In the decision of his love I have the righteousness which his command requires of me and which avails before him. This revelation of God’s love in the givenness of the command is the gospel. It must not be separated from the command. Only through it does the law acquire truth and weight. Without it I have not heard the law as God’s Word, as the Word that truly binds me. I see the law as the Word that binds me only as I know it to be God’s law. But I know it as God’s law only as I see God’s love and my own election in it. And I see God’s love in it only as I let myself be told—the gospel tells me—that God’s love is unconditioned love, that it is not conditioned by my decision but is a love that precedes it, the love of eternal election. It is as one who is unconditionally loved, as one about whom a decision has been made, that I am summoned to move on to decision the very next moment, i.e., to be the one I am, not to elect but to be elected and to confirm my election, to fulfill in my decision the decision that has been made about me, to be the one whom God loves in my own decision in virtue of God’s decision. What this means will have to be the subject of further discussion.
This, however, is the fundamental and all-controlling and conditioning thing that God’s judgment by his command always implies. This is the circle within which there takes place man’s sanctification, his claiming by God’s Word. In all else that we have to say we must remember that it can be said aright only in the light of God’s love, faithfulness, grace, and election. Everything would be abstraction and confusion which meant stepping even for a moment outside this circle.
I think it has already become clear in making this first and basic point that it was not superfluous to issue an express reminder in the first subsection about the uncertainty of the path on which we find ourselves when it is a matter of laying the decisive foundations of theological ethics. To find God’s love in his judgment prior to all its other determinations, to see the gospel in the law, is either a nonsensical paradox or it is an appeal to the reality of God himself in his revelation in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Clearly it cannot be the achieving of a synthesis but only the recognition of a synthesis already achieved if we have recourse to the decision of God’s love which in principle precedes our decision and stands substitute for it. This is not a truth on which we have a handle or which we can deduce from some other truth. It is the truth of revelation, i.e., a truth which strictly is true only as it reveals itself, as it itself speaks to us. This is God’s eternal counsel and its execution in the incarnation of his Word and the outpouring of his Spirit. We have to reckon with no less than this if we are to speak correctly about sanctification. But how can we reckon with it? Like dogmatics and theology in general, theological ethics can never give a theoretical answer to this question. It can answer only by doing, by doing as basically and carefully as possible, yet aware also that it has no guarantee but the reality of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It can answer, then, only with the counterquestion whether the one who asks should not know this reality.
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The command that is given to us becomes our judge by showing us totally and irrefutably that our decision is as such transgression. By the law—this is the first concrete element in sanctification—is the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20). We shall try to clarify this in three complementary discussions.
a. We begin with the fact that we have found the reality of the command in the concrete and specific command. As such the command is that which necessarily and unconditionally condemns us as we act and decide. If instead the command were to be understood as a general idea of what is commanded, which we have to fill out concretely for ourselves, then it would be easy, and fundamentally it would always be possible, to view our decision as in conformity with the command and to regard ourselves as justified. For if the filling out and the fulfilling of the command were in our own hands, would it not be simply unavoidable that we should fill it out from the very first in such a way that we would and could later fulfill it, or that having fulfilled [it] as we would and could we should later correct the filling out in accordance with the fulfillment? The imperative falsely substituted for the command, general moral truths taken from the Bible, formal and material general truths of morality, always constitute a focal point for the righteous who need no repentance [cf. Luke 15:7] because they are at peace with the law. They are at peace with the law because they mean by it a general truth that one can accept as one accepts the truth that two and two make four, and when the point is reached where there must be concrete action instead of theoretical acceptance, they are their own lawgivers who do not act according to the law, but like the scribes and Pharisees act according to their exposition of the law, which at its most concrete means according to their own caprice. Is it any surprise that with this identifying of the legislative and the executive they did not see themselves as transgressors? One can here be at peace with oneself and it can even be an unnecessary whimsicality not to try to do so. They correctly appeal to their good conscience. A good conscience is possible so long as it is not concerned about the self, so long as it is not smitten by the real command that is not set up by ourselves but established over against us. This real command, as we have seen, is not a general framework of demand but the most concrete and specific command. The concreteness of the real command spoils our little game of filling out and fulfilling in which we are on our own. It also pitilessly ruins our good conscience. Obviously, in face of it our acts are always deviation, addition, or subtraction. They are always different from the acts that are commanded us. They are thus a nondoing of what is commanded us. We may in good faith regard what we do as commanded, for we may perhaps do it in truly well-intentioned exposition of a general moral truth. We may perhaps think that it was commanded once before or might be later on. We may believe that even now it is commanded of others, perhaps of all others. These possibilities, however, do not alter the fact that we certainly do not act as those who are really commanded now. In this connection, in relation to the question how we stand before the command that is issued to us now, it makes no difference whether in our acts we are far or less far from what is commanded. If sometimes we are far from it, this should make it clear to us that we do deviate from it, which is not perhaps so clear when without being any the better for it we are not so far. It is a dreadful thing to wake up with the discovery that we have wandered far from the command, but what we then realize is truer than what we may perhaps dream to be our harmony with the command when we are less far from it. If we measure our decision by the real command that is given to us, then we see that it is not imperfect obedience but real disobedience. For our acts are really decision when placed under the command. Decision, however, is a matter of either/or, all or nothing, not more or less. Björnson’s mountain parson rightly saw and said this.3 We constantly find ourselves to be those who, in greater or smaller distance from what is commanded, do not do what they should, so that even though they are at great peace with themselves and their conscience is ever so good, they are in conflict with the law, i.e., with God. Our decision always means that we are disobedient.
b. We begin also with the fact that the command that is given to us is God’s command. As such it condemns us. This would not be so if we could think of it as a law of the natural or spiritual world, as the power of our destiny, written perhaps in our stars, or as the power of the historical situation or process in which we have a part. We might clash with these powers too. We could suffer under them. We could be broken on them. They might crush us. But they could not put us in the wrong. They could not condemn us. For in the last resort we owe them no obedience. Even in the event of the severest collision with them we could still be deeply at peace with ourselves and with them too, even confronting them as superior forces. None of them can indeed demand of us that we recognize it as lord over us, that we cease to be our own, that we really place ourselves under its direction. They want to be respected, but only as powerful, even overwhelmingly powerful partners in the game of life. We ourselves can always be the other partner. No matter how badly we have played, why should we not be finally peaceful, secure, and cheerful? The strange thing about human creatureliness is that according to Psalm 8:5 man is made so “little less than God” that, even though he is the weaker partner who yields and falls and submits in the game of life, he can still defy the gods and assert himself, so that come what may he does not have to fear anything in the whole world, not even fate or death itself. “If the vault of heaven broke and fell on him, the ruins would smite him undismayed.”4