2
I have entitled the section “the command as the judgment of God.” It thus corresponds to our deliberations thus far. The event to which all theological ethics refers, God’s claiming of man, sanctification, the act of establishing, revealing, and validating the divine command, implies the judgment of God. The point of all ethical reflection is that at every moment of life, including the very next moment to which our reflection relates, we have to respond by our action, i.e., by our existence in that moment no matter what its concrete content might be; that our action, as it occurs, is measured and judged and set under an eternal determination. At every moment our action means crisis, not a crisis we bring on but a crisis in which we stand, which is brought upon us by the good, the command, God the Lord. We are put on the scales. By the fact that we are put on the scales now we are called upon to consider that we will immediately be so again, that life is an unbroken transition from being weighed to being weighed again. To the extent that the Word of God heard today is this call, the saying is true: “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” [Psalm 119:105]. Being unable to anticipate the result of our being weighed, we have no choice between good and evil. But we may be awake or asleep. We may live responsibly or irresponsibly. To be mature is to act with awareness of the responsibility of our acts. This is not less but more than that choice. As we come to reflect on the fact that we are weighed and that our acts in some way mean responsibility, we recognize that we will be weighed and therefore that we will be responsible the very next moment, so that it is high time to awake out of sleep [cf. Rom. 13:11], because the meaning of the very next moment will again be the judgment of God. It is at this event of the very next moment that all theological ethics, starting out from the event of the present moment and its call, is aiming.
The first and basic statement that we have to make in relation to this event is obviously that God accepts us in it. Even though we weigh too lightly on his scales, nevertheless he puts us there. We may not stand according to his measure, but we are still measured by it. It may be that his judgment means our conviction and condemnation but something worthy of a different judgment might at least have been expected of us. Summoned to give an account to him we are basically and primarily summoned (no matter what the account may be) to recognize that in some sense he counts us his, shares with us, and holds fellowship with us. Unable to avoid the insight that we have him as Lord, we confirm thereby the further and materially superior insight that in some sense he regards and treats us as his own, as his possession. As his command becomes the crisis of our conduct, he tells us, as Calvin says (Inst. III, 6, 1), that he does at least ask concerning the symmetry and harmony of our decision with his own will. Under the influence of the polemic in Romans and Galatians against a dialectically understood concept of the law, and even more so under that of Luther’s use of this polemic and his to-some-extent-objectionable absolutizing of it,1 it may easily be overlooked that the origin of the establishment and revelation of the law is undoubtedly God himself and the love of God. The law should not be so unequivocally grouped with the devil, sin, and reason, as it sometimes is in Luther, nor should it be understood in a relation to God’s wrath that is so clearly taken for granted.2 While one may emphasize the distance and even the antithesis between God and man which the revelation of the command and the occurrence of the crisis manifest, one must still remember above all that this event does at least mean encounter with God. And while one may with horror take note of the element of God’s holy wrath that characterizes this encounter, nevertheless it must be perceived above all that the fact of this encounter is in itself a proof of the love of God, a love which is perhaps displayed as wrathful love, yet still God’s love. As God as Commander meets us along the way, he tells us that he does not want to be God without us but that no matter who we are he wants to be “God with us,” Immanuel. This is love, and as God’s love it must not be furnished with a restrictive “only,” just because the event also means more than this. This must be regarded as the thing which dominates everything else. We have a poor view of the crisis in which we now stand, and our reflection on it lacks seriousness, if we will not understand that we move toward, and with our acts have to give account to, the one who counts us his, who does not treat us as strangers but as members of his household [cf. Eph. 2:19], as his possession, who has loved us and will love us no matter how our encounter with him may go. As he gives us the command, indeed through the command itself, he tells us that he will be our God and we shall be his people [cf. Lev. 26:12, etc.]. That we let ourselves be told this absolutely positive thing is the presupposition of all true maturing. Hear the command, we are told. But even as this “hear” sounds forth, it tells us already that God has accepted us. The saying is not: “Hear, O Moab, Midian, or Amalek,” but: “Hear, O Israel [cf. Deut. 6:4, etc.]. “Hear” is not said to Moab, Midian, or Amalek. Where it is said, there is Israel, i.e., there is love, election, calling, the covenant, grace, faithfulness, above all God. When Israel forgot and rejected the love of Yahweh and the fact of its election from among the nations, when as a lost virgin it played the harlot with the Baals of the Gentiles as though Yahweh were not the husband who had eternally affianced her to himself [Hos. 2:21], then it forgot and rejected the commands too. Hearing the commands, without which there is no obedience, means hearing the love in the command, the election which reveals the givenness of the command, the absolutely primary Yes which God says to us through the command. If we do not hear this gracious Yes in the command, we do not hear the command at all. It is a theological hardness of heart that sees a lower stage of religion in the Old Testament because it does not know the abstract differentiation of law and gospel which, even in face of the jubilation with which again Psalm 119 and other passages sing about the gift of the law, dares to operate with the catchword of legalism, or which, according to the same schema, would find in Calvin’s joy in the law a relapse into Judaism. How can one really refute the statement of Calvin that the law is from the very outset “graced with the covenant of free adoption” (Inst. II, 7, 2)? Is not the final point of the law, of the command of God that judges us, God’s promise, the promise of his covenant with us? Can one hear it as command or place oneself under its judgment without recognizing this final point which is also the first one? Are we really mature, do we really know our accountability, so long as we do not know our election?
That God judges us means above all that he loves us. We have to think two thoughts together here: judgment and love, law and gospel. But in these two thoughts, if we think them aright, we think the one ineffable truth of God. Love is before judgment and above it. Law is simply the concrete form and voice of gospel. As such, however, it, too, has force and worth. The law has “come between” (Rom. 5:20) and is a “taskmaster” (Gal. 3:24), according to Paul’s polemic, only as the abstraction of a “Thou shalt” which is something different from the form and voice of an original “Thou mayest,” in which lies hidden the fact that first and foremost God has bound himself to man and man to him. In this sense it is the “law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). In this sense it is the law that is not really heard as God’s law. Yet the law is not as such overthrown but upheld (Rom. 3:31). It is “holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). It is “the law of the spirit of life” (Rom. 8:2). Given law means fulfilled promise: the promise that God has bound himself to me, that I am loved by him. Prior to my decision, before it has become true in my act (as measured by his will) that I am his servant, before it has also become true that I have been found an unprofitable, unfaithful, and treacherous servant, before all this, God’s decision about me has been made, and even though the mountains depart and the hills be removed his grace will never depart nor will the covenant of his peace be removed [cf. Isaiah 54:10]. The love of God manifested in the givenness of the command means a decision of God which stands substitute for mine to the extent that, as it is the final point of command that comes to me and judges me, so it also anticipates the final point of my decision, or of the judgment in which I stand with it. In it—and the same is to be said of my decision—satisfaction, and indeed full satisfaction, is already done in advance to the command under which I am placed and by which I am judged. If God is for us, then no command, even when and as it judges us, can be against us. In virtue of the decision of his love manifested in the givenness of the command, I cannot be one who is condemned by this command. In the decision of his love, the symmetry and harmony of my decision