To this first question of the distinctiveness of the specific ethical question there must then be added in all three areas the question of the distinctiveness of the specific knowledge of the divine claim, or, as we might put it, of the form of the divine command. |
We know the commanding of the Creator, the necessity of life, to the extent that we know our calling, not understood, of course, in the narrowest sense, but as the epitome of the necessity, the “commandedness,” of the concrete reality in which each individual exists as such. We do not live any kind of life according to our own caprice. As we know ourselves in God’s Word, we are oriented to our fellows and we live a life whose specific ends are totally determined and which actualizes that orientation in a particular way. As thus determined our life has a necessity by creation. Our life itself then becomes for us the divine command. |
Second, we know the commanding of the Reconciler, the necessity of law, to the extent that, biblically speaking, we encounter Moses, the divinely commissioned fellowman who is set before us in this sense, or, more generally, to the extent that human authority encounters us. The brokenness in which we [are] set under God’s judgment because of our sin and the reconciliation in which we exist by his grace mean concretely that our conduct, in so far as we know ourselves in God’s Word, is done on all sides not merely in that orientation to our fellows in the form of our calling, but under the contradiction, direction, and instruction of fellowmen who are superior to us because they meet us with authority, so that it is always conduct in specific forms of subjection and under an alien human law. As thus determined, the law of the good is necessarily the divine command which strives against us and which we cannot refuse to respect as such. |
Third, we know the commanding of the Redeemer, the necessity of promise, in the voice of our own conscience. Our determination for the life of the world to come, our eschatological determination, means concretely that the obligation resting on my conduct covers more than its determination by my calling and by the authority that encounters me. Beyond both of these there is in us recollection of the perfect as the measure of the good in relative independence of the command of calling and the command of the commissioned fellowman. As thus determined, the promise is necessarily the divine command for the final and eternal goal of our conduct. —— These are the deliberations on the ground of knowledge or the form of the divine command which in all three chapters will form the second development in our train of thought. |
A third development will clearly have to take place as we answer the question of the content of the divine commanding. What does God want in claiming us for himself? At this point we can turn at once into a well-known path of reformation theology, namely, the doctrine of the threefold use of the law in which not only Christian necessity but also the Christian content of God’s law can be very fully described. |
The command of God the Creator, the necessity of life to which we subject ourselves in obedience to our calling, is obviously in content the necessity and command of order. There is a political or civil use of the law, as earlier thinkers put it. In this sense the command means the external order of our life by which we are disciplined and human life is possible as life together. As we live according to our calling we recognize that we live in orientation to our fellows. We recognize that the necessity of our life is the community of life. We recognize that our conduct is bound by the fact that it takes place with this reference, by a rule which is valid both for my fellows and me and me and my fellows, which precedes in dignity both his ends and mine, both my ends and his. This obligation of an order of life is the necessity of life properly understood. It is what God first wants from us. What occupies us here is materially the problem of the law of nature which is not set aside but confirmed and reestablished by revelation. |
The command of God the Reconciler, the necessity of law under which we stand as pardoned sinners in that concrete subjection to the commissioned fellowman, is in content the necessity or command of humility. The older writers spoke of the pedagogic use of the law. The law must put us where we belong. It is meant to lead us to repentance and faith where we can know only our own sin and God’s judgment and grace. As we subject ourselves, as we act as those who must be told something, we recognize that we have deserved to be contradicted and that we are helped by being contradicted. We recognize the alien majesty of the law in our life as our judgment and salvation. Our salvation is that we have been disturbed and attacked in our possession, our security, our self, and to grasp our salvation means yielding to the attack. This humbling, this dispossession, this giving up to death of the old man is what God the Reconciler wants of us when he sanctifies us. What meets us here is the specifically Old Testament side of the revealed command but one which forms an integral part of the New Testament witness too. |
The command of God the Redeemer, the necessity of promise under which we stand as heirs of God’s kingdom as we hear the voice of conscience with its witness to coming perfection, is in content the command of the necessity of gratitude. Earlier scholars spoke of a third use of the law, the didactic or normative use. Only as the recipient of the Holy Spirit does man really come under God’s command. As our conscience makes the perfect present, we recognize the necessity of free action in faith and obedience, the command of gratitude as the Heidelberg Catechism called this principle of the new Christian life oriented to God’s future. God’s command is not content to order our going and to push us into and keep us in the corner in which we can live only by God’s grace. As it does this it speaks to us as to God’s elect from and to all eternity. It demands our gratitude, or, very simply, ourselves. For obviously the only possible thanks for God’s election is that we should recognize our obligation, indeed, our having fallen forfeit to him. If it is not in our power to grasp the perfect, to put ourselves in God’s hand as he takes us in his hand, the point of our existence should now be that of sacrifice, of witness and demonstration that we have heard, that we have heard this last and strongest meaning of his Word. What we have to deal with in this context is the specifically New Testament side of the command of God to which witness is borne in the Sermon on the Mount and the ethics of Paul and John but which is also not unknown to the witness of the Old Testament as well. —— This, then, will be the third development in our train of thought in all three areas. In what will have to be said along these lines a certain resemblance may be seen to what is worked out in many ethical systems as a doctrine of “duties.” |
Finally, along a fourth line of thought, we shall be concerned to understand as truly good conduct the human conduct which is thus understood to be set under God’s command. We cannot forget that sanctification as well as justification is God’s grace, total, real and effective grace. The one to whom God is gracious, i.e., to whom he not only promises forgiveness of sin in Christ but whom he also claims for himself in Christ, whom he both justifies and sanctifies (and grace would not be grace were it not grace in this totality), this person—and we should not shrink from saying this even though we must weigh its meaning very carefully—this person does good acts. What will have to be shown at the fourth point in each area is how far a fulfillment of God’s command takes place in virtue of the same divine act of sanctification in which the command of God is set before man as a demand and in which man himself is set under the command. Again we can adopt a classical, and in this case a biblical, triad of concepts which seems to be ready to hand for this purpose. I have in mind the Pauline sequence of faith, love, and hope. All three of these are characterized by the fact that they describe a real attitude and action on man’s part, yet one which is in no sense man’s own achievment, but which—as man certainly stands or falls by his believing, loving, and hoping, as he is certainly called to do this—is in the strictest sense a work, or rather the work of God on man: faith (πίστις), God’s being faithful to himself; love (ἀγάπη), God’s free good will, as the one he is, to his own, no matter who or how they are, his free good will not to withhold but to give himself and all his