Ethics. Karl Barth

felt to be a final and dreadful thing, or at least something that is surrounded by all kinds of restraints. At this point, then, our first task is simply to emphasize that in all cases it is true that here no less than in suicide we have an extreme, a most extreme possibility which the command of respect for life surrounds with all kinds of possible question marks. Ethical reflection and instruction has done a great deal when it has simply underlined as heavily as possible the borderline character of this possibility. |

      But we must now go on to make a second observation. We are today at a stage in human history where—for reasons that need not detain us here—the borderline character of this possibility—for all the constant interruptions and crying contradictions—is on the whole being increasingly felt and established. Ethical reflection on the dubious nature of the permission or command that men may be killed even within these three possibilities is now wide awake, where in the Middle Ages it seems to have been at least asleep. We are not saying that men today have become better even in this one respect—what does better mean?—but that they have on the whole become more scrupulous. This can mean, and to a large extent it does in fact mean, that the mutual killing of men now takes for the most part an indirect form, and in this form has a stronger real or supposed sanctioning by permission or command. But this does not alter the fact that for all the episodic exceptions (the 1914–1918 war is an outstanding one) a growing uneasiness about permitted or commanded direct killing is simply a fact. A storm of indignation such as that which rightly or wrongly shook the whole world on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti27 would have been quite impossible fifty years ago. And the greatest of all wars was also the first war which, from the very outset and in all countries, was accompanied by a radical protest against all war, a protest which rose and fell but was never totally suspended. In this respect, then, we can simply sail with the wind—and yet not do anything superfluous—as we take the matter, for which others might find a different basis, and set it in the light of the command of the Creator, emphasizing and affirming that there is indeed a place here for the sharpest suspicion, for the most exact testing of what traditional ethics has taken for granted, for asking whether the final reasons can really be supported as final after all. No basis for these reasons which has its source elsewhere—and we do not intend to adopt a closed attitude to these reasons—and certainly no contempt for modern sentimentality and the like should prevent us from saying that the horror at the thing which is growing today (even though in many forms it may be self-deception), the horror also at all attempts to justify it ethically and theologically, is right, not as a definitive answer, but as a sharper form of the question as to the command of the Creator. And it is one of the most incomprehensible absurdities in the history of theology that theology has dared to refer to the divine order of creation in order to beat down and silence the concern largely represented here by the children of the world, indeed, by publicans and sinners of all kinds. Ethics, theology, can as little appropriate pacifism as any other-ism, but what certainly should not have happened is that, at a time when (no matter what view we may take of pacifism) the question of the command has arisen, the dominant and most articulate theology should be explicitly a militaristic theology.