With this insight, in the light of the sole efficacy and sufficiency of grace, we must also view—naturally as the second thing, not the first—the corresponding negation, the concept of sin, much more sharply than this Roman Catholic doctrine does. We cannot accept a purely relative, quantitative, and factual significance of the fall for the capacity of man in relation to God. Without being in Manichean fashion unmindful of the creation of man by God and man’s determination, by creation, for God, we must reject any fitness of man for cooperation with God on the basis of this orientation to him. This side of the fall, that orientation in itself and as such produces no possibility or reality of even a restricted fellowship with the living and true God. If, as we shall see later, grace and the divine command have an implication for the pure creatureliness of man as such, this is an implication of grace and not a presupposition of nature and reason. It was again an aberration when the early church from at least the second half of the first century18 began to seek and find the sources of Christian morality and moral teaching in both reason and revelation and consequently in both Cicero, etc., and the Gospels. The obvious reason for this aberration was that grace began to be understood as no longer grace and sin as no longer sin, and the reign began of an idea of the perfect Christian state which in §1, 2 we came upon with regret at the cradle of emancipated Christian morals. |
Justification and also sanctification are not the work of both God and man but of God alone, and theology cannot unite with a philosophy which would have things different in order that it may itself follow the same path as Roman Catholic theology does. The distinction between philosophical and theological ethics cannot mean that the two draw on different sources and even if in mutual fulfillment rest in different ways on the knowledge of God. For philosophy, too, grace cannot be a mere illumination and direction of human thought that in itself is already on the way to God. On the other hand, for theology, too, grace is not something that it can handle as its special preserve even if in only a relative antithesis to philosophy, so that on the basis of its special relation to it—mark well, on the basis of its special relation to God’s grace—it can and should claim precedence over philosophy. |
Is not this distinction of two different sources of ethics, and the resultant ranking of theology and philosophy, simply another relapse into the isolation of theology which in what is perhaps a fateful way compromises the strict validity of its own principle by passing on to philosophy another valid principle, and which will not satisfy philosophy itself, perhaps, and rightly so? If the “wisest of all intermediaries,” as Mausbach (p. 527) calls Thomas, cleverly avoided in fact the crass errors of apologetics and isolation which recent Protestant ethics has committed, does not the basic error which seems to be present in him frighten us all the more? What are finally the Protestant mistakes but coarser forms of the refined error that we must see in the union of Aristotle and Augustine as such? If formally and in its main structural outlines we accept the Roman Catholic definition of the relation between philosophical and theological ethics as a model, we must at least give to it a different basis and content corresponding to the Protestant view of God, man, sin, and grace.
4
The debate with the most important definitions of the relation between philosophical and theological ethics is now behind us. We have conducted it from a specific point assigned to us by our task, the task of theological ethics. It is obvious that when conducted from the standpoint of philosophy the debate would have other aspects. But if it were a matter of the philosophy which is alone at issue here, namely, that which shares with theology the latter’s final knowledge, the material result could not possibly be any different. In the rejection of the method of apologetics and isolation, and in the material rejection of the Roman Catholic construction along with an acknowledgment of its great formal significance, philosophy might argue differently but could only agree with us. With the same proviso and the same expectation we now address the task of giving our own answer to the problem indicated in the title of the present section. The proviso is that we do not presume to speak in the name of both theology and philosophy but are fundamentally leaving it to philosophy to speak the word that it ought to speak here. The expectation is that philosophy will speak very differently but will not in fact have anything different to say.19
a
The Common Christianity of Philosophical and Theological Ethics
Among the results of our deliberations thus far the concept of a Christian philosophy must have proved especially strange from more than one standpoint. In explanation we may observe primarily that “Christian theology,” if the term Christian is to have any significance, is a concept which is not in any sense any more self-evident. Just as well and just as badly as philosophy, theology is a human science. It knows, understands, and speaks on earth and not in heaven. If the word “Christian” is not to be simply a historical differentiation of this theology from similar phenomena in Buddhism or Islam, if the thought behind it is Christ, and therefore the revelation of the living and true God to man, and therefore a science that has as its theme, not one of the revelations of the demonic, which also exist, but the revelation of this the living God, then the question how this science acquires the predicate “Christian” is no less apposite than the question how philosophy, the science of man’s understanding of himself, comes to presuppose God’s revelation and therefore to have a claim to be called “Christian.” One might even consider whether theology’s claim to be Christian is not even bolder than raising such a claim for philosophy, whether the Christian element in philosophy, the revelation of God, cannot have at least the less striking significance of a decisive but unexpressed presupposition, and might not be applied to science as a whole, to art, to education, and finally indeed to any practical area, whereas the Christian element in theology, which is perilously isolated compared to all these fields, claims to arise precisely as the theme of human investigation, assertion, and presentation. Might it not be that for serious reasons there are more objections against the Christianity of theology than that of philosophy? |
We will begin with three negative statements: (1) If the Christian element is understood seriously as the Word of God, it cannot have even for the theologian the significance of a first and basic principle, a definition, which is then adapted to be the principle of further definitions and supposedly guarantees the Christianity of the whole. (2) The Christian element, seriously understood, cannot consist even for the theologian in a specific method, in the deduction of all statements from holy scripture or dogma, or even in the candid and sincere expression of the religious consciousness. (3) Again the Christian element cannot lie in the degree of depth and force of the personal Christian piety of the theologian concerned. Sought in any of these three directions, the Christian element would obviously be under man’s control and it need hardly be shown that it would then no longer be taken seriously as the Christian element, and in spite of the presence of perhaps all the qualities we should constantly have to reckon