b. Where there is real command, there is a will distinct from our own. Everything depends on whether the command is understood not to be in any way secretly present in us, but always to imply disruption and questioning for us. And this in turn depends on our having to understand it as act and not as being. We are so in control of an object which we can contemplate that even its absoluteness will finally attest and reflect only our own absoluteness. But if the command, the good, is act, this means that we are not in control of it. It is not a criterion at our own disposal but a criterion under which we stand, which we cannot apply but which is applied to us. This is to think the thought of God’s command. The step from Kant to Fichte, the true fall of German Idealism, is then impossible. We can only see ⌜with Kant and⌝ better than Kant that moral knowledge is unattainable without transition to worship.
c. Where there is real command, there is a personal will. Command is claim. In all cases it is speech, word, logos; not influence, effect, impression. A thunderstorm or earthquake may shake and startle a man and become part of his experience. To be addressed is something different, and it is with this something different that we have to do in the real command. But there is more to it than this. At a pinch a flower or waterfall or work of art might be a form of address. The command, however, claims us. It addresses our conscience. It makes our conscience, the totality of our self-consciousness, an instrument to bind our existence, to put it under obligation. This obligation again is not just a general one. The real command, as shown, always wills something specific from us. All this characterizes our encounter with the command as a personal encounter comparable to the encounter with a man, except that the claim at issue here is inescapable. By this distinction the person with whom we have dealings in the command that reaches us here is shown to be the incomparable divine person. When we think through the thought of the personal nature of the real command, we have again arrived at the thought of God, [the thought of] the eternal Logos.
d. Where there is real command, there is a living will. The concreteness of the command is not grounded in the concreteness of our own life. It is not as though man were first alive and then the command of God followed him into the richness of his existence. No, God, the one unchangeable God, is the rich and living God, and the command is at every moment this and this specific command because he has dealings with us, because it is not that a body of law is set up by whose sections we are to be guided, but a ruling Lord is present who never lets the initiative out of his own hands. It may be asked whether Psalm 119, which is so often blamed for its monotony, does not, with its 176 verses in praise of the law, see more clearly than many an apparently more perspicacious thinker the living nature of the law which is finally coincident with the living nature of him who gave it. The inexhaustibility with which our deciding constantly becomes the theater of revelation characterizes this revelation as the revelation of God.
We draw to a close. The absolute, personal, and living will of God which is distinct from our own is the will of God. The decision in which we live every moment is a decision for or against God. Responsibility to him is its point. His judgment is passed on us in it. As we seriously ask about the good, we recognize that we are not on our own but have a Lord, this Lord, the Lord. We “have” him, as we “have” a master, to the extent that we have his command, that here and now we, you and I, hear his command, that in virtue of this Word of his he “has” us. It might be added that we cannot have the Lord, we cannot have God, in any other way. Talk of God apart from the question of the good, apart from the command that is given here and now to you and me, is not talk of God even though it pretends to be confession of God or denial of God. God is he in virtue of whose Word my decision is decision for or against the good. He is this God and no other. He is the Judge toward whom we go or he is not God at all.
§6
THE COMMAND OF GOD AS THE JUDGMENT OF GOD
As God reveals his command to man, he judges him. But God’s judgment and therefore man’s sanctification by God is that God has loved, elected, and declared to be his possession the one whom he has taken up by his command, that God shows his whole decision and conduct to be a transgression of the command, that God for the sake of his own goodness accepts the sinner as a doer of his Word, and that in so doing God orients his sinful conduct to the work of obedience.
1
In this section we come to the true substance of the first chapter and of theological ethics in general. All that has been said thus far has been just a preparation for what has to be said now. And all that will have to be said later can be only a descent from the peak that has now to be won. “Has to,” I say, for it would be vanity and even presumption to promise that the decisive word will actually be said and the peak won. The task before us is to give a recapitulatory presentation of the whole doctrine of the appropriation of God’s grace to man on the special assumption that this appropriation consists of the placing of man under God’s command. This task, if any in theology, is in many respects a venture for both teacher and students. The honorable titles “doctor of theology” and “theological student” sound somewhat dubious when we see what kind of a noetic task confronts us here. In addition, however, we stand directly at the point—it has long since given intimation of itself but can no longer remain invisible—where every theological discipline both begins and ends as such, but which it has neither the strength nor the permission to posit, prove, deduce, or even maintain, which it can only recognize to be posited as it continually starts with it and returns to it. We stand at the point where theology must fight for knowledge in such a way that it lays down all its weapons and unreservedly accepts and acknowledges how threatened is its claim to want to know. This claim is threatened by the fact that knowledge occurs here only in so far as its object gives itself to be known, that it is thus an event over whose occurrence we have no control. This is a situation which threatens theology alone among the sciences and we are now at the point in theological ethics where this situation—which determines the whole and not just this part of the whole—is now acute, where it is no longer possible not to think about it explicitly. In §4 we fixed the point where God’s command is to be known as command. In §5 we tried to show further how the command is to be understood as God’s command. If we seriously intend to describe the reality of the command of God we must now go on and try to reach some understanding of the event of the divine commanding as such, of the act of the divine claiming or sanctification, without which all talk of command and God’s command is left up in the air. It is clear, however, that we now really seem to be left up in the air, since obviously all understanding of this event presupposes that it really occurs; yet its occurrence does not seem to be a factor on which we can count, but we can bring it into our discussion only as a factor in the most literal sense, i.e., as doers. If the decisive word is truly said here as a conclusion to what has preceded, and if the peak has really been won as the presupposition of all that follows, i.e., if we really understand the event of sanctification as such, then by way of introduction we must say that this cannot be the result of a dialectical achievement. No matter how it approaches this factor, no theological dialectic can at root achieve more than is achieved if we are content to make a simple reference to the name of Jesus Christ and to leave it at that. If we choose the more involved way of theological dialectic, this is not in order to do something more effective; but in order to summon us to awareness that we stand before the factor which must speak for itself if all that we can do is not to be done in vain. Because this insight is clearer when we make the reference in the harder rather than the easier way, because this insight not only threatens theology but also offers a basis for it, at this point where we must choose