First Part

"The Love of God and the Decay of the World" and "The Church and the World".

Bonhoeffer begins the first chapter of this section with a challenging sentence, namely:

The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflections. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge." (23)

The foundation of this conviction is that:

Christian ethics claims to discuss the origin of the whole problem of ethics, and thus professes to be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics. (24)

The distinctive difference between Christian ethics and all other ethics lies in the fact that the former deals with the life in the unity of the knowledge of God, while the latter is concerned with the life in the disunity of the knowledge of good and evil. He explains this connection by referring to the story of the Fall in Genesis:

Instead of knowing only the God who is good to him and instead of knowing all things in Him, he now knows himself as the origin of good and evil. Instead of accepting the choice and elec­ tion of God, man himself desires to choose, to be the origin of the election. (2 5)

Thus man has become like God. However, he says: 23) Ethics, p. 3.

In becoming like God man has become a god against God. (26)

As a result of the Fall, man's eyes are opened to his nakedness, i.e. to his disunion with God and with men, and shame arises;

Shame is man's ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement from the origin; it is grief for this estrangement, and the powerless longing to return to unity with the origin. (27)

Then he discusses the relation of shame and conscience. He gives a definition:

In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men; conscience is the

sign of man's disunion with himself. (28)

The call of conscience is always a prohibition, so that life falls into two parts: what is permitted

(the good) and what is forbidden (the evil). Con­ science does not embrace the whole of life, but reacts only to certain definite actions. It pretends to be the voice of God and thus the standard for the relation to other men, but it is actually man's judgement over God and other men and himself. "All knowledge is now

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based upon self-knowledge" and thus all things are drawn into the process of disunion.

25) Ethics, p. 5 26) op. cit., p. 5 27) op. cit., p. 6

After giving a definition of this world as "The World of Conflicts", he moves to the thinking of the new world. He defines it as "The World of Recovered Unity", He declares:

Now anyone who reads the New Testament even superficially cannot but notice the complete absence of this world of disunion, conflict and ethical problems. Not man's falling apart from God, from men, from things and from himself, but rather the rediscovered unity, reconciliation,

is now the basis of the discussion and the 'point of decision of the specifically ethical experience'. The life and activity of men is not at all prob­ lematic or tormented or dark: it is self-evident, joyful, sure and clear. (30)

He recognizes this difference of the old and the new in the encounter of Jesus with the Pharisee. He defines the Pharisee as follows:

The Pharisee is not an adventitious historical phenomenon of a particular time. He is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. (31) For the Pharisee, therefore, the knowledge of

good and evil is the most essential problem, and he is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbour to the honour of God. Such a person cannot confront any man in any other way than by examining him with 29) Ethics, p. 11.

30) op. cit., p. 11. 31) op. cit., p. 12.

regard to his decisions in the conflicts of life. On the contrary, Jesus answers them from unity with God, not from the world of conflict. Therefore, Jesus

never allows Himself to be drawn into one of their con­ flicts of decision's, but answers in such a way that he leaves the case of conflict beneath Him.

That is why their words so strikingly fail to make contact, and that is why Jesus's answers do not appear to be answers at all, but rather attacks of His own against the Pharisees, which is what they, in fact, are. (32)

Jesus speaks with a complete freedom which appears to the Pharisee as the negation of all order, all piety, and all belief:

The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities;

it consists on the contrary precisely in the

complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities,

conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives

and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but by the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplic­ ity of all action. (33)

Then Bonhoeffer tries to show what is new in that which He has brought with Him through interpreting

Jesus's words such as; "Judge not, that ye be not judged" (Mt. 7:1), "but when thou doest alms, let not thy left 32) Ethics, p. 13.

hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret" (Mt. 6:3ff) or the parable of the

last judgement (Mt. 25s31ff). When the time of judge­ ment will have come, the author stresses, we ourselves shall be filled with wonder at what we receive^because all judging and all knowing will be on the part of God and of Jesus Christ.

It would also be entirely misunderstood if the new knowledge of reconciliation was regarded as psychologically observable data because the psycho­ logical view is itself always already subject to the law of disunion. But at the same time he pays attention to the necessity of proving the will of God:

The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of available possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a man must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. (34)

This proving takes place solely on the basis of a metamorphosis, a complete inward transmutation of one's previous form, namely the overcoming of the form of the fallen man, Adam, and conformation with the form of the new man, Christ, It is based on the knowledge of God's will in Jesus Christ, which means

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