Ethics. Karl Barth

advantage, a glance at the holy God being followed by a second glance at holy man. On the basis of this presupposition the early church, as we have seen, did achieve a theological ethics, although not without borrowing from Cicero and Aristotle. But this hypothesis and the exchange based upon it involve quite simply the surrender of theology, ⌜at any rate of Christian theology.⌝ Theology is ⌜Christian⌝ theology when and so far as its statements relate to revelation. Revelation, however, is the revelation of God and not of pious man. If there is a shift of direction, even with an appeal to revelation, so that theology is suddenly looking at believing spontaneity, at what we are to become and to make of ourselves, at the outworking of the essence of Christianity, or however the formula runs, then there is in reality a turning away from revelation and it ceases to be theology. The supposed expansion of the subject means in fact its loss. This is illustrated by the incidental definitions of dogmatics, which we cannot go into here but which may be shown to be just as mistaken as those of ethics. Inevitably when ethics is defined as it is, it drags dogmatics and all the rest of theology down into the same plight as itself.

      Theology is a presentation of the reality of the Word of God directed to man. This presentation involves it in three different tasks. As exegesis theology investigates the revelation of this Word in holy scripture. As dogmatics it investigates the relation of the content of the modern preaching of the church to this Word revealed in scripture; as homiletics it investigates the necessary relation of the form of modern preaching to this Word. The tasks of these three theological disciplines differ. The first has an essentially historical character, the second an essentially dialectico-critical, and the third an essentially technological. But the orientation and subject are the same. Exegesis whose theme is the pious personalities of the prophets and apostles, or even of Jesus himself, and dogmatics whose object has really become the piety of the preacher and his congregation, have ceased to be theology. They have lost from under their feet the ground on which theology is given a special theme in a special way. For the definition of theology cannot equally well be reversed. |

      Theology is not the presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man and also the presentation of the reality of the man to whom God’s Word is addressed. This is also a reality, of course, and it need hardly be said that in none of its main disciplines can theology ignore it. Theology knows the reality of the Word of God only as that of the Word of God addressed to man and it cannot for a moment abstract itself away from this determination of its theme. One may thus say that not just dogmatics but theology in general includes from the very first and at every point the problem of ethics. But the man to whom God’s Word is directed can never become the theme or subject of theology. He is not in any sense a second subject of theology which must be approached with a shift of focus. When this transition takes place, when such questions can be asked as what we are to become and to make of ourselves, death is in the pot (cf. 2 Kings 4:40). For even though theology neither can nor should lose sight of it for a single moment, the reality of the man whom God’s Word addresses is not at all on the same plane as the reality of the Word of God, so that there cannot be that coordination of looking upward and downward which is envisaged in the above-mentioned formulae of modern writers. Receptivity and spontaneity, gift and task, the inward and the outward, being and becoming can certainly be coordinated, but not God and God’s Word on the one side and man on the other. It is not true that this second reality stands like a second pole over against the first and in a certain tension with it. It is not true that pious man has to work at the coming of the kingdom of God. [He has to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God—but this is something different.] It is not true that he is related to God’s Word as subject is to object. All these are notions that are possible only on the basis of the idea of a synthesis and continuity between nature and supernature—an idea which ruined the ancient Catholic Church and which signified a repenetration of the church by paganism. |

      The reality of the man who is addressed by God’s Word relates to the reality of God’s Word itself as predicate relates to subject. Never in any respect is it this reality in itself. It is it only as posited along with the reality of God’s Word. It may be discovered only in terms of that reality and discussed only as that reality is discussed. There are Christians only in Christ and not in themselves, only as seen from above and not from below, only in faith and not in sight, and not therefore as there are Mohammedans, Buddhists, and atheists, or Roman Catholics and Protestants. |

      When we speak of Christians and Christianity and Christendom in the latter sense—and if only for the sake of brevity we often cannot avoid doing so—we should always be aware that we are speaking of the Christian world, which is truly world or cosmos (in the sense of John’s Gospel) as the rest of the world is. We are then speaking in typically untheological fashion. Why should we not speak untheologically of Christianity instead of Christ? Undoubtedly the pious man, even the Christian, can be in himself a rewarding, interesting, and instructive object of academic research. There is even a whole series of auxiliary theological disciplines, and one that is indispensable to exegesis, dogmatics, and homiletics, namely, church history, in which the Christian as such is ostensibly, dialectically, and for the sake of instruction the theme of theological research as well. But willynilly church history makes it truly evident that the Christian as such is not the man addressed by the Word of God and that there can never really be any talk of his patent holiness even though he be an Augustine or a Luther. This discipline is precisely the one which shows that the Christian and Christianity are phenomena in the cosmos alongside many other phenomena. Precisely with its dialectically intended untheological questions, it makes it clear that there have to be theological questions and answers if the Christian is to be understood as something other than a portion and bearer of the cosmos. |

      This is what obviously happens when the question of the goodness of human conduct is raised in theology. In the first part of the section we saw that this question radically transcends the questions of psychology, history, and law. It obviously has to do this in theology too, where goodness must be understood along the lines of the concept of conformity to God. For in theology too, in methodological continuation of the line in church history and in analogy to the profane disciplines referred to in the first subsection, we also find the auxiliary disciplines of religious psychology, folklore, and church law. If there is to be ethics in theology, if in some sense the question of the goodness of human conduct has to be put here, this question cannot be the same as that of religious psychology, folklore, or church law, nor, even methodologically, can it be put side by side with that of church history. Its object cannot be the Christain life as such, which is good because of its conformity to God. Instead, to take up again the concepts of the first subsection, its theme is the correctness of the Christian’s Christianity, its validiy, origin, and worth. The goodness of human conduct can be sought only in the goodness of the Word addressed to man. We should be doing neither theology nor ethics if we related the question to dogmatics, and let it be determined in the same way as the theological authors adduced—a way which is at all events readily suggested by the unfortunate history of the problem.

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      According to what is perhaps a more appropriate encyclopedic integration of ethics into theology, we find it best to answer the question by attempting an independent discussion of how and how far ethics really constitutes one of the tasks of theology.

      We have defined theology as a presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man. We have seen that this theme cannot be divided into the two themes of God and man and that theological ethics cannot be grounded in such a way that when enough has been said about what God has done for and to and in us we have then to speak about a second topic, namely, what we have to do. We do not reject this second question out of indifference to what it has in view but because, when it is put in this abstraction as a second question over against the first, we cannot take it seriously either as a theological question nor indeed, as we have seen, as an ethical question. Yet we have to deal more fully with what it has in view.

      Within theology the concern of ethics obviously emerges in relation to dogmatics. Dogmatics is the science of the content of Christian preaching, i.e., of the relation of preaching to God’s revealed Word. The concern of dogmatics is that God’s Word be heard in Christian preaching. It thus presents the reality of God’s Word, not directly, but as it is reflected in the many ways that the word of pious man is moved