The concept of man contained in God’s own Word understands him as God’s creature, as God’s pardoned sinner, and as God’s future redeemed. We see ourselves in these relations when and insofar as we see ourselves in God’s Word. In these relations we obviously have to ask about our sanctification, about the significance of the divine decision, of the event of God’s commanding. In these three relations we see ourselves as claimed by God’s Word. This is man—and we take as a basis, not a general and abstract concept of man, but the concrete Christian concept, when we say that this is sanctified man, who is the predicate and not the subject of the statements of theological ethics. Man is God’s creature, a sinner pardoned in Christ, the heir of God’s kingdom, because and to the extent that God claims him as such. In all these relations the divine commanding is the principle of the goodness of his conduct. It is plain that these relations, too, do not denote stages or parts of man’s being, and that these understandings of sanctification are not different stages or parts of God’s commanding, but that we are always dealing with the one whole man and the one whole command of God as this is given to him in God’s revelation. Here too, then, the differentiation can only be intended logically and not ontologically. It can denote only various points on the way of knowledge, only various angles from which to understand what is intrinsically one whole reality, not a division within this reality. But this one whole reality is God’s own reality whose unity we do not control and which as an absolutely actual reality cannot be used by us to form the unity of a system. The distinction is thus necessary as a logical distinction. We do not have at our disposal the synthesis which would remove it. God is the synthesis, but not a synthesis that we have made or can make. Thus the significance of the divine commanding is necessarily different as we understand it as that of God the Creator, God the Reconciler, and God the Redeemer, although these three are not three but one. How can we possibly understand his command in one word without that distinction if we can understand God himself only in the denoted movement of knowledge? |
The history of Christian ethics with its innumerable conflicts between types of thinking oriented to creation, reconciliation, or redemption, to nature, grace, or glory, shows us that in fact this movement has taken place in the ethical thinking of Christianity. If we understand that the Word of God is moral truth, we understand that the distinction which underlies this movement is necessary and cannot be evaded. Hence we not only see that the historical conflicts in their own way make sense but we can also express in the proper place the different concerns obviously intimated by them. In the proper place! We shall thus be able to avoid the rigidity with which one or other of the possible and justifiable standpoints has been adopted and treated as the one absolute standpoint. Yet we also cannot unite these different standpoints into a single one. This would be to forget the need to distinguish them and the fact that their unity only lies in the reality of God, which is not at our command. One can establish the validity of the different standpoints only as stations on a way. Thus the nature of Christian moral knowledge is to be sought and found neither in isolated preference for one or the other standpoint, nor in a construction that unites and harmonizes all three, but in the treading of this way in accordance with the divine act of revelation, in the act of traversing the three standpoints, in the basically single circle of the movement of knowledge described. |
To make this movement of knowledge is the task of the second special part of ethics, of our second, third, and fourth chapters, an exact repetition on a small scale of the same movement that dogmatics makes on a big scale, with the practical, not methodological, difference that ethics pays particular attention to the question of the claiming of man as such. Again, everything depends here, as in dogmatics, on whether or not we understand the relation between the three successive developments kinetically and not statically, just as the picture of a movement can be presented only in the sequence of all three stages and not by a delineation of the first or second or third stage nor by a recapitulatory depiction or grouping together of all three. We are asking about the good. We cannot expect to see the good, however, in the second, third, or fourth chapter, and even less in a summary of their conclusions, but if at all only in the act of thinking structured according to these chapters. The good is what is commanded me, a man, as God’s creature, pardoned sinner, and heir of his kingdom. As I myself as this man see myself set under God’s command, I know the good. Hence I cannot know it except as I do it. And as I do it I know myself as this man: “from him, by him, to him” [cf. 1 Cor. 8:6]. Claimed by the divine self, I know myself in that cycle of knowledge, I see myself thrice claimed. My conduct in this thrice-understood claim is the conduct commanded me, my good conduct. In the second chapter, then, we shall speak of the commanding of God the Creator, in the third of the commanding of God the Reconciler, and in the fourth of the commanding of God the Redeemer, but never intending to say three different things, since the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer are one and the same God and “from him, by him, to him” denotes one and the same claiming by God. We have simply to say the same things three times in fundamentally different ways. In detail then, in the ordering of the content of the three chapters, the way to be taken has to be three times fundamentally the same, though different thoughts will have to be expressed at the different points. Here again, however, four elements seem to force themselves upon us with a certain materially grounded necessity and not without some support at least from classical models. |
It is clear first that at the beginning of each chapter it will be necessary to work out the uniqueness of the specific ethical standpoint, showing how far human action as divinely commanded in one sense or the other really does come each time under a special light that cannot be exchanged for that of the other standpoints, how far precisely from this standpoint it is claimed and therefore sanctified by God’s Word in an indissolubly distinctive way. |
Thus when we think of the special features of the command of the Creator as we need to do at the beginning of the second chapter, the particular aspect of the divine commanding is to be understood as the necessity of the life that is given us. As in the light of creation we understand the necessity under which we are set by the divine claim as the necessity of life, we are saying that what is commanded us, the good, is to be sought first in the reality of human existence because and in so far as this existence rests on God’s creation and therefore on his will. Where the divine claiming is known at all it truly wills to be known as one that begins with the fact that we are. We are not except as we are the Lord’s. As we live, we stand under the necessity of living to him. He is the necessity of our lives. We have simply to understand what life is and we shall also understand what is commanded us. |
The same claiming takes on a very different aspect when we view it from the standpoint of reconciliation. The same reality at the beginning of the third chapter has to be described as the necessity of law. We now see ourselves in our contradiction of God as sinners and also, of course, in the contradiction which God victoriously and supremely contradicts, as sinners, then, whom God in his grace has accepted in spite of their sin. Here the command, the good, obviously does not coincide any longer with our existing. It is set for us and opposed to us. It strives against our life because we are sinners. The reverse side of the grace that comes to us sinners is the judgment on us which precisely as recipients of grace we cannot evade. The crucial thing is that we should now understand the good in this strife against us, as the judgment on us that it signifies, as the law in its necessity. Over against us enemies to whom God has shown mercy, the divine claiming necessarily means the law whose validity cannot in any circumstances be called into question by our corruption, and which cannot be twisted or explained away no matter what may become of us.16 |
Finally the same reality, seen from the standpoint of redemption, is the necessity of promise. We not only have life as God’s creatures and law as members of the covenant of grace, but also as such we have promise. Our first point in the last chapter is that as God really claims us we are addressed as heirs of his eternal kingdom. The promise is the goal of our life which may be seen in and with the divine claiming. The promise is the consummation which is held out before us, pledged to us, and allotted to us in advance. As such it, too, is in its own way the divine claim. From this point, too, from the eschatological boundary, God meets