To conclude our discussion of this side of the issue, we now have good reason precisely in a theological ethics to make a very special demarcation on this side. It is in keeping with all that has been said that the command addressed to man, as it is present in the message of the Bible which the Christian church accepts and proclaims, almost always occurs as a concrete command and therefore as a plenitude of commands. Jesus does not merely say to the rich young ruler: “You know what you should do,” but: “You know the commandments” [Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20]. You know, then, that in this concrete way you stand in decision. |
It will be well to establish as unequivocally as possible the relation between the concreteness of the unconditioned command and the concreteness of the biblical commands. Obviously neither the totality nor a selection of the biblical imperatives, nor any one of them, is in itself the unconditioned concrete command that comes to you and me today. This neither can nor should be said either of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, or the imperatives of the admonitory chapters in the epistles. Precisely for the sake of a proper understanding of the authority of the Bible we must not confuse the issue by an overhasty biblicism. All the biblical imperatives—and we do not say this to impugn the authority of the Bible but to define it—are addressed to others and not to us, and they are addressed to others who differ greatly among themselves, to the people of Israel in different situations, to the disciples of Jesus, to the first Christian churches of Jews and Gentiles. Their concreteness is that of a specific then and there. Again, as we now have them, they are not ⌜for the most part⌝ wholly and absolutely concrete commands addressed to these and these specific people. Their concreteness is relative. ⌜Even⌝ formally they are at least in part—we have only to think of the familiar saying in Matthew 7:125—not wholly unlike the general principles that we discussed earlier. They are in the main general summaries of the commands issued then and there to specific people. They are—and I am expressly including the Sermon on the Mount—witness to the absolutely concrete command received by Israel, the disciples, and the primitive church. It is in this specific form of witness to the absolutely concrete real command that they come to us and can and should apply to us as the absolutely concrete real command. This means, however, that no biblical command or prohibition is a rule, a general moral truth, precisely because it comes to us as witness to the absolutely concrete real command. How can it be a general moral truth if it is witness to the command that God has really issued and issues? As such it would conceal and deny what it is supposed to attest. If it were a general moral truth, if, e.g., the command not to kill [Exod. 20:3] or the command to love one’s enemies [Matt. 5:44] were seen as a rule that we have only to apply, then obviously in relation to the biblical imperatives, too, we should have to distinguish between their general validity and their validity for us, again filling them out concretely for ourselves—for which of them is so clear and concrete that this is not necessary?—exactly as we do with the principles discussed earlier. The commands not to kill and to love one’s enemies are oriented to the absolutely concrete command but are themselves only relatively concrete. Concretely different things may be commanded in line with this orientation, although it would be hazardous to say of the differences that they are irrelevant for the qualifying of our action and that selection among them is left to us. Yet even if the selection is not a matter of indifference, but decision takes place in it, nevertheless, assuming that the command is really meant and treated as a general truth, the good is our good choice among the possibilities it offers and not the command itself. A biblicism which thinks it sees the direct command to us in the relatively concrete biblical imperatives, whether individually or collectively, is ineluctably compelled to make use of the same method of the secret autonomy of those who are apparently subject to the law as an ill-advised philosophical ethics usually does with the help of its freely constructed principles.
To be sure, a secret lawlessness rather than “legalism” is the proper charge to bring against a biblicist ethics such as that of the Anabaptists of the age of the Reformation. This has become perfectly clear in the continuation of this approach in Tolstoy.6 Over against the arrogance which for a change uses the Bible to place man’s free choice on the judgment-seat concerning good and evil. ⌜and which makes man and his so-called “best judgment and conscience” the arbiter between two or three different and competing divine commands,⌝ we have to remember that throughout the Bible the biblical commandments are not simple and direct revelation, but like the whole Bible they are witness to revelation, and it is in this specific sense which excludes their use as general moral truths that they are God’s Word to us. This means, however, that they are not themselves the direct, definite, individual command to us which is alone the real command. Then and there, as specific people heard it, the real command was very different from the recollection of it which, in the form of the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, bears witness to us today of the way in which the ⌜divine⌝ Logos, the good, claimed people then and there. In their relative concreteness, however, they point us, as the whole Bible does, to the event of that claiming of men by the ⌜divine⌝ Logos which will be unavoidably the meaning of our own action.
This indication is made with imperious force. Through this witness to God’s command the command itself is heard by us, by God’s church. This is why the church proclaims it as it receives the biblical witness to it. This is why it gives instruction in the good by means of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It does this on the presupposition—and with this presupposition the church stands or falls—that here and not elsewhere the command of God is to be heard. But to be heard as the command of God—which means hearing for ourselves what we are commanded by this command as we ourselves are concretely claimed by the command attested in the Bible. And if too much attention cannot be paid to the fact that the biblical witness to God’s command almost never speaks abstractly in real proximity to those general principles but almost always speaks with at least a relative concreteness, we shall note not only that the finger we see pointing there points us toward the wholly concrete command of God but also in what direction it points us. For awareness of the responsibility that we must accept with our acts it is not a matter of indifference but one of urgent importance that ⌜at the decisive point⌝ the command is not that we should kill but that we should not kill, that the Sermon on the Mount does not invite us to take up the attitude of the rich but of the poor in spirit [cf. Matt. 5:3], and that Pauline exhortation does not focus on the concept of the superman but on that of sacrifice and humility. We shall agree that even if the great Old and New Testament command to love God and our neighbor is not the real command, nevertheless it tells us very clearly about it. And beyond that we shall always take into account that this and this definite biblical imperative itself becomes directly the most concrete command—why should it not, would it not be a bad thing if it did not?—so that in and with the wording of the biblical witness to God’s command the command itself is given that judges our action. When this takes place, however, there is no transforming of the biblical imperatives into general moral truths.