It is tempting to answer rather angrily these objectors, who in fact are to be found not only among Roman Catholics, with Anselm’s dictum: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”8 Does it not seem obvious that we have here the sleep of the overrighteous? Will not such objectors finally be driven to wake up and see and admit their real situation, so that at least in the hour of death they will no longer be able to find comfort in their supposed fulfillment of the law? Perhaps even now we can really awake these sleepers with a powerful summons, though only if our summons does not represent a perverted Pharisaism, that of the publican, of villainy, but is a witness to the majesty of the divine command to which God himself says Amen. If we realize this, then we will be just as restrained with our charge of a deficient sense of the seriousness of sin in other people as we are with all charges. The statement that we are always sinners [cf. Rom. 3:23] cannot be victoriously asserted and demonstrated by emotional or rational means. Like the statement that the command declares God’s love to us, it cannot be forced on anybody, but can only be an appeal to the reality of the divine Word itself and to the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, to the reality which itself bears witness to itself where it is known. Calvin expressed this in the almost intolerably strict formula that “there never existed any work of a godly man which, if examined by God’s stern judgment, would not deserve condemnation” (Inst. III,14, 11). In this formula, however, there should be noted not only the cautious “if examined” but also the fact that the judgment is God’s judgment. The statement speaks truth, but highly particular truth, not general truth: truth that may be discerned only in this special case. This case, however, obviously cannot be created by speaking either to or about people, nor can anyone put himself in this case in which his work is really measured by God’s stern judgment. This case arises when the judgment takes place. Then man, even and precisely the godly man, does recognize, of course, that his work deserves condemnation. Then, having seen his face in a glass (James 1:23f.), he can no longer go away and forget what he has seen. Then he knows that he is done for. But he has as little accepted or attained this knowledge on his own as he has the knowledge of the love of God and his election. As little as the latter does it rest on his profound experience and great earnestness, and as little as the latter can it become an object of possession or a matter of a habit. He knows because and to the extent that he stands under the fatherly discipline of God. Discipline, however, is revelation. And revelation is the act of God. What we can know by revelation, however, is not suitable for use by us to silence others, even though they be the most stupid and unperceptive of objectors. It obstinately refuses to be used in this way. If we really understand the statement that all have gone astray, that all are wicked [Rom. 3:12], that God’s people is always the people of the lost, then we will pay almost more careful attention to that perverted Pharisaism than to the usual variety, knowing that this is not our own insight and that we cannot ourselves triumph with it. How can we indeed utter such a statement except with an awareness of the great risk with which every true theological statement is made? It might be that the insight, hidden from human eyes and ears, is much more genuinely present when the fatal objection is made than when the statement about man’s plight is perhaps affirmed too readily to be really affirmed under the discipline of the Holy Spirit, just as knowledge of the love of God can be much more genuinely present when the statement at issue is perhaps questioned and contested than when it is uttered as though we had its content in our pocket and the suspicion is aroused that perhaps we have said it to ourselves more than we should. As the command itself is grace, so it is grace when, through the command, God shows all our deciding and doing to be transgression of the command. As knowledge of sin by the command is God’s work of sanctification, so it escapes our grasp and is an act of our life that is hidden with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3]. We evade the truth if we try to evade the caveat with which alone we can speak in this regard.
4
As my decision comes into God’s judgment, it is—as my decision—condemned. It is, as my decision, measured by God’s command, apostasy, treason, and revolt. I do not do the good before God but—there is no third possibility—I do the bad. Yet as my decision comes into God’s judgment, as what I do is done before God, the “my” and “I” are radically called in question. Certainly it is my decision and I do what is done, but that my decision and deed are a last word, that they create a definitive situation, that I can make an eternal choice, is challenged by the fact that I come into God’s judgment and my deed is done before God. Certainly the command of God reveals to me what I have to think of my decision, how I am to understand myself, and as self-knowledge the revelation that I am a transgressor is the truth behind or above which there is no higher or deeper truth, no self-knowledge in which I find myself to be anything better than a transgressor. But that my self-knowledge or self-discovery exhausts the truth about my existence is denied by the same command because it is God’s command. To stay with my self-knowledge even though final clarity may have been given to it by the command, to refuse to be told more about myself than I can and must tell myself when instructed by God’s command, is something I am forbidden to do by the same command because it is God’s command. According to the revelation of the command I stand in God’s judgment and I do what I do before him. This means, however, that he speaks the last word by his decision and act, that he creates the definitive situation, that I am fundamentally known by him beyond my knowledge of myself, that I am known in a fundamentally different way from that in which I know myself, the fundamental difference being that, even in my apostasy, treason, and revolt, he who for his own reasons has bound himself to me from eternity sees me in the quality in which I am elected, loved, and blessed by him. His decision and act is the free good-pleasure which he has found in me by seeing me in Christ the second and obedient Adam, by imputing Christ’s righteousness to me as my own righteousness. In this decision of his, in virtue of this free divine good-pleasure, I have the quality in which I am worthy for all my unworthiness, of being the one he has elected, loved, and blessed. Before I chose what is corrupt, supra lapsum (before the fall), I was elected in Christ. Before I did not love, I was loved in Christ. Before my unsatisfactoriness came to light, satisfaction was perfectly done for me by Christ. God’s faithfulness was not overthrown by my unfaithfulness [cf. Rom. 3:3]. If God’s command reveals my unfaithfulness, the same command, if I hear it as God’s command, reveals God’s faithfulness. The thing which, beyond my self-knowledge, even beyond all the self-knowledge illumined by the command, I must let myself be told by the command, by the law that is “graced with the covenant of free adoption,” or by the gospel that is not to be separated from the command that is really given us, is that God was and is and will be faithful to me, that God has reconciled the cosmos to himself [cf. 2 Cor. 5:19]. It is still true, of course, that God knows me—and I have to let myself be told that he does—as I myself never know myself in any continuation, extension, or deepening of my self-knowledge. In my self-knowledge as such I must stay with the truth which in the area of self-knowledge is the truth, God’s truth. In this area I look in vain for any quality in which I am worthy to be elected, loved, and blessed by God. According to my knowledge, my decision, my existence will never be pleasing to God. If I may and should know that God has elected me, in face of what I know about myself through his command, I can regard the basis for this act of his only as a miracle, as sheer mercy.
It is not true, then, that I know myself as God knows me—in 1 Corinthians 13:12 this is expressly called an eschatological reality—but what is true is that I have to let myself hear this and be told it. God knows me without my being able to invoke the corresponding findings of my self-knowledge as witness thereto. This knowledge of myself, which is exclusively God’s knowledge, which cannot in any sense be translated or dissolved into self-knowledge, by which the truth of my self-knowledge under the illumination of the command is not abrogated, in which this self-knowledge of mine is rather comprehended and empowered—this knowledge is my justification in the judgment of his command. It is God’s knowledge of myself in which my self-knowledge under the illumination of his command, unaffected, unbroken, and unchanged, holy, just, and good, is confirmed in its judging and condemning force, so that out of it no possibility of self-justification arises but all such possibility is now definitively shattered. For