Faith is the fulfillment of the necessity of life. God is the necessity of life. It is from God that we proceed, for he is the Creator of our existence, its Creator out of nothing. To do justice to the necessity of life is to do God’s will. It is to put ourselves under the order of his creation according to and in our calling. This takes place only so far as and as we believe, affirming without either knowing or seeing, but simply because it is said to us by God’s Word in Jesus Christ, that he is our Creator and the Lord of our life, that we belong to him, and that that is no life, therefore, which is not ready to be life under his command. This affirmation, this Yes, is the miracle of faith. Without faith we can only rebel. Without faith we live without necessity, we have no calling, we know of no order. If God decides for us in sanctifying us, claiming us, and putting us under his command, then faith is his inexpressible gift. |
Love is the fulfillment of law [cf. Rom. 13:10]. God judges and pardons us as he opposes the law to us like a rock on which we are inevitably broken, as he subjects us to human authority exercised in his name, as he forces us into humility. But this humbling of us is not an end in itself. The law is not fulfilled by our recognition that we are sinners who live by grace. In this plight God wills to be loved by us. In this plight which he prepares for us his love for us is concealed. Our humbling is complete only when we love him in return. Concretely the command which puts us there must also be the fulfillment. Again our fellowman is the specific other that is to be loved by us for God’s sake, in God’s place, and in demonstration of our love for God. The law would not have been fulfilled in us, it would not have discharged its deathdealing office, if love had not been spoken to us by it. Nor could we ourselves have fulfilled the law if we thought that we should be like God in holding up before our neighbor the law that judges him. In so doing we should simply show that we ourselves still stand under the unfulfilled law, that our contradicting of God is still unbroken, that our love for God has not yet awakened. That this happens, that we can love our neighbor instead of judging him, this Yes to God is again his miracle to us. If God decides for us, if he sets us under his command, this miracle takes place and love, our love, is his gift, just as faith is. We would love neither him nor our neighbor if he had not first loved us [cf. 1 John 4:19]. When, indeed, can our love be anything other than our being loved? |
Finally hope is the fulfillment of the necessity of promise. If it is true that God by the voice of conscience claims our gratitude and freedom, then beyond every existing order and in spite of the humility that we are given, our conduct acquires an orientation toward coming perfection. Faith affirms God, love rejoices in God, and hope seeks him. Beyond all that is present, hope expects everything from him. To that extent faith and love also live by hope. Hope would, of course, be mere fantasy and fanaticism if it were just an unrest of spirit. It is the fulfillment of the command, real gratitude, to the degree that it is not our own unrest but that of the Holy Spirit who as the Spirit of prayer will lead us into all truth [cf. John 16:13] and in whom, as the pledge of our inheritance [cf. Eph. 1:14], the eternal future is already present. Again this Yes to God, with which we seek God after and because we have already found him, after and because we are already found by him, is God’s own miracle to us. If God decides for us and sanctifies us by his command, it is his gift to us that we are those who hope. —— Thus faith, love, and hope are the good in human conduct and are therewith the answer of theological ethics to the ethical question—the goal that we have to reach in this last development of our thinking. Understood with a pinch of salt, this is our equivalent of teaching about “virtues.” After this brief preliminary notice we shall now address ourselves to the matter itself.
| The Word of God as the Command of | |||
| the Creator | the Reconciler | the Redeemer | |
| means (standpoint) | life | law | promise |
| is revealed as (knowledge) | calling | authority | conscience |
| demands (content) | order | humility | gratitude |
| gives (fulfillment) | faith | love | hope |
The Reality of the Divine Command
§4
THE REVELATION OF THE COMMAND
The truth of God is not a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. It reveals itself in the concrete event of our own conduct as our decision for or against the command of the good that is given to us.
1
If according to Pythagoras it is true that in a right triangle the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides equals the square of the longest side, this is a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. If it is true that the earth is a sphere slightly flattened at the two poles, or that the German Empire was founded in 1871, or that there has been an intermediate biological stage between man and a superior chimpanzee, or that we may shortly expect a revolutionary change in the whole surface of the earth which will necessarily have the most serious consequences for all of us, or that our life is determined at its most important points by the conjunction of the planets on our birthday, or that the whole cosmos is evolving from matter to spirit and God has achieved self-awareness in this process, then all these empirically demonstrable facts of nature and history, all these scientific hypotheses, all these speculative, metaphysical constructions, no matter how strict might be the differentiation between them, are both corporately and individually general and theoretical and consequently conditioned truths, like all other acknowledged or alleged truths on this level. They are general truths to the extent that I can assert them as such without the fact of my being this specific person having any significance; to the extent that in asserting them I must consciously ignore as far as possible my own subjectivity, which could only disrupt the objectivity of my knowledge. They are theoretical truths to the extent that I can best assert them with the participation of one who is as far as possible a nonparticipant, an onlooker, a spectator, a spectator even of my own life if they affect my own life; to the extent that in asserting them no act of my own is needed but that of calculation, observation, and syllogistic combination along with a bit of experience and intuition; to the extent that my own action consists only in contemplation and the actual assertion itself. They are consequently conditioned truths to the extent that their assertion is reached on the presupposition that I am “born to observe and ordained to see,”1 that the criteria of truth that I use in this act are true criteria of truth, that the significance of my assertion of these truths will not be hurt if it is conditioned by myself, by the ineradicable remnant of subjectivity without which there can be no objectivity, conditioned by my practice (as which even the purest and most passive theōrein must finally be claimed), conditioned by the question of truth which is obviously put to me and which challenges my knowledge of truth as such. There is no doubt that even in the shadow of this last question of truth which we ourselves link with its being conditioned, we can to a large extent be glad about our knowledge of general and theoretical truths, so glad that it might seem to be unprofitably scrupulous of us even to think of the shadow. But no matter what our view of it may be, all these truths are in fact challenged as such by the question of truth, the question of ourselves and what we