Ethics. Karl Barth

ethics is itself dogmatics, not an independent discipline alongside it. We obey only an academic necessity in treating it separately. Ethics, too, reflects on the Word of God as the transcendent meaning, theme, and bearer of Christian preaching in the form of criticism of the pious human word. It reflects especially on the fact that this Word of God which is to be proclaimed and received in Christian preaching claims man in a very particular way. It was most fitting—we are again thinking of the Pauline epistles and especially of Romans—when the early church devoted that qualified attention to the problem of ethics. Even in the modern emancipation of ethics from dogmatics there lay a justifiable concern, and in its overdevelopment a nemesis and historically understandable reaction to the fall against which no dogmatics is secure, a fall into spectator-metaphysics, into the luxury of an idle worldview. But it is high time to move away from this historically justifiable but materially very dangerous reaction against an unethical dogmatics. It is high time to try to do justice to that concern as can be properly done only in the sphere of the reformation churches, i.e., in such a way that the ultimately pagan introduction of a second standpoint, which will unavoidably result in the loss of the first and true one, is reversed, and in ethics, too, the sole inquiry, even if it has a specific edge, is not into a second thing but into the one and only thing that is necessary. Conducted in any other way the enterprise of theological ethics will finally mean the destroying and not the upbuilding of the church.

§2

       THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS

      Ethics is theological ethics to the extent that it sees the goodness of human conduct in the reality of the Word of God that sanctifies man. As on this presupposition it confesses the concrete revelation of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, it acknowledges the validity of another ethics which on the basis of the same Christian confession will as philosophical ethics seek and find the goodness of human conduct in the possibility, grounded in that reality, of human action that is rightly claimed by one’s fellowman.1

1

      We have already said that ethics is not originally or self-evidently theological ethics. Always and still today the question of the goodness of human conduct arises in other contexts than that of theology. Historically considered, theological ethics undoubtedly signifies a kind of annexation comparable to the entry of the children of Israel, against which objections can obviously be made, into the land of Canaan, where other nations claimed to have, if not an original, at least a very ancient right of domicile. On the field of ethical deliberation, which is apparently open to all kinds of other possible investigations, and which has been long since lit up and worked over by a whole series of what are often very serious investigations, there takes place the entry, or, one might almost say, the invasion of a rival whose investigation differs in such an extraordinary way from all other possible and actual investigations that on their part doubt as to the legitimacy of this act seems almost unavoidable, especially as this rival is in no position to behave peacefully as one partner in discussion among many others. But, modest though its entry may be formally, and primitive though its intellectual equipment may perhaps appear, it advances the claim that it is the one that with its investigation has the last word which absorbs all others. |

      When, as sometimes happens, the philosophical ethicist of any trend pays attention to theological ethics, he finds himself set in a strange world. What is alien to him here is a presumed and puzzling knowledge of the whence and whither of every ethical question and answer. What is a problem to him, the law or goodness or value which the philosophical ethicist seeks as a standard by which to measure human conduct, the problem of the truth of the good, seems to be no problem at all here. Instead, in the concept of God of a proper theological ethics, in the concept of the reality of the God who has dealings with man through his Word, this problem is the inwardly secure and presupposed starting point of every question and answer. Conversely, what is no problem for him, the real situation of man in the light of the ethical question and answer, his real commitment to the norm of the good, his real distance from any achieving of this norm, and the real overcoming of this distance, not by man, but by the truth of the good itself known as a reality, all this is here an acute problem, the goal of every ethical question and answer. What relation is there between an inquiry that is ruled by knowledge of the whence and the whither and that which he knows as ethics, no matter whether he espouses naturalism, positivism, or idealism? In the light of any system of philosophical ethics, will not the definition of the good that we gave in the first section, namely, conduct sanctified by God’s Word, cause him to shake his head? Can the philosophical ethicist fail to see that even though the same question of the goodness of human conduct is in some way at issue here as in the inquiry that he calls ethics, nevertheless the “in some way” is calculated to lead him to the decision that what is attempted is both impossible on the one side and insignificant on the other. It is impossible because a suspension of the fundamental rules of human thought is entailed if we simply start with the concept of God as the quintessance of the good, with the truth, regarded as a reality, of an absolutely transcendent and decisive Word of God addressed to man. It is insignificant because the question of the real situation of man, and concepts like conscience, sin, and grace, although they may have psychological and historical importance, can only hamper and confuse the question of ethics, the question of the true law, value, or good, the question of the quality of human conduct to be deduced from these criteria. This decision, the summary rejection of theological ethics as such, is at least a very natural one for the philosophical ethicist as such. |

      This being so, it is on the other hand very natural for the theological ethicist to forget that he is in the situation of the attacker and not the attacked, that if he understands his own work he cannot stop to justify himself, that ipso facto as a theologian he enters the sphere of ethical reflection and cannot regard the supposedly original inhabitants of the land as a court to which he is commanded or is even able to give account. |

      The protest or disregard with which philosophical ethics usually rejects theological ethics carries with it for the latter the temptation to enter into debate with the former in the form of apologetics. This is the first possibility that we must oppose here. Apologetics is the attempt to establish and justify theological thinking in the context of philosophical, or, more generally and precisely, nontheological thinking. In our own case it is the attempt to establish and justify the approach of theological ethics in the context of philosophical ethics.

      Schleiermacher does apologetics when he maintains that, if not the Christian self-consciousness, at least the general religious self-consciousness which underlies it, is with its moral content or orientation an unavoidable element even in the inquiry of philosophical ethics, and when he thus aims at least indirectly to justify Christian ethics at the bar of philosophical ethics (Chr. Sitte, pp. 29, 75). De Wette does apologetics when he extols the Christian revelation from which Christian ethics derives as manifested and actualized reason (Lehrbuch, p. 2). Hagenbach does apologetics when he has philosophical ethics aiming at Christianity, in which alone it finds its fulfillment because belief in God is the supreme shoot of the moral life (Enzykl. 12th ed., p. 436).2 W. Herrmann does apologetics when he thinks that without further ado he can claim that every ethics that wants to deal not only with the concept of the good but also with its achievement by man must see to it that the Christian religion is understood as a morally liberating power and must itself at its peak become Christian ethics (Ethik, 4th ed., p. 3). G. Wünsch does apologetics when he wants Christian ethics to be understood as a possibility, foreseen in philosophical ethics, of reflection on values, as the affirmation of a particular position on values, namely, that the really acknowledged holy in the form of the personality is the chief value anchored in the transcendent, Christian ethics also commending itself to philosophical ethics because its formal criteria are identical with those of the latter (Theol. Eth., p. 59f.).3 Finally A. Schweitzer does apologetics when with reference to Indian ethics he thinks he can trace back the distinction between religious and philosophical thinking to the relative distinction between a more intuitive and a more analytical knowledge of the basic moral principle (Kult. u. Ethik, p. 24f.).4

      These and similar linkages cannot achieve what explicitly or implicitly they are meant to achieve, namely, the establishment and justification of theological ethics