Here as elsewhere, however, we must be careful to say the right thing about whether this or that man, in this case this or that philosopher, is really a hearer and therefore a witness of the Word. We should again be misconstruing world judgment as world judgment by the idea that Christ has set aside, and instituting ourselves as judges of the world, if we were to arm ourselves with some norm of what is Christian and survey philosophical ethicists with a view to saying which of them belong to the sheep and which to the goats. In theology and philosophy, as everywhere where human work is done, the judgment whether human work has been done in God [cf. John. 3:21] is in God’s hands. Fundamentally we cannot press on beyond the questions that we have everywhere to put to its authors, and even when they cannot perhaps give satisfactory answers, we cannot arrive at a definitive statement whether a work is valid for us as witness or not. It might be that in one case we have evaded a witness by not hearing it as such and in another that we have wrongly lent our ears to the voice of a demon. The Christian and its opposite never meet us anywhere with the clearcut distinction of black and white but both of them broken up a hundredfold in both philosophy and theology. Our own deciding and dividing can take place only in faith and can be justified only in faith. It is enough for philosophy, as for theology too, that there is a grace of God and a space in the church of Christ for it, that it is summoned thereby to reflect on whether the object of its reflection is real man, i.e., man set in the light of revelation, and that the truth-content in any philosophy depends on how far it is indirect witness to revelation on the basis of this reflection. We do not really need to judge the servants of another [cf. Rom. 14:4] in order to achieve critical scientific certainty as to our own path.
b
The Word of God as Reality and Theological Ethics
We may be brief here, for we shall have to deal expressly with this matter in the third subsection of the Introduction when unfolding the task of theological ethics, and then again in the first chapter of our exposition in the strict and proper sense. It interests us here only by way of contrast to the issue of philosophical ethics.
Theology, too, is an act of human reflection and understanding. Unlike philosophy, however, it is not man’s reflection on and understanding of himself. In basic analogy to jurisprudence, natural and historical science, and medicine, it is reflection on and understanding of an object that is to be distinguished methodologically from inquiring man who is the subject of the science. Like all these sciences, theology has the object of its research and instruction contingently given to it. Among all sciences only philosophy (perhaps including mathematics) is pure self-reflection and self-understanding, inquiry and instruction “without an object.” In distinction from it theology is one of the positive sciences (or one of the three higher faculties as they used to put it). It arises in a very simple and earthly way out of the concrete demands of a specific sphere of human purpose, namely, the church, which does not want to teach without also learning and therefore does not want to take away the education of its ministers from the university, just as thus far the university has obviously not wanted to lose from the circle of its scientific investigations and answers the reflection and understanding demanded by this sphere. |
The basic object which characterizes the reflection demanded in the sphere of the church is the Word of God, God’s revelation to man. This object constitutes and validates the existence of the church and of theological science (as the function of both the church and the university). The existence of this science is on the one hand a confession of the church that it regards scientific questions and answers as necessary in relation to this object while on the other hand it is a confession of the university that it regards scientific questions and answers as possible in relation to this object. It would be all up with theology, ⌜and the abolition of the theological faculty would demand serious consideration⌝, if either the church could seriously lose interest in science or the university in this science. |
For philosophy the object of theology is fundamentally in question like the objects of all human thought and volition along with the man as such to which it directs its attention. It is one of the possible objects whose reality philosophy, which reckons only with the reality of man himself, does not have to deny but also does not consider—except, perhaps, as the presupposition of man himself, which is another matter. A theology which wants to follow it in this, treating the Word of God as a possibility that has still to be discussed, would obviously be just as pointless an enterprise as a jurisprudence that tried to treat as a problem that factual and necessary existence of the state and its laws, or a medicine that did the same with the fact and necessity of man’s physical life. The lawyer or doctor may perhaps do this to the extent that he has also minored in philosophy, but once he begins to think in terms of law or medicine the problem can no longer exist for him. Theology too, presupposing the reality of its object, may be only a possibility for philosophy, but it proceeds like any other positive science in its adoption of the church’s concern for truth. In the self-evident sense in which the same is true for jurisprudence and medicine and natural and historical science, its thought is tied to the reality of its object. If the theologian thinks freely as though he were a philospher—and even if he does so in a secondary way, then like the lawyer and doctor he must see to it how far this is compatible with his main function—he no longer thinks theologically and he can no longer demand that what he says from this angle, ⌜e.g., from the spectator standpoint of a historian or psychologist,⌝ enjoys any right of participation in the theological dialogue.
If he wants to be a theological scholar and teacher, faithful to his office both in the church and in the university, he cannot wander at large among all kinds of other subjects (as has happened very widely, for example, in the last decades or centuries with respect to the reality of ⌜human piety and its⌝ history, as though ⌜something of this nature⌝ could just as well be its object as the Word of God). He cannot abstract away from this object. He cannot act as though God had not spoken, or perhaps had not spoken, or as though it had first to be investigated whether he had really done so. He cannot permit theological thinking to be at root anything but thinking about this object (as object!). He must form its concepts as predicates of this subject and not (we have already had to guard against this possibility in the discussion in the first section) as a presentation of the pious Christian man who receives the Word of God. If with this alteration of the object it can undoubtedly be a science too, it ceases therewith to be theology. Above the demand that it be scientific, i.e., that it follow a method appropriate to a specific object, there stands for positive science, and therefore for theology, the demand that it be objective, i.e., that it be faithful to its particular object, for concretely it is only on this basis that it may be scientific. |
If theology is to include ethics, or a definition of the good in human conduct, we must not fail to note that God has spoken, speaks, and will speak to man, so that man is told what is good (Mic. 6:8). In no way, however, can this sanctifying reality of God’s Word be a problem here. In no way, again, can there by any question of listening to some other reality of nature and history instead of to this reality. In no way, as has been said, can obedient or disobedient man become the theme of the presentation. Without denying that scientific problems and, in their own way, urgent concerns are present here, we have to say that the existence of the church is constituted and validated by an object, indeed, by this specific object, so that theology, in so far as there is such, and with it theological ethics, must inquire into the relation of this object to human conduct, into the sanctifying reality of God’s Word, and not into anything else. According to the proclamation of the Christian church the true good of human conduct is this reality. Theological ethics, not in the least ashamed of being tied in this way, not departing for a single moment from this standpoint, nor replacing it by another, nor changing it into another, has the task of showing how far this is so. If it