To sum up, when people reached by God’s command stand in decision, it is a particular and definite command that has reached them. Moral generalities of any kind, ⌜even though they be biblical and in the exact words of the Bible,⌝ are not the command, for over against them we ourselves secretly are and remain judges and masters. The good is this or that command that is given to me without choice or determination on my part. It is given to me, and I cannot first ask whether it might be given to others also either with reference to them or to my own action. We stand alone7 knowing that we do not stand on ourselves and cannot be our own judges and masters. Primarily and fundamentally moral fellowship can mean only that we know—and this is the knowledge of the Christian church—that we are together and in the same situation to the extent that we know that we are mutually under the real command that is concrete and specific. Moral understanding means at root a common respect for the command which is a special and definite command for each individual. We should not think and say too hastily that this involves the negation of moral fellowship. It is tempting to say this, but if we do we speak superficially. General moral truths, from which we usually expect moral fellowship, do not have, as shown, and no matter what their derivation, the force of the true command, for in them the decisive choice between concrete possibilities is still according to what seems best to us. With this secret centrifugal effect, how can they have the power to build fellowship? Precisely under the lordship of general moral truths we cannot be united but can only become constantly disunited. But we find ourselves together and enter truly common ground when in the will and act of others we respect the revelation of the command, the good, which may, of course, be imparted only to them. It may perhaps be given only to us and not to any others. It may perhaps judge us as it does not judge anyone else. But in the very particularity as the command that is given to us it is the one command that judges all. We can and will ask ourselves whether others have heard aright what is said to them—having first put the same question to ourselves—but we trust, and this trust is the act that establishes moral fellowship, that in fact there is also said to them what they have heard either well or badly. We do not reckon them good—how can we, we do not, it is hoped, reckon ourselves good—but we reckon that the same participation in the good is granted to them as we reckon to be granted to us. We enter the ground of moral fellowship, then, when instead of proclaiming moral generalities and thereby introducing the seed of disruption into what may be an existing moral fellowship, we mutually agree that no one is in a position to judge the servant of another, for “it is before his own master that he stands or falls” on the confident presupposition with which each of us must approach his own judgment: “And he will stand, for God is mighty to make him stand,” [Rom. 14:4]. But again it cannot be ruled out—though we cannot begin here, it must first be discovered, and it will be when it is to be, though only and precisely on this ground—that several or many may see that they are placed simultaneously under the command and claimed by it in the same specific way, so that in the same definite and specific way they are called to reflection, to common ethical reflection. |
The actualizing and sustaining of a narrower moral fellowship in this sense will depend, however, on our leaving not to ourselves but to our commonly acknowledged Lord the freedom to encounter each of us with a specific and definite command without being tied to the fellowship that has been set up between us in this extraordinary way. It will depend on our recognizing and acknowledging that we are not so much bound to one another as to the Lord who commands us. If another can comfort and encourage me by telling me that he stands with me under the same command—and there is no greater comfort or stronger encouragement on earth than awareness of this common bond—nevertheless no other can be responsible for my proper hearing of what is commanded of me. Nor can any other bind my conscience. The other is set there to arouse my conscience and I must always be ready to pay heed to him. But he cannot bind me. He neither can nor should judge me by appealing to what he has heard. And although on the basis of what is said to me I can and should be my brother’s keeper [cf. Gen. 4:9] and not a spectator, I neither can nor should take from him his own responsibility for hearing properly what is commanded of him. It means liberation from a nightmare that with the best intentions we have made for ourselves when we see that we are neither called nor in any position to alter or improve one another or to set one another on the right path. With such good intentions we persistently judge one another. The wisdom which as an inalienable axiom must underlie all common ethical reflection (in the broadest sense) runs as follows: “Judge not” [Matt. 7]. All narrower moral fellowship that may arise from time to time, all common ethical reflection, can only be a summons that each should hear aright what is and will be said to him. There is no mutual recognition apart from the presupposition of a further and deeper recognition of the mutual agreement with which each believes of the other that something more will be said to him and that he will hear it in his own way. Anything else would not only violate the freedom of the other—this good is not the supreme sanctuary of the good that must be respected here—but it would also quench the Spirit [cf. 1 Thess. 5:19], drive oneself and others away from the Lord who commands, and in this way most assuredly destroy the fellowship. It is in this freedom and responsibility of the individual that the Christian church, if it knows what it is doing, accepts and understands and proclaims the real, divine, and biblical command. The command hits home to the individual; he himself is unable to hit upon the right. It comes to him as a definite command; he himself does not have to define it. It is one command and for each person it is always a concrete command.
3
Thus far we have more or less taken it for granted that the command with which we have to do in the reality of moral decision is God’s command. We are in fact only adding precision and confirmation to what we have said already when, having equated the good with the command, we further equate it with the divine commanding, i.e., with God himself. We may question whether we have heard properly what is commanded of us, whether the revelation of the command finds us open, ready, and willing, whether we are clear about the meaning of the decision that we must always take, whether we submit to the judgment that is passed on us in it, whether it is for us a summons to go watchfully toward our Lord and Judge, who will meet us again in the decision of the very next moment. But we cannot question the fact that the command under which our decision stands and by which it is measured as obedience or disobedience is God’s command, the command of the absolutely sovereign Lord who reveals himself to us and acts with us through his address and claim, through his Word. Thus far we have believed that we should understand the real command as commission, direction, order, i.e., as an act of command. If we had understood it as general moral truth we should have had to equate it now with the content of an absolute body of law. Somewhere and in some way it would have to be true in itself. But according to our previous deliberations it cannot be equated with this kind of corpus—even the Bible with its commands, as we have seen, can never be viewed as such. What makes this view impossible is that it ascribes to man the dignity of judge. The good, the command, is not true but becomes true as it is spoken to us as the truth, as it meets us speaking as truth. We thus stand directly before the concept of God; indeed, strictly speaking we have already achieved the concept. We may thus dismiss as childish the question how we have come to make the equation between the command and the command of God, i.e., God himself. The answer is that it is not at all the case that we come to this. If we know what the revelation of the good is in moral decision, if we know the strictly concrete character of the good which reveals itself to us there, then we know therewith and therein that God has come to us. We know that we have not first to begin to speak about him but that from the very first we have already been spoken to by him. Where the real command is, there is absolute, personal, living will distinct from ours. If this can be shown in analysis, then reserving all further definitions—this whole course of lectures can only be one big attempt to make these further definitions—we have the right to understand this will as the divine will and therefore the command that meets us as God’s command, i.e., as God himself.
a. Where there is real command, there is an absolutely imperious will. We have seen how with the seriously put question of the good we have recognized the presence of an absolute “ought.” I would not advise that this recognition