V
We now raise in a concluding chapter the question of the concrete form assumed by a live eschatological hope in modern society. Here the title ‘Exodus Church’ is meant to focus attention on the reality of Christianity as that of the ‘pilgrim people of God’, as described in the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come’ (Heb. 13:13f.). What does this mean for the social shape of Christianity in ‘modern society’ and for the task it has there to fulfil in the field of social ethics?
In this context we cannot speak simply of the ‘Church’ and mean by this the organized institution with all its public functions. Nor can we speak merely of the ‘congregation’ and thereby mean the company that gathers around the word and sacrament in divine service. We must follow the Reformation, and especially Luther, in speaking of ‘Christianity’ as represented in ‘church’ and ‘congregation’ and in Christians at their worldly callings. According to the Schmalkald Articles of 1537 ‘by the grace of God alone our churches are thus illumined and nurtured by the pure word and the right use of the sacrament and the knowledge of all kinds of stations and right works (cognitione vocationum et verorum operum)’. This means, however, that Christianity must also continually present itself, and does de facto always present itself, in the weekday obedience and the worldly callings of Christians and in their social roles. This third insight on the part of the Reformation has receded unduly into the background in the movements of the modern evangelical church towards reform. From the standpoint of sociology this is understandable, for modern, emancipated society seems to offer no chance for peculiarly Christian obedience. But from the standpoint of theology it is unintelligible, for it is precisely at this point, at which it is a question of the Christian’s call in our social callings, that the decision falls as to whether Christians can become an accommodating group, or whether their existence within the horizon of eschatological hope makes them resist accommodation and their presence has something peculiar to say to the world.
When in this context we speak of modern society, we mean the society that has established itself with the rise of the modern industrial system. We mean, in negative terms, not the state and not the family, but that sphere of public life which is governed by the conduct of business, by production, consumption and commerce—the realm in which the relations between man and man are determined by the things of the business world and by the businesslike approach. Naturally, this social intercourse in terms of things and functions extends far into the spheres of political and family life, yet the reduction of all relationships to terms of things and facts does not have its origin in these spheres, but in the advancing possibilities of scientific, technical civilization. The society which is dominated by the modernity and progressiveness of this civilization has the peculiar characteristic of considering itself to be neutral towards matters of religion and questions of value and consequently emancipating itself from the control of history and tradition, whereby it also withdraws itself from the influence of religions and religious bodies. What are the social roles in which this modern society places faith, the congregation, the Church and finally Christianity?
Ever since classical times our Western societies had always had a definite, clearly outlined concept of religion. Since the rise of ‘bourgeois society’ and the ‘system of needs’ in industrial society, however, modern society has emancipated itself from the classical concept of religion. The Christian Church can consequently no longer present itself to this society as the religion of society.
From the days of the Emperor Constantine until far into the nineteenth century the Christian Church, despite many reformations and despite many changes in society, had possessed a clearly defined character in public social life. The place and function of the Church were firmly established. Everyone knew what was to be expected of it. It was the rise of industrial society that first destroyed the old harmony between ecclesia and societas. From the standpoint of the history of religion, the former public claims of the Christian Church had their source in the public claims of the Roman state religion. Beginning with Constantine, and then consolidated in the legislation of the Emperors Theodosius and Justinian, the Christian religion took over the social place of the old Roman state religion. The Christian religion became the cultus publicus. It became the protector and preserver of the sacra publica. According to the classical view of society, it is the supreme duty (finis principalis) of human societas to see that the gods are given their due veneration. Peace and prosperity depend on the favour of the national gods. The public wellbeing and enduring stability of the state depend on the blessing of the gods of the state. ‘Religion’ here has the sense of pious veneration for the powers in which the divine eternity of Rome is represented, and without which there can be no such thing as ‘Rome’ in the fullest sense. When the Christian faith took the place of the Roman state religion, then of course the public state sacrifices ceased, yet their place was taken by the Christian prayers of intercession for the state and the emperor. Thus the Christian faith became the ‘religion of society’. It fulfilled the supreme end of state and society. Hence titles of the Roman emperor-priest were transferred to the pope. State and society understood the Christian faith as their religion.
In the Protestant humanism of Melanchthon, too, without which the Reformation would presumably not have got moving, princes and magistrates were appealed to in the interests of society’s religious duty as understood in the classical sense. The highest goal of society is the true veneration of God—so it is affirmed here also, though here to be sure in expounding the First Commandment in terms of the usus politicus. What is ‘true veneration of God’? The answer was: the carrying out of the Reformation as a restoration of the true religion of the one God. A government which seeks to be religiously neutral and to restrict itself to the cultivation of peace and worldly wellbeing, was here, too, with the help of arguments from the classical view of society, represented as lunacy.
Thus the understanding of society in classical and pre-modern times always in itself implies a religious goal of society. Here we have the source of the images which are still employed today to describe the role of the Church in society: ‘crown of society’, ‘healing centre of society’, ‘inner principle of the life of society’. In its worship and its moral precepts, the human and material is raised to the plane of the divine, and the Eternal and Absolute stoops to the plane of earthly society. When today the ‘loss of a centre’ is lamented in a disintegrating society, then that is an expression of the longing for such a pre-modern, religious integration of men combined to form a society.
Modern society, however, acquired its nature and its power precisely through its emancipation from this religious centre. Hegel was one of the first to perceive the rise of the modern, emancipated society which destroys all the forces of tradition, and to analyse it, following the British national economy, as a ‘system of needs’. It is the society which emancipates itself in principle from all presuppositions in regard to the orders of human life as laid down by historic tradition, and finds its content solely in the constant and consistent nature of man’s needs as an individual and their satisfaction by means of collective and divided labour. According to its own principles, it contains nothing but what is demanded by ‘the ascertaining of needs and the satisfying of the individual by means of his labour and by means of the labour and satisfaction of the needs of all the rest’. That means that this society, in contradistinction to all previous societies, restricts itself to such social relationships as bind individuals together in the satisfying of their needs by means of their divided labour. Men here associate themselves with each other necessarily only as the bearers of needs, as producers and consumers. Everything else that makes up a man’s life—culture, religion, tradition, nationality, morals, etc.—is excluded from the necessary social relationships and left to each man’s individual freedom. Social intercourse thus becomes abstract. It emancipates itself from the particular historic conditions from which we have come, and becomes irresistibly universal. ‘The non-historic nature of society is its historic essence.’ The future and the progressiveness of this society bear no relation to its origin. This, however, makes social intercourse totalitarian. ‘Need and labour, when exalted to such universality, thus form in themselves a tremendous system of community and mutual interdependence, a self-propelled system of dead creatures.’ ‘Civil society … is the tremendous power which seizes hold of man and demands from him that he work for it and make it the medium of all he is and does.’ Hegel sees in this the approach of the age of universal conformity, of mediocrity and the mass. But he differs from modern critics of culture in seeing also the other side of the dialectic. The general objectification of social intercourse in the modern world, and its reduction to a question of things and facts and functions, bring at the same time also a tremendous disburdening of the individual. Beyond the system of needs and of division of labour in civil society, the ‘private person whose aim is his own interest’ necessarily becomes the citizen (citoyen) and subject of this society. The individual becomes the ‘son of civil society’. Thus the revolutionary idea of the freedom of all men which goes back to the French revolution comes to its own with the birth of modern working society from the industrial revolution. The latter is its necessary presupposition and the condition on which it becomes possible. ‘It is precisely through its abstract, non-historic character that society gives free rein to subjectivity’s right to particularity.’ In its emancipation from history, society finds its ground in the satisfying of needs through labour, and thus gives man free rein in all his other life relationships. All other life relationships are relieved of social necessity. It is only from the standpoint of need that we can speak of ‘the concrete conception that is called man’. In civil society man counts because he is man, and not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German or Italian. The modern subjectivity in which we today experience ourselves as individual and personal human beings, is a result of the disburdening of social intercourse by reducing it to terms of practical affairs.
Hegel’s analyses thus make it clear that the age of increasing mass organization is at the same time dialectically also the age of individuality, and that the age of socialization at the same time became the age of free associations. Any critic of culture who attacks the age of mass movement, of objectification, of materialism, etc., and sees the salvation of culture in the regaining of personal humanity, accordingly fails to recognize the nature of modern society, and is himself moving within that dualism of subjectivity and objectification which is the basic principle of this very society.
‘The society of conformity and mediocrity supplies the individual with a tremendous diversity of individual variations in matters of taste, evaluation and opinion, so that the most motley assortment of informal groupings weaves its way across the constant bureaucratic uniformity of the major organizations, and the age of a new uniformity of conduct is yet at the same time also the age of a peculiar unfolding of the things of the soul and the intellect.’ ‘Conformity and individualization both have their roots in the fact that the social ties and relationships are becoming slacker and less binding, that … while the mobility of industrial society facilitates accommodation to the model of uniform social behaviour, it is equally favourable towards the opportunity of reserving the private and personal sphere from social conventions and constraints.’ Hence the dilemma does not by any means consist in the fact that man, who is conditioned and claimed by modern social intercourse only in functions which only partially involve him, now encounters his fellow man only as a ‘representative’ of socially predetermined roles. Rather, it lies in the question how man can endure, and even live in, the state of being torn between the rational objectification of his social life on the one hand and the free and infinitely variable subjectivity conferred on him on the other.
There arises also the further question whether everything that is thus dismissed from modern society’s abstract bond of association, and left to the freedom of the subject, does not become functionless and necessarily fall to pieces, when it can no longer acquire any social relevance. This applies especially to religion and culture. Once bereft of social necessity, they threaten to become the playthings of inclination and the tumbling ground for varieties of unreal and ineffective beliefs and opinions.
Hegel, however, was able to recognize the movement of the spirit as acting precisely in this torn and divided state of objectification and subjectivity. It is not the romanticist’s self-preservation from this tornness and his way of shutting himself off from it, but only self-emptying surrender to it that proves the power of the spirit.
What became of the Christian Church in its social significance as a result of this development in society? The result of this development was, that it lost the character of cultus publicus to which it had been accustomed for more than a thousand years. It became something which in its religious form it never was and which, moreover, from the theological standpoint of the New Testament it can never seek to be—namely, a cultus privatus. The cult of the Absolute is no longer necessary for the integration of this society. The Absolute is now sought and experienced only in our liberated, socially disburdened subjectivity. ‘Religion’ ceases to be a public, social duty and becomes a voluntary, private activity. ‘Religion’ in the course of the nineteenth century becomes the religiosity of the individual, private, inward, edifying. By giving free rein to religion and leaving it to the free unfolding of the personality in complete freedom of religious choice, modern society as a modern ‘society of needs’ emancipates itself from religious needs. This process was furthered by many revivalist and pietist movements within Christianity. There prevailed within it a pious individualism, which for its own part was romanticist in form and withdrew itself from the material entanglements of society. The Church thus slipped over into the modern cultus privatus and produced in theology and pastoral care a corresponding self-consciousness as a haven of intimacy and guardian of personality for a race that had developed a materialist society and felt itself not at home there. This certainly means that the Christian religion is dismissed from the integrating centre of modern society and relieved of its duty of having to represent the highest goal of society, but that is not by any means the end of it. On the contrary, society can assign to it other roles in which it is expected to be effective. While it is true that in these roles it has nothing more to do with the finis principalis of modern society, yet it can exercise dialectical functions of disburdening for the men who have to live in this society. This allows it infinite possibilities of variation, but they are the possibilities of self-propulsion and self-development within the bounds of the general social stagnation imposed on the Christian faith as being a matter of religion.
The first and most important role in which industrial society expects religion as the cult of the absolute to be effective, is undoubtedly that of providing the transcendental determination of the new, liberated subjectivity. The primary conception of religion in modern society assigns to religion the saving and preserving of personal, individual and private humanity. It is expected that the materialist industrial system must be supplied from ‘somewhere or other’ with a human foundation which is a match for this world of things that has swollen to such incalculable dimensions. It is expected that ‘the man of our day may once again become a vessel to receive the influx of transcendent forces’. ‘Islands of meaning’ are sought in a world which, while it is certainly not meaningless, is nevertheless non-human. ‘If it were possible … to establish a humanity which was a match for the secondary system, then this secondary system would have restored to it the foundation which it has itself destroyed’. Now as a result of the fact that all things and conditions can be manufactured by dint of technique and organization, the divine in the sense of the transcendent has disappeared from the world of nature, of history and of society. The world has become the material for technical reshaping by man. The gods of cosmological metaphysics are dead. The world no longer offers man a home and an abiding shelter.
Its place has been taken, however, by a ‘metaphysic of subjecthood’, in which the world of objects is submitted to planning by the human subject. To be sure, the gods of cosmological metaphysics are dead. Rationalization has ‘disenchanted’ the world (Max Weber), and secularization has stripped it of gods. Yet this was possible only on the basis of the modern metaphysic of ‘subjecthood’. The latter has disclosed to man his freedom over against the world as the possible work of his hands. In so doing it demands of man at the same time also responsibility for the world. The world is surrendered to the reason of man.
The saving of man’s humanity in the midst of industrial culture is therefore seen in the cultivation and development of this metaphysic of ‘subjecthood’. H. Schelsky advises us to reflect once more on an ‘inwardness’, on a ‘spirituality’ beyond the relationships that have been reduced to materialist terms. He sees this possibility of metaphysics in our technical scientific civilization as consisting in the mental attitude of ‘constant metaphysical reflection’. ‘This is the form in which the thinking subject constantly seeks to hasten ahead of his own objectification, and thus assures himself of his superiority to his own world process.’ ‘However much of his reflection the subject may surrender to the mechanical process, he becomes only the richer thereby, because ever new powers of reflection flow to him from an inexhaustible and boundless inwardness.’ By means of this mental attitude of constant metaphysical reflection the subject manifestly reflects itself out of all its objectifications, takes them back again into itself and its freedom, and gains from its own self an endless influx of new possibilities. All social realities are traced back again in the detachment of reflection and irony to the possibilities arising in the subject. It is plain that behind this advice for the saving of humanity there stands the concept of transcendental subjectivity found in early idealism and developed by Fichte. It is a question, however, whether this ‘reflective philosophy of transcendental subjectivity’, as it was already called by Hegel, does not separate the human subject in a romanticist way from relationships that have become petrified, abandon these latter to themselves in their meaningless, inhuman petrification, and seek to save the individual in himself.
In harmony with this romanticist metaphysic of subjecthood and this mental attitude of constant metaphysical reflection there then appears also the theology which takes the cult of the absolute that has become of no significance in our social relationships and cultivates it as the transcendent background of modern existence. This is the theology which presents itself as ‘doctrine of the faith’ and finds the place of faith in the transcendental subjectivity of man. It is a theology of existence, for which ‘existence’ is the relation of man to himself as this emerges in the ‘total reflection of man on himself’. This theology assigns faith its home in that subjectivity and spontaneity of man which is non-objectifiable, incalculable and cannot be grasped in his social roles. It localizes faith in that ethical reality which is determined by man’s decisions and encounters, but not by the pattern of social behaviour and the self-contained rational laws of the economic circumstances in which he lives. In ‘total reflection’ on himself man becomes aware of a selfhood that is unmistakably his own, and in so doing he distinguishes himself from the modern world and sees it as a secularized world which is nothing but world. The self which here emerges, however, becomes the ‘pure receiving’ of the transcendent and divine. The modern metaphysic of subjecthood with its consequences in the secularization of the world must then be represented as a consequence of Christian faith, and Christian faith must be represented as the truth behind this metaphysic of subjecthood. Faith as the ‘total reflection of man on himself’ (F. Gogarten) then presents itself as the truth and radicalization of the mental attitude of ‘constant metaphysical reflection’ (H. Schelsky). In this theology, Christian faith is transcendent as compared with everything meaningful that can be socially communicated. It is not provable—but its unprovability, so it is said, is its very strength—and consequently it is also irrefutable. Unbelief alone, as being the contrary decision, is its enemy. As constant reflection it cannot be given institutional form, but is itself transcendence as compared with social institutions. It has primarily to do with the ‘self-understanding’ of the human subject in the technical world. It sees ‘God’ not as a God of the world or of history or of society, but rather as the unconditioned in the conditional, the beyond in the things of this world, the transcendent in the present. The adjectives which are used to describe the peculiarity of this religious experience are all contrapuntally related to the objectified, material, non-human relationships of industrial society. It is a ‘thing that happens or comes about again and again from instance to instance’, an ‘unexpectable event’, ‘openness for God’s encounters’ and readiness for self-transformation in God’s encounters. Faith is the receiving of one’s self from God. This places it in a position of radical loneliness, makes it ‘individual’, de-secularizes it in the midst of an organized society. This gives man the freedom ‘to stride confidently through darkness and perplexity, and to venture and bear the responsibility for action in the loneliness of his own decision.’
In the ‘inability to make anything of the world of objects’, which is typical of existentialism, the Christian ethic is then reduced to the ‘ethical demand’ to accept one’s self and take responsibility for the world in general. But it is no longer able to give any pertinent ethical instructions for the ordering of social and political life. Christian love accordingly quits the realm of justice and of the social order. It is a thing that comes about in each several event of spontaneous co-humanity, in the I-thou relationship which is immediate and not objectively mediated. Justice, social order and political righteousness, once they have been rendered so void, must then be understood positivistically as pure organization, as matters of power and law. The ‘neighbour’ who is the object of Christian love is then the man who encounters us at any given moment, our fellow man in his selfhood, but he can no longer be known, respected and loved in his juridical person and his social role. Our ‘neighbour’ comes on the scene only in personal encounter, but not in his social reality. It is the man within arm’s length or at our door who is our neighbour, but not man as he appears in the social and juridical order, in questions of aid to underdeveloped countries and race relationships, in social callings, roles and claims.
If, however, we now examine the dialectic of modern, dualistic society, it transpires that the metaphysic of subjecthood and the cult of the absolute in transcendental subjectivity are due to specific, modern social conditions. The ‘category of individuality’ is itself a product of society. ‘A personality is an institution in the form of a single instance.’ It is not as if modern, scientific technical civilization were only an objectification of the infinitely creative subjectivity of man. The modern subjectivity of man for its part also owes its freedom, its spontaneity and its infinite inward resources to the ways in which modern, materialist society relieves it of its burdens. A cultural saving of humanity by means of the cultivating and deepening of our subjectivity in constant metaphysical reflection, in art and religion, is romanticist escapism as long as social conditions are not changed. Where conditions are left as they are, this cultural saving of humanity automatically acquires the function of stabilizing these social conditions in their non-humanity, by providing the inner life of the heart with the things which it has to do without in the outside world.
A theology which settles faith in the ‘existence’ of the individual, in the sphere of his personal, immediate encounters and decisions, is a theology which from the viewpoint of sociological science stands at the very place to which society has banished the cultus privatus in order to emancipate itself from it. This faith is in the literal sense socially irrelevant, because it stands in the social no-man’s-land of the unburdening of the individual—that is, in a realm which materialist society has already left free to human individuality in any case. The existential decision of faith consequently hardly provokes the counter-decision of unbelief any longer, and is consequently not really engaged in a struggle with unbelief at all. What it actually does constantly provoke is its own non-committal character—namely, the now notorious attitude of refusing to take sides in disputes of faith that have long become socially irrelevant, the well known ‘religion void of decision’. The battle of faith is socially no longer necessary, since for social life it has no longer any binding character. The transcendent point of reference which is constituted by man’s free subjectivity, and in view of which this proclamation addresses him, has already been socially neutralized before it can be made use of in the decision of faith. Hence this theology threatens to become a religious ideology of romanticist subjectivity, a religion within the sphere of the individuality that has been relieved of all social obligations. Nor does the appeal of its existential radicality prevent the Christian faith, as thus understood, being brought to social stagnation.
The second role in which modern society expects religion to be effectual consists in the transcendent determination of co-humanity as community.
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the romanticist reaction to the conditions that seem to rob man of his humanity has clung again and again and in ever new forms to the idea of ‘community’. ‘True human community is … that between man and man; i.e. the community in which man finds himself by surrendering himself to the other.’ This form of complete disclosure of personal co-humanity in ‘community’ is then always set in a polemical relation to its antithesis in the concept of ‘society’: society is an artificial, arbitrary, organized arrangement between men for practical and businesslike purposes. The dominant factor in it is not the will to be a self, but rational purposefulness, convention, and a businesslike approach. It is pseudo-community and brings man merely to a semblance of existence. This kind of society is seen above all in the ‘large industrial cities’, whereas community apparently means the idyllically conceived village conditions of pre-modern times.
This idea of community, which is held to promise the saving of culture from technical civilization, has its origins in the age of romanticism. It is found in the Communist Manifesto as the revolution’s goal in a ‘free association of free individuals’, in that community of the future in which division of labour is abolished, in which man is the highest being in man’s eyes, in which each can exchange ‘love only for love, trust only for trust’, which accordingly produces ‘man with his all-embracing and profound mind’ as its constant reality, in which the total loss of man in capitalist society is followed by the total recovery of man. This idea of community is found in detail in Ferdinand Tönnies, and through him inspired the youth movement and a vast array of community movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is found again in the sociologically critical and nationalistically revolutionary idea of the community of nations. Hans Freyer canvassed it in 1931 in his ‘revolution from the right’: industrial society, which rests on nothing but the calculation of matter and forces, has no solid foundation but hangs in the air. It has no vitality to give it a peculiar rationality of its own. It is a perpetuum mobile of material values, work quotas, commercial media and mass needs. The revolution from the left has come to a dead end in the trade unions and has already been merged into this industrial world. But where can man assert himself as man over against this system? ‘The people is the antagonist of industrial society. The principle of the people against the principle of industrial society.’ This story has not been played out, but the tide is rising in the village against the industrial city. Primaeval forces of history, decrees of the Absolute, flow to man once more from the people. In the life of the people, in the man of the people and in the people’s state the ‘earth’ rises up as it were against the abstract, non-committed, inhuman system of industrial society. Man and earth find each other again. The principle of industrial society has become invalid, because there are men who are no longer defined by their social interest. The ‘human emancipation of man’, which Marx expected from the revolution of the proletariat, is here expected from the life of the people. ‘Man is free when he is free amid his people, and this too in his Lebensraum. Man is free when he stands within a common will which carries on its history on its own reponsibility.’
The idea of community, however, is found with socially critical and socially therapeutic intent also in Roman Catholic social teaching. According to Mater et Magistra, it is essential ‘that the above mentioned groups present the form and substance of a true community, that is, that the individual members be considered and treated as persons and encouraged to take an active part in the ordering of their lives’. It follows that ‘whether the enterprise is private or public … every effort should be made that the enterprise should be a community of persons’. ‘In such a way, a precious contribution to the formation of a world community can be made, a community in which all members are … conscious of their own duties and rights, working on a basis of equality for the bringing about of the universal common good.’
Yet in the course of the progress of industrial society this ideal of community has also lost its revolutionary power and been integrated into the industrial system. It has often been shown by sociologists and critics of culture that modern society is not by any means on the way to becoming a totalitarian ant-hill in which any and every activity is governed by rules and regulations, but that this age of conformity and indiscrimination, of vast organizations and economic combines, is at the same time also the age of small, specialist groups and of confidential relationships within narrow circles. The super-organizations and macro-structures in the economic world are answered by the micro-structures of informal groups, bodies, societies, clubs, etc. ‘Here the isolation of man is checked, and these informal, unofficial institutions are manifestly acquiring increasing significance.’ Alexis de Tocqueville had already observed this in the American democracy of last century: ‘The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.’
In the circle of his friends, his intimate colleagues, neighbours and children, at home, in the choral society and the local community, it is as if man’s businesslike and inhuman outlook were suddenly blown away. Here he is ‘man’, and is permitted to be man. Perhaps, as A. Gehlen thinks, all these small ties provided by the intimate groups combine to form a sort of cement for the total structure of society: ‘the vast utility organizations and the individuals pitch-forked into them do not by any means constitute the whole of the truth.’
Amongst and between these small groups the church, too, as a congregation can have its place and carry out its function. Here it can become a refuge of the inner life, away from the supposedly ‘soulless’ world of affairs. Conditions in the vast industrial complexes transcend our intellectual range and can no longer be mastered morally. Responsibility for the ‘modern world’ as such can no longer be expected of anyone. The objectifications of our scientific technical civilization have reached such vast and independent proportions that they can no longer be re-subjectified. In return, they leave free a small-scale world, in which responsibilities can be assumed in limited communities. Here Christian congregations can offer human warmth and nearness, neighbourliness and homeliness, ‘community’ which is not utilitarian but nevertheless meaningful, and therefore also readily called ‘genuine’. The ‘authentic’ living relationship between man and man is here not channelled and prescribed in patterns of behaviour appropriate to rational ends. Here life can still be carried on in freedom, it evades formal fashioning and cannot be subjected to constraint and control. Here, instead of complying with the technically necessary rules of conduct in society, it is possible in human spontaneity to produce ever new solutions in ever new combinations of circumstances. In this non-preformed, unorganized, unofficial realm which is left free by industrial society, clubs, sects and communities of every kind thrive. Here Christian communities and groups, too, can become a kind of Noah’s ark for men in their social estrangement. They become islands of genuine co-humanity and of authentic life in the rough sea of circumstances which the ordinary man can after all do nothing to alter. Here the Christian churches can become rallying points for integration, and would thereby no doubt have fulfilled a social aim. For the subliminal existence of free communities of this kind is for modern society a most salutary thing, because in the domestic economy of the human soul it can provide a certain compensation for the economic and technical forces of destruction. This, however, does nothing to alter the stern reality of the loss of the human in ‘society’. It provides only a dialectical compensation and a disburdening of the soul, so that in the alternating rhythm of the private and the public, of community and society, man can endure his official existence today.
It is entirely in harmony with the social significance of ‘community’ in this sense when Christian theology of various persuasions sets over against the officially and legally constituted Church the ‘true Church’ as a ‘genuine community’, as a ‘spiritual church’ (R. Sohm), as a ‘spiritual community of persons’ (E. Brunner), as a ‘community of faith’ and a ‘community in the transcendent’ (R. Bultmann), and sees its existence as ‘pure happening’ and ‘unexpectable event’ in spontaneous encounters and decisions. The Church is then an absolutely non-worldly phenomenon, which in contrast to the planned society of rational ends is described in the categories of ‘community’. It is then still possible to speak of the Christian Church’s responsibility for ‘the world’, but hardly any longer of Christian callings in the world. Yet it must surely be plainly recognized that such a church, as ‘community’ and as ‘pure event’, cannot disturb the official doings of this society and certainly cannot alter them—indeed, it is hardly any longer even a real partner for the social institutions. True, the man who feels estranged and longs for authentic life and genuine community, for the spontaneity of experience, of making his own decisions and of transforming himself, is here met halfway and has his longing fulfilled. But it is fulfilled only in the personal esoteric realm in which he is relieved of social demands. Nor does the emphasis on the genuineness and authenticity of life in this personal community prevent Christian neighbourliness being brought to a social standstill.
A third role in which modern society expects the Christian religion to be effectual is, surprisingly enough, once more to be found today in the institution with all it involves in the way of officialdom and official claims. Modern, post-Enlightenment culture is again more ready to play into the hands of religion than was the pre-industrial age of the eighteenth century. After the hectic decades of the founding of industrialism, in which vast social dislocations made men uncertain in their behaviour and therefore also susceptible to ideologies, industrial society in the highly industrialized countries is today again consolidating itself in new institutions. These new institutions, however, in turn relieve man of the permanent pressure of decision to which he is subjected in times of uncertainty. Stereotyped patterns of conduct give them an enduring, stable and communal character. Thus there emerges a new store of unvarying customs and axioms in work, consumption and intercourse. A ‘beneficial unquestioningness’ (A. Gehlen) spreads over life. This kind of institutionalizing of official, social life certainly springs from the permanent need of security on the part of man, who experiences himself in history as a ‘creature at risk’ and therefore also endeavours to resolve the historic character of his history into a cosmos of institutions. This institutionalizing, however, brings about at the same time by an inner logic the suspension of the question of meaning. ‘The conduct which they have made habitual has the purely factual result of suspending the question of meaning. To raise the question of meaning is either to have taken a wrong turning, or else to express consciously or unconsciously a need for something other than the existing institutions.’ For the latter are of course relationships and modes of conduct which must be axiomatic and unquestioning. The institutionalizing of public life is today producing in the highly industrialized countries an everywhere perceptible disappearance of ideologies. Ideologies as a means of giving purpose and meaning to life are becoming increasingly superfluous. This makes them optional and private. To be sure, it can be said even in the midst of institutionalized life: ‘In the world of machines and “cultural values”, of great alleviations, life slips away like water between the fingers that would hold it because it is the highest of goods. From out of unfathomable depths it is called in question.’ Yet this questionableness is experienced only in the free realm of subjectivity, and no longer in terms of the uncertainty and the historic character of the outside world.
This tendency towards the institutionalization of public life, together with the fact that the arts and sciences have become so abstract that only caricatures of them can now find ideological application, has had the result that the Christian religion is left alone and unopposed on the field of ideologies and world views in the highly industrialized countries. Darwinism in its day was bitterly contested by the Christian confessions. Modern genetics, however, whose technical consequences are beyond our range of vision, does not disturb them, because this is a science of boundless complexity and cannot turn into a speculative opponent. Christian theology accordingly finds itself in a position of being able to assert a neo-dogmatism and say things which can neither be proved nor contested on the ground of real experience, and which can therefore acquire for modern man a binding character which he hardly even disputes any more. On the contrary, he is prepared to delegate to the Church as an institution the problems regarding his own believing decision, and to leave the detailed questions to theological specialists. If, however, the vital decisions are delegated to the Church as an institution, which is then regarded as an institute for relieving us of them, then the result is the religious attitude of an institutionalized non-committal outlook. ‘Christianity’ becomes a social axiom and is relegated to one’s environment. Matters of theological dispute are regarded as ‘confessional witch-hunting’ and banished from public life. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical institution of religious modes of conduct acquires a new social significance. For indeed even the modern, institutionalized consciousness retains somewhere on the margin an inkling of the horrors of history. It does not find articulate expression in normal times. Yet this subliminal consciousness of crisis results in a general, if also non-committal, recognition of the religious institutions as the guarantors of life’s security in general. The institution of the churches then has the effect of being an ultimate institution overshadowing the institutional security of life, and one from which security is expected against the ultimate fears of existence. In this respect, too, Christianity has a certain social significance for modern society. Yet it is the significance of an institutionalized non-committal outlook. This, too, is religious movement within the limits of a social standstill. It is Christianity as prescribed by the social milieu.
This brief sketch of the new social roles of religion, of the Church and of the Christian faith has made it plain that these roles—‘religion as the cult of subjectivity’, ‘religion as the cult of co-humanity’ and ‘religion as the cult of the institution’—are not the result of the goodwill or illwill of individual men, nor can they be laid to the charge of theologies determined by the history of ideas, but arise from that which, difficult as it is to grasp, must be called the socially ‘axiomatic’. The theological ‘self-understanding’ (Selbstverständnis) of the Christian faith always stands in a relation to the socially ‘axiomatic’ (Selbstverständliche). Only where we become critically aware of this connection can the symbiosis be resolved and the peculiar character of the Christian faith come to expression in conflict with the things that are socially axiomatic. If Christianity, according to the will of him in whom it believes and in whom it hopes, is to be different and to serve a different purpose, then it must address itself to no less a task than that of breaking out of these its socially fixed roles. It must then display a kind of conduct-which is not in accordance with these. That is the conflict which is imposed on every Christian and every Christian minister. If the God who called them to life should expect of them something other than what modern industrial society expects and requires of them, then Christians must venture an exodus and regard their social roles as a new Babylonian exile. Only where they appear in society as a group which is not wholly adaptable and in the case of which the modern integration of everything with everything else fails to succeed, do they enter into a conflict-laden, but fruitful partnership with this society. Only where their resistance shows them to be a group that is incapable of being assimilated or of ‘making the grade’, can they communicate their own hope to this society. They will then be led in this society to a constant unrest which nothing can allay or bring to accommodation and rest. Here the task of Christianity today is not so much to oppose the ideological glorification of things, but rather to resist the institutional stabilizing of things, and by ‘raising the question of meaning’ to make things uncertain and keep them moving and elastic in the process of history. This aim—here formulated to begin with in very general terms—is not achieved simply by stirring up ‘historicality’, vitality and mobility in the realms which are socially unburdened but have been brought socially to general stagnation. It is achieved precisely by breaking through this social stagnation. Hope alone keeps life—including public, social life—flowing and free.
‘Christianity’ has its essence and its goal not in itself and not in its own existence, but lives from something and exists for something which reaches far beyond itself. If we would grasp the secret of its existence and its modes of behaviour, we must enquire into its mission. If we would fathom its essence, then we must enquire into that future on which it sets its hopes and expectations. If Christianity in the new social conditions has itself lost its bearings and become uncertain, then it must once again consider why it exists and what is its aim.
It is generally recognized today that the New Testament regards the Church as the ‘community of eschatological salvation’, and accordingly speaks of the gathering in and sending out of the community in terms of a horizon of eschatological expectation. The risen Christ calls, sends, justifies and sanctifies men, and in so doing gathers, calls and sends them into his eschatological future for the world. The risen Lord is always the Lord expected by the Church—the Lord, moreover, expected by the Church for the world and not merely for itself. Hence the Christian community does not live from itself and for itself, but from the sovereignty of the risen Lord and for the coming sovereignty of him who has conquered death and is bringing life, righteousness and the kingdom of God.
This eschatological orientation is seen in everything from which and for which the Church lives. The Church lives by the word of God, the word that is proclaimed, that pronounces and sends. This word has no magical quality in itself. ‘The proclaimed word is directed towards that which in every respect lies ahead of it. It is open for the “future” which comes to pass in it, yet which in its coming to pass is recognized to be still outstanding.’ The word which creates life and calls to faith is pro-clamation and pro-nouncement. It provides no final revelation, but calls us to a path whose goal it shows in terms of promise, and whose goal can be attained only by obediently following the promise. As the promise of an eschatological and universal future, the word points beyond itself, forwards to coming events and outwards into the breadth of the world to which the promised coming events are coming. This is why all proclamation stands in the eschatological tension of which we have spoken. It is valid to the extent that it is made valid. It is true to the extent that it announces the future of the truth. It communicates this truth in such a way that we can have it only by confidently waiting for it and wholeheartedly seeking it. Thus the word has an inner transcendence in regard to its future. The word of God is itself an eschatological gift. In it the hidden future of God for the world is already present. But it is present in the form of promise and of awakened hope. The word is not itself the eschatological salvation, but acquires its eschatological relevance from the coming salvation. What is true of the Spirit of God is true also of the word of God: it is an earnest of things to come, and binds us to itself in order to point and direct us to greater things.
The same is true of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism, too, is ‘ahead of itself’. In baptizing men into the past death of Christ, it seals men for the future of the kingdom that is being brought by the risen Christ. It is only as an eschatological Church that the baptizing Church has the right to perform the act of baptism, i.e. its title to this judicial and creative act derives from its openness towards that which is as yet only on the way towards it. Likewise, the Lord’s Supper is not to be regarded in terms of mystery and cult, but eschatologically. The congregation at the Table is not in possession of the sacral presence of the Absolute, but is a waiting, expectant congregation seeking communion with the coming Lord. Thus Christianity is to be understood as the community of those who on the ground of the resurrection of Christ wait for the kingdom of God and whose life is determined by this expectation.
If, however, the Christian Church is thus oriented towards the future of the Lord, and receives itself and its own nature always only in expectation and hope from the coming of the Lord who is ahead of it, then its life and suffering, its work and action in the world and upon the world, must also be determined by the open foreland of its hopes for the world. Meaningful action is always possible only within a horizon of expectation, otherwise all decisions and actions would be desperate thrusts into a void and would hang unintelligibly and meaninglessly in the air. Only when a meaningful horizon of expectation can be given articulate expression does man acquire the possibility and the freedom to expend himself, to objectify himself and to expose himself to the pain of the negative, without bewailing the accompanying risk and surrender of his free subjectivity. Only when the realization of life is, so to speak, caught up and held by a horizon of expectation, is realization (Verwirklichung) no longer—as for romanticist subjectivity—the forfeiting (Verwirkung) of possibilities and surrender of freedom, but the gaining of life.
The Christian Church which follows Christ’s mission to the world is engaged also in following Christ’s service of the world. It has its nature as the body of the crucified and risen Christ only where in specific acts of service it is obedient to its mission to the world. Its existence is completely bound to the fulfilling of its service. For this reason it is nothing in itself, but all that it is, it is in existing for others. It is the Church of God where it is a Church for the world. Now this modern phrase ‘Church for the world’ is very vague. It could of course be understood to the effect that personal faith, or the fellowship of the congregation, or the Church as an institution loyally fulfils the social roles in which modern society expects it to be useful. ‘Church for the world’, however, does not mean a solidarity that is bereft of ideas and a co-humanity that is void of hopes, but service of the world and work in the world as and where God wishes it and expects it. The will and expectation of God are voiced in the mission of Christ and in the apostolate. The Church lays claim to the whole of humanity in mission. This mission is not carried out within the horizon of expectation provided by the social roles which society concedes to the Church, but it takes place within its own peculiar horizon of the eschatological expectation of the coming kingdom of God, of the coming righteousness and the coming peace, of the coming freedom and dignity of man. The Christian Church has not to serve mankind in order that this world may remain what it is, or may be preserved in the state in which it is, but in order that it may transform itself and become what it is promised to be. For this reason ‘Church for the world’ can mean nothing else but ‘Church for the kingdom of God’ and the renewing of the world. This means in practice that Christianity takes up mankind—or to put it concretely, the Church takes up the society with which it lives—into its own horizon of expectation of the eschatological fulfilment of justice, life, humanity and sociability, and communicates in its own decisions in history its openness and readiness for this future and its elasticity towards it.
One of the first senses in which this happens is in the missionary proclamation of the gospel, that no corner of this world should remain without God’s promise of new creation through the power of the resurrection. This has nothing whatever to do with an extension of the claim to sovereignty on the part of the Church and its officials, or with an attempt to regain the old privileges accruing from the cult of the Absolute. ‘Missions perform their service today only when they infect men with hope.’ This kindling of live hopes that are braced for action and prepared to suffer, hopes of the kingdom of God that is coming to earth in order to transform it, is the purpose of mission. It is the task of the whole body of Christians, not merely the task of particular officials. The whole body of Christians is engaged in the apostolate of hope for the world and finds therein its essence—namely that which makes it the Church of God. It is not in itself the salvation of the world, so that the ‘churchifying’ of the world would mean the latter’s salvation, but it serves the coming salvation of the world and is like an arrow sent out into the world to point to the future.
What missionary proclamation of the promises of God means, becomes clear from the Old Testament background of the Christian mission. In the Christian mission of hope there begins to happen already what according to Old Testament prophecies, especially in Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah, is to happen only after Israel has received salvation and Zion is established. With the resurrection of Christ the divine lordship that has drawn near enters into the process of realization, in that Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians, bond and free, come to the obedience of faith and thereby attain to eschatological freedom and human dignity. If we take seriously this eschatological background in the prophets, against which the proclamation of the gospel by Christianity takes place, then the goal of the Christian mission must also become plain. It aims at reconciliation with God (2 Cor. 5:18ff.), at forgiveness of sins and abolition of godlessness. But salvation, σωτηρία, must also be understood as shalōm in the Old Testament sense. This does not mean merely salvation of the soul, individual rescue from the evil world, comfort for the troubled conscience, but also the realization of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation. This ‘other side’ of reconciliation with God has always been given too little consideration in the history of Christianity, because Christians no longer understood themselves eschatologically and left earthly eschatological anticipations to the fanatics and the sects. Yet it is only in the light of this ‘other side’ of reconciliation that Christians can get beyond the religious relief functions which they are expected to perform for a society left to itself, and can gain new impulses for the shaping of man’s public, social and political life. If the Christian mission which brings to all men righteousness by faith arises against the background of the Yahwist promise to Abraham (Gen. 12:3) and of the prophetic eschatology of Isaiah (Isa. 2:1–4; 25:6–8; 45:18–25; 60:1–22), by turning these expectations into present activity, then its horizon must embrace not only the establishment of the obedience of faith among the Gentiles (Rom. 15:18), but also that which the Old Testament hopes for in terms of blessing, peace, righteousness and fulness of life (cf. Rom. 15:8–13). This is anticipated in the power of that love which unites strong and weak, bond and free, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians in a new community.
The coming lordship of the risen Christ cannot be merely hoped for and awaited. This hope and expectation also sets its stamp on life, action and suffering in the history of society. Hence mission means not merely propagation of faith and hope, but also historic transformation of life. The life of the body, including also social and public life, is expected as a sacrifice in day-to-day obedience (Rom. 12:1ff.). Not to be conformed to this world does not mean merely to be transformed in oneself, but to transform in opposition and creative expectation the face of the world in the midst of which one believes, hopes and loves. The hope of the gospel has a polemic and liberating relation not only to the religions and ideologies of men, but still more to the factual, practical life of men and to the relationships in which this life is lived. It is not enough to say that the kingdom of God has to do only with persons; for one thing, the righteousness and peace of the promised kingdom are terms of relationship and accordingly have to do also with the relationships of men to each other and to things, and secondly, the idea of an a-social human personality is an abstraction. The reason why Christian hope raises the ‘question of meaning’ in an institutionalized life is, that in fact it cannot put up with these relationships and sees the ‘beneficial unquestioningness of life’ in them only as a new form of vanity and death. It is in fact in search of ‘other institutions’, because it must expect true, eternal life, the true and eternal dignity of man, true and just relationships, from the coming kingdom of God. It will therefore endeavour to lead our modern institutions away from their own immanent tendency towards stabilization, will make them uncertain, historify them and open them to that elasticity which is demanded by openness towards the future for which it hopes. In practical opposition to things as they are, and in creative reshaping of them, Christian hope calls them in question and thus serves the things that are to come. With its face towards the expected new situation, it leaves the existing situation behind and seeks for opportunities of bringing history into ever better correspondence to the promised future.
The Reformers’ rediscovery of the ‘universal priesthood of all believers’ made it plain that the call of the gospel is issued to every man. Everyone who believes and hopes is vocatus and has to offer his life in the service of God, in the work of his kingdom and the freedom of faith. For the Reformers, this call in our earthly life took concrete shape in our ‘callings’. The mission and call of the Christian Church fan out, so to speak, into the world in our earthly callings in services, commissions and charismata towards the earth and human society. In our worldly callings, the lordship of Christ and the freedom of faith penetrate into the world as ‘politia Christi regnum suum ostendentis coram hoc mundo. In his enim sanctificat corda et reprimit diabolum, et ut retineat evangelium inter homines, foris opponit regno diaboli confessionem sanctorum et in nostra imbecillitate declarat potentiam suam’ (‘the city of Christ in which he displays his kingdom in face of this world. For in these he sanctifies our hearts and restrains the devil, and in order to maintain the gospel among men he openly opposes the confession of the saints to the kingdom of the devil and declares his power in our weakness.’) Our earthly doings, as a result of the fact that since the Reformation they have been designated ‘calling’, i.e. vocatio, klēsis, have acquired a new theological significance. The vita Christiana, the Christian life, no longer consists in fleeing the world and in spiritual resignation from it, but is engaged in an attack upon the world and a calling in the world. Only, as the Reformation progressed, it became obscure who actually appoints these earthly callings. The revolutionary social movements of the fanatics caused the Reformers more and more to neglect the call to discipleship in the freedom of faith and to concentrate on the concern for order and its preservation. The new idea of calling was transformed into a doctrine of the two kingdoms, in which it was more and more a matter of adjusting questions of competence as between the divine institutions of church, state, business and home. Thus the Confession of Augsburg XVI declares that the gospel brings no new laws and ordinances into the world, and does not dissolve the political and economic orders, ‘sed maxime postulat conservare tamquam ordinationes Dei et in talibus ordinationibus exercere charitatem’ (‘but chiefly demands both the preservation of the ordinances of God and the exercise of charity in all such ordinances’). Our callings do remain the several places of love’s orderly service to the world for God, only it remains an open question whence this ‘severalness’ derives. The vocational ethics of Protestantism has usually had recourse at this point to the postulate of a second source of revelation. The ‘call’ which leads to specific callings was derived by Karl Holl from the coinciding of two voices—the ‘inner call’ heard in the gospel, and the voice which comes to us from things themselves and their necessity. Like Bismarck, he would hear in each given historic situation itself ‘the footsteps of the God who strides through history’. Thus the call to our calling comes from both voices together—from the call of God in the gospel of Christ, and from the call of the God of history. At this point Emil Brunner put ‘providence’: ‘The “place” of the action, the here and now … is the place given by God.’ Others have sought amid the multiplicity of possibilities in society and history certain ever-existing, abiding basic orders such as marriage and family, church and state, on the basis of which the many possibilities are to be elucidated as variations. They have called these basic orders God’s ‘created orders’, his ‘preserving orders’, his ‘mandates’, his ‘fundamental ordinances’, or institutions given along with human nature. This means, however, that the place of call is always seen as something given or predetermined, so that the call and the obedience of faith can then bring about only inner modifications in the exercitium caritatis at this place and in the predetermined vocational role. Typical of this are the lines in Johann Heermann’s hymn: ‘Grant me with diligence to do thy will, thy statutes in my station to fulfil.’ But the ‘station’ or the vocational role in society had then in terms of a theology of creation or of history to be accepted as fate and seen as God-given. The ‘conservare’ of the Confession of Augsburg XVI has always set a highly conservative stamp on the vocational ethics of Protestantism. And since, once left to themselves, forces of a totally different kind took over the determination of the place and role of men’s ‘callings’, the call and mission of the believer was able to work itself out only in the inward fulfilment of his calling. The determining of the concrete historic form of the above-mentioned ‘orders’ was left to what happened to be the prevailing powers.
In actual fact, however, the call to discipleship of Christ is not aimed at faithful and loving fulfilment of our calling under the prescribed conditions—whatever the God or the forces prescribing them. On the contrary, this call has its own goal. It is the call to join in working for the kingdom of God that is to come. The Reformers’ identification of call and ‘calling’ was never intended to dissolve the call in the calling, but vice versa to integrate and transform the ‘callings’ in the call. The call according to the New Testament is once for all, irrevocable and immutable, and has its eschatological goal in the hope to which God calls us.
Our callings, however, are historic, changing, changeable, temporally limited, and are therefore to be shaped in the process of being accepted in terms of call, of hope and of love. The call always appears only in the singular. The callings, roles, functions and relationships which make a social claim on man, always appear in an open multiplicity. Always man stands in a multi-layered network of social dependences and claims. Our modern society is conspicuously no longer a society of stations, but is rather to be described as a society of mobile jobs. It lays open to man a multitude of chances and demands of him elasticity, adaptability and imaginativeness.
Amid this fulness and wealth of conditions and possibilities, the decisive question for Christian existence is not whether and how man in the fluctuating variety of his social commitments, or at the point of intersection of all these roles in which he is always only partially involved, can be ‘himself’ and can maintain his own identity and continuity with himself. The point of reference of his expressions and renunciations, his activities and sufferings, is not a transcendental Ego upon which he could and must repeatedly reflect in the midst of all his distractions. But the point of reference is his call. It is to this, and not to himself, that he seeks to live. It is this that gives him identity and continuity—even, and indeed precisely, where he expends himself in non-identity. He does not require to preserve himself by himself, in constant unity with himself, but in surrendering himself to the work of mission he is preserved by the hope inherent in that mission. The callings, roles, conditions and claims which society lays upon him are therefore not to be examined in regard to whether and how they fully occupy his own self or estrange him from himself, but in regard to whether and how far they afford possibilities for the incarnation of faith, for the concretion of hope, and for earthly, historic correspondence with the hoped-for and promised kingdom of God and of freedom. The criterion for the choice of a calling, for changing our calling, for spare-time activities, as well as for the acceptance and shaping of the process of socialization, is constituted solely by the mission of Christian hope.
The horizon of expectation within which a Christian doctrine of conduct must be developed is the eschatological horizon of expectation of the kingdom of God, of his righteousness and his peace with a new creation, of his freedom and his humanity for all men. This horizon alone, with its formative effect on the present, leads a man in missionary hope to oppose and suffer under the inadequacies of the present, brings him into conflict with the present form of society and causes him to discover the ‘cross of the present’ (Hegel). The place and situation in which the call to the hope of the gospel reaches men is, to be sure, the concrete terminus a quo of their calling, but not its terminus ad quem. Only Christians who no longer understand their eschatological mission as a mission for the future of the world and of man can identify their call with the existing circumstances in the social roles of their callings and be content to fit in with these. But where the call is seen within the horizon of expectation proper to it, there our believing obedience, our discipleship and our love must be understood as ‘creative discipleship’ and ‘creative love’.
‘Creative discipleship’ cannot consist in adaptation to, or preservation of, the existing social and judicial orders, still less can it supply religious backgrounds for a given or manufactured situation. It must consist in the theoretical and practical recognition of the structure of historic process and development inherent in the situation requiring to be ordered, and thus of the potentialities and the future of that situation. Luther, too, could claim this creative freedom for Christian faith: ‘Habito enim Christo facile condemus leges, et omnia recte judicabimus, imo novos Decalogos faciemus, sicut Paulus facit per omnes Epistolas, et Petrus, maxime Christus in Euangelio.’ (‘For when we have Christ we shall easily issue laws, and judge all things aright, and even make new decalogues, as Paul does in all his epistles, and Peter, and above all Christ in the Gospel.’) ‘Creative discipleship’ of this kind in a love which institutes community, sets things right and puts them in order, becomes eschatologically possible through the Christian hope’s prospects of the future of God’s kingdom and of man. It alone constitutes here in our open-ended history the appropriate counterpart to that which is promised and is to come. ‘Presentative eschatology’ means nothing else but simply ‘creative expectation’, hope which sets about criticizing and transforming the present because it is open towards the universal future of the kingdom.
From this standpoint the nowadays increasingly difficult problem of ‘man and society’ or ‘freedom and estrangement’, or man and work, must find a different answer from that which is possible on the ground of a humanism of transcendental subjectivity. German Idealism and the European Romanticism which followed it were the first reactions to the new conditions created by the industrial revolution. From that age and that way of thinking comes the idea that man must become identical with himself because primarily and originally he was and is so. But in order to become identical with himself and live ‘in constant unity with himself’ (Fichte), he must again and again collect himself from his outgoings, recall himself from the lostness of surrender, turn from his distractions to reflect upon himself and his true, eternal Ego. All acts which man allows to issue from himself acquire an independent existence according to laws of their own, and thus rob him of his freedom. His products grow too much for him, so that the creator has to bow to the things he has created. His personal relationships change into factual relationships which develop a logic of their own and stand on their own feet. In so doing they estrange man from his true nature, and he can no longer rediscover himself in them. Consequently, the individual must be able to take these factualized, independent forces which have turned into complexes of constraint and subject them once more to himself, to appropriate them again and take them back into himself, to see through them and be conscious of them. This return from estrangement is apparently possible in two ways—the way of utopia, and the way of irony. Karl Marx in his early days thought it possible on the ground of his social pathology of early industrial conditions to realize the classical German educational ideal of the ‘profound and thoroughly versatile man’ by means of the revolutionary abolition of capitalist exploitation, class society and division of labour in a future ‘association of free individuals’. In Western social philosophy today, on the other hand, we repeatedly find attempts to retain the idea of estrangement and regain the human nature of man by means of transcendental reflection. ‘I no longer coincide with my social “I”, even if at every moment I am together with it. I can now in my social existence be conscious of the role, so to speak, which I take upon me or put up with. I see myself and my roles falling apart.’ By means of such reflections, the self-consciousness of man withdraws itself from the compromising, confusing, social reality. In constant reflection, in irony and in criticism of the corruptness of conditions, it regains that detachment in which it thinks to find its infinite possibilities, its freedom and superiority. Yet this subjectivity reflecting upon itself, which does not expend itself in any social task, but soars above a reality that has been degraded into an ‘interplay of roles’—this faith that feels itself bound to no reality, not even its own—turn man into a ‘man without attributes’ in a ‘world of attributes without man’ (R. Musil). They rescue the humanity of man in an inner emigration in which man now only ‘accompanies’ his outward life, and in so doing they abandon conditions to final corruption.
When, by means of reflection, subjectivity is withdrawn from its social reality, then it loses contact with the real conditions of society and robs these conditions of the very forces which it requires in order to give them human shape and vindicate them to the future. ‘Whoever attempts to get rid of the antinomy by proscribing the world of organized labour as being the result of a mistake, and by recommending a withdrawal into the inward life as being the only possible way of salvation from the consequences of this mistake, abandons that world to a disorder that will sooner or later also lay hold of his artificially defined spiritual world.’
A thing is alive only when it contains contradiction in itself and is indeed the power of holding the contradiction within itself and enduring it. It is not reflection, recalling man’s own subjectivity from its social realization, that brings him back his possibilities and therewith his freedom, but this is done only by the hope which leads him to expend himself and at the same time makes him grasp continually new possibilities from the expected future. Human life must be risked if it would be won. It must expend itself if it would gain firmness and future. If, however, we are thus to risk expending ourselves, then we need a horizon of expectation which makes the expending meaningful—and moreover, a horizon of expectation which embraces the realms and areas in which and for which the work we do in our self-expending is to take place. The expectation of the promised future of the kingdom of God which is coming to man and the world to set them right and create life, makes us ready to expend ourselves unrestrainedly and unreservedly in love and in the work of the reconciliation of the world with God and his future. The social institutions, roles and functions are means on the way to this self-expending. They have therefore to be shaped creatively by love, in order that men may live together in them more justly, more humanely, more peacefully, and in mutual recognition of their human dignity and freedom. They have therefore not to be taken as ‘reliefs’ (A. Gehlen), and not as a lapse into estrangement or as a benumbing of life, but as ways and historic forms of self-expending, and hence also as events and processes which are open towards the future of God. Creative hope historifies these conditions, and thus opposes their immanent tendencies towards stabilization—and still more the ‘beneficial unquestioningness’ of life in them. Faith can expend itself in the pain of love, it can make itself ‘into a thing’ and assume the form of a servant, because it is upheld by the assurance of hope in the resurrection of the dead. For love, we always require hope and assurance of the future, for love looks to the as yet unrealized possibilities of the other, and thus grants him freedom and allows him a future in recognition of his possibilities. In the recognition and ascription of that human dignity of which man is deemed worthy in the resurrection of the dead, creative love finds the comprehensive future in view of which it loves.
As a result of this hope in God’s future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labour, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of the realization of justice in the light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world. This world is not the heaven of self-realization, as it was said to be in Idealism. This world is not the hell of self-estrangement, as it is said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The world is not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in a history. It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace. This is an age of diaspora, of sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacrifice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future. Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-to-day love in hope, becomes possible and becomes human within that horizon of expectation which transcends this world. The glory of self-realization and the misery of self-estrangement alike arise from hopelessness in a world of lost horizons. To disclose to it the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ is the task of the Christian Church.