This knowledge of my obligation, or of my freedom for God and against sin, is my conversion, or the satisfaction of works, which is the unavoidable other side of real submission to God’s command. It, too, is not an act of self-reflection or self-determination, but, as I am forgiven by the gospel the law comes into force with its demand and puts me in this new position in which I must deny the final necessity of my own corruption and affirm a final freedom for my righteousness before God, not on the basis of a discovery that I have finally made in myself, but on the basis of the order which I am given by the law that has gone forth with the gospel, and which I have to take just as seriously as what the same law tells me, by means of my self-knowledge, about my inability to do anything good. This order does not point me to myself, of course, but to Christ. In him I am no longer the old man who must sin, but I am claimed as the new creature, the free man. Knowing myself in him, I must in fact let myself be told by the law: You can because you should! Letting myself be told this is the other side of the determination of my existence by God’s Word, of the characterization of my sinful act by the command, of my own movement by grace. Grace does not just discipline me but puts me under discipline. Accepting this discipline, the discipline of the law, is the other side of the Yes to God’s grace in which grace comes to completion. It means taking the place which belongs to one who has been shown mercy. It means going on to the decision of the very next moment as one who has accepted the order. Good works, then, are works of conversion, works done on hearing the appeal to the new man that I am, not in myself, but in Christ. When our action is done in this hearing, as sinful action it is established as the work of obedience. And as thus established, even though we cannot deny its sinfulness, it is sanctified work, work by which God will be lauded and praised as it is his will that he be by justified sinners.15
At this last point in our train of thought we must not omit to note in conclusion that all this has been said on the assumption that the reality of the divine command speaks for itself. Neither the knowledge nor the forgiveness of sin is given to us apart from this reality, nor is our faith, our obedience of faith that says Yes to grace, to our penitence, or to our conversion. The determination of our existence by the command, our new life in sanctification in which we move on from the decision of this moment to that of the next, is a being in relation to this reality. We have no control over the reality, nor have we, therefore, over its relation to our existence. Our sanctification, our new life, is, all along the line, hidden with Christ in God [cf. Col. 3:3]. Its manifestations are as such unequivocally manifest only to God, as they are really its manifestations only by God’s act. The new life cannot be abstracted from the free, giving act of God: “in him we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28]. This life cannot be reinterpreted as a being, having, and doing of man distinguished from direct knowability from all his other being, having, and doing. We cannot be too cautious in handling all the concepts that might denote a third sphere between God and man and common to both. The Bible knows no such sphere. It knows only the event of the incarnate Word and the quickening Spirit. In this event God is and remains the one who acts, the one who acts, of course, as the one who is. I have in mind the concept of “pneumatic reality.” If this relates to the reality of the Holy Spirit, then it is as well to say that it never appears with direct knowability as a second reality of man alongside his secular reality. It is a qualification of the secular reality of our life but strictly a qualification from above, by God, and therefore one that bears witness to itself as a divine act but cannot be said to be our possession or attribute or position. If it is our position, if it is so in this way, i.e., by God’s grace, then I speak factually on this basis, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear. But the statement or assertion that I speak out of pneumatic reality is an impossible one. In this connection we have already at an earlier point expressed our doubts about the too direct use of concepts like Christianity, Christians, and Christian.16 To be Christian is to be en Christo and the term can be used to qualify human persons, things, and acts only if it is remembered that it refers to the relation which exists only as the reality established by God. The same applies—the same point is at issue—to the concept of the sanctified and the saints. In the Old and New Testaments holy denotes a divinely established relation in which man stands when he is determined thereto by God. Holy in the Bible does not mean devout or virtuous but separated by God.
It is divine separation when our action is sanctified, not a quality immanent in the action itself. Knowing the divine act of sanctification we can and should offer our action to God as penitence and conversion just as a sacrifice is offered (Rom. 12:2). But this offering, the work of the very next moment, is no less subject to the divine crisis than everyday acts. Cain, too, brought an offering [cf. Gen. 4:3–5]. Pagans also sacrifice on the basis of having heard something, but what they have heard is not God’s command. In no case is it our intention that makes our action holy. ⌜Even the highest and purest sacrifice is not holy in itself nor is its offering as such.⌝ Sacrifice becomes holy by the fact that God accepts it. If we have seen the concept of sanctification come to fulfillment in our own Yes to grace, we must emphasize again that it is grace when we say Yes to grace, grace that we do say Yes, and grace that we really say Yes to grace, that our action is not without an object or does not relate to some other object. If we want to abstract our penitence from God’s acceptance of it, over which we have no control, then we have no means to differentiate its salutary disquiet from the useless disquiet of our own self-knowledge when this is left on its own. With our penitence as such, be it ever so sincere and serious, we cannot force the mercy of God which alone gives it meaning. Similarly, if we wanted to take our conversion alone, apart from God’s acceptance of it, as obedience in disobedience, how could it be anything but self-deception to think that we are really converted? It is not at all true that God’s mercy comes to us as we convert ourselves. The Word and Spirit of God guarantee the existence of the relation between the divine Yes and the human Yes. They are the guarantee as they themselves are the relation. The existence of the relation is not guaranteed directly but indirectly—indirectly inasmuch as we must always go back to God’s own gracious will and take refuge in prayer to find it guaranteed. On the question whether there might also be a direct guarantee of the relation, the ways of Roman Catholic and Protestant thinking divide, although in the course of centuries the distinction has become suspiciously blurred on the Protestant side. Instead of being content to seek the reality of sanctification in the eternally hidden act of divine election, many have thought, and still think, that they should seek it and can find it in some supposedly real saintliness of man which can be perceived and guaranteed directly apart from prayer and the answering of prayer. We should know what we are doing when we play around with possibilities of this kind, when we think along lines such as these. It is hard to see how we can come to do so except on the ground of Roman Catholic presuppositions about God, man, sin, grace, and, above all, the church. On that ground everything is clear when we do it. For everything is in advance, in a masterly way, posited on the direct guarantee of hagiōsynē which supplements if it does not replace the guarantee by God. Among us everything is unclear when we do not dare to follow the reformers any more in radically renouncing any such direct guarantee and thus being all the more certain of the indirect and only true guarantee. |
Karl Heim in the introduction to the second edition of his Glauben und Leben, pp. 29f.17 brings against the theology represented here the objection that its system of coordinates is incomplete, since it does not have alongside God and man, eternity and time, the third dimension in which there is put on certain men and