the will of God. Finally, the Church as the place where, in the midst of the dominion of sin, evil, death and devil, there is proclaimed and accepted a special presence of God, the presence of God in His revelation in contradistinction to the presence of God the Creator, which, in spite of everything, cannot and must not be denied to the rest of human history and society. All these are in any case very special forms of divine immanence in the world. In view of these things our forefathers were in the habit of speaking of providentia speciallissima. And these things pass beyond our range of vision because they are all bound up with the central mystery of the Incarnation, which is most assuredly misunderstood if with Schleiermacher it is understood as the completion and crown of creation. It is not that in Christ creation has reached its goal, but that in Christ the Creator has become—and this is something different—Himself creature; the creature has been assumed into unity with the Creator as first-fruits of a new creation. Projecting our thought “consequently” along the line of the creation dogma, we should have in one way or another to deny the Incarnation, Miracle, prayer, the Church. That has often enough been done. But the facts demand that we give it up, though consistency seems to demand it. In truth it is just in the knowledge of Jesus Christ that we stand at the source of the creation, faith and dogma. If we did not know about the immanence, once and for all and in an altogether special sense, of the Word of God in the flesh, how would and could we dare, in despite of sin, evil, death and devil, to believe in a general immanence of God in the world, and to live? Therefore far from our having to, or being able to, deny the former for the sake of the latter, we have to acknowledge the former in order rightly to believe and teach the latter.
ET IN JESUM CHRISTUM, FILIUM EIUS UNICUM
WITH these words we step into the great centre of the Christian Creed. And here decisions are made. For instance, our understanding of the second Article decides whether we rightly understand the first and the third, and therefore whether we understand the whole as Christian creed in its true nature and distinct from all other actual and possible creeds. Whether a sermon and proclamation in word or writing have rightly or wrongly a place in the Christian Church is decided by their relationship to the second article. At this point Dogmatics, as watchman, cannot be too wide-awake. Besides, even its own fate is here decided, namely, in the question whether it is genuinely Church Theology, because bound to the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures as witness to revelation, or on the other hand a Philosophy, working with Biblical and Church materials under another sovereignty altogether. The decision that is here made is of course not a human, but a divine and therefore ultimately hidden, decision. That is the proviso under which human, even Christian judgment will here also have to bow. Even by the decisive clauses to which we shall now turn, we are called neither to be judges over ourselves nor to be judges over others, but we are called to watch. That proviso does not one whit alter the fact that here in a special way decisions are made. Just on that account we shall here also have to be in a very special sense awake.
The arrangement of the three Articles is not to be understood genetically, i.e. it does not represent the way in which faith gets its knowledge. If that had been intended, then undoubtedly the second Article would have had to be the first. Perhaps there were very old forms of the symbol which actually had this structure. In 2 Cor. 13:13, we hear the sequence: “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the communion of the Holy Spirit”. If the symbol in its later form, according to Matt. 28:19; Rom. 1:1–4; 11:33; 2 Thess. 2:13, puts it differently, it is clearly intended to set forth the essential order, the way of God’s condescension, which is the content of revelation: in the first Article God who, as Father, is over man, in the second, God Who, as Son, Himself becomes man, in the third, God Who, as Holy Spirit, is with man. But even if this that the symbol sets before us is the essential order, the second Article belongs to the beginning of the order of our knowing. The “Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth” Who, according to the first Article, is over man, is none other than the Father of Jesus Christ; and likewise God the Holy Spirit Who, according to the third Article, is with man, is the Spirit of this Father and of this Son. If God had not become man, as is recognised and confessed in the second Article, then everything we could conceive and say to ourselves about God over man and about God with man, would hang in the air as arbitrarily, as mistakenly and as misleadingly, as the corresponding ideas which, in the long run, have been fashioned about God and man in all religions and cosmic speculations. And therefore the fact to which the second Article bears witness, namely that God became man, must be absolutely determinative for us for the interpretation of the first and third. As there is no special and direct revelation of the Father and Creator as such, so also there is no special and direct revelation of the Spirit. But the revelation of the Son is as such at once the revelation of the Father and of the Spirit.
The second Article begins by naming as object of the credo a man, “Jesus,” and at once goes on to identify this man, by means of the designation, “Christ,” with the prophet, priest and king of the last days, expected by the people of Israel, in order then, by means of the expression “God’s only Son,” to place Him in the closest relationship, indeed, in unity, with God Himself. Here above all we shall have to marvel if we are to understand. What does Jesus here signify? What does he signify here as Messiah of Israel? What does he signify, this Jesus, the Christ, in proximity to God and as apparently second object of the credo? Here it is justifiable, here we are bound to wonder. In the first Article we heard of the concealment of God: here we are told that He has form and indeed a quite definite form. We heard there of His omnipotence; here we are told about a special act of God on the narrow strip of human history upon which a prophecy given to the people of Israel is to reach fulfilment. We heard there that God is the Creator; here we are told, if we only rightly understand, that He Himself is creature too, that He is not only Lord of our existence, but that He is here with us and like us. We heard there of His unity; here we are told of a difference within this unity, namely, of a unique Son of God, unique in the sense that He clearly exists as such uniquely, and that He only is so to be named. One surprise and difficulty here follows on the heels of another. And again, anyone who perhaps understood the doctrines of divine omnipotence and creation as abstract truths—that is, abstracted from the fact that the Almighty Father and Creator is the Father of Jesus Christ—would no doubt be brought to a halt here, and, either, in face of what is here said, refuse to go on, or, on the other hand, would have to reinterpret what is here said with the utmost violence, in order to make it acceptable to himself. But even if we go on together, and indeed go on together without reinterpretation, we shall at all events have to say: Here actually begins a second, another, an amazing new Article of the Christian knowledge of God.
In order to answer the question here put to us, reference can, and indeed must, be made to the abyss of that enigma which we briefly touched on at the end of the last Lecture with the words sin, evil, death and devil. The second Article—it would then be said—is the testimony of revelation and Christian faith in face of this enigma. It speaks of the reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God; accomplished in His passion, death and resurrection, in execution of His Messianic office as prophet, priest and king, the reconciliation of sinful man, i.e. man who has fallen from unity of will with his Creator and who has thereby fallen under the sway of evil and death and finally under that impossibility in person, the devil. That is actually the case; the second Article does speak of this reconciliation; and therefore the attempt has again and again been made of old and in recent times to establish and explain the doctrine of Jesus Christ and thereby the decisive centre of the Christian creed on this basis, namely, by reference to the negative precondition of this reconciliation, by opening up as sharply, emphatically, seriously as possible the gulf between God and man which has been bridged by Jesus Christ as reconciler. The misery and despair of man, who has become guilty before God and who therefore stands under God’s judgment, give the light by which are to be recognised what grace is and Who Jesus Christ is, namely, God’s only Son. But it will
