Ethics. Karl Barth

all things and everything, even though he has become guilty before all in everything. The tragic hero finally triumphs, defying the world, or even blessing it in spite of everything, even in his downfall. He is a type, a respectable type, of man’s own upstanding righteousness. The Zarathustra of Nietzsche and the Prometheus of Goethe and Spitteler,5 like the Prometheus of the ancient Greek story, are figures that have the fear of death and fate behind them, figures that obviously do not stand under accusation, and we must be clear that real life stands behind them. Why are they not accused even though they are so assaulted? Because there is for them no command, no command of God that cannot be escaped, as one can escape even the sharpest accusation of the world of nature and spirit or as even on the ruins one can escape the attack of the whole cosmos. There is no true assault where there is no sin. But there is no sin where there is no command of God beyond the command of powers and forces and the law of gods and demons. God’s command reveals sin. God’s command condemns man. It does so because it smites man at the very point where the tragic hero is strong and good, because it constantly surprises man in his act with the demand that instead of asserting himself he must surrender himself. The command of God wills that we regard God as an unconditioned Lord. We do not want to do this. We do not do it. Whatever our decision may be, finally it is always self-assertion. Our sensuality and spirituality, our love and hate, our prayer and cursing—they are all self-assertion. We want to live. We want to be ourselves. Always, perhaps even with God’s help, we want to thrust ourselves forward. It is with this true and deepest program of ours that in each of our decisions we stand even against God and precisely against God, as though God were one of the gods whom it is a laudable thing for the tragic hero to encounter. We always deal with God on the basis of a supposed credit. Even when we decide for the ostensible good we always decide as our own masters. We never act as those that are truly bound. This is transgression, sin. The Pharisee in the temple, who unlike the publican has put everything straight and thanks God that he is himself and not like these others [cf. Luke 18:11], is the true sinner. Again there are distinctions. It is one thing to assert oneself so wildly and defiantly, to play the superman, the god-man, as directly as Nietzsche did.6 It is another to rebel in so moderate and perhaps so highly Christian a form as did that good-natured model child, the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son [cf. Luke 15:25–32]. Yet we must not deceive ourselves. The distinction is irrelevant in this context, namely, in the question how we stand before God. We must see that whether crude or refined it is the same revolt: disobedience. The one is not disobedience and the other imperfect obedience. Both are disobedience. Our action is decision and decision is either/or. Our decision as such undoubtedly means that even at best what ought to be done is not done.

      c. We begin finally with the fact that the command is not given to us without the promise that we are God’s elected covenant-partners whom he loves. It is as such that it condemns us. This is the obviously contradictory description of the even more contradictory fact that precisely the revelation of God’s love, as which we must finally understand the command, unmasks us as those who love neither God nor the neighbor in relation to whom our love for God must show itself in concrete decision. Again it would not be too difficult to regard our decision as good and ourselves as justified if we had not to remember this final point of the command, the revelation of God’s love. God comes so uncannily close to us that he loves us; that he wants not just our work or our obedience or ourselves, but ourselves in our own freedom, ourselves not merely in our creaturely dependence but also in our creaturely independence; that he does not will to be without us. If he did not love us, the command would not be the question of our response of love. We should be merely effects of a superior cause or slaves of a powerful lord instead of children of an eternal Father. God’s lordship would not be most glorious in the fact that he is this Father. In face of the command it would be just a matter of factual observance, of the fulfillment of this or that outer or inner act or attitude, not of God’s heart and our own heart. Why, then, should we not be able to satisfy his command? Along such lines there is so much that we can do and that people have actually done. There have been those who in observance of God’s command have offered high things, perhaps the highest, perhaps the final thing of all, their lives. But it is a question of love for God (demonstrated in love for neighbor). And loving means freely wanting to be in all things, not without but with the one whom one loves in the same self-evident way as one cannot be without oneself. It is thus that God loves us and calls us to love him in return. In our decision however, in every moment of action, we find that we are those who do not love him in return. Remember that here again it cannot be a matter of more or less. Love is not a quantity. It is a quality that is either there or not. And when do we see ourselves to be those who have this quality? When do we not see ourselves instead as those who realize with shame that in the last resort they would rather be without both God and neighbor, if we are not to say even more clearly, with Question 5 of the Heidelberg Catechism, that we are prone by nature to hate God and our neighbor?7 We cannot escape the judgment of this question by pointing to the attitude and acts of individuals whose unselfishness, dedication, and readiness for sacrifice seem to rule out the assumption that they do not really love God and their neighbor but actually hate them. It must be remembered that we have to do here with the question which we must put and answer, not for others or with reference to others, but strictly with reference to ourselves. Even if we were among those saintly people, even if we gave an impression of perfect love for others, could we and would we say to ourselves that we have even partially fulfilled the command of love and are justified before God in virtue of this love? This is the question. True saints have not done so, we should have to say. Knowledge of the judgment passed on us by the command always means, even and precisely for saints, knowledge that we are not loving people, that God deals with us in a way that is qualitatively and not just quantitatively different from the way we deal with him, that something meets us in his love for which we are absolute debtors to him, not just partially but totally, not just in our worst moments but in our best as well. Certainly there may be important differences between the different debtors to God’s love and between our levels of indebtedness at different times. But there are never any final or decisive differences and we are never nondebtors. Of no one can it be said that he has rendered imperfect obedience, but still obedience. There are no favorable moments in which an individual can appeal at least to a minimum of obedience. From this standpoint our decision is again a faulty and corrupt decision. Our sanctification is precisely that, precisely as those who are loved by God, we find ourselves to be those who are unworthy to be loved, who have deserved wrath instead of love, and what meets us in this discovery, this unveiling of our hearts is in fact wrath, the wrathful love of God.

      We must pause for a moment, however, to consider the great epistemological caveat with which we opened this section. Here, too, it cannot escape us that the way of thought that we are pursuing is not a secure one except in the reality of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Can we not conceive of very serious and even passionate objections to all that has been said here? Is it true that our acts, so far as may be seen, are deviations from the concrete command that is given us? What are we to say if someone steps up to assure us that he himself, perhaps as one who knows and possesses spiritual realities and gifts, believes he has in fact fulfilled, and does so continually, the concrete command that is given him, and that he thus regards himself as justified? Again, is it true that we can stand upright against the world, death, and destiny, but are always unrighteous before God? How can we reply if someone says that in the best part of him he does not finally know that irresponsibility and rebellion of man against God but does know a deepest basis of his nature in which he is always at peace with God, gives God the honor that is his due, and is therefore justified before God? Again, is it true, is it not a misanthropic exaggeration, to say that we never attain to the deepest meaning of the command of love for God and neighbor, and that placed under the command we recognize that we do not love at all and are thus condemned by the command? What are we to answer if someone tells us with the friendly but triumphant laugh of the worldling or even the Christian that he is not as bad as all that but does love God and neighbor and is sorry we cannot say this about him? And beyond this general contradiction, what are we to say if someone rejects the established either/or, the alternative of obedience or disobedience, and tries to tell us that in the gentle middle between the two there is such a thing as imperfect obedience, and that the relative differences of deviation, which we have not denied, imply from the opposite standpoint relative stages of