting—we are again thinking of the Pauline epistles and especially of Romans—when the early church devoted that qualified attention to the problem of ethics. Even in the modern emancipation of ethics from dogmatics there lay a justifiable concern, and in its overdevelopment a nemesis and historically understandable reaction to the fall against which no dogmatics is secure, a fall into spectator-metaphysics, into the luxury of an idle worldview. But it is high time to move away from this historically justifiable but materially very dangerous reaction against an unethical dogmatics. It is high time to try to do justice to that concern as can be properly done only in the sphere of the reformation churches, i.e., in such a way that the ultimately pagan introduction of a second standpoint, which will unavoidably result in the loss of the first and true one, is reversed, and in ethics, too, the sole inquiry, even if it has a specific edge, is not into a second thing but into the one and only thing that is necessary. Conducted in any other way the enterprise of theological ethics will finally mean the destroying and not the upbuilding of the church.
§2
THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS
Ethics is theological ethics to the extent that it sees the goodness of human conduct in the reality of the Word of God that sanctifies man. As on this presupposition it confesses the concrete revelation of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, it acknowledges the validity of another ethics which on the basis of the same Christian confession will as philosophical ethics seek and find the goodness of human conduct in the possibility, grounded in that reality, of human action that is rightly claimed by one’s fellowman.1
1
We have already said that ethics is not originally or self-evidently theological ethics. Always and still today the question of the goodness of human conduct arises in other contexts than that of theology. Historically considered, theological ethics undoubtedly signifies a kind of annexation comparable to the entry of the children of Israel, against which objections can obviously be made, into the land of Canaan, where other nations claimed to have, if not an original, at least a very ancient right of domicile. On the field of ethical deliberation, which is apparently open to all kinds of other possible investigations, and which has been long since lit up and worked over by a whole series of what are often very serious investigations, there takes place the entry, or, one might almost say, the invasion of a rival whose investigation differs in such an extraordinary way from all other possible and actual investigations that on their part doubt as to the legitimacy of this act seems almost unavoidable, especially as this rival is in no position to behave peacefully as one partner in discussion among many others. But, modest though its entry may be formally, and primitive though its intellectual equipment may perhaps appear, it advances the claim that it is the one that with its investigation has the last word which absorbs all others. |
When, as sometimes happens, the philosophical ethicist of any trend pays attention to theological ethics, he finds himself set in a strange world. What is alien to him here is a presumed and puzzling knowledge of the whence and whither of every ethical question and answer. What is a problem to him, the law or goodness or value which the philosophical ethicist seeks as a standard by which to measure human conduct, the problem of the truth of the good, seems to be no problem at all here. Instead, in the concept of God of a proper theological ethics, in the concept of the reality of the God who has dealings with man through his Word, this problem is the inwardly secure and presupposed starting point of every question and answer. Conversely, what is no problem for him, the real situation of man in the light of the ethical question and answer, his real commitment to the norm of the good, his real distance from any achieving of this norm, and the real overcoming of this distance, not by man, but by the truth of the good itself known as a reality, all this is here an acute problem, the goal of every ethical question and answer. What relation is there between an inquiry that is ruled by knowledge of the whence and the whither and that which he knows as ethics, no matter whether he espouses naturalism, positivism, or idealism? In the light of any system of philosophical ethics, will not the definition of the good that we gave in the first section, namely, conduct sanctified by God’s Word, cause him to shake his head? Can the philosophical ethicist fail to see that even though the same question of the goodness of human conduct is in some way at issue here as in the inquiry that he calls ethics, nevertheless the “in some way” is calculated to lead him to the decision that what is attempted is both impossible on the one side and insignificant on the other. It is impossible because a suspension of the fundamental rules of human thought is entailed if we simply start with the concept of God as the quintessance of the good, with the truth, regarded as a reality, of an absolutely transcendent and decisive Word of God addressed to man. It is insignificant because the question of the real situation of man, and concepts like conscience, sin, and grace, although they may have psychological and historical importance, can only hamper and confuse the question of ethics, the question of the true law, value, or good, the question of the quality of human conduct to be deduced from these criteria. This decision, the summary rejection of theological ethics as such, is at least a very natural one for the philosophical ethicist as such. |
This being so, it is on the other hand very natural for the theological ethicist to forget that he is in the situation of the attacker and not the attacked, that if he understands his own work he cannot stop to justify himself, that ipso facto as a theologian he enters the sphere of ethical reflection and cannot regard the supposedly original inhabitants of the land as a court to which he is commanded or is even able to give account. |
