We can and must remember that grace is assigned to us, that we need no arts or ruses to participate in it and thus to hear and say as truth all that we have said and heard. It is a matter of grace, however, and even though it would make no sense to look about for complicated ways to lay hold of it, this does not imply that we need to use only some simple means but rather that there are no means at all, that it is pure gift, and that as such it comes to us with the full freedom of the giver.
We can and do also remember that we are not alone when we venture to count on the Word and Spirit of God as witnesses to the truth of what has been said and heard. In venturing it we stand with the Christian church, which is none other than the community of justified sinners, of sinners justified in Christ, and in which we do not make the venture in our own name but by command and under promise. The Christian church is the place where we must at any rate make the venture—it remains a venture even when made in obedience—to follow the summons: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ [cf. Acts 16:31]. The Christian church cannot guarantee what obviously has to be guaranteed here, namely, the sanctifying reality of the divine command itself. Even in the Christian church no one can believe for another, no one can safely lead another past the dark abyss of offense, unbelief, disobedience, and the despair that does not hear the gospel but only the law, which without the gospel is certainly not the true and divine law—the despair that might always be a mark of our rejection, since God never owes it to anyone, never owes it to us, to elect us instead of rejecting us. Precisely in the church we know that deep down at the decisive point we can appeal only to the Lord and not to the church. |
We can and do also remember that in counting on the Word and Spirit of God we do no other than take seriously our baptism as the sign of promise which is given to each of us personally and truly as a sign of promise for our thinking, and therefore with epistemological significance. In this respect the gift of baptism is that I may and should regard myself as one to whose existence it belongs, no matter what may be his experiences or the results of his self-knowledge, to make a comforted beginning with grace, i.e., with the knowledge of God, and with the same comfort to think from that starting point. The comfort, however, again cannot mean power over the Lord of baptism, as though in baptism we were placed in some kind of “it” and not placed in the hands of a “he.” Nor is baptism fulfillment, for in it we are commended to the grace of God. Grace means, however, that we should hear the word of fulfillment through it. |
When we hear this word through it, then we must always remember that he who stands there must see to it that he does not fall [cf. 1 Cor. 10:12], or, in other words, that all hearing is a summons to hear again and not simply to be content to have heard. Certainly the evident truth is heard here. But what is evident is a participial and therefore a verbal form. Here the truth becomes evident. Like the manna in the wilderness it is a good thing that is given to be received and enjoyed, not conserved and stored away. When some people left part of it until morning, “it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted” (Ex. 16:20f.). So it is with the evident truth of grace. We cannot lay our hands on God’s Word and Spirit as they are given to us, but we live by the fact that God does not withdraw his hand from us. This is what I mean when I say that we must reckon here with the Word and Spirit of God in such a way that we can think and reflect only as we pray. That our thinking is not without an object but has an object can only be—if we ask how this can be—a matter of the answering of prayer. Without the answering of prayer we could understand theology at this central point only as a vessel with no content. In prayer alone is our membership of the church, our baptism, so powerful that the freedom of the Spirit to blow where he wills [cf. John 3:8] does not alarm us and we need not be afraid, just as God’s people in the wilderness did not have to be afraid when they went forward to each new day with empty hands. It need hardly be said, I hope, that this too, and this precisely, is a direction that we cannot follow unless it is given us to do so from above [cf. John 3:27].
5
God’s command justifies us as it judges us. For God’s command, the sentence that it imposes on us, is included in God’s promise that even and precisely as those that are condemned by him we are just before him, we are not repulsed by him because of our sins but upheld by him, we are not let fall in our corruption but carried by him. “Jesus receives sinners”11 [cf. Luke 15:2] and “as you are, you may come.”12 This is the gospel which comes to us in and with the command. Yet we have not fully described the reality of the divine command if we do not engage in a final act of reflection and state expressly that this gospel comes to us only in the command and through the command. God’s command, as, recognized or not, it meets us at every moment of our action as the judgment under which we are set, says two things about us according to what we have stated thus far. First, it says that we are in the wrong before God, and second, it says that as those who are in the wrong before God we are just before him. Since God by his command primarily claims us as his own, counts us his, sees us as those who belong to him and are loved by him, two things are necessarily included. First, as those who are thus claimed by him we cannot help but see clearly how totally we fail to meet this claim. Second, in spite of this failure we cannot help but see in the same claim God’s inconceivable and unmerited good-pleasure in us. The two statements, however, spring from the same root, and for this reason we cannot be content to understand them as mere statements. What God’s Word says about us in this twofold sense it says to us. It is not just truth but truth spoken and heard. As it meets us, it does not continue standing over against us but grasps at us and determines us. Existence in the decision of our act, whose point is God’s decision about us, existence under the twofold statement made concerning us, is a highly determined existence, an existence determined not by us but by God’s Word. This determination of our existence by God’s Word is according to our presuppositions the essence of our sanctification. It makes sense to subsume election, the knowledge of sin, and justification under the concept of sanctification, as we have done, only if what we are aiming at in all this is the determination of human existence by God’s act as thus described, the grasping at us that takes place in and with all this. |
We could not in fact speak either of the knowledge of sin or of justification, and certainly not of God’s love and our election, if we did not think of the faith in and for which all this takes place. And if in so doing we have reached the point where the reality of the divine command can only speak for itself, there can be no doubt, we hope, that, when it speaks for itself in its unique sovereignty, it speaks to us, that real faith, even though we can understand it only as God’s work on and in us, is our own faith, our absolutely miraculous being with that reality in a way that does not derive from our self-determination, our obedience. Election, the knowledge of sins, and the forgiveness of sins, in a word, grace, becomes an event when we say Yes to it. Since this Yes of ours is the last and greatest miracle of grace itself, we do well to see to it that before ourselves and others we ground this Yes of ours at only one point, derive it from only one point, and with it stand only at one point—the point where we do not understand ourselves, where we do something which seems to call in question all our other acts as it itself seems to be called in question when seen from the standpoint of these other acts, and yet which is still undoubtedly our own Yes. And if it were not spoken, if our faith were not obedience, the