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Bonhoeffer

JOHND <

OF Off- i ;
-

i-X

Bonfroeffer
ietrich Bonhoeffer's major theologi-
1 work is here made available for the

st time to the American public. The

irtyred German pastor and theolo-
m is one of the commanding figures
the age,

nhoeffer's other books PRISONER

R GOD, LIKE TOGETHER, and ETHICS
5 constant companions to Christians

mighout the land. In ACT AND BEING

reader will find the
theological un-
:

*girding,
the basic structure, of Bon-
iffer's
thought. Philosophical and
ologicai alternatives of major con-
(CantiwMtd on back fla.fi)
25 O BTlac 62-05559
Bonhoeffer
Act; and "being
ACT AND BEING

>A E i",,U,
 Dietrich BpnhoefFer

ACT AND
BEING
Translated by
Bernard Noble
Introduction by
Ernst Wolf

HARPER 8c BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

New York
 This book under the title of
AKT UND SEIN
was first published in 1956 by
Christian Kaiser Verlag, Munich

ACT AND BEING

Copyright 1956 by Christian Kaiser rerlag
Copyright 1961 by William Collins Sons
if Co. Ltd., London, and Harper ^r Brothers,
New York
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief

quotations embodied in critical articles and

reviews. For information address

Harper <& Brothers,

49 East ttrd Street, New York 16, N.Y.
FIRST EDITION

Library of Cong) ess catalog card number;

62-7951
 INTRODUCTION

Act and Being., Bonhoeffer's inaugural dissertation of 1931,

develops the questions raised in Sanctorum Communio in the

"
direction of the problem of being in the truth." At the
same time and in face of the real or apparent theological
fronts just prior to the beginning of the church struggle,
Bonhoeffer is
attempting a genuine
cc
mediation." He
traces these fronts back to the encounter of a theology
** "
of act (contingency, discontinuity, transcendentalism,
reference to existence, and decision) with a theology of
" "
being (givenness, continuity, metaphyous objectifica-
"
tion, and doctrine ") and, by analogy, to the correspond-
ing confrontation between cardinal, mutually exclusive
philosophical positions: Transcendentalism (Kant) and
Ontology (Heidegger). The vain struggle for truth in the
sphere of an autonomous self-understanding of man, pre-
sented in the first part of this book, is taken with its problems
on to the level of the church as " the occurrence of truth "
and set forth anew a problem within the reality of revela-
as
" versus " "
tion. The solution of the problem of* act being
is reached in terms of revelation and the church, and, in

the concept of revelation itself, is understood within the

" "
community of persons, over against the one-sided act

interpretation (whether theocentric, as with Barth, or

anthropocentric, as with Bultmann) or the equally one-
" "
sided being interpretation with its doctrine of the self-
binding of the freedom of God. Bonhoefier attempts to
oil (jrfb.)
A f;
f>
o ^ r* o Q
 Introduction

comprehend the continuity of the new being in faith with

the human-personal ego as a whole in the reality of the
community. The dialectic of simul Justus et peccator is here
" " in
met with as the dialectic of being in Adam," i.e.
untruth/
9
and " being in Christ/' i.e.
"
in truth."
Just as Sanctorum Communio dealt with the dogmatic com-
prehension of the church by uniting sociological and theo-
logical categories, so here dogmatics is grounded in the
"
reality of the church, in Christ existing as community."
The notion that theology is a function of the church is
taken up with great care not wholly clear in the philo-
sophical introduction but illuminating in the second part,
the dogmatic examination such that the church, the
"
place where being is comprehended," is presented as
the unity of act and being.
With his considerations and attempts at a solution of this
problem, BonhoefFer's work may be set alongside questions
which to-day have become so pressing concerning the
nature of theology as such the tension between theological
:

existentialism and neo-orthodox

"
pure doctrine," and
** "
self-understanding of Christian being in the world over
against its dissolution in religiosity.

Gottingm 9 June 1956

ERNST WOLF
 CONTENTS

THE PROBLEM page II

PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF ACT AND

BEING, TREATED AS THE EPISTEMO-
LOGIGAL PROBLEM IN PHILOSOPHY'S
UNDERSTANDING OF DASEIN IJ
1. The transcendental endeavour 19
2. The ontological endeavour 49
NOTE: Theological anthropology 73
PART TWO*. THE ACT-BEING PROBLEM
IN REVELATION, AND THE CHURCH
AS ITS SOLUTION 77
1 . Revelation in terms of the act 79
A. The contingency of revelation 79
B. Knowledge of revelation 91
c. Man and decision 97
2. Revelation in terms of being 108
" " 108
A. The being of revelation
B. The knowledge of revelation 113
Man as " in . .
" 1
c. being . 14
3. The Church as a unity of act and being 117
A. The Church as the place where Dasein
is understood 118
 Contents

B. Revelations mode of being within the

Church 119
c. Man's mode of being within the Church 126
D. The problem of knowledge and the idea

of the Church 135

PART THREE: THE ACT-BEING PROBLEM
IN THE CONCRETE DOCTRINE OF
MAN "IN ADAM" OR "IN CHRIST" 153
i. Being in Adam 155
"
A. Definition of" being in Adam 155
c* **
B. Adam as I and as humanity 162
c Every daynes$> temptation and the knowl-
edge of conscience 166
2* Being in Christ 170
" in Christ
A. Definition of** being 170
B. The past as determinant of being in
Christ: Conscience 177
c. The future as determinant of being in
Christ: the Child 180
TNDEX 185
The Problem
It seems to me that the latest
developments in theology can
be interpreted as an attempt to come to grips with the
"
problem of act and being. Karl Earth, with his critical
reservation ", wishes to maintain the freedom of God's

grace, and to establish human existence on that ground;

Friedrich Gogarten and Rudolf Bultmann seek to remove
man from his own disposal in the cc concrete situation ",
" "
historically ; H. M. Miiller pins decision, in the
33
contingency of temptation, to the "proffer Christum ;
F. K. Schumann, blaming idealist epistemology for the ruin
of theology up to and including Earth, has gone in quest of
an objective idea of God. On the other side, Paul Althaus
is anxious to salvage a theology of faith from the wreck of

that of consciousness, while Emmanuel Hirsch, in the line

of R. Seeberg's and Karl HolPs Lutheran studies, seeks the
" "
Christian's being in consciousness qua conscience, qua
new will. Brunstad unites man and God in the <c uncondi-
tional personality ". E. Peterson has discovered in pure

phenomenology an arm against dialectical theology and

sees in theological concepts pure essential and ontological
abstractions* Two
philosophical viewpoints, Heidegger's
onto-phenomenological analysis of existence qua existentia
"
and Grisebach's virtual counter-thesis, his critical philo-
"
sophy of the contingent present, have found a hearing in
theology. Finally, the Catholic and Thomist E. Przywara,
ii
 Act and Being

who assesses the theological position of both camps with

marvellous clarity, puts forward his ontology of the analogia
entis in opposition to dialectical theology's pre-occupation
with the act. All these viewpoints illustrate at bottom a

widespread wrestling with the same problem, one which is

theology's legacy from Kant and idealism. The problem is

one of forming genuine theological concepts and of choosing

whether one is to use ontological categories in explaining
them or those of transcendental philosophy. It is a question
" "
of the objectivity of the concept God, of an adequate
concept of knowledge, of defining the relation between the
" "
being of God and the mental act which conceives it.
In other words, there has to be a theological interpretation
"
of what "the being of God in revelation means and how
it known, of what may be the interrelation of belief as
is

act and revelation as being, and correspondingly of where

man stands when seen from the standpoint of revelation. Is
" "
revelation merely what is given to man in the per-
formance of a certain act, or is there such a thing for him
"
in revelation as a being "? What form is taken by the

concept of revelation if we
explain it in terms of the act, and
"
what other form if in terms of a being "?
Here it is not our intention to apply the dichotomy of
act and being as a critical principle to the history of theology,
not even the most recent, though our inquiry can scarcely
avoid touching upon matters of present concern, but to
demonstrate in systematic outline the significance of the
act-being problem for dogmatics as a whole.
The juxtaposition of act and being is not identical with
that of consciousness and being, for the latter pair of concepts
is not mutually exclusive in its terms. Even consciousness
12
 Act and Being

has predicates of being, for as conscious-raw it embodies the

ontological category of the conscious. The act, inasmuch
as it is pure intentionality, must be considered wholly alien
to being. That it is consciously executed necessitates the
distinction between direct (actus directus) and reflexive (actus

reflexus) consciousness: in the first, consciousness is simply

"directed at"; in the second, it can become objectively
conscious of itself in reflexion. It is not, then, that the act

offers no material to reflexion, only that the intentionaiity of

the direct act automatically displaced by reflexion in
is

relation to which, therefore, it cannot stand as a datum that

" "
was there for the finding. Later this distinction will

prove to have decisive importance in theology.

Even as conscious/zm, being is not contained within
consciousness.As something taking place in consciousness,
the act a temporal psychic phenomenon, but it is not
is
" "
really understood by being explained as an event in
" "
time, no more is being understood through definition as
"entity" (or even, say, conscious entity
1
). The act, as
" " "
Dilthey said, can never be
explained but only under-
" "
stood ", just as being can never be proved but only
" **
shown It follows that we are here concerned with real-
"
ities transcending the entity ". All hopes for a genuine

ontology or transcendental philosophy must come to grief

if this is not understood.

At this point let a few quite general and

us lay down
preliminary definitions about the nature of act and being,
from which we can proceed in our inquiry. If outward
reference, infinite extensity, restriction to the conscious,
1
Bewusst~Seiende$.

13
 Act and Being

*
existentiality and discontinuity are comprised in the act,

being comprises a strict self-confinement, infinite m-tensity,

transcendence of the conscious, and continuity. How a
concrete understanding of both is reached in philosophy
and theology remains to be seen. But it must already be

obvious that the whole of theology, in its theory of the

knowledge of God, of man, of sin and grace, crucially
depends on whether it elects to stress concepts of act or of
being at the outset.
It is intended to examine the problem systematically,

stageby stage, as follows:

The problem of knowledge offers the first context in
which light is shed on the problem of act and being. When
we come to the concept of the object it becomes an acute
necessity to explain in terms of the act or of being; if we
resolve that concept wholly in terms of the act-subject, this
must produce intolerable consequences for any science
insistingon the indispensability of objective ontological
concepts and vice versa. For the question of knowledge is
the self questioning the self, the self-testing of understanding
of existence, the I's reflexive self-placing into a world, or

wanting to find itself in a world it is the question of man.

:

Though one does not follow from the other, the connection
is there in the nature of things: the meaning of epistemology
is anthropology. It is because man himself, no less, is at
stake that the passion for philosophising has flared into life

whenever, since Descartes, man's capacity to know has been

in dispute. But inasmuch as the necessity for the knowing
to transcend the known, or vice versa, is comprised in the
1
Here " existentiality
"
does not designate the sphere ol " there is ",
but the person's central, potential involvement.
14
 Act and Being

very concept of knowledge, the understanding of existence

in relation to transcendence is part and parcel of the problem
of knowledge in all its forms, which
implies that the problem
of God, in some way, also conies into question. This is
even true (as we mean to show) when one tries to exclude
completely the question of God, or when, as in Heidegger's
ontology, epistemology is allotted quite another place in the
totality of philosophy than transcendentalism allows. It is
true because the question of man lies hidden in epistemology,
whether the transcendental attempt is being made to explain
in terms of the act-subject, or the ontological attempt to
ec
explain in purely objective terms of being ". (For these
two represent the most sharply antithetic formulations of
any given position in epistemology.)
It follows that the critical idea which must govern the

argument of Part One, below, is the possibility of applying

suggested solutions of the act-being problem to the Christian

ideas of God and on which all further theory is
revelation,
conditional. The of this possibility will be provided by
test

the underlying self-understanding of men asserted in any

given case. For even if we can envisage the applicability of

the purely transcendental or ontological theses to other
fields of inquiry, the possibility of constructing a genuine

theology on one or other concept of knowledge founders on

the attendant human self-understanding, which we discover
to be that of an autonomous I understanding itself and in

its own power. In principle, the idea of a contingent

revelation of God in Christ denies the possibility of the Ps

self-comprehension outside the reference to revelation

(Christian transcendentalism). The idea of revelation must

therefore yield an epistemology of its own. But inasmuch
 Act and Being

whether of a cort being l

as analysis of revelation In terms

produces concepts of knowledge unsuited to bear the whole

weight of revelation, the idea of revelation must be re-
envisaged within the concretion of the idea of the Church,
i.e. in a sociological category where both kinds of analysis

encounter each other and are drawn together in one. 2 The

dialectic of act and being is here recognisable in theological
terms as the dialectic of faith and the communion of Christ;
neither is to be imagined without the other, but each is
" "
suspended in the other. The theological concepts of
knowledge and object are shown to be determined by the

sociological category of the person and must reshape them-

selves accordingly. The sphere of the entity, of" there is ,"
of frozen ontological concepts, is thawed into motion by
the sociological category. Concepts of being, inasmuch as

deriving from revelation, are always determined by the

"
concepts of sin and grace, Adam " and Christ. In
theology there are 110 pre-existing categories of pure creature-
hood which are divorced from these concepts. The idea
" "
of this being of sin and man in sin, of grace and man
in grace is Three developed within the wider
in Part
concretion of the idea of the Church. Our investigation
"
ends with an analysis of being in Christ " as determined
by past and future, reflexion and intentionality. The past is
" "
suspended in the future, reflexion in intentionality. Out
of the man of conscience is formed the child.
The wholerepresents an attempt to unify the aims of true
transcendentalism and true ontology within an " eccle-
siastical thought ".

1
Part Two, Chapters i and 2,
*
Part Two, Chapter 3.
16
 PART ONE

The problem of act and being, treated

as the epistemological problem in

philosophy's understanding

of Dasein
 THE TRANSCENDENTAL ENDEAVOUR

Epistemology is the self's attempt to understand itself, I

reflect on myself, and I and my-self separate, then they fuse

again: that is the basic attitude of the transcendental

philosopher, and somehow or other the I's self-understanding
is comprised in this attitude of reflexion. In regarding
itself the intention of the I is
self-understanding. Here we
see the common germinal cell of transcendental philosophy
and idealism.
In what follows, two considerations must be kept in view.
Firstly, we must distinguish between genuine transcendental
philosophy, the concept which Kant endeavoured to amplify
from its long evolution reaching back farther than scholastic

theology, and the concept of transcendentalist philosophy

1

2
as understood by post-Kantian idealism. Secondly, we
must bear in mind the question whether Kant's transcen-
**
1
Cf. H. Knitter meyer, Die Transzendentalphilosophie und die
Theologie," Christliche Welt, 1924, especially p. 222.
2
All that follows below by way of representing Kantian or idealist

philosophy stylised (and therefore dispenses with quotations).

is Kant
is represented as a pure transcendental philosopher, which he never was

entirely, though we believe he intended to be one. It is the system

we debate, not matters of historical fact.
19
 Act and Being

dental critique of reason is altogether identical with the

criticism of reason in Luther and orthodox Protestant

dogmatics; we must ask whether Kant was not, rather,

bent on using delimitation to establish reason in its rights:
if this were so it would be impermissible to claim him as the
1
representative epistemologist of Protestantism.
To the concept of genuine transcendentalism belongs the
reference of thought to something transcendental, but not
itshaving that something at its disposal. All thinking has
a double reference to the transcendental: a retrospective,
inasmuch as it claims, qua thought, a meaning which it
cannot give to itself, and inasmuch as meaning is connected
with the logos of the transcendental, and also a prospective
reference to objects within which, supposing they are truly
"
objective (conceive object" how you will with Kant,
with Rickert or no matter who), something transcending
thought stands over against it. So long as the resistance of
transcendence to thought is asserted, i.e. so long as the
thing-in-itself and transcendental apperception are under-
stood as irreducible definitive concepts, neither of which is
involved in the other, we may speak of genuine transcen-
dentalism:
In knowing, human existence is aware of itself as in ten-
"
sion between two poles which transcend it, and this being
" 2
amid transcendence is Dasein. But this acquires another,
special meaning through thought. All entity among which
" "
human Dasein is situated has reference to human
1 Gf. W. Liitgert's interpretation in Die Religion des Idealismus, I,

PP- 8ff-
2 The concept of Dasein as the mode of being peculiar to man as
distinct from other forms of being is here taken over from Heidegger's
1927.
20
 Act and Being

Dasein virtue of thought, that same thought which

by
permits Dasein to be understood as being between poles of

transcendence, or which understands itself to be so placed.

In this way human Dasein acquires a mode of being which
sets it apart from all other entity. In human Dasein the
world of other entity is transcended; indeed, it exists only
in reference to thought though whether, also, only by
thought is another question and the ontological category
of human Dasein., which has these remarkable characteristics,
is for genuine transcendentalism the act pure and simple.
That is the astounding, but necessary, consequence. "Being"
isbeing between transcendent poles, but that is only on
account of the will to self-understanding which is reference
to transcendence. The knowing oneself to refer to the

transcendental, but to be also, for that reason, the world's

point of reference, that, for transcendentalism, is human
existence.
It is from this delimitation and restriction of self-under-

standing man, i.e. of reason, that the radical critique of

reason springs. Yet inasmuch as reason itself becomes the
critic of reason, it is original rights; in
reinstated in its

other words, man understands himself in the last resort not

from the transcendental but from himself, from reason or
from the bounds which reason has prescribed to itself, be
they ethical or rational in kind. Every transcendental
epistemology or corresponding interpretation of existence
must peter out in this internal contradiction, and this
hiatus, which has its roots deep in the nature of the case,
must be taken more seriously than hastily ensuing attempts
to restore inner unity, which proceed at the expense of the
transcendental premises themselves.
21
 Act and Being

The immediate point which we have to note and examine

is this: man is existence as pure act, understanding itself
from out its self-imposed bounds, i.e. from itself. Trans-
cendentalism not phenomenalism. Even if we encounter
is

certain ideas in Kant that have a strongly phenomenalistic

ring, it is from the question which divides him from

clear

phenomenalism that they are foreign to his design. Pheno-

menalism asked: how does the I come upon the object?
and resolved the question by the pure phenomenality of
objects in the consciousness. Kant accepts the given relation
of I to object and goes on to ask: How is knowledge possible
at all, i.e. what is the meaning of this given relationship?

Thereby his question differs from the phenomenalistic as

a question about a given relation differs from an ontological
question. For questions of being are unknown to genuine
transcendentalism, and it must be so, since its very sense
" "
and purpose is to transcend the dogmatism of ontology.
Knowing cannot possibly be a simple reflection or copy of
reality (if that were so, there would be no criteria of truth),
but is possible only by virtue of a synthesis originally founded
in the cognitive subject in the unity of transcendental apper-

ception, and there taking place, which must be regarded

as having logical precedence over the empirical, over
experience in other words, as a priori. But this synthesis
must be internally necessary and regular; therein it gives
proof of its truth and validity. It is not through some kind
of coincidence with the object of knowledge that knowledge
is but through the necessity of the a priori synthesis.
valid,
Truth only in the pure act. Thus the concept of being is
is
" "
resolved into the concept of the act. Being is only
" " " "
with reference to knowing. This with-reference-to
22
 Act and Being

characterising the original form of transcendentalism still

leaves room for thought's essential reference back to the
"
transcendental, whereas any substituted by virtue of" or
" "
through would imply the omnipotence of reason over
transcendence. Consequently., to understand existence is,
for Kant, to know oneself in being as
"
having reference ",
to feel the radical challenge which knowledge throws down
1
to the knowing self, to be unable to rest in oneself without
surrendering oneself, to be purely and simply the act. But
as such the understanding of existence must always be
transcendent of itself. 2 It is aimed at itself in a permanent
reference, without any possibility of attaining itself, for if it were
"
to attain itself it would no longer be with reference to ",
no longer the and nothing but the act. The endeavour
act
to understand oneself purely from oneself is bound to mis-
carry, because it is the nature of existence to be not self-
"
contained but simply with reference to ". However, the
very attainment is a logical impossibility, for supposing
"
I knew myself, myself" would represent a thing completed
and attained, but it would no longer be " I " or the attaining
"
act or with reference to "; "I ", regarded as the attaining
act, has yet to become the thing completed and attained.
" "
I is something which cannot be thought, because it is

the precondition at the back of thinking; that is to say, at

" "
all times it is already there as the a priori synthesis
before the object, whose role it can never assume. Now
"
here stands revealed a profound contradiction: As what
Kmttermeyer, in %wiscken dm %eiten> 1929, No. 4, pp. 352ff.
1

a
Concerning what follows it is necessary to reiterate that this is only
one side of the historical Kant, but that ever since Fichte fresh attempts
have had to be made to understand Kant better than he understood
himself.

23
 Act and Being

is always already there ", as the very act of thinking and its

intrinsic precondition, the I logically precedes thought. But

inasmuch as everything deterrninable about the I is imbued
with the character of noesis, thought precedes the L This
" "
means that thought lies on the brink of the non-objective
without which, since the condition of the conditional,
it is

there nothing objective. Thought is the frontier of the

is

general existence out of which man lives, in the sense that

the unconditional (the background of existence) is always
" "
there for man already ", but has always "just slipped
past whenever human existence is bent, in thought, on the
understanding of existence. From the outset we are thus
confronted with the impossibility that human existence
should understand capacity as performance of
itself in its

acts, for the very reason that its essence is the spontaneous

performance of acts.
When one is in this way brought up against the barrier in
concepts of the I and thought, it is
possible to adopt one of
two attitudes. By exercising and
testing itself against the I,
thought suspends itself, but in restricting itself by this self-

suspension (and in consequently contrasting with the

objective the I in its role of thought's precondition), thought

reasserts itself as the only thing which makes such a severance
possible. Now thought can bow to this self-limitation, in
the manner of genuine transcendentalism, and this attitude

seems to me to accord with Kant's original design, though in

the historical Kant it is admittedly inextricable (in a way
which invites misunderstanding) from phenomenalistic and
idealistic elements.

Alternatively and this is philosophy's great temptation

thought can promote itself to be lord and master of the
24
 Act and Being

non-objective, in that it takes the doing and thinking I Into

itselfand makes the self-thinking I no longer the ne plus
ultraof philosophy but its point of departure. It cannot do
this,however, without losing two things reality and trans-
:

cendence, or one by the other. Philosophy, thought, the I,

are forfeit to themselves instead of to the transcendental.
Hence the immensity of thought's claim is transformed into
the opposite; thought languishes in itself, for where there is
freedom from the transcendental, from reality, there is
imprisonment in the self. From the original transcendental
thesis has evolved a system characterised by thought's sheer
self-transcendentalisation or (which conies to the same thing)
a monism unadulterated with reality; whether it is styled
a system of pure transcendence or pure immanence, the
end-product is materially the same. Kierkegaard said,
justly enough, that philosophising of this kind patently

forgets that one exists. This second possibility was grasped

and elaborated as much in the transition from Socrates to
Plato, though of course in quite a different way, as pre-
eminently in that from Kant to idealism. It alone holds
the key and permit of the system: therein lies its mysterious
power.
Whether thought demeans itself modestly, i.e. remains

genuine transcendental thinking, or misappropriates the

unconditional and becomes idealistic thinking, that is no
longer a question of theoretical philosophy (which simply
provides, as shown, a choice of two possibilities) but a
decision of practical reason. There is nothing to oblige
thought, as free thinking, not to annex the unconditional or
empower itself of its I. Yet it is no less an act of free thought
if, in order to remain free, it contents itself with reference
25
 Act and Being

to transcendence and for the same reason, that it is only

relative, referential refrains from taking over its L Here
at the apogee of thought, though not merely to justify any
stinting of hard cogitation, there comes to the fore that
decision-character which thought assumes once it is no longer

subject to a compulsion of internal logic *; it is this that

Fichte expresses in his dictum that the kind of philosophy
a man has depends on the sort of man he is. 2
Inasmuch
as idealism deprives self-understanding existence

of its transcendental reference, i.e. delivers it from the

clamping embrace of being between transcendent poles, it

seems to have resolved the concept of being, which in pure
transcendentalism still appeared to adhere to the transcen-
dental in some possible way, entirely into the concept of the
act. It has drawn out Kant's findings to the radical extreme.

To be is to be comprehended by the I in the a priori syn-

thesis. 3 Without I there is no being; I is creative, the sole
efficient; I goes out from itself, and to itself returns. A
being which was not the potential object of understanding,
but was absolutely thought-projected, would lead directly
to materialism. Idealism is neighbour to materialism,
Hegel to Marx. Existence, then, is the in-turning, re-

turning or homecoming of the eternal I to itself; this,

understood as the eternal from the
act, is self-understanding

self, for whence could come any self-understanding from

1
The issue can be decided in a third way, by pure ontology. On
v
this point more is said below.
2
Werke, I, p. 434.
8 In this connection
Brunstsid's Idee der Religion, 1922.
cf. As this
writer sees it, Kant and
idealism are contiguous; in his exposition of
idealism he traces with exemplary clarity the development in idealistic
interpretation of the basic theme the a priori synthesis.
26
 Act and Being

outside the self if the I

is the creator of its world? Mind is
understood from mind; thus I can understand myself from
"
myself, or one might add from God ": insofar as God is
in me, God is which I am. 1
the unconditional personality
In this process all ontological concepts appear to have fallen
by the wayside, and a refined concept of the act rules both
epistemology and anthropology. Yet with this apparent
radicalisation of the transcendental
position something
surprising has come to pass. If in original transcendentalism
the mind of man was in tension between transcendent poles
and was thus irrevocably their co-ordinate, henceforth the
movement of the mind is purely self-illumined, 2 which is to
say that in principle it has come to rest. The mind's forth-
proceeding from itself ensues only under the conditions of
its being by itself; hence in this movement the mind remains

always in full possession of itself, it can never get into the

" 5>
embarrassing position of merely being in reference to
the transcendental. Nevertheless, mind residing in itself,
"
even a (dialectically unreal) movement, is substance ",
if in

i.e. absolute being, so that Hegel could well say that the
one thing he felt obliged to hold against Spinoza was his
3
failing to define substance itself as subjectivity. In fact
idealism, especially in Hegel, appears to achieve a synopsis
of act and being which would be capable of satisfying the
demands of the problem if only the philosopher's reasoning
did not founder on the resistance of his own reality. Hegel
wrote a philosophy of angels, but not of human existence.
1 Cf. Brunstad's idea of the unconditional personality, in which
God and I are one.
2
Luther, RSm. Komm, II, 136, 28, ed. Ficker:ratio in se ipsam incurva.
8
Werke, 15, 409, quoted in Hirsch, Die idedistische Philosophic und das
Christmtum, 1926, p. 61, n. 4.
27
 Act and Being

It simply is man (Including even the

not true that concrete
philosopher) in full possession of the mind.
is Whoever
countenances the idea that he need only arrive at himself
to be in God is doomed to hideous disillusion in experiencing
the utter introversion, the treadmill confinement to the

self, of the very loneliest solitude, with its tormenting desola-

tion and sterility. Concrete man sees himself placed in a
contingent here-or-there as one who has to find his where-
abouts by asking, thinking and doing, one who has to relate
to himself the position pre-given to him and at the same time
" "
define himself with reference to it. And the imposition,
" " "
the outrage, which man feels at being already with
"
reference to some other thing which transcends him is
something essentially different from a certainty of bearing
within himself the possibility of mastering the world. In
sum, even the character of the act, what it means to be an
agent, is more purely expressed in the genuine transcendental
understanding of existence than in idealism's conflation of
actand being. Only when existence, supposed in per-
manent orientation to transcendence, is said not to be able
to understand itself (or only to understand that it does not
understand the true sense of the act expressed : act
itself) is
"
as anever-shifting with reference to ", as utter inten-
tionality, as something which gives proof of itself in the
psychic process but is only to be understood on the far side
" ?>
of it, act as direct consciousness actus directus. Here
philosophising itself has an essential connection with exist-

ence, and this can be so because it

places itself within the
responsibility of human existence and frames questions only
from out that context; accordingly the question itself is
proper to existence and does not involve the answer before-
28
 Act and Being

hand. Thus philosophising partakes of the act-character of

existence and does not make statements from the standpoint
of an existing stock of property such as might inhere in
"
a being ".
Idealism, of course, also seems to perpetuate the trans-
cendental thesis in allowing the reality of the external world
to be understood only from the starting-point of the I.
Kant's a priori synthesis and Fichte's intellectual intuition
the
(Anschauung) seem identical in respect of founding
external world's reality in the I; yet even here genuine
transcendentalism must come to a more modest conclusion
than idealism: the former judges there is no knowledge

capable of passing beyond the proposition that phenomena

" "
(the external world) refer to the I and are therefore
knowable only via the I. It does not lie within the com-
to proceed there-
petence of purely transcendental thought
from to a negative or positive judgment as to the being of

the phenomenal world. Idealism, however, feels impelled

to add the finishing touch by replacing the transcendental
reference with an ontological judgment entailing the creative
of
power of the I, and so it comes to distort the meaning
transcendentalism by radicalisation. Now it is no mere
chance that idealism, which begins with an ontological
finishes, as shown, with something very like a
judgment,
new concept of substance, so that the pure concept of the
act is left to transcendentalism. The world, i.e. the objects
" " that is the trans-
of my knowledge, has reference to me
cendental judgment; but idealism pronounces: the world
" which
is in being through me ". This is a distinction
should not be disregarded in the study of systems merely
because it remains blurred in the history of philosophy.
 Act and Being

On the contrary, it Is not hard to see its importance even

for theology, as well as for the philosophical theory of God
at a given time. The reason why Fichte was unable to
make use of Kant in the conflict over atheism derives from
the fact that, at bottom, Kant understood himself even
better than Fichte thought himself able to understand him.
If the world owes its being to the I, there is an exchange of
roles between the I and the creator-god; God can no longer
become the object of knowledge, but, since he cannot

imaginably be the creature of the I, is somehow integrated

" "
with the I itself. Thereupon God is only in so far as
I think, i.e. entermyself in thought.
Transcendentalism proper is dissociated from this attitude
by its refusal to turn the I into the Creator, regarding it
only as something to which the world must be thought to
have reference. In this way there is at least in principle

(i.e.
so far as this isat all possible in philosophy 1 ) no
violation of the all-important frontier of creatorhood.
Admittedly, here too it is impossible for God to become the
object of cognition, otherwise he would have to be thought
of as referring to the I (in the way of mundane phenomena)
and consequently as
essentially existing-for-the-I. By
transcendental premises the objectivity of God is an im-

possibility, since of course all being is understood as entity,

" "
as there is in a priori synthesis, i.e. is translated into act,
and absolute being becomes an idea which is unattainable
because it is, as such, wholly non-objective. Thus the concept
of God never forsakes the realm of the non-objective, where
he abides as the foundation for the possibility of existence

1
Doubtless an oblique reference to the hubris of philosophy, which
for Bonhoeffer is per se systematic: see pp. 58 and 70 below (Translator).
3
 Act and Being

and thought. Transcendental thought can never say " God

" " "
is that would be objectivising, finitising ", dogma-
" "
tising ". Truth is only in the act itself, with its reference
to transcendence. Only in the action of the act, in existence
" "
seeking to understand is
condition,
itself, God as

potentiality but always in the doing, never in the result.

Thus in whatever direction man may turn, God is always
at his back.
There is no denying the closeness of God and I in this
system. But both remain marginal concepts to which
"
thought and existence simply have permanent reference ".
Yet since transcendentalism is here growing noticeably
unsure in its theory, one can scarcely refrain from asking
it one further question what in fact is this " transcendental "
:

to which everything is supposed to refer? If it can never

be objectively knowable, how can reason determine its own
limits against this unknown? Even if it is to exercise a free
decision of practical reason, the outcome is nevertheless
reason's self-chosen self-limitation, whereby it reinstates its
own authorityas the reason which performed this very
limitation. This inmost obscurity in the Kantian concept
of the transcendental leads to the discovery that even here,

despite the strenuous attempt to surpass itself or prescribe

itsown limitations, reason is left alone with itself and so
" "
understands itself not with reference to that which
transcends it but with back-reference to itself. The mis-

carriage of this endeavour to ascertain the bounds of reason

is due to the fact that essentially reason has no bounds, for

bound can be thought away until it is

in principle the very
no more a genuine boundary. Reason can only be taken
into obedience, whether the obedience of speculation, the
3*
 Act and Being

obedience of Christ, or however else. There are bounds

only to concrete man as a whole, and their name is Christ.
It only remains to state that in both Kantian transcendent-
alism and idealism reason is entangled in itself. In these
circumstances, "to understand oneself" can only mean
"to understand oneself from oneself", "I am" means
"I think" (cogitosum). "God is" means "the mind
comes to itself, knows in the unity of consciousness ". In
this way the ground seems to crumble under any proposition

of genuine belief in God that is, there is no possibility of

;

asserting the being of God outside the I, since there is only

reason alone with itself. At this point it is evident that the
I does not advance via itself to any position beyond itself.

It is caught up in itself, seeing only itself even when it sees

something else, even when it means to see God. It under-

stands itself from itself, sure, but this really means
to be
that, at bottom, it does not understand itself at all, for it
cannot be said to do so until this I feels the overwhelming
1
impact of another I on its existence. It believes itself free

and is captive, is overlord of all yet is itself its

only vassal:
that is what Protestant dogmatists mean by the corruption
se 2
*
of reason. It is ontic narcissism, the cor curvum : if

Kant had some inkling of how this would be manuest even,

for example, in his doctrine of radical evil, but nevertheless

Bonhoeffer's words could be construed to mean that, In principle,

1

understanding can take place only between an I-subject and an I-object,

and that these cannot be entirely identical (because, e.g. of the in-
compossibility of reflexion and actus directus) . This indeed is the epis-
temological aspect of the book's theme. But the author's thought
is more radical than epistemology, it is existential and Christian,
(Translator).
8
Luther, Rdm* Komm. II, 137, i, ed. Ficker.

32
 Act and Being

wrestled In vain to overcome the problem by means of

the original transcendental thesis, idealism, taking over from

Kant, allowed the I to celebrate on this very ground the

triumph of its liberation.

Everything now converges on the all-important question

which must be put to transcendentalism and idealism alike :
can the I understand itself from itself? Or is there a funda-
mental objection?
To " understand " from " explain ") is a term
(as distinct
whose field of application is represented by states of affairs
with a basis of intention, and it comprises the direct con-
sciousness of self-evidence. This latter is only possible in the
presence of potential productivity in the direction of the

thing to be understood, be it a piece of conduct, an idea or

an artistic composition. To understand implies being
somehow creative, irrespective of the presence or absence
of actual technical ability. In the present case the object
to be understood is existence itself, i.e. as an integral whole,
for there is no understanding save in a context of unity. If

existence is so constructed that the very will to self-under-

standing belongs to its essence, the problem arises of how the

unity of existence can be attained by self-understanding
from out the self. The eye does not see itself. It follows

that self-understanding existence must be able to think of

itself as entire creator of itself (including its self-under-

standing), and even as creator of its own existence, into

which it has been thrust as a self-understander or -non-
understander; this is self-contradictory from the fact that
" "
the I must already exist in order to create. Faced with
l
this position the idealistic reason-I nevertheless persists in
1
And in final analysis Kant's transcendental I as well.

33
 Act and Being
" am"
declaring Itself the ultimate entity I am what I

to the concept
(ontologically meaningful only in application
of God) in making itself, by an irreducible paradox, its
own creator. Alternatively man
grasps that this his exis-
"
psychophysical ambiguity, is
a being
tentiality, in all its
" "
between ", a being in reference to something to which
existence is a still uncomprehended pointer. In this case,
of course, no real understanding of existence is signified,
for the self-understanding involved merely characterises the

final position attainable by human thought and self-posses-

sion. This line of thought can do no more than unfold a new

problem of act and being.

In order to solve the problem of thought and being, neo-
Kantianism has tried to develop the transcendental thesis
on fresh lines. Yet merely by beginning with the thing-in~
itself it expresses an ontological instead of a relational
of Fichte, in making
judgment, and enters upon the path
It is a moot point how,
thought the foundation of being.
Cohen's concept of method, derived from transcendent-
say,
of
alism, connects with Fichte's quasi-substantial concept
creative mind.
1
While at the outset Natorp here accom-
to master the problem
panies Cohen, later, in a fresh attempt
"
of being, he forms the idea of a universal logic."
2
The
logos lies on the far side
of thought and being as that whereby
both are possible. Neither is reducible to or suspensible in
" "
the other, yet thought is onto-thinking and being is
"
noeto-being ". Quite obviously this speculation, as

1
Cf. H. Cohen, System der Philosophie, I, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,
1902.
*Cf. especially Natorp's latest work, Proktlsche Philosophic, 1925,

pp. 1-27.
34
 Act and Being

evidenced by the amalgamation of act and being, has taken

us into the Hegel country,
What, in sum, results for the problem of act and being from
the transcendental and idealist endeavours? Common to
"
both is the attempt to raise substance to the subject "/ as
most thoroughly executed in Hegel's logic: the understand-
ing of the object as an apriori synthesis In transcendental
apperception. Thereby being becomes the knowing con-
sciousness. But, as it stands, this proposition is by no
means unequivocal. Its positive and its negative interpreta-
tions lead in utterly different directions. The thesis

that being is given in the cognitive consciousness is

certainly not identical with the converse, that in the absence
of the cognitive consciousness there is no being. The
difference we have noted here comes to the fore: in the

positive interpretation the inter-reference of consciousness

and transcendent being receives expression; in the negative,
the resolution of the latter into the former. But of course
the pressing interest of both interpretations is centred on
the attention drawn to the mental act of the person. There
is no person save in consciousness. In his phenomenology
Hegel represented the Fs gradual development towards
becoming truly a person a goal attainable only, in the last
resort, by philosophical thinking. If anything is to make
itself known to me as being, it must be apprehensible by the

thinking mind, accordingly the person is only grasped when

logical material is under consideration; that is to say, the
"
existence of the person is reached through meaning '*.
" "
It follows that the word must be allotted an exceptional
position, as the only sensible means of communicating
1
Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic, p. 337.

35
 Act and Being

logical material. The person abides in freedom. Knowing

takes place in freedom; only in freedom can man's existence

grasp and interpret itself. The act, meaning and freedom

belong together. Thus the essence of the person is freedom,
autonomy, coming-to-itself or being-by-itself.
If at this point they are at one, transcendentalism and
idealism part company when they come to express the
character of the act. Transcendentalism succeeds in pre-
serving the purity of the act by regarding existence as
" "
merely referring to something transcendent, but since
this transcendent cannot, in Kant, prove itself genuinely

transcendent, his version the original comes to grief;

hence it is that idealism draws the transcendent into itself,
and unites act and being within itself, with all the conse-

quences that follow for anthropology. We may see from

this that neither in the Kantian orientation to transcendence,
nor in idealism's permeation with transcendence, can
concepts of being be dispensed with. Yet such an outcome
1
is at variance with the original intention of both.

Now, theology seeks to espouse this transcendentalism

if

idealist epistemology, it needs must forfeit a certain right.

(Transcendentalist, as distinct from transcendental, is the

term with which we denote that transcendental philo-
shall

sophy which develops the transcendental thesis into a system,

1
In the history of philosophy one could discover a parallel to nom-
inalism in this attempt to resolve concepts of being. There is no
" "
absolute being, not even of concepts: these are only in the act of
abstraction. But, admittedly, if (as especially in Roscellin de Compiegne)
the isolated reality of individual things is excluded from this,, we have
an interpretation quite alien to idealistic philosophy. For idealism, of
course., individual things are only objects of cognition through applica-
tion of the universal thought-forms and concepts.
36
 Act and Being

of reason.) The raison d'etre of transcendentalist-idealist

epistemology is its claim to involve understanding of
existence, hence finally of world and God. Unmindful of
that claim, it would abandon its title to consideration.

Epistemology is the mind turning to the mind. In the unity

of the mind, overriding the subject-object bifurcation, was
discovered the fulcrum of the understanding of existence,
world and God. If a theology wished to style itself trans-
cendentalist-idealist, it would have to accommodate this

claim. This a consideration which severely restricts its

is

own concept of knowledge. Furthermore, the theology

would have to translate all being into consciousness. The
object, reality, a priori synthesis. A judgment is
is now an
no longer true as a judgment about a reality transcending
"
consciousness, but true in the unconditional unity-of-
l
experience of the personality ". This must apply also to
statements about God. Correspondingly, as already shown,
such a theology can envisage no objective concept of God,
" "
since of course the object is only in the transcendental
"
unity of apperception, therefore God himself is ", as in

this never imaginable but only operating in the

unity,
activity of the conscious mind. And so the identity of my

non-objective I with God is expressed in what is called the

" 2
unconditional personality ". Theology is confronted
with the dilemma of either making the objective God the
content of consciousness and object of the I-subject, or of
1
Brunstad, op. cit., p. 154.
*
Brunstad, op. 217: the revdatio spedalis is the disclosure of
cit., p.
the unconditional-synthetic personality as such, it is the self's compre-
"
hension in God as this unconditional personality, the foundation,
effected in God, of the oneness of God's consciousness with self-con-
sciousness ".

37
 Act and Being

permitting the I to locate God in its non-objective I-hood,

in its coming to itself,
" "
God is not, outside the conscious mind coming to
"
itself. The ultimate, true reality is that which is attested
in our self-activity, our I-hood." *
Once non-objectivity,
then, taken seriously, God is never but in the act of the
is

self-knowing mind. Even as a component of philosophising,

God not an objective entity, but is only in the execution
is

of the philosophising act. But while the process of genuine

transcendental thought has perpetual reference to transcend-
ence and is therefore (in principle) open and inconclusive,
the philosophising of idealism already implies the system
God himself is within it. In this way idealist thought is
exposed as an illusion of movement within a self-contained
repose. I find God present in my coming to myself; I

become aware of myself, I find myself, i.e. I find God. The

direction of intention is introspective. Whereas in genuine
transcendentalism God's non-objectivity behind the activity
of consciousness is such that the existentially God-intending
act takes place in the actus directus but is inaccessible to the
reflexion of consciousnesness on itself, in idealism the act is
able to find God in the reflexion of consciousn&sr (Bewusst-

Sein}*
The gospel of mind finding itself in God and God in itself

1
Hirsch, Philosophu des Idealismus, p. 54,
2
BrunstacPs distinction between the Individual consciousness and
universal conscious-ness (Bewusstheit), of which the former is a symbol,
both coming together in the I, does nothing to alter the position. His
attempt (op. cit., pp. 89-92) to reduce the interrelation of consciousness
and Bewusstheit to that of the part and the whole, so as to ensure for
Bewusstheit a being independent of individual consciousness (cf. p. i xaf.),
is arbitrary and leads straight back to realistic concepts.

38
 Act and Being

was preached too seductively by idealism for theology to

blandishments, and all too readily it reasoned thus
resist its :

" "
if being is God must be in
essentially consciousness,
religious experiences, and the reborn I must find God in
reflexion on itself. Where else could God be found but in

my consciousness? Even if I can never pass beyond it, it

must be what constitutes being in general. God, then, is
the God of consciousness. He
" "
my is only in my religious
consciousness.
But this was jumping to conclusions. If the philosophical

system of idealism is mind coming

the explicit form of pure
to an analogous theology would have to be the
itself,

explicit form of reborn man's self-consciousness. But this

latter, as a complex quantity, is essentially different from

pure self-consciousness (which combines in the I the absol-

utely individual and the absolutely general) it is bound up

;

with experiences of a particular content, and if God himself

is to be found in this reborn consciousness he must be

extracted from these experiences; yet this means that God

" "
once again becomes objective in the consciousness,

consequently he is retracted into the unity of transcendental

apperception, where he becomes the prisoner of the con-

sciousness. Imperceptibly, God, who was to be regarded
solely as a functional correlate of the mental act, has become
the objective object.
There are two ways of recovery from this setback:
i. To radicalise the older thesis, from the standpoint of
idealism, in such a way that the experience of God becomes
the very self-experience of the transcendental I which is the
basis of all other experiences. This course, to be sure, has

only once been whole-heartedly adopted and developed on

39
 Act and Being

a large scale to the best of my knowledge. This was by

F. Brunstad in his Idee der Religion. Here the point of
identity between God and man ispresented in the idea of
the unconditional personality. The experience of God
must be the experience of unconditional personality in
this

myself.
1
It follows that certainty of the experience of God

lies nowhere but in experience of the unity of my own I,

and, just as the transcendental unity of the I is the basis of

all truth, is confirmed only by the fact
the truth of religion

that, in character
its as experience of the unconditional
it itself becomes the basis for the possibility of
personality,
all truth.
2
How the I can thereupon enter into communion
with God is something which cannot be explored, for plainly
here again God stands at any given time behind the I as
the basis of its possibility if he could stand over against
:

the I he would have become an object. The I can never

say
"
God is " (as an object) without at the same time
"
saying God is not ", i.e. not non-objectifiable, not per-
manently subjective. the same with the I itself:
It is just
" "
when I in fact say could also say
I ", I God ". But just
as I can have no commerce with my transcendental I, I can
have none with God. The I keeps itself company; its

1 "
Brunstad, op., at., p. 15 if. Religion as experience, as the being-
:

seized by awareness of the unconditional personality, of the uncon-

ditional value-reality of personal life, is the condition on which all

truth and validity is

possible".
"
a
Op. cit., p. 154: The truth of religion does not lie in the fact that
science arrives at results coincident with the utterances of faith, but
in the significance of religious experiences, of the religious experience,
as a necessary prerequisite of all truth. Religious experience has a
"
certainty wholly in and through itself ". Religion has truth, is truth,
because it comprises the basis of all
possible truth in the experience of
the unconditional-synthetic unity of the I ".

40
 Act and Being

looking into itself, into its inmost depths, is religion, but is

also revelation of the divine mind, indeed that is all revela-
tion is. What reason can learn from itself (thus Hegel) is

revelation, and so God is incarcerated in consciousness. 1

Through living reflexion on itself, the I understands itself

from itself. It directly relates itself to itself, hence to God,

in reflexion. It follows that religion is here equivalent to
revelation; there is no room for faith and Word, for they
are repugnant to reason. Yet Deus non potest apprehendi nisi

per verbum (A.C. 2, 67).

Here, as in the whole of idealism, the inmost identity of
I and God, underlying everything, is simply an expression

of the proposition: Like is conceivable only by like. If

God is to come to man, man must already be in essence
divine. If theology is to grasp the relationship of God
and man, can only do so by postulating the profound
it

likeness of one to the other and finding there, exactly, the

unity of God and man. One is like the very God one
conceives.
Thus intensified, such propositions are exposed as theolo-
gically intolerable. It is not because man is by nature God
that God comes to him on the contrary, he would not
then need to come but because he is utterly unlike God
and never shapes his concept of God according to his own
image. That is why God gives himself to man, that man
may conceive him, and then only then man can indeed
214), but on p. 216 we
1
Brunstad would contest this (op. dt. 9 p.
read: "It revelation, revelation in action;
(the unity of experience) is

this very subjectivity, its very inwardness, is pervaded by and constitutes

"
revelation "; and on p. 218: know God We
so tar as we are I ', m '

in so far as we continue in experience. The limitation of our knowledge

of God lies in the limited nature of our content of consciousness ". (!)

41
 Act and Being

conceive him. This is an idea which has a place

to find
in Christian epistemology. Against it, however, the assump-
tions of the foregoing collapse. Everything clearly hinges
on the transformation of ontological concepts into concepts
of the act. In the first place, this operation leaves no other
location to God but the I to be found in the execution of the
mental act (or the basis of its possibility) ; secondly, the
I is made the creator of the world. But, in the end, the

philosopher has lost sight of the business of understanding

the concrete psychophysical man the man who is essen-

tially at stake in Christian theology, and who invariably

"
finds himself" already there in his given world. The only

thing which enabled idealism to achieve its resolution of

ontological concepts was an unexpressed ontological judg-

ment, and this produced a false position from the outset.
The negative judgment of " this is not " or " this is e ' c '

"
only through me remains in all circumstances an ontolo-
gical judgment, and one, moreover, which does not lie
within the confines of transcendentalism but represents a
frontier violation with the most fateful consequences.
2. The second way of escape from the impasse is to fall

back on the purely transcendental thesis. God is not

objective. In this case that implies that he is no longer
accessible even to the reflexion of consciousness on itself.
" "
He is in the pure execution of the mental act, but he
stays withdrawn from every attempt to seize him in reflexion;
" " "
he is as actus directus. The act is always in reference
"
to transcendence, which means, in the transcendental
"
framework, that being ", independent of the I, is possible
even if not given, whereas in idealism being and I merge
one into the other. Unless the transcendental thesis is once
42
 Act and Being

again to finish in the system of reason, it clearly requires a

" "
new version of the bounds of reason, viz. the concept of
" "
being and the concept of the act in reference to this

being. For here is the reef on which the first attempt

foundered.
Our own problem of being is not the problem of the exist-
"
ence or proof of a real external world "- 1 No, we are con-

cerned to ascertain the mode of being of divine revelation. In

thiscontext the meaning of the idea of transcendence, the
" "
meaning of the outside or of being, receives far clearer
of the
expression than in connection with the problem
external world, however much both problems may coincide
for idealism. The implications of the Christian idea of
God, for example, for the question of the external world's

reality, will receive attention in the positive section of this

book.
The conceptual world of Karl Earth leans toward the
1
If, to give an example,
A. Riehl (Der philosophische Kritizismus, 2,
the dependence of the consciousness on
pp. if. and 172) wishes to make
sensation the proof of the external world's reality, the logico-epistemo-
logical problems of idealism
remain unaffected even idealism does not
doubt the existence of an empirical external world but the argument
lacks force as a contribution to epistemology, since it confuses psycho-

logical and epistemological significance. The same considerations

"
disqualify the inference of the external
world from social emotions ".
W. Dilthey's inquiry into the reality of the external world, which at
first sight impresses as biassed in favour of tradition, proceeds
from our
to it, and makes a thorough-going
experience of the will and resistance
to demolish the whole of idealistic epistemology in favour of
attempt
a philosophy of life determined by history. Thus interpreted, Dilthey's
work is of crucial importance for the most recent philosophy of history,
and it has of late acquired influence over theology as well. (Beitrage Z.UT
unseres Glaubens an die Reditdt der Aussmwelt
Losung der Frage vom Ursprung
und seinem Recht, 1890, Gesammelte Schriften, V, x. Halfte, pp. 9off.
and 134.)
43
 Act and Being

transcendental theory. 1 But, in one way and another, the

idealist encroachments on negative ontological judgments
(vide supra)) and their incompatibility with the idea of God,
have nearly always been sensed, and frequently laid bare
in full.

Likewise the epistemology of R. Seeberg 2 in unmistak-

able contrast to that of Brunstad may be far more correctly
denoted as Kantian-transcendental than as idealist; the
same is true of his idea of religious transcendentalism. In
the entire nexus of his ideas there are signs of the wrestling
of theology with transcendental epistemology. Underlying
all is an idea of God conceived as actus purus. In God there
is no
potentiality, only actuality; that leads Seeberg to pure
voluntarism. God, the primal will, works as actus on man,
and thus affects him, as a being whose nature is conscious
mind, in his will. This encounter of God and man epistem-
ologynow tries to comprehend in transcendental terms.

Though man is potentiality and act, while God is

pure act,
their encounter
evidently possible only in the act of
is

awareness, therefore the essence of man lies in the mental

act. however noteworthy that the term potentiality is
It is

plainly intended to provide for the concrete man, whom

Seeberg believes himself unable to cover with the unmodified

the idea of the act. Now, if God and man can meet only in
awareness, i.e. in total freedom and fullmental clarity as to
the meaning of the process, 3 this is the point from which

"
1
On this point cf. our chapter, Revelation in terms of the act ".
*
R. Seeberg, Dogmatik, I, especially pp. 70110, 257-284.
8 "
Op. p. 103:
cit., it cannot
If the contact is to be a mental one,
last for aninstant without entering consciousness or becoming ideal ";
p. 91; The contact of man and God happens in such a way that man
44
 Act and Being

Seeberg can evolve his transcendentalism. 1 As the con-

sciousness "has" God, so he (God) "is"; if it "have"
" "
him not, he is not. What counts as valid is what is of
2
necessity thought by the subject. Being appears to be
submerging into act (somewhat in the manner of Brunstad's
theory). But at this very point Seeberg refrains from taking
the step to idealism. On
the contrary, we now find in his

argument bluntly juxtaposed statements which place the

existence of the supramundane and of concepts to boot
in the human mind alone, yet admit of no doubt as to an
"
objective being ", i.e. a being of the supramundane which
3
manifestly transcends consciousness.
This is the way in which the danger of identifying God
with the I is averted. 4 God is the supramundane reality
transcending consciousness, the lord and creator. This

c<
consciously and willingly himself performs, in consciousness of his

freedom, the movement performed in him by the mind of God ".

"
1
Op. cit., But inasmuch as this mental entity is shown to
p. 87:
be real only in a particular disposition of man, and can be known by us
as real only in the form prescribed by this disposition, we shall have to
*
term the attendant sensation and knowledge transcendental '".
"
2
Op. cit., p. 279: The necessity of an item of subjective knowledge
is for transcendentalism the proof of the known thing's objective reality".
"
Op. cit., p. 105: And
concepts per se are not in the
so, just as

objective world but exist only in the mind of man, the supramundane
has no other existence than that it enjoys in the religious movements of
the human the religious intuition of the human mind.
will, In this
sense, here too, a matter of
it is transcendental feeling and vision. But,
just as transcendentalism does not cast doubt on the objective being
of the world, the ideas we here express do not cast doubt on the objective
being of the supramundane. Only, this should be said: the super-
world is perceptible to the human mind which is to say, existent in
no other form than that of one specific menial apprehension".
4
Op. cit,, p. 93.
45
 Act and Being

postulate Is an unconditional requirement of Christian

theology and is elaborated by Seeberg throughout his
dogmatics. But on the other hand it can be said that God
is the consciousness of man, or only for
existent only in
it. where Seeberg's theory of the religious a priori
This is
"
comes into play; man, he says, is charged with the
" "
capacity for becoming directly conscious of pure
mind ". 1 According to this theory, man is able to receive
God into himself, i.e. to experience his immediate contact
in feeling and intuition, and on these premises it is a thor-

oughly justified transcendental inference to attribute a

being to God only in so far as a being-conceived corresponds
to him. But at the same time it is also genuinely trans-
cendental to refrain from an absolute negative judgment as
to being; in the present case that restraint is exercised.
Be thatas it may, we are told of a direct becoming-aware, of
God directly touching man. The zeligious a priori is said
to be fundamentally open to the divine will, there is said
to be a mould in man wherein the divine content of revela-
2
tion may
pour. In other words, revelation must become
religion, and that is its nature. Revelation is religion. But
this represents a trend from pure transcendentalism to

idealism, in that the absolute, to use Seeberg's terms, enters

" "
here again into direct contact, union, with the I, my
will is subjected to the primal will and now God's will is

1
from idealism.
Cf., op. cit., p. 81, Seeberg's self-dissociation
"
2
Op. cit., As a formal mental disposition, the religious
p. 104:
a priori has no content of its own. The positive content of faith is
dictated by revelation, the a priori is simply the intrinsic capacity,
within becoming aware of the being and activity of
this context, for
the supramundane God, and accordingly for receiving the content of
his revelation, as divine, into the soul *'.
 Act and Being

active in me. The difficulty lies in the idea of the religious

a priori, in spite of the latitude Seeberg accords the concept.
If we are to suppose that the urgent capacity to receive
revelation is given with this a priori, Le. in implication, the

capacity of faith, that is already going too far. Natural

man has a cor curvum in se. Even natural religion remains
flesh, and strives after the flesh. If revelation is to come to

man, he must be wholly transformed. Faith itself must be

" "
created in him. In this case there is no ability to hear
"
before the hearing ". These are thoughts which Seeberg
himself expresses, and refers to in Luther. 1 But faith stands as
the work of God, in a sense inapplicable to natural religiosity,
for which the religious a priori noted by Seeberg certainly
holds good. According to Luther, revelation and faith are
bound to the concrete message, and the Word is the mediator
of the contact between God and man, admitting no other
"
directness ". But then the idea of the a priori can only
be understood to imply that certain mental forms are
preposited for the formal understanding of the Word, in
which case, it must be admitted, a specifically religious
a priori loses
meaning. All that pertains to personal

appropriation of the fact of Christ is not a prioristic, but is

owed to the contingent action of God on man. What
Seeberg calls feeling (Empfindung) and intuition come under
the same criticism, for the purely formal
understanding of
the Word requires no other noetic forms than are supplied

by the a priori of thought itself.

In Seeberg's account of epistemology we find the clearest
juxtaposition of theology's two great concerns: firstly, to
affirm being transcendent of consciousness, and make
1
Dogmatik, 2, pp. 506 ff.
47
 Act and Being

possible the formation of proper ontological concepts;

secondly, in the reference of revelation to the consciousness,
to expound the nature of the latter as act. It is a corollary
of these problems that not the transcendentalist-idealist
system, but only genuine transcendentalism, provides
philosophical concepts for their solution. However, it will
be later shown that even transcendentalism is inadequate
without radical transformation and completion.
 THE ONTOLOGIGAL ENDEAVOUR

Act pointed to being. Hegel restored the ontology that

Kant had dethroned 1 Kant's thing-in-itself was trans-
;

formed into the concept of substance which Hegel found

indispensable in defining mind.
the business of true ontology to prove the primacy of
It is

being over consciousness and to uncover this being. The

immediate aim of ontology is no more than to say that there
" a real
is being outside consciousness, outside the sphere
"
of logos and the limits of ratio "; knowledge of objects
refers to this being . . . but it is not coincident with this

being ". 2 The proper problematic sphere of ontology is

centred in underlying concept. In the combination of

its

logos and a clash of two equally mighty claims.

6v there is

The claim of logos, as presented in the preceding pages, is

disputed by the ov which is in itself free. How, in these
circumstances, is a science called ontology possible? Clearly
it is only possible if one member of the combination here
it must be logos desists from its claim, or in the case of
1
Of. Enzyklopadie, 33.
*N. Hartmann, Grundlagen einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 1925, pp.
iSofF.

49
 Act and Being

a rapprochement between the two. But this can only arise in

the movement of thought, in such a way that the very move-
ment of thought somehow partakes in essence of being.
Here the step from Husserl and Scheler to Heidegger is
foreshadowed.
If the logos does in fact surrender its claim, it abandons
its system of immanence. The question is whether either,

per se> is possible for logos. For, by an ironic subterfuge,

logos surrender only to recover with greater strength.

may
Being, when
it forms the content of intention
(Sein als
"
gedachtes Sein), remains an object "which 's an entity. i

But the endeavour to regard thought itself as being is the

test-case where transcendentalism, idealism and ontology
must go their separate ways in decisions no longer imposed
" "
by intrinsic logic. The first imagines thought to be in
" "
reference to transcendence, idealism swallows up
transcendental being into thought; finally ontology leaves

being its full independence of thought, over which it also

accords it priority. Genuine ontology, therefore, must
always be a critical science,which does not even assume
being as given for being, which here includes even existence
and quasi-hypostatic noesis (Dasein und Denkseiri), transcends
" "
the given, the entity but thinks of itself as already
existing only within the logos, in self-understanding; it is
cc
a science which forms ideas about this fact of
already
"
existing in context, and ever-mindful of the following
it is
" "
correlation: at all times thought must be suspended in

being.
Here the logos must voluntarily refrain from usurping
creative power whether it does so in true kenosis or in
krypsis remains, of course, to be shown; spontaneity must,
50
 Act and Being

in consideration of being's independence, be transmuted

into receptivity. In other words, insight or pure intuition

(intueri=look upon, take note of) must evolve from creative

thinking. And but a step from this position to
yet it is

systematic ontology, which throws being itself open to the

inspection of intuition. This, however, is a flagrant retreat

to behind the transcendental and idealist skepsis. Where
thought or intuition have access to the object without
need of mediation, there can be no genuine ontology,
" "
for this insists that
thought is at all times suspended in
being, therefore critically involved in the process of cog-
nition.

Systematic ontology supposes pure being to be intuitively

beheld in its transcendence of consciousness. Of course, if
being should happen to be hiding behind phenomenal
"
entities, thought will have the task of uncovering or clearing
"
the way to this being. There are different ways of regard-
"
ing this operation of laying bare the essence ". But, in

principle, man has eyes to see; he carries within him the

possibility of penetration to the eternal essentials. In

Platonic terms, he has beheld ideas, and now eternally bears
anamnesis within him, until he attain pure vision once again.
Man understands himself from what he has beheld, or sees
the revelation of his own eternal nucleus. That is the un-

varnished, unadulterated systematic ontology which has

weathered modern philosophy unchanged, though expanded
by Malebranche, in his doctrine of the participation of all

knowledge in the idea of God, and later by the ontologism

of Vincenzo Gioberti.
On the lines of the preceding chapter, the following pages
1
5
 Act and Being

are intended to present a systematic ontology with the aid

of a few salient examples.
In some way, the phenomenology of Husserl and his school,
though it has an intense pre-occupation with ontological
problems, is still within the pale of idealism. The conse-

quences be briefly shown. To Husserl * phenomenology

will
is the study of the phenomena in the pure consciousness.

It is only concerned with phenomena given to consciousness.

"
From the outset, the question of existence is put in inverted
commas ". Realities and phantasmagoria vie together on
the one level of consideration. Thereby arises a rift between
essence and reality (essentia, that is, and existentia). To be
sure, every act intends an object, consciousness is always
" " "
awareness of x ", but whether this intentional object

envisaged by consciousness is also a real object is irrelevant

to the question of pure essentiality. Noesis refers to noema,
" "
but the noeto-noematic parallel structure remains im-
manent in the consciousness. The empirical tree (for
" " " "
example) is not yet given in simple perception (in
"
schlichter Ansckauung "), but before something can be
" cc "
given ", the method of putting in inverted commas
"
i.e. phenomenological and eidetic reduction ", must be
brought into operation. Thereby a way is found at once
through theory to the pre-theoretic givenness. The simple
givenness is marred by all interpretation, and anything real

already represents interpretation, for reality is constituted

2
by consciousness, and so everything real must be absolutely
1
Logische Untersuchungm, 1922 (Vols. i and 2 are particularly relevant),
**
Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie", 1922.
a
"Idcen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie," pp. lySff., pp. 87-107.

52
 Act and Being

"ruled out of bounds " *; thus phenomenological-eidetic

reduction has the task of filtering away the empirical and
factual from the eidos, the essence, so that the transcendental
no longer interpretative consciousness and the essence
stand over against each other in simple givenness. In both
kinds of reduction, essential vision (Wesensschau] , which is
the specific cognitive method of phenomenology, comes into
action. Just as there is a purely sensory, so there is a purely
"
mental perception (eine rein geistige Aiischauung). The
beholding of essences, it too, is perception, just as surely as
the eidetic object is well and truly an object. . And so . .

the beholding of essences really is

perception it is, more-
over, beholding in the most meaningful sense, not a mere,
more or less vague bringing to mind ;
thus it is a perception
supplying the datum at first hand, seizing the essence in its
' '
2
corporeal selfhood."
Here two trains of thought seem to cross paths in Husserl. 3
It is clear that the concept of essential vision implies that
there stands over against the subject a being, independent
of him and self-contained, whose concept he forms from direct
4
vision, i.e. without interpretation or inventive production.

(What meaning could there be in reduction to the eidos, if

in theend that too were understood to be a product of
consciousness?) We may say that this train of thought

1
idem, pp. 53*!
2
idem, p. n.
8
Attention has already been drawn to this, notably by R. Winkler's
Phdnomenologie und Religion, 1921 (pp. 6^ff.) y by J. Geyser's Neue und alte
Wege der Philosophie and his Max Schelers Phdnomenologie der Religion, 1
924,
and by W. Ehrlich in his Kant und Husserl, 1923.
4 " 22 and
Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie/' 24.
53
 Act and Being

accords with a transcendental realism. Against this must

be set the contention that consciousness is the constituent
of all entities, i.e. the emphasis on the immanence in con-
sciousness of all being. Only the regularity which con-
sciousness projects beyond itself, so as to order reality within

it, is transcendent of consciousness. 1 But if this is the case,

the cognitive process can no longer be understood as
" " " "
vision copying the eidos in ideation even Husserl,
of course, rejects the realistic epistemology whereby con-
2
sciousness is the mirror of being but must be represented
" "
as creative, as generating this or that object (Cohen),
3
as spontaneity, In other words, a priority belongs not on
the side of the object but on the side of the consciousness.
In this way Husserl joins hands with pure idealism in a
manner that seems to me quite at variance with his original
thesis. As for the idea of God, if one not unreasonably
expects from systematic phenomenology something re-
4
sembling the Platonic idea, Husserl undeceives us by re-
quiring that God's transcendence should be put in inverted
commas. 5 Phenomenology poses no questions of being, only
questions of essence. Yet Husserl finds room in the question
of God for a passing reference, a kind of footnote, to the
" "
possibility of some special intuitive intimation of God,
"
such as would require not a mundane " concept of God
but a special form of transcendence. 6 Even if he here
attains no genuineclarity, the fact remains that HusserPs
1 "
Idem, e.g. p. 96 Nature Is only as constituting itself on lines laid
:

down by consciousness ".

2 3
Idem, pp. 185!!". Idem, 23, p. 42.
4
Cf. Logische Untersuchungen, I, 2, 64, p. 168.
5 "
Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie", 58.
Idem, 51, p. g6n.

54
 Act and Being

phenomenology rests on belief in the possibility of intellec-

tually mastering the absolute from out the pure conscious-

ness whether by means of the first-hand data of essential
vision, or in some spontaneous manner. Nevertheless this
is a belief which restores the I, the consciousness, to the
place of God which Husserl would deny, though it is an
inescapable consequence of his philosophical premises. The
ov has been overcome by the human logos, and there is no
more arriving at truly grasped concepts of either being or
God. Being as existentia is resolved in essentia, and the seal
is set on the transition to idealism.
Now we see in Scheler how what Husserl confined to pure
"
logic strives to embrace the totality of life ". Evidently
Scheler noticed the idealistic character of HusserPs pheno-
menology, and simply resumed the genuinely phenomeno-
logical thesis with the object, first, of purging it thoroughly

of idealistic notions and, second, of developing it consistently

in the fields of ethics and philosophy of religion. Where
Husserl failed to prevent the emergence of a priority of
logos over ov, despite his intention to preserve being's
independence, Scheler reverses the position with his lucid
elaboration of being's priority over consciousness. A
decisive step was taken when he transferred the a priori
from the formal and noetic to the supraformal, substantive,
valuate and given, 1 which is a proper development from the
basic premises of phenomenology. The object of inquiry
is now no longer the general possibility of a priori data but

the actual quid-est of the given. 2 Here else there would

1 Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materials Wertethik^ 19*21, pp.
43-87.
*
Op. cit., p. 50.
55
 Act and Being

be no philosophising is an obvious postulation of being

transcending consciousness. The question asked by Kan-
tianism and idealism is dismissed as formalistic, therefore

wrongly framed because laden with unwarranted assump-

tions. The datum present in values is there for the beholding

in the rich fulness of every living thing, from the humblest

1
to the highest values of the good and the holy. But these
values are predicates of being, i.e. such as inhere in a being,
in logical independence of any consciousness; they lie
displayed to the consciousness, just as consciousnm is

This moreover, as will be

displayed to the consciousness.
shown, has great significance for the doctrines of guilt,
original sin and grace.
Turning to the idea of God, we find that God's trans-
cendence of consciousness is preserved with the priority of
being. God and I do not finally coalesce, yet two difficulties

arise :

In the first place, it is a problem to discover how Scheler

regards the actual existence of God, the positing of God's
reality, and this is a question which remains unanswered
not only in his Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale
Wertethik but also, inspection, in Vom Ewigen im
upon
Menschen. It appears as if Scheler takes as the object of his

investigation the essence, but not the very existence, of God,

and avoids proceeding to an affirmation of God's 2
reality.

1
On this point cf. Przywara, Drd Richtungen der Phdnomenologie;
Stimmen der %eit, 1928, and J. Geyser, Max Schelers Phdnomenologie der

Religion, 1924.
*
See the opinions of J, Geyser, op. cit, pp. 35ff., and of E. Przywara
in Religionsbegriindung. Relevant pages are, in Der Formalismus in der
Ethik und die material* Wertethik, pp. 411. (especially n. i), and, in
Vom Ewigen im Menschen, pp. 5410*.

56
 Act and Being

Scheler Is unwilling to recognise as a proof of God's existence

the fact that belief in the reality of God is given as part of
the religious phenomenon. Such shyness in making state-
ments about existence is of a piece with Husserl's way of
putting reality in inverted commas. When Scheler opines
that the demand for a proof of God outside the basic religious
"
is tantamount to
experience asking that the existence of
colours should be rationally demonstrated before they are
x
seen, or of sounds before they are heard," we indeed see

clearly his will to posit reality, but we also see that the

undertaking comes to grief in the same way as Cartesian

methods of proof. Wherever he may stand in the matter,
Scheler has with the problem of reality because,
difficulties

though he does not hesitate to base his thought on the

hypothesis of the essence's transcendence of consciousness,
he cannot find his way back to the existentia and finally loses
his grip on the essentia as well.

The second difficulty stems from the question of how being

and human logos under which latter concept we may
" "
include the sense of values are interrelated in the
context of Scheler' s theory. No doubt a sphere transcending
the logos not to say a primacy is reserved for being, i.e.
"
for the essence ". Nevertheless, according to Scheler
" "
himself, in the sense of values the envisioning I is
endowed with the capacity to take into itself the whole
world, the fulness of life, the good and the very deity; by
virtue of its vision of the highest values, it bears within itself,
as a person, something which permits it to understand God
and itself. In this way the being of God, of world and I is
once again delivered into the hands of the person remaining
1
Vom Ewigen im Menschen, pp. 55 if.
57
 Act and Being

in itself and understanding itself from itself. But this time

it is the person produced the being, only as if the
not as if

being were accessible to the I from out itself, as if man had

1

the power to confer and confirm the Tightness, the justness

of himself and of the world. 2 Husserl leaves room for a
transcendence of God, without probing further. Scheler's
version of essential vision reaches out for God himself,
him in love, pulls him down to its own level
swings up to
this especially in the last period of Scheler's literary activity.
The All is sealed in by theI, and in this All there is also

God.
" "
This well accords, even, with the will to build a system 3
which at first seems incompatible with the bases of pheno-
menology, but demonstrable in Husserl no less than in
is

Scheler. The goal of philosophy is not a " picture-book

"
phenomenology but a system. A system, however, is
made possible only by an immanent idea of God, or by
total exclusion of the idea of God from the context of
philosophy supposing that were a practical possibility,
which we would beg leave to deny. In the system there lies
the mastery of being by the knowing I, but hence also the
"
Fs claim to divinity the path to the usurpation of godly
vision ". 4
If previously God's mode of being was in question, it is
here determined, by the power of essential vision, to be
1
Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, p. 304, at the
foot.
*
The original text has a play on the word rechtfirtigen, to justify, which
is composed of recht, right or just, and fertig, achieved or complete
Translator.
8
Logische Untersuchungen, I, Chapter 1 1 ; Formalismus ... p. 7.
4
Przywara, Drei Richtungen der Phdnomenologie, p. 262.

58
 Act and Being

that of a
phenomenal entity over against which the I stands
infreedom of vision. Here the being which transcends the
phenomenal entity, the very being whose mode thought
intuitive vision know themselves to be, has been lost to
sight, and the upshot is the system of pure immanence.
Phenomenology since Husserl has mishandled a problem
whose clarification ought to have been indispensable for its
"
very premises: the problem of being. Not until reality ",
the existence on which inverted commas have been so

arbitrarily imposed, undergoes a new and radical onto-

logical treatment, can we look for so much as a clarification
of the act-being problem, on which Husserl and Scheler
shed no light.
Here we have the point of departure for the most recent
full-scale phenomenological investigation, which takes onto-

logy itself as its object: Martin Heidegger's Sein und %eit.

In what appears to be the bluntest reversal of preceding
1
phenomenology, existentia is made the essentia of esse.
"
Precisely where Husserl puts in brackets ", Heidegger
discloses being itself. Correspondingly, where Husserl and
Scheler talk of timeless essentialities and values as the Being
of the entity (in so far as this distinction is made!), in

Heidegger Being is essentially interpreted in terms of

temporality; and that again is only possible because the

" "
place of Husserl's pure transcendental consciousness is

taken by the man himself concretely putting the question of

being, the man who is withal an entity in the peculiar form
of his own kind of Being: Dasein 2 An understanding of
.

"
being can only be gained by proceeding from a hermen-
1 Sein und gelt, Halle, 1927, p. 42.
*
Ddsein means the entity which exists, namely, man himself.

59
 Act and Being
ec
eutics of Dasein 'V which is analytic of the existentiality
of existence", Being understood from Dasein^ since at all
is
"
is in such a way that
times Dasein already being is under-
stood as something like Being ", 2 But, in all given instances,
" " "
Dasein is my Dasein. Understanding of Dasein is itself
3 Cfi
an ontological characteristic of Dasein". Dasein is
being
in the manner of an understanding of being. That being
towards which Dasein can have such and such an attitude
or relation, and towards which it always does have some
kind of attitude or relation,, we This
shall call existence".
" "
existence is not mere Being-present-at-hand (" Vor-
handensein ") a mode of being not proper to Dasein but only
to the res but is the already encountered decision and
" "
realisation of Daseirfs potentiality for Being (**
Sein-
c *

konnen"}. "Dasein is not something present-at-hand

which has also the endowment of potentiality in this or that
direction., primarily potentiality. Dasein is what it
but it is

can be, and possibility to be." But great attention

as it is its

must here be paid to the fact that Heidegger understands

the concept of possibility in a dual sense. His primary
concern is, as stated, the ontological analytic of the existen-
"
tiality of existence, i.e. the dissection of what constitutes
existence ". 4 So what are here brought to light are the
existential-ontological possibilities of existence these must ;
" "
be distinguished from the ontico-existentiell possibilities,
about which philosophy is silent. But neither kind of possi-

1
Op. cit., p. 38,
"
2
Idem, p. 17: in der Weise ist 3 mend so etwas wig Sein zu ver$teherf\
"
8
Idem, p. 1 2 : Seinswrstandnis ist sdbst dm Stsinsbatimmtheit des
Daseins".
4
Idem, p. 12.

60
 Act and Being

bility can be termed absolute possibility, for the very reason

that the existentiality of historical (geschichtlich) existence is
"
the object under review. For its part, however, the
analytic of existence is in the last resort existentiell, i.e. rooted
"
in the ontic". 1
The substance of man is ... existence."
Dasein always finds itself already in a world. It is " being-
" " 4 "
in-the-world it is in
being with others ", in
; being
c '
fallen into the they ", in everydayness. It understands
" " " "
its being-in-the-world as its having been thrown
into the world. Dasein is the being-in-the-world of Dasein,
and its being, as potentiality, is
epitomised in the proposition
" c ' " 5
that existence is care this toobeing understood in
a purely ontological-existential way. As temporal Dasein
within historicity (Geschichtlichkeit}, it must order itself
upon its own final end, in order to attain its original whole-
ness. And end this death. 6
In the most proper sense,
is
" 3>
Dasein is being towards death But instead of living in .

"
this its proper condition of commitment to death ",
"
Dasein always finds itself in process of falling into the
* ' 7
they ". But the call of conscience summons Dasein to
"
rise to its own very particular potentiality ".
8
And yet
"
the caller is Dasein itself, finding itself thrown into the
world, and anxious about its potentialities ". For Dasein
" <c
wishes to return to its true escaping the uneasiness
self,

it feels in the world; in the call of conscience it understands

that it is guilty in its gravitation to the world, its futility,

and enters into the possibility most proper to it commit-

1 2 3
Idem, p. 13. Idem, p. 1 17. Idem, pp. 52ff.
5 " 6
<ldem, pp. i i4ff. Idem, pp. iSoff. Sorge". : Idem, pp. 235ff.
7 * 8
Idem, pp. ayoflf. Idem, p. 277. Idem, ibid.
61
 Act and Being

ment to death. Yet this it does not by withdrawing from

the world, but by taking its fallenness upon itself as its guilt.

In this way Dasein lays hold of its most authentic possibility

and its proper existence, inasmuch as it appropriates its

own wholeness.
What is germane to our inquiry here is the unconditional

priority accorded to the question of being over the question

of thought: It has been the fundamental mistake of

Descartes and all his followers to have neglected putting the

" 1
question of being to the sum in cogito ergo sum "- But this
"
is not even possible unless there is something
question
such as understanding of being ". 2 All thought is but an
ontological characteristic of Dasein. Thus even thought
does not produce its world for itself, but finds itself, as
Dasein, in a world; it is already in a world, just as it is
3
already itself. Already Dasein is its possibility, in authen-
ticity or inauthenticity. It can choose itself in authenticity,

or lose itself in inauthenticity. The decisive point, however,

" "
is that it already is whatever it understands itself to be
and defines itself as. Here is obviously a leaning toward
4
philosophical realism. It is self-evident that Dasein, which
is in the world, is in fact in a real external world. In this,
realism is right, but prove this
it is wrong when it tries to
"
external world. The scandal of philosophy does not lie
in the fact that this proof has hitherto been wanting, but
in the fact that such proofs are still awaited and attempted.
, .
Rightly understood, Dastin resists such proofs because

Idem, pp. 22fF. and an.

1

a
Idem, p. 200.
8 " *' " "
Idem, p. 42 (Grammatically, its may refer to thought or
** "
existence Translator.}
4
Idem, pp. aooff., 43.
62
 Act and Being

in its being it
already is what subsequent proofs consider
still to require proving onto attempted proof it". l
An
presupposes an isolated subject on one side, and on the
other an isolated entity. Being, however, can never be
elucidated via entities, but can only be understood within
Dasein (in the I-reflexion of idealism!).
So here, too, idealism gets its due. Being is essentially
2
Dasein, but Dasein is mind in its historicity. Nevertheless,
passing beyond idealism, this Dasein itself must ask the
question of its ontological structure, since only in this way
can any light at all be shed on the meaning of being. 3 And
so we have the priority of being over thought, yet being =
Z>&r<?itt=understanding being of mind. That is how
Heidegger's ontology finally takes shape for us. Being
understands itself in Dasein^ in mind. But Dasein is man's
understanding in historicity, in the given temporal context
of the decisions he has taken.
Fromthe standpoint of the problem of act and being it

appears that here the two members of the dichotomy are

established in a genuinely consistent relation. True, the
priority of being has finally assumed the character of a
priority of mind-being, but not in such a way that mind
annihilates being: it merely "fe" and understands being.
This solution, though reminiscent of Hegel, shows itself
1
Idem, p. 205.
"
2
Cf. Przywara on Heidegger, op. The being of (human)
cit., p. 259 :

mind the absolute essence of being.

is . However much he may talk
. .

of reduction from truth to being Heidegger's being remains nothing

other than the being of consciousness".
"
8
Heidegger, op. cit., p. 208: If the name idealism implies appre-
ciation of the fact that being can never be explained in terms of entity,
* '
but isalways the transcendental for every entity, then in idealism
lies the one possibility of correct philosophical problem-formulation".
63
 Act and Being

essentially distinct from his theory in that being is Dasein,

"
being in the world ", existing in temporality. Thus pure
consciousness no longer dominates in Husserl's sense, nor
in Scheler's the supraformal a priori. Heidegger has
succeeded in forcing act and being into partnership in the
concept of Dasein that is to say, the actual decidings of
Dasein coincide with its given decidedness. In non-decision,
decision has already taken place. No absolute potentiality
is attributable to Dasein. The ontological-existential struc-
ture cannot be wholly divorced from the ontic. And Dasein
is not a discontinuous succession of discrete acts, yet neither
the continuity of a supratemporal being. It is perpetual
is it

deciding in time, but also the constant fait accompli.

Two factors enable Heidegger to break through to this
solution :

he interprets being so thoroughly in temporal

Firstly,
terms that even the eternity of God must, according to
Heidegger, be thought of as, in principle, drawn into time,
if it is to be philosophically considered at all. 1 Thus Dasein
" "
always is already, whenever it determines itself by
decision. If on these occasions it were reaching down out
of a sphere transcendent of time, it would always be having
" "
to constitute itself anew. Being is extricated from the

static conception of the entity. It is explained with reference

to understanding of being, thereby drawn into the flux of
self-determining existence what Dilthey calls the " totality
of life".

Secondly, temporal Dasein is always directed upon itself

" "
in self-decision, but this itself" already is ", so as to be
able to decide itself. It is able to seize its most authentic
1
See op. cit, p. 427, n. i.
 Act and Being

possibility, which it is offered by the existence it enjoys. It

can arrive at itself, for it can understand itself; but this
means that Dasein is included in the world, or rather that
the world is included in Dasein.
It is the basic thesis of this ontological metaphysics that
Dasein in temporality already possesses, at all times, under-
" "
standing of being, that it is (so to speak) open to itself,
and that Dasein in this way becomes insight into being. Thus
the genuinely ontological development of the suspension oi

thought in being is permeated by the systematic theme of

man's having, qua an understanding of being at his
Dasein,
disposal. Nevertheless it must be highly instructive for

theology to see ready-formed in philosophy a metaphysical

definition of the interrelation of act and being in which the

concept of being remains self-contained despite its involve-

ment in the internal reflexion of consciousness.
Heidegger's
philosophy a consciously atheistic philosophy of finitude.
is

It relates everything to the self-incapsulation, in Dasein, of

the finite. It is cardinal for the existential analysis of Dasein

that finitude should be conceived as sealed-in. Incapsulation
can no longer be separated from finitude. Like all other
existential characteristics of Dasein, its potentiality is revealed
as determined by the incapsulation of the finite, not as a

general existential constant of finite Dasein (nicht als allge-

meines Existential endlichen Daseins}. In its essence the philo-

sophical concept of finitude that of incapsulated finitude.

is

Here, then, no room has been left for the idea of revelation,
and with the knowledge in revelation that finiteness is

crcatureliness, i.e. is open to God, allconcepts of being must

be formed anew. It follows that Heidegger's concept of
being, despite its powerful expansion of philosophy through
65
 Act and Being

discovery of the Existential sphere, cannot be adapted for

the purposes of theology. 1

Beginning with the anti-idealistic hypothesis of being's

priority over consciousness, Catholic Thomism shatters the
concept of basically closed being, in order to let in the
transcendence of God. Within being, esse and essentia are
rent apart. 2 While both coincide in God, so that one might
wonder whether his existence comprehended his thusness,
3
or his thusness his existence (for God always is what he
should be according to his essence), in man they are asunder.
His essentia is related to his esse, but the latter always differs

from it in some way, forman is in process of " becoming ",

while God is " in being ". God is the eternal
"
Is
"
that
"
is in all
"
Was " and Will-be ", 4 yet is also infinite beyond
them. It is not that the esse of man is divine and the essentia
non-divine, nor the reverse, but the objective relationship
of man and God lies in the former's essentia-esse difference
and the latter's essentia-esse identity, considered together
and as a whole. form neither of pure exclusivity
It takes the

(even if only partial) nor of pure identity (again, even if

only partial), and the two sides of the relationship can rather
"
be considered in a relation of analogy ", as being is
analogous to becoming. That
the Thomist principle of
is

the analogia entis, which Przywara especially, in our time,

has restored with methodical brilliance to the centre of
Catholic philosophy of religion and dogmatics. By this
thorough ontological treatment Przywara' s Thomism appears
1
Cf. also, op. cit, p. 61, n. i.

Aquinas : De mte et essentia.

a
Gf.

Przywara, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologu, 1927, p. 24.

*
Przywara, Ringen der Gegenwart, Vol. 2, pp. 9238!
66
 Act and Being

to have succeeded in opening the concept of being to

transcendence, God is not contained in existence, nor that
in God, but just as God is imagined to exist absolutely in
his own right, so man is envisaged as enjoying a relative
but authentic reality of his own in relation to God (causae
secundae) the concept of analogy demands two substances
:

standing over against each other in relative independence

" " " "
of each other. But, as the Is stands in-over (" in-
"
tlber Przywara's term) the becoming, and the latter
" "
comes from the former (" von jenem her " ist), God is not
divorced from his creature, but is as much in him as he also
allows him that relative reality of his own. (Thence arise
the inferences of all-efficacy, as distinct from sole efficacy,
the theory of the natural and supernatural, and the doctrine
of grace.) This is the way in which Aquinas succeeds in
interpreting existence in temporal terms without sealing it
in itself. The question remains of whether the transcendence
cc
of God's Is ", the analogy of divine being, is really adequate

to express his transcendence as understood by Christianity,

or whether, on the contrary, a metaphysics of immanence
lurks behind the facade. The Thomist theory ot being
holds good for the being of man
qua creature, inasmuch as
his being is defined by St. Thomas as essentially creature-
liness. This implies a continuity of the mode of being in
both statu corruptionis and statu gratiae. With the continuity
of his own
ontological condition there is also guaranteed to
man, by the analogia entis9 a continuity of that of God, so
that his being, whether in the original state of Adam or in
Christ,can always be certain of its analogy to God's being.
" "
God in-over
is still man; but if that is to acquire any
kind of concrete theological sense and not remain purely
67
 Act and Being
"
formalistic and metaphysical, the modes of being in
" ""
Adam or in Christ must be understood and interpreted
in their own right; that is to say, we must ask whether there
is in fact a being of man which is not already determined
" " <c
as his being-in-Adam or being-in-Christ ", as his

being-guilty or being-blessed-with-grace, and could not be

understood only as such. But then, a priori, the ground is
removed from under the guarantee of divine
possibility of a
continuity of being; the eternal Is remains a speculative
" "
idea which is continuously in-over becoming, which
even admits of expansion into an a prioristic system of
natural rational insight, but which is inadequate for a
theological ontology. Primarily not the sheer Is: God is
" " " " " "
he is the just one, is the holy one, he is love.

Theological concepts of being must have precisely this as

their ontological premise, that the Is can in no way be
detached from the concrete definition. Any formalistic
u
attempt to fall something of a more general
back on
nature ", supposedly discoverable behind the specific condi-
tions of divinity, must serve to obliterate the Christian idea
of revelation. The contingency of God's revelation in law
and message is changed into a general theory of being with
occasional modifications, and thus the path to a genuinely
theological concept of sin or of grace is effaced. Only
general attributes can be deduced from the concept of the
analogy of being; the two like-unlike embodiments of being
are fixed in their relational attitudes each other;
vis-ti-vis

but from this standpoint, contingent action, whether of man

or God, Is everything, in principle, must
unthinkable
already be preformed in the concept of analogous being.
But now we come up against the Thomist concept of
68
 Act and Being

existence, as epitomised in Przywara. Man, existing in the

esse-essentia tension, must bear within himself, as a given
existential possibility, the ability to behold the Is the
esse-essentia identity. It follows from this, however, that in
this concept of existence one regards as implicit and already
" "
present what remains only to be made explicit in those
ways of God to man (and vice versa) which are possible
within the limits of the analogia entis. But then human
existence is once more comprehensible through itself, and
it thereby also has access to God. That is the inevitable
consequence of systematic metaphysics. Thus even the
all

attempt to open the concept of being to the transcendental

terminates in an illusory transcendence. There loom into
view the basic features of the ontological proof of God; if
there is a tension in the creature between essentia and esse,
there must be beyond that, underlying that tension and

making it possible, an identity of the pair: the divine being,

" l
as essentia and esse. Just as Anselm arrived at a being ",
but, to arrive at God, remained in the closed
failing
world, Thomist ontology is unable to advance beyond
an intramundane metaphysics in its concept of God, so
long as purports to discover possibilities in man of under-
it

standing himself, and God via himself in other words,

self-" projection on the lines of his authentic potentiality"

(Heidegger) and so long as the world and its idea of God

are both contained within the I; but that means, so long
as there is failure to make room for a revelation, i.e. to form

theological concepts of act and being.

Does this indicate that every ontological thesis is useless for

theology? Such outright rejection is no more applicable

1 n. 3.
Cf. Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, III, 3, pp. 150!".,

69
 Act and Being

here than in the case of the transcendental thesis. In so

far as the act as foundation of being, and being as
both
foundation of act evolve into the I-enclosed system (in
that the I understands itself from itself, can place itself in

truth), they offer no assistance in understanding the idea of

revelation. If on one side the genuinely transcendental
thesisadmitted a being transcendent of consciousness, a
" "
being with reference to which existence was envisaged,
but a being which itself remained non-objective, and if on
the other side genuine ontology considers being the a priori
of thought in such a way that thought is itself suspended in
being, it is an inescapable conclusion that in the first case
the limits are prescribed by reason itself, that in the second
case being somehow falls into the power of the thinking I,
consequently that in both cases the I understands itself from
within a closed system. Per
itself se, a philosophy cannot
*
spare room for revelation let it then recognise revelation
;

and confess itself Christian philosophy, knowing that the

place it wished to usurp is already occupied by another
Christ.

Nevertheless, be that in the following pages we

it may
shall find in genuine transcendentalism and ontology (as
distinct from idealism and phenomenology) certain contri-
butions to the solution of the act-being problem within the

concept of revelation, if only because they have exhaustively

fathomed and argued the philosophical dilemma of act and
being, or because we shall be able to adopt their polar
"
standpoints of man as pure act with reference to ", and
" "
thought suspended in being, in order to test against

revelation, in the sharpest possible antithesis, the merits of

1
See Note concluding Part One, pp. 73 fF*
70
 Act and Being

explanation in terms of act or of being. If that is so, we

may be sure that these theories will emerge from their
encounter with the idea of revelation in a wholly new guise,
" "
but equally we shall know that the with reference to
" "
and the suspension are amenable to theological inter-

pretation, hence, after all, of service in understanding the

idea of revelation.
What offends Christian thought in any autonomous
self-understanding is that man capable of
it considers

bestowing truth on himself, of transporting himself into the

truth by his own resources, since it is reasonable to suppose
" "
that the basis of existence must somehow be within
" "
truth (likeness to God). Here, however, truth comprises
only that reference to God which Christian theology does
not hold possible save in the Word spoken, of man and to
man, in the law and the gospel. It is in this sense that formal
validity may be conceded to the proposition, common to

transcendentalism and idealism, that knowledge about

"
oneself or about God is no disconnected possession but
'

V
" "
places the knower in a direct possessive relation to the

known; employing a terminology which must be further

explained below, this means that knowledge in truth about
"
oneself, or about God, is already being in . . ." whether
" " "
in Adam or in Christ ".
" "
Never being able to give oneself truth represents the
unattainability of a systematic metaphysics; for such knowl-

edge as that would imply would signify a self-placing into

the truth. But neither is such knowledge a possibility for

K. Schumann, Gottesgedanke und %erfall der Moderne>

1
Cf. F. 1929,
closing chapter.
71
 Act and Being
" " l
any critical
philosophy a philosophy with such great
;

expectations of itself would be highly uncritical. Thought

is as little able as good works to deliver the cor curvum in se

from itself. merely by chance that the profoundest

Is it

German philosophy finishes in the I-confinement of the All?

No, the knowledge it
represents is likewise a self-placing
into truth for the world of the untouched by grace is
I

confined to the I though not the truth of God's word,

" "
because it simplynot in this truth; if it were, it would
is

be unable to celebrate here the triumph of the I, but would

have to recognise, in its eternal loneliness, the curse of lost
communion with God. Only thought which, bound to the
" "
obedience of Christ, is
from the truth can place into
the truth. Thus our way is pointed onward to revelation
itself, yet we cannot understand this step merely as a final
possible step, but as one which must already have been taken,
or us to be able to take it.

This something which very recently a group of theo-

is

logians and philosophers, whose ideas join in circling round

the central problem of existence, have understood and

accepted. It remains to be seen, of course, whether they

have succeeded in adequately interpreting the idea of
revelation from the standpoint of the act-being problem.
1 Gf. on Grisebach
the passage in Part Two.
 NOTE
Theological anthropology

If P. Tillich is of the opinion that no distinction can be

made between philosophical and
theological anthropology
(Religiose Furche, n.d., p. 300), one need
Verwirklichung,,

only indicate in reply the concept of revelation. If from

the standpoint of revelation the existence of man is seen by
a theological anthropology as essentially determined by
"
guilt or by grace and not merely as being at risk
"
(Bedrohtheit) in the
unconditional sense philosophical
anthropology able to avail itself of those concepts only at
is

the cost of bursting its frame, of transforming even this

analysis of human existence into an attempt to seize hold of
itself, of in other words becoming theological anthro-
pology. Admittedly, this does nothing to settle the question
of truth. This may be put to the test only in conjunction
with the concept of contingency inherent in revelation.
"
Cf. relevant passages below, also F. Gogarten, Das
"
Problem einer theologischen Anthropologie in ^wischen
den eiten y No. 6, 1929. Recently R. Bultmann (" Die
Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und Der Glaube," ^eitschrift

fur Theologie und Kirche, 1930, No. 5, pp. 339-64) has formu-
lated the interrelation of philosophy and theology in such
a way that it becomes the business of philosophy to investigate
phenomenologically those structures of existence (Daseiri)
which represent the existential-ontological (as distinct, of
course, from ontic) possibilities of believing and unbelieving
73
 Act and Being
"
existence alike. Philosophy sees that existence is in all
cases a concrete existence characterised by a definite 'How' ;
it speaks of the
e
actual fact
'
of this
*
How ', but not of the
"
*
How itself (op. p. 342). cit., The theme of philosophy
is said to be existentiality, that of theology concrete (believ-

ing) existence. The same line is followed by the following

statements on the concept of revelation No believer can :

say more exactly or completely than an unbeliever what

" '
revelation is. What more does the believer know?
c

Just that revelation has descended upon him, that he

this,
"
is in
life, endued with grace and forgiven (op. cit.,, p. 352).
The event-character of revelation and the event-character
of belief can, notwithstanding their contingency, be imagined
within the existential-ontological possibilities of existence.
The precondition for all this is to be found in Bultmann's
cc
unpursued assertion that existence in faith is still, in any
"
case, existence (op. cit., very point
p. 343). But this is the

where further questions ought to be asked, for here lies the

root of philosophy's infinite claims. The question is whether
one can of existence irrespective of
assert this uniformity
revelation (be it only the uniformity of existential-onto-

logical possibilities) without making revelation superfluous.

If one can, then the believer does in fact know nothing
**
more " about revelation, in principle, than the unbeliever.
But the position is otherwise when seen from the standpoint
of revelation itself: the believer knows everything about
revelation whereas the unbeliever knows nothing; the
reason is that the essence of revelation lies in its character
as a contingent event. For the purposes of existential-

ontological analysis, revelation may be envisaged among

the standing possibilities of existence, but then it does not
74
 Act and Being

possess its essential character of an event one originating

in God's freedom. Only where forgiveness of sins is an
event do I know of revelation as a believer, and where that
event does not take place, the forgiveness of sins of which
I
"
know " is not the forgiveness of sins attended by revela-
tion: if this were not so, the doctrine of justification would
be tottering. But if revelation is essentially an event brought
about by the free act of God, it outbids and
supersedes the
existential-ontological possibilities of existence. Then there
is no longer an essential identity of existence per se in all
instances whether the event of revelation has taken place
or not. Then revelation claims to initiate the unity of exist-

ence and to have sole right to proclaim it; philosophy sees

the deepest root of its claims excised. The abandonment
of the ontic by retreat upon the ontological is considered
inadmissible by revelation. In the existential event of
revelation the existential structure of existence is attacked
and transmuted. here no second mediator, not
There is

even the existential structure of existence. For revelation,

the ontic-existential and the ontological-existential structures
coincide. Inasmuch as it consistently observes man without
regard to the event of revelation, the phenomenological
definition of existence according to its existential structure
" " "
as historical ", as care ", as being unto death ", is,
for revelation, no an abstraction and hypothesis than
less

a merely biological definition of man. That is why, finally,

this interpretation of existence is also irrelevant to theology.
"
(Cfr especially Kurt Lowith, Phanomenologische Onto-
"
logie und protestantische Theologie in the %eitschrift

fur Theologie und Kirche, 1930, No. 5, pp. 365-99.

I find

myself very largely agreeing with him against Bultmann

75
 Act and Being
"
in what he has to say about the preformed ideal of
"
existence underlying even existential analysis, in point of
which the general idea of existential analysis is widely
open to criticism: I have greatly profited from Lowith's
article.)
 PART TWO

The act-being problem in Revelation,

and the Church as its solution

 REVELATION IN TERMS OF THE ACT

A. The contingency of revelation

The proposition that man cannot place himself into truth

is not self-evident in the sense of entitling or obliging one
to postulate thenceforth a revelation capable of supplying
truth. On the contrary, the untruth of human self-under-
standing isobvious only from the viewpoint of revelation
and its truth, onceit has taken place and been
accepted in
belief. Were it not so, revelation, as the final postulate of
human thought, would itself be ensnared in the falsehood of
self-understanding, with the result that man, from the
postulates of his own existence, would enter the position of
adjudging himself right and placing himself into truth
which nevertheless the revelation he postulates, if fully
intended as real, is alone able to do for him. Consequently,
only the person already placed in truth can understand
himself as in truth. For from within truth he can, in his
" "
potential reproduction of his being known by God
(cf. p. 32 above),
understand or recognise that he is situated

in truth,i.e. re-created from untruth into truth. But only

from within truth, i.e. in revelation, which is to say, whether

judged or pardoned, in Christ. This is what yields the

79
 Act and Being

theological concept of existence existence is envisaged in

:

reference to revelation, as encountered or not encountered

by revelation. There is no longer any inherent potentiality

of being encountered: existence either is or is not actually
encountered by revelation, and this happens to it, as a
" "
concrete, psychophysical whole, on the borderline which
no longer passes through man as such, or can be drawn by
him, but is Christ himself. This concept of existence will
have to be made explicit in the following pages, and attest
its own validity in various connections.
It is in this frame of reference that one should envisage
the agenda of all theology, which ever since Duns Scotus
and William of Occam has laid special stress on the con-
tingency of revelation; but in the contingency of revelation
is asserted its transcendence of reason, i.e. its absolute
freedom in relation to reason, likewise to all possibilities

deployable, so to speak, by an existence understood as

potentiality. Revelation, which places the I into truth,
i.e. gives understanding of God and self, is a contingent
occurrence which can only be welcomed or rejected in its
positivity that is to say, received as a reality but not
from speculations about human existence as such.
elicited
It an occurrence with its basis in the freedom of God,
is

whether positively, as his self-giving, or negatively, as his

withholding of himself.
The proposition of God's freedom in revelation admits
a double interpretation. a formal one: God is free
First,
inasmuch as bound by nothing, not even by the manipulablc
" " " "
entity of his historical Word. The Word as truly
God's is free. God can give and withdraw himself absolutely
according to his pleasure; in either action he remains free.
80
 Act and Being

He never at man's discretion; it is his honour and glory l

is

to remain utterly free and unconditional in relation to

"
everything given and conditional. Now it would follow
that the relationship between God and man in which God's
revelation may truly be imparted to me, a man, must be
a not a static relationship, in the sense that its very
free,

constancy may never mean anything other than constancy

in a transaction not only continuous but at every moment
beginning, in all seriousness, at the beginning. It may

never be conceived as already given, already obtaining, nor

even as analogous to a natural law or mathematical function;
instead, one must always think of it as actwise (aktuell)
i.e. the instability of a deed in course of execution ". 2
with all

Revelation is interpreted purely in terms of the act. It is

something happening to receptive man, but within God's
freedom to suspend the connection at any moment. How
"
could it be otherwise, since It is God's pleasure, majestically
"
free (Earth) which initiates the connection and remains
its master. God is understood as pure act. God's freedom
is the possibility but with all that possibility implies
comprehended in the concrete act.

Inevitably, exception must be taken from the first to the

fact that the God-man relationship should be resolved in
terms of pure act-subjects in the very context where revela-
tion's transcendence of consciousness is unequivocally
asserted. And the suspicion therefrom arising, that trans-
"
Luther, W. A., 23, 157: It is the honour and glory of our
1
But cf.

God however, that, giving himself for our sake in

(unseres Gottes Ehre),
deepest condescension, he passes into the flesh, the bread, our hearts,
mouths, entrails, and suffers also for our sake that he be dishonourably
(unehrlicK) handled, on the altar as on the Cross ".
2
Barth, Dogmatik, I, 1927, p. 295.
81
 Act and Being

cendentalism is lurking here somewhere, receives confirma-

tion. God reveals himself only in acts freely initiated by
"
himself. Man
touched with grace when, and from the
is

fact that, the Word of God conies to him, no sooner, no

later, and not otherwise. So far as is known, the heavenly

manna in the wilderness could not be put into storage "- 1
God's Word has no being in independence of his self-
revelation to man and its being heard and believed by man.

This, however,, is where we may recognise the transcendental

thesis. Because God himself creates the hearing and belief,
and is indeed himself hearing and believing, in man, 2 "God's
Word is only in the act of belief, never in that abstraction

from the strictlyoccasional event, at God's sole discretion,

8
which we call grace." God's being is solely act, 4 is conse-
quently in man
only as act, and that in such a way that
any on
reflexion the accomplished act has ipso facto lost
contact with the act itself, with the result that the act can
never be grasped in conceptual form and cannot therefore
be enlisted into systematic thought. It follows that although
Earth has no hesitation in making use of temporal categories
(moment, here and now, before, after, etc,) his concept of
the act must not be regarded as temporal. The freedom of
God and the act of belief are essentially supratemporal; if
Earth nevertheless stresses the act which, recurrently
"
beginning at the beginning ", is at all times free, so that
there can be no inference from one act to the next, we must
"
1
Earth, Scbicksal und Idee in dcr Theologie", in %wischm den
Zeiten, 1929, No. 4, pp. 324!
2
Earth, Dogmatik, I, pp. 35 yf. Also %wischm den %eiUn9 1925, No. 3,
pp. 239$*. ; Dogmatiky I, pp. 284!!.
3
Earth, in %wischen den ^jsiten, 1929, p. 325.
4
Idem, p. 321.
82
 Act and Being

understand that he is endeavouring to translate the trans-

cendental concept of the act into terms of the
geschichtlich.
However, this
attempt is bound to come to grief against the
fact that
(according to Earth) no " historical
"
moment is

capax infinity so that the

"
empirical action of man belief",
" "
obedience becomes at most a pointer to God's activity
and can never, in its historically, be faith and obedience
themselves.
Thus the problem of transcendental
philosophy, which
we discovered at the beginning, presents itself afresh. God
recedes into the non-objective, the non-available. That is
a necessary consequence of the formal
conception of his
freedom, which might be traced without difficulty to the
combination of nominalism and the idea of
contingency in
the closing stages of medievalism. 1
God
remains always the master, always the
subject, so
that if any man should think he has God as an object, it is
no longer God whom he " has "; God is always the " com-
" "
ing ", not the existing deity (Earth).
It was inevitable
that this formal
understanding of God's
contingent activity should lead Earth to develop his idea of
" "
the dialectical ". God's Word is not bound, and never
will be bound. Theological dialectic is
genuine dialectic
to the extent that it is to this idea, to the extent in
open
fact that it will subserve this idea, subserve the freedom of
the Word of God ". 2 The freedom of God's Word cannot
1
Admittedly, the late-scholastic concept of God's freedom appears to
refer only to unreal possibilities. In that way the positivity of eccles-
iastical order could be preserved.
According to Earth, however, the
freedom of God persists within the positive order, with a rider of
explosive
possibilities for all historical forms.
2
Barth, in ^wischen den %eiten> 1929, p. 346.
83
 Act and Being

be pinned down by unequivocal theological statements. It

snaps their pronouncement thus there are only in twain:

"
theological statements under critical reservation ". x All
Earth's theological propositions are rooted in the necessity
of saying not-God when I speak of God (because / speak of
kirn), and not~I when I speak of the believing I; thus due
regard is paid to the idea that genuinely theological concepts
do not an undialectical system
fit into if it were otherwise,
concepts of an act-character would have petrified., within the
system, into fixed ontological abstractions, and the concept
" "
of contingency would be excluded: the coming changed
" "
to the existing God. Revelation would have sunk to
rest in the theological system. This is countered by the
" "
critical reservation. But it is not as if the systematic
formula for a theology of revelation had at last been found
"
in a dialectical theology; no, for theology too, there is a
justification only by faith
3
'.
2
The reservation made by
dialectical theology is not a logical one, such as might be

suspended in the antithesis, but one real and recurrent in

3
view of predestination ; however, as such no theological

R. Bultmann derives concept of dialectic from the historicality

1
his
of existence, and one to say, while acknowledging the
I feel this entitles

difference between their concepts of existence, that on this point there

is no fundamental difference between him and Earth. Man in the
"
historical situation proposes, or is ", the question to which God gives

his free answer, and the only way to talk about this answer in histori-
" " "
cality is dialectically ". Dialectical does not mean so much
" ** **
determined by the object determined by the historical reality J>
as

by the concrete question of the situation, and by God's answer. See

Tfteologische Blatter, yth Year, No. 3, p. 66.
2
Earth, in Jgwischen den %dten> 1929, p. 348.
The reproach cast up against Earth by Grisebach and his friends,
8

that at bottom he has a catholicising influence, because even his theology

 Act and Being
"
idea can ever seize God: it remains, strictly speaking, a
testimony from the Devil ".
1
God remains free, non-
objective, pure act, but he can, if he choose to do so, make
use of a theology in order to attest himself therein. That
does not within the power of the theology but, again,
lie

within the freedom of God. Thought is a cohesive whole,

incapable of radical self-disturbance; of this Earth is

conscious that even dialectical theology is no way to catch

of the reservation is a system with the mere difference of including

a reservation seems to me, quite apart from an untenable philosophical
and theological assumption which is mentioned in the text, to do Barth
an injustice. One cannot determine to achieve the theology of the
"
Word, one can only be determined in the direction of the theology of
the Word. . . Not because my dialectic might be supposed so superior
.

in quality, but because God wishes to make use of me and that question-
able instrument, thus not because I have found the philosopher's stone,
squared the circle, traced the line of intersection of the two planes,
reality and
truth, . . but because
. it has pleased God to make himself
"
known to rne (Barth, in Jfyuischen den %eiten, 1929, p. 347). If H. M.
Miiller (** Credo ut intelligam; Kritische Bemerkungen zu Karl Barths
Dogmatik", Theologische Blatter, 1928, No. 7) and Gerhard Kuhlmann

(" Zum theologischen Problem der Existenz", eitschrift fur Theologu

und Kirche, 1929, No. i, p. 33, n. i) think that Barth's critical reservation

constitutes his systematic method, I myself feel compelled to take a

"
different line of interpretation. Theological cognition can never
"
catch God (Barth, op. cit). It is only possible that God should make
himself known to it of his own free will. Both sides of the proposition
are meant in an existential (existentiell) sense; thus the negation does
not purport to embody the secret way to the universal truth about God,
the way to the system, but the witness of obedient thought, which
must be testified anew on every occasion. As will be seen, there is a
further inference, which will be discussed subsequently in the text, to
the effect that there must be obedient theological thinking, even without
the critical reservation.
1
Barth, in Jgwischen den eiten y 1929, p. 348.
85
 Act and Being

God. How could it be otherwise, since before all thought

stands unfathomable predestination?
This attempt at unsystematic thinking, corresponding to
God's freedom as formally understood, finds its parallel in
a new trend of philosophy, which itself takes part with lively
interest in the development of modern theology. E.
1
Grisebach has tried in various works to clarify the idea of
or rather, point the way to reality: every system, in
one way or another, conflates reality, truth and the I;
purports to understand reality and have it at its disposal.
"
In his satanity ", man is tempted to draw reality, the

absolute, his fellowman, into himself, but in this way he

remains alone with himself in his system, and fails to arrive
at reality. Theory is unable to form a concept of reality.
" "
Reality is experienced in the contingent fact of the
" " " "
claim of others Only what comes from outside
can show man the way to his reality, his existence. In
" " ce "
sustaining the claim of my neighbour I exist
in reality, I act ethically; that is the sense of an ethics
"
not of timeless truths but of the present 'Y
2
Man can
never have the absolute at his disposal, i.e. bear it

within him, and for that reason he never arrives at the

system.
Friedrich Gogarten and H. Knittermeyer have developed
this thesis for theology in such a way that the place of man's
encounter with the absolute, with God, is taken by his
encounter with the Thou of his neighbour, his restriction

1
C especially Die Grenzen des Erziekers und seine Verantwortung, 1925,
and Gegenwart: eim kritische Ethik, 1928.
"
3
On Grisebach's concept of time, cf. Gegmwart^ Chapter 12, Vom
Gestern, Heute und Morgen ".

86
 Act and Being

by the other working itself out in history if not actually

as

constituting history.
1
Faced with this Thou, all " human-
"
istic-systematic thought, tending to ontological concepts,
must confess its impotence. For we are dealing with history:
that is, the meeting of I and Thou. The meaning of the

gospel is that the claim of one's neighbour was met once and
for all in Christ. 2

Undeniably, the objection to be raised against this thesis

is that in the attempt to avoid any postulation of an absolute,
the Thou is in effect made absolute. If the Ps claim to be
absolute is be transferred merely to the Thou, not to him
to
who is above both and above the absolute, we appear to be
heading for a wholly ethicalised version of the gospel;
worse, even the concepts of history and theology are grow-
ing obscure, which means that revelation is being lost to

sight.
1
Tillich's theories also concentrate on the frustration of man. But
he does not advance beyond the speculative in his attempt to define the
"
nature of the Protestant message, firstly, as the drive to live-through
"
the impasse of one's limitations (die Qrenzsituatiori) and, secondly, as
"
the pronouncement of the Yes, which befalls man when he takes his
"
Grenzsituation with utter seriousness (Religiose Verwirklichung, p. 40;
his third definition is irrelevant here) ; the same may be said of his

rejection of all "religious contents, even God and Christ" (p. 38).
Speaking in concrete terms, what else is man's Grenzsituation but sin;
"
and what else is the Protestant message to preach but the religious
"
content of grace and forgiveness of sin? But the Grenzsituation must
be preached to man with the Word of judgment and mercy. If I could

transplant myself into truth without the aid of the message, I could
place myself in truth of my own accord, and lumen naturae would be
justified in itself.
1 The " Dogmatics " of both Gogarten and Knittermeyer begin from
this viewpoint (respectively, Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott, 1926, and
Du Philosophie und das Christentum, 1927). Cf. Gogarten in %uuischen den
%eiten9 1929, No, 6.

8?
 Act and Being

Now if, as stated, the I is called into reality by the Thou,

if the Thou shows it theway to its existence, this certainly

appears to open to Thou and

I a possibility of being and
"
understanding themselves in reality, of reciprocally plac-
" "
ing each other into truth ", without God and revelation.
If this is so, the possibility is based on postulation of the
Thou as absolute, and it therefore follows that such a
" "
a theological hypothesis,
critical philosophy is useless as

for the one hypothesis of theology is that revelation is man's

only of entering truth. 1

possibility Thus Grisebach's
" "
critical philosophy, because ideal even while critical,
"
remains a system. Even if it could be genuinely unsys-
tematic ", it would still appear to trap reality, to enter
reality its own resources.
from Thought, if it is genuine
thought, bent on is
completeness, for thought is even able to
"
comprehend the claim of the other ". Grisebach is right,
and comes a long way meet Christian thought, when he
to

says that man can be shown the

way to reality only from
outside. But the natural man's first intimation of this
" "
from outside is not supplied by his contact with his
neighbour's claim, even though it is his reaction to this

which finally to exercise moral conduct;

enables him
no, it
supplied by
is encounter with something that
his
"
at the same time enables him to understand the from
"
outside in a meaningful sense revelation accepted in
faith.

The from a system, as a deliberate gesture

will to refrain
of ethical modesty towards others, is no more a prerequisite

" "
1
Man can be "in reality and **
in truth only through God.
True reality is reality seen through the truth of the Word of God, so
that whoever is in reality is also in truth, and vice versa,
88
 Act and Being

than good works for the understanding of revelation. God-

lessthought however ethical remains self-enclosed. Even
a critical philosophy is powerless to place the philosopher in
truth, because its criticism issues from itself, and the seeming
reality subservient to the (in this case
is still
undemanding)
claims of the cor curvum in se. Revelation isits own donor,

without preconditions, and alone has the power to place in

reality. From God to reality, not from reality to God, goes
the path of theology. Accordingly the will to refrain from
a system must fail in its purpose thought stays within itself,
;

in sin as in grace. That thought is bent on a system, cannot

disrupt itself, is self-contained, that is its
property by reason
of its creation and its no longer
eschatological end, where it

needs self-disruption because in reality, placed by God

it is

in truth eternally, because it

sees. But for that reason any
system of man which is not eternally in truth is an untrue
system and must be broken in pieces that the true system
may become possible. It is the preaching of the Word that

brings about this breakage through faith. And so we come

to the problem of theology, predication and faith, which is

treated at greater length below.

In sum all thought remains in itself so long as existence
:

remains in itself. But revelation, the Word, leads existence

out of itself into a state of self-criticism. Even when existence
has been placed in truth, its thinking about itself and God
remains within itself, but is repeatedly disturbed by the
reality of revelation in a way which distinguishes it from
profane thought, as will later be explained; this means that
man must have been placed in reality by God if there is to

be a place for reality in his thought.

If the knowledge of God and self divinely implanted in
89
 Act and Being

man is considered purely as act, any being is of course

wholly excluded. The act is always inaccessible to reflexion;
" "
it fulfils itself always in direct consciousness (see above).
That follows from the formal understanding of God's
freedom. In this way theological thought seems condemned
to remain in principle profane; it can only, in the event,
stand "under the sign of God" (thus Earth). But the
following objection has to be made: what can it mean to
say that theology requires a justification by faith (see p. 84
above), when it can only be a question of justifying the
theologian who thinks the theology? Indeed it is open to
doubt whether the existence of the theologian, placed in
truth, serves to distinguish his systematic thought from

profane thought, whether there is any such possibility at all

(if so, on what basis?) Seen from the viewpoint of a formal-
isticunderstanding of God's freedom, the theory of revela-
tion as pure act can only serve to deny the possibility of a
distinction between profane and theological or if we may
anticipate ecclesiastical thought.
The whole situation impels one to ask whether a formalistic
understanding of God's freedom in contingent revelation,
conceived wholly in terms of the act, is really the proper
groundwork for theology. In revelation it is a question less
of God's freedom on the far side from us, i.e. his eternal
isolationand aseity, than of his forth-proceeding, his given
Word, bond in which he has bound himself, of his freedom
his

as it is his having freely bound

most strongly attested in
himself to historical man, having placed himself at man's
disposal. God is not free 0/man but for man, Christ is the
Word of his freedom. God is there, which is to say: not in
eternal non-objectivity but (looking ahead for the moment)
90
 Act and Being
"
haveable ", graspable in his Word within the Church.
Here a substantial comes to supplant the formal under-
standing of God's freedom. If it should prove itself, it will
suggest a redirection of our attention from revelation seen
in terms of the act towards ontological ideas. But we may
be sure that from the new standpoint, with its reappraisal
of revelation, the problem of the theological system will
assume quite a different aspect and resolve itself in quite
a different way. It would remain to be seen to what extent
one would still be justified in using concepts of the act to
explain revelation.
But first we shall examine the epistemological
of all

problems deriving from act-theory in this context, and subse-

quently observe the concept of existence from the same
viewpoint, after which the state of the case will demand
that we proceed to ontological theory.

B. Knowledge of revelation

The explanation of revelation in terms of the act has its

philosophical the genuine transcendental

counterpart in
thesis. Epistemologically this signifies that one can speak
of the object of knowledge only with reference to the cogni-
tive subject. Essentially nothing is thereby said about the
being of the entity outside its being known. The transcen-
dental can never become the object of knowledge; being
the basis for the possibility of all cognition, it evades the

cognitive act because it is, precisely, the pure act in cogni-

tion. Anything objective is involved in or formed by
all that remains free of the I is the basis of the
cognition;
known as of the knower; in other words, being, unlike the
 Act and Being

entity, is not involved in the I but transcends it. The

identification of being and the
I, precipitately inferred by

idealism, is impossible once the I recognises that it exists in

time, bound to its existence in history.
If we now try to place revelation in this frame, we have
the one choice of considering objective or non-objective.
it

Epistemologically, it certainly appears that we must place

itin the non-objective, for the objective is involved in the I,
in which case the being of the entity, as we have seen, retains
its freedom but cannot become objective. Yet if revelation
is non-objective, the theological implication is that God
always remains a subject and evades every human attempt
to seize him cognitively. If, on the other hand, we are really

speaking of must somehow, by definition,

revelation, it

become manifest man, knowable by man; and in fact

to

God's revelation has, as we know, become knowable in

Christ. How are we to understand that? God can never
become the object of consciousness. Revelation can only be
understood in such a way that God must be borne in mind
as a subject; but this is possible only if God is also the
subject of the knowing of revelation, since, if man knew,
then it was not God that he knew. But this knowing of
"
revelation is called believing *', what is revealed has the
name of Christ, the subject of the understanding is God as
the Holy Spirit. So in revelation God is in the act of

understanding himself* That is his location, and he cannot

be found in my consciousness for any reflexion on this act.
Essentially, the representation of God which I have in my
consciousness is not God himself, God is only in the act of
" "
belief. In my belief, the Holy Spirit is
accrediting
92
 Act and Being

himself. That this is so is no demonstrable matter of fact

" "
but is
merely existentially true, i.e. in the encounter
with revelation, in the act of belief itself, which for the rest
remains an act psychic like the others. Accordingly my
knowledge of God depends in the event on whether God
has known me in Christ (I Cor. 13, 12; Gal. 4, 9), whether
he is effecting faith in Christ within me. There is therefore
no prescriptive method for acquiring knowledge of God;
man cannot transplant himself into the existential situation
from where he could speak of God, for he is unable to place
himself into truth.
And so this unadulterated development of the trans-
cendental thesis makes a stand against any objectivisation
of God, whether this makes its appearance in the Catholic
canonisation of history (the idea of the Church), in Protes-
tant verbal inspiration or in the nineteenth-century theology
of consciousness. God is not the God of our consciousness

(Earth contra Schaeder); it is quite certain that a specific

idea of God enters our consciousness when we speak of
God, but it is no less certain that God himself is not thereby
intercepted inasmuch as we cannot speak of him at all as
something there for the finding: on the contrary, only God
himself can speak of God. To make God the content of my
consciousness means to understand him as an entity. This
has two consequences :

" "
i. God not, in the sense of an objecive entity; he is
is

understanding himself in man within the act of faith ; he is

in the self-understanding of human existence within revela-
" "
tion. Whether he also is outside the act of faith, faith
alone can say. The transcendental thesis leaves room for

a being thus transcendent of the I, without (of course)

93
 Act and Being

bringing it within reach of the I. For that reason faith

may not be understood as essentially a psychic happening,

though it is that too, but as the pure deed of God and of

God alone.
2. If in this way God apprehended as the subject of
is

cognition, it is equally pressing, on one side, to understand

the human I as subject of the knowledge of God (since
otherwise the act of belief would have no contact with
human existence) and, on the other side, to avoid identifying
the human with the divine I. Thus one asks what mediation
there is between the divine and the human acts of belief,
what relation, in other words, subsists between grace and
religion, revelation and history, with reference to the

problem of knowledge.
This is the point where the profound difference between
genuine transcendentalism and idealism stands clearly
exposed. If in the latter (as has been shown, above) revela-
tion was essentially religion through the identification of
I and being, the original transcendental thesis marks a sharp
u "
contrast between the two. God is only in belief, but the
subject of the believing is God himself. Hence faith is
something essentially different from religion. But (even in
Barth) no light is shed on how we can envisage the human
religious act in conjunction with the divine act of belief,
unless we sever them to allot them essentially different
" "
spheres, or suppress the subjectivity of God if not,
alternatively, the existential impact of revelation. Religious
acts of every kind be stimulated by man, but only
may
God himself can bestow faith, as full readiness to hear the
Word; only he indeed can hear. The act of belief as
reflected on cannot be distinguished from the religious act;
94
 Act and Being

belief, because effected by God, is only in the act, never

something left for But from that it follows that
the finding.
the I of belief, supposedly mine and God's together, can
never be anything already present, but only
something
acting in the act of belief. Whether I do or do not believe
is therefore something I cannot learn from any reflexion
on my religious acts, but it is equally impossible, while I am
in process of believing, to centre my attention on
my belief
in such a way that I would have to believe in my belief. 1
Belief is never directed to itself, but only on Christ, on
something extrinsic. And so it is only in the believing
in Christ that I know that I believe, which is to say
that here and now I do not know it, and in reflexion on
the believing I know nothing. From the non-objectivity
of God follows necessarily the non-objectivity of whatever
I knows God but that implies the non-objectivity of
faith.
If we were to discard this interpretation of revelation for

another, the position could not but alter completely. How-

ever, such an exchange would only be possible if accom-
panied by a critique of the transcendental concept of knowl-
edge which played so large a part in the purely act-centred
theory of God's freedom and revelation. It was only within
that epistemology that God's non-objectivity could be
brought to clear philosophical expression and objectivity
repudiated. Here some may disagree, but it may be that
the concepts of objectivity and non-objectivity in the non-
transcendental senseshow themselves, in this context,
inadequate to what they are called on to express..

1
Even Luther could speak in these terms: W. A., 5, 164, Cf.
O. Piper, Theologie und reine Lehre, 1926, p. 5.
95
 Act and Being

Knowing and having: Through the act of knowing the

known comes into the power of the I; it can be ranged
within the system of general knowledge. Qiia known, it
" "
is only in this system. The goal of cognition is to close
this system. Once it succeeds, the I has become master of
the world. For that reason alone, revelation is inimical to
the system; for God is the master of the world, and the
true system is an eschatological possibility. From that it

seems an inescapable conclusion that God can be known

only in the act, i.e. existentially. Otherwise he would
deliver himself into the system. For knowing is having.
Thus a chasm opens up between systematic and existential

knowledge. Though the latter has in principle

(existentiell)
its place within the former, as general knowledge it must

sacrifice the cogency of the existential. This seems to be the

only way in which God's claim to sole mastery can here be

attested.
The world of my systematic knowledge remains in force
even over the extent of my knowledge of God and fellow-
man. Taking this standpoint, Bultmann is of the opinion
"
that there can be talk of God only as a kind of talk about
" " "
ourselves *, since the grasp of our existence signifies
"
grasp of God ".
2
But here, at least in the formulation,
he expresses a view which comes near to ignoring the fact
that it is impossible for faith to be directed elsewhere than
to God. It is speaking of God which first enables us to

speak truly of ourselves. In reflexive theological thought

I have no closer reference to my existence than to God.
"
1
Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden? " in TheoLogische Blatter,
1925, No. 6, p. 133.
8
Idem, p. 134.

96
 Act and Being

On the contrary, one might paradoxically say that God is

nearer to me than my existence is, 1 inasmuch as it is he
who first discloses my existence to me. So there is no
" "
thoroughfare via ourselves to knowledge of God. It
would therefore be impossible to speak of God or know

(wissen) about God in a science (Wissenschaft] of theology

unless it were incorrect to think of revelation as pure act,
unless there were such a thing as a being of revelation
outside my existential knowledge of it outside my faith
on which my faith, my thought, my knowledge could "rest".
Like transcendental philosophy, the theology evolved from
the transcendental thesis is entangled in the peculiar
reference of existence to transcendence. Its knowledge is
implicated in the problem of existence. But a science
(Wissenschaft}, the essence of which is its knowing (wisseri),
not its must be passionately interested in concepts
asking,
of being; what mode of being is apposite here must remain
for the present an unanswered question.

G. Man and decision

If existence Is within truth only in the act of encounter

with God, we may say that at a given time it has relapsed
or is relapsing into untruth. Being unable, however, to
" " " "
place itself into truth, it is only in God's decision for

it,which of course must also be understood as its decision

" " "
for God. In other words, it is in its having reference
"
to God ", which rests on God's having reference to the I ".
Only existence standing in truth, i.e. in the decision, under-
stands itself, and that in such a way that it knows itself
1
G Luther, W. A., 23, 135-
97
 Act and Being

placed In truth by Christ, in judgment and mercy. Only

" " "
at this point is it true to say I am a sinner or I have
"
been forgiven ". Outside the decision this
may be a known
truth ", but not truth for me. And the recurrent lapse into
untruth must be understood as decision against God,
therefore as God's decision against me, his wrath against me.
Thus declining to decide is already decision.
is the consequence for the concept of existence, as
This
it stands in the centre of dialectical theology, of interpreting
"
revelation solely in terms of the act. Whether we know
it or not," 1
man
is the question put to God, to which only

God can give the answer. But this question, which we are,
"
is not our destiny but our doing. ourselves are the We
2 "
accomplishes of our lives". Man's being is not con-
" "
ceived i.e. by St. Paul as a nature or substance, but
accomplishes itself comportment towards God's claim,
in its

hence in its conduct, given that this is no process expending

itself in time (like the working of a machine) but decision
3
and responsible behaviour".
1 " " in
Bultmann, Die Frage der dialektischen Theologie %urischen
den geiten, 1926, No. i, p. 43.
2
Barth, Dogmatik, I, p. 72.
3
Bultmann in 1928, No. 3, p. 66.
Theologische Blatter, Bultmann
"
continues : On
that very account, he does not have power over his
own being, since it is at stake in every Now, under the possibility, for
Paul, of being determined by God or by sin". Here the concept of
possibilityis clearly suggested to Bultmann by Heidegger's Existential-

ontological analysis of Dasein as the possibility of ontic existing. Conse-

quently it includes the possibility of an ontological understanding of
Dasein unaffected or unencountered by revelation. But, seen from, the
" "
viewpoint of revelation, if to be possible means anything in reference
to sin and grace (whether
existentially or existentiell) it means to be ,
"
already in one or the other. Here Bultmann differs very
'*, really in,
considerably from Barth, a point which has been demonstrated with
98
 Act and Being

For man, to exist means to stand under God's claim, to

conduct oneself, to make decisions. Existence is in pure
agere (Aktualitdt). Consequently there is no self-understand-
ing save in the act itself. There are no a priori concepts of
existence (keine Vorbegnffe fiber Existent). Man's existence is
either in sin. or in grace. Through (contingent) revelation
there is only sinful existence or existence touched by grace:
there is no potentiality.
In Bultmann's endeavour to use the historicity of existence
as a basis for interpreting its instability (its invariably
"
being already guilty ") lurks the danger of a concept of
existence achieved outside revelation. One can interpret
the historicity of being from the position of sin, but not the
state of sin from historicity.

In the indissoluble and exclusive reference of existence to

revelation the original transcendental thesis comes into its
"
own. The I is "with reference to transcendence; it has
instants of decision, but it decides in such a way that its

decision automatically a having-been-decided by the

is

transcendental, just as the "with reference to transcend-

"
ence has as its basis the reference of (transcendent) being
to Dasein. The problem here is how Dasein qua decision can

be envisaged in continuity. This might appear simple if

Dasein could be thought to decide over and over again for
"
the possibility most its own ", i.e. for sin, in which case
this possibility is already reality. But even here we are still

absolute clarity by G. Kuhlinann, in the J^eitschrift Jur Theologie ttnd

Kirsche^ 1929, No. need hardly be said that Bultmann is here no

i. It

less widely separated from any understanding of act.

99
 Act and Being

without indication of the light under which the being of

sin can be understood as a whole. Still more does the new

existence of faith appear to resist interpretation as a con-

" "
tinuity of being "* How
are we to imagine a being in
faith 'V when the faith is an occasional, divinely effected
decision? The requirement of continuity applies not only
to the new existence as such but to the whole I as a unity,
and to the empirical total I in general. The question is:

how and with what right are we to think of existence, in

particular the new existence, as a unified whole?

When we put the question of continuity, it becomes
evident that Heidegger's concept of existence is useless for

elucidating foz'jzg-in-faith. Heidegger's Dasein is in con-

tinuity, since it is in the state of having relapsed to the
world, in whose favour it has decided.
Always Dasein finds
itselfalready guilty ; it
2
can summon itself back to
itself

out of the world, in conscience, but this possibility only

confirms its perpetual condition. Now it is impossible to
consider this already being in guilt as ontologically analogous
to being in faith, because being as potentiality is confined
within its own bounds, whereas faith is not in itself a human
3
potentiality, therefore not a being wherein existence finds

1
English has faith and belief where German has only Glaube, but faith
is already the being of belief. (Translator.)
2
Schuldig, in Heidegger, expresses the existential-ontological, not the
concrete Christian sense of the concept of guilt, therefore we cannot
" "
adopt it as the starting-point of our interpretation of being in sin.
(It may be helpful to remember that Schuldhas a basic sense of" owing ",
debt "Translator.)
3
Neither in the existential-ontological nor in the ontic sense: it is
not any kind of possibility but a contingent advent of revelation in
reality. Neither is sin a human potentiality, not even of fallen man, nor
even an absolute possibility: it too is a happening reality.
100
 Act and Being

itself as it attains itself. If understanding of being is

regarded
as an ontological characteristic ofDasein, we must with some
dubiety ask whether and how the being of self-understanding
existence is conceivable in the circumstances of an extrinsic
revelation. It is unthinkable in the frame of Heidegger's
Existen^ since this is confined within its existential-

onto-logical possibilities. Yet only a being could under-

lie the continuity of the new existence in unity with the
I.

At this stage, further possible solutions are offered by

attempts: i. to preserve the continuity of the new existence

at the expense of that of the total I (Earth) ; 2. to assert the

continuity of the total I at the expense of that

of the new
existence (Bultmann).
i. In Earth we find the new I formally defined as the
" "
non-being of the old L In any case the new I is at once
" the suspension
not-I "- 1 It is not intuitively evident; it is
"
of the old I, and imperceptible. It is
strictly
the non-being

of the first world which is the being of the second, just as

the second has its basis-of-being (Setnsgrund) in the non-being
of the first ".
2
"The man to whom
God reveals himself
(sick offenbarf)
man to whom God cannot become man-
is the
ifest (offenbar}. ... He would have to conceive himself as
not existing in order to conceive the Word of God coming
to him. the position is that the man
Properly understood,
to whom God in reality reveals himself must see the revela-
3
tion in this, his own impossibility".

1
Gf. Romerbrief, 3rd edition, especially pp. 1258"., 2s6ff.
raison d'fae, which would
Op. cit., p. 142. (Srinsgrund may mean
2

modify the apparent tautology Trans.)

8
Dogmatik, I, p. 287.
101
 Act and Being

But the reason for Earth's statements lies in the fact that
"
he can conceive revelation only as non-revelation ".

However, as the negation of the old man, the new man

can in fact be understood in continuity of the I. Yet two
considerations remain:

(a) Are we to think of the new I in unity with the

"
empirical total I, or does it remain the latter 's
heavenly
double "? This is a question which puts Earth's concept of
the act on trial. If the act of the new I has a supratemporal

continuity, danger of empirical theology is wholly

the
averted but at the expense of man's historicity, hence
existential act-character. As absolutely supratemporal the
act of the new
(=act of the
I Holy Spirit) must be regarded
as the horizontal, as well as the infinitude of the vertical,
whence we may more easily understand Earth's characteristic
wavering between use and rejection of temporal definitions
1
of the act of belief. In essence, the eternal act always

"precedes" "any" historical act:in fact, because it is

free; logically, because for that very reason conceived in

Earth is well aware that he has to define the
pure negation.
total I as historical, yet his concepts have already been
over-defined before he approaches that of the historical.
When he comes to it, he doubtless says everything that
needs to be said, but he has unfortunately said too many
things beforehand. Consequently he can no longer render
the I comprehensible as a historical total I. As against
this we maintain that the essence of the actus directus does

not lie in its timelessness but in its intentionality towards

1
See p. 82 above, with preceding quotations, and cf. Earth's
" "
Bemerkungen zu H. M. Muller's Lutherbuch in %wischen den geitcn,
1929, No. 6.
102
 Act and Being

Christ, which is not repeatable at will, because it is freely

given by God. This is as much as to say that its essence is
expressed by its manner of touching upon existence by
which we mean the totality of historical, temporal Existenz.
For this reason alone it is not amenable to demonstrative
"
heres and theres ", even if it does fulfil itself in the concrete,

conscious, psychic event whose material may be reproduced

and submitted to reflexion. This is a valid application of
the proposition (see p. 1 2 above) that the actus directus may
offer material to reflexion, though in its pure intentionality
here founded in and directed on Christ it does not enter
reflexion at all.

(b} If I and
not-I are envisaged in the relation of inter-

negation, the belief of the I must be directed towards its

identity with not-I. But this forces the act of belief into a
" "
crooked path. Belief knows only an outward direction,
to cross and resurrection, and knows itself, as an act of the

empirical total I, to be critically affected with it by those

events. It is in this sense that dogmatics has to grasp the
problem of continuity. For Barth there would also be the
question of how the believing I, which as believing is already
not-I, could still believe in this iaot-I 3 or whether there are
two distinct acts of belief, one of the I and another of the
not-I. In this way the problem is once more reduced to
1
that of the actus directus

1
Naturally one cannot fail to see that Barth himself tries his utmost
can only believe in God; it is on this very point that
to insist that faith
the dialectical method of discussing God hinges. Notwithstanding,
there is still an between my asking, in faith, about
essential difference

my identity with myself and my asking about the grace of God in

which this identity must have its basis. Of its nature, belief can
no longer call itself in question, since it has a basis of unity, though
103
 Act and Being

2. Bultmann's concept of historicity enables him to

imagine the continuity of the new I with the total I.
1
The
whole I stands under God's claim: in decision for God it

becomes the new I in toto, in relapse to sin the old I. Always

"
it is entirely itself. We are always on trial, to see how we
will seize the possibilities of our historical existence; since
the historical fact of Jesus Christ, to see whether we want
to belong to God or to the Devil." 2 The Word of forgive-
3
way into historicity. So far, so good. But
ness points our
how can we now envisage the new I in continuity? Is
being in Christ constituted only by every conscious act of
decision for Christ? And what in this case is decision?
" "
What is the meaning of wanting to belong to God or to

the Devil? Clearly a decision by God is postulated, for

this decision is neither an existentiell nor existential possi-

bility of my existence. As I find myself already in guilt, so

as a believer I would have to find myself already in Christ.
ce "
But it is not at all clear how I 3 being already in guilt,
can be thought of as Christ. now in
It would appear to

depend on the possibility of somehow bringing this being of

the new I into conjunction with the concept of existence,
unless we are to assume a discontinuous new I. 4 To us,

unbelief can doubt Christ and thus import reflexion into the act of
belief. But this distinction has decisive consequences for the concept
of existence.
1
Cf. Theolcgische Blatter, 1928, No. 3, pp. 6$f.
" " in
2
Bultmann, Zur Frage der Christilogie ^wischen dm ^eiten }
1928, pp. 67f.
8
Theologische Blatter, 1928, No. 3.
4
Even supposing the possibility of an existential-ontological unity of
"
existence, an account would still be lacking of what is meant by being
in Christ ".

104
 Act and Being

however, that possibility appears to require the idea of the

Church for its realisation.

It is R. Seeberg who here provides a positive view, evolved

in connection with his Lutheran studies. From the stand-
point of his logical voluntarism he introduces the concept
of the new direction of will. In this he veers from the
genuinely transcendental thesis towards idealism. The
new I is the new will, which God has turned into the direc-
tion which points to him, and which, being now in the right
direction, does good of its own accord. Thereby the histori-

city of the I, the continuity of the total I with the new I,

and the continuity of the new I itself are preserved. The
problem of everydayness seems to be satisfactorily solved by
" "
the concept of direction. Being in Christ means the
possession of the new direction of will. The interpretations
of revelation in terms of act and of being are genuinely
combined. One must first digest the manifest simplicity of
the conception before proceeding to a few questions. These
arise in the first place from Seeberg's concept of sin. The
justified man remains a sinner. What can that mean in
Seeberg's theory save that the wrong direction is still a
constituent of the justified man? If accordingly the new
directionmust be regarded not as continuous but as inter-
rupted by the old, what are we to think of the continuity of
the total I?

Secondly, is there a will not consciously aiming at God,

which might be claimed as the will of the justified man?
Isthe everyday direction of the will really direction to
God? Unless this be so, we are left with a new I that
105
 Act and Being

recurrently perishes and revives. Once again we should

have to look elsewhere for continuous being. Because
the new direction must be sought or given in each discrete
act, it seems impossible to form any answer to our

question.
Again, the concept of direction does not guarantee the
unity of the concept of the person. As a factor of no more
than psychological standing, direction is subject to dissection
into individual acts and whatever interpretation may be
imposed. Here Seeberg gives occasion to revive the objec-
tions propounded by Luther in his momentous exposure
of nominalism: man must be conceived as a unity before
we can set him over against the oneness of God. This unity,
however, is something which a psychological concept, as
such, is unable to convey: even according to Luther, man
is Nobody knows his
self-impenetrable in his psychology-
own motives, nobody wholly knows own sin; man is his

unable to understand himself from his own psychical

experiences ; they are susceptible of every arbitrary inter-

pretation. Be that as it may, since, as was shown above,
there is human if at all from the
self-understanding only
oneness of man, and since the understanding of man supposes
a potential reproduction, the unity must be sought where
man created or re-created and this being-created is
is
"
executed on " him yet also with him where man must
know himself, without interpretation, in utter clarity and
reality. But this is
man, of human
to say that the unity of

existence, is founded solely in the Word of God. This

Word permits man to understand himself as " being in
Adam " or " being in Christ ", " being in the communion
1 06
 Act and Being

of Christ ", in such a way that the fact of the unity's basis
in the Word is identical with the fact of its basis in being
in Adam or Christ. Now this is not an empirical datum
but given to faith as revelation. Only in faith is the unity,
is
"
the being ", of the person disclosed.

107
 REVELATION IN TERMS OF BEING

" "
A. The being of revelation

Unmistakably, agere sequitur esse, the basic ontological thesis

of Catholic and traditional Protestant dogmatics, expresses
the antithesis of transcendentalism. It is the esse which we
have to interpret; the business of ontological analysis is to
understand the continuity of man and revelation. It has to
" "
establish of revelation that God is in it, and of man that
" " "
he is before he acts, and acts only out of that being ".
The ontological account of the being of revelation defines
"
it as, in principle, transcending consciousness and objec-
""
tive can somehow be brought to givenness, it exists, is
; it

there, present, accessible, in being; it is independent of

the consciousness, does not fall into its power. Within
ontology itself, this definition is open to divers readings.
In complete contrast to the transcendental endeavour,
three possibilities are available from the outset to the
explanation of revelation in terms of being. Revelation is
understood: i. as doctrine 1 ; 2. as psychic experience;
3. as an institution.
i. If the essence of revelation is taken to be doctrine,
" " "
1 Or theory ", Ibre (Lehre) Translator.
1 08
 Act and Being

then itsexplanation will follow in terms of ontological

concepts, for doctrine is basically continuous and accessible
hence can be freely accepted or rejected. If God binds
himself within a doctrine of his nature, he may be found in
that doctrine, understood and allocated his place in human
"
existence ". But this leaves the existence of man un-
affected, unencountered. Even a doctrine of the merciful
God, even one which wherever man and God
states that

come together, there the Gross must stand even such a

doctrine is in itself no stumbling-block (at least to our
modern way of thinking), but rather a wholly welcome
"
addition to our system ". The stumbling-block, the
scandal, arises only when our existence is really affected,

when we not only hear of the Cross and judgment but,

hearing, needs must deliver ourselves to them, that grace
may descend. If, then, it is only a divinely created faith
which can appropriate the doctrine, it is clear that to
revelation qua doctrine is added some other constituent
which in one way or another exceeds the ontological
possibilities of man. From this it follows that when revela-
tion is understood only as doctrine, the Christian idea of
revelation eludes the grasp, because there has been an
attempt to seize God with an ontological apparatus which
is adequate only to the human.

2. If we
here revert to the attempt to understand revela-
tion as an experience in consciousness, the justification is
that we now see another aspect of the fusing of act- and
being-concepts which was demonstrated above in respect of
" "
idealism. The objectivity of the entity is conferred on
revelation once it is understood as religious experience.
God is then present in my experience, understandable,
109
 Act and Being

amenable to human system of experi-

classification in the

ences. Thus here, too, existence goes unaffected. But in

understanding revelation it is not a question of reproducing
this or that experience in principle, any experience, even
if religious, is
reproducible but of knowing that revelation
has impinged upon my existence, disclosing it and trans-

planting it into a new manner of existing. Again, therefore,

the reference something else which lies beyond revela-
is to

tion qua experience, from which it follows that to under-

stand revelation in this sense is to overlook the decisive
factor. From
point of view it
this is likewise impossible to

understand the being of the new man, since existence is

unaffected.

3. If former attempts ended by delivering revelation into

the power of the human subject, the last possibility of
grasping the being of revelation trans-subjectively appears
to consist in conceiving it as a divine institution a view to
which the Catholic Church adheres, as well as Protestant

orthodoxy with its assertion of the Bible's verbal inspiration.

" "
In the institution God is as one directly confined and
at the disposal of man. Catholicism takes this to mean that
whoever is in the institution is in God. Yet the being of
man located wholly in the trans-subjective. Correspond-
is

ingly the grace infused into him through the Church is

"
represented from the outset as a kind of being ", in the
form of a habitus (habitus entitativus/). The stress is laid

entirely on the being of man. That his substance should

remain untouched by the accidental quality of grace opens
a problem unsuitable for discussion here, 1 but it goes to
1
On how far the substance is affected, cf. Bartmann, Lehrbuch der

Dogmatik, II, pp. ioif., including his quotations from Aquinas.

110
 Act and Being

show that even here the existence of man is unaffected. His

being is said to have its foundation in the trans-subjective,
for there can be impact on his existence only "from outside" ;
therefore the new being must be founded and sustained from
outside,and the sacrament of ordination which is basic to
the Catholic idea of Church stands warranty for that.
c<
To the stipulation of the from outside however, should
",
be added this other, no less indispensable, that it must be
truly the whole existence of man which is transplanted into
" "
a new manner of being otherwise even the
;
outside is
"
no genuine outside ", for it is defined as such by the fact
of coming from the farther side of all intra-existential

possibilities to impinge on existence itself and create it

anew. is not
This, though, guaranteed in the Catholic
ontology of revelation. The being of an institution is
incapable of affecting the existence of man qua sin; it cannot
stand over against man, be ob-jective (gegen-standlich] in the
full sense. That is only possible in the real meeting with
another person; from this we see that although on the one
hand it is correct to make
the transition from the ontology
of revelation to the concept of the Church, on the other
hand the Church should here be conceived not in an insti-
tutional sense but in terms of persons. Thus we are re-
directed into the path earlier forecast.

The reason why these three ways of explaining revelation

in terms of being are inadequate to the Christian idea of
revelation isthey understand the revealed God as an
this:

entity, whereas transcended by act and being.

entities are

Man assimilates them into his transcendental I, and so they

are unable to be ob-jective in the full sense, hence are useless
in
 Act and Being

for theological explanation of the revelation in Christ which

bears against Adam's very manner of The existence.

entity, that is to say, or the creaturely, cannot shake the

existence of man not even in the
"
Thou ", the " claim
"
of my (Gogarten, Grisebach)
neighbour unless God
himself assail and turn man from his ways. That this
" "
of
happens through entity is the problem revelation,
"
but everything depends on the interpretation of" through
There is no hiding the fact that the identification of
entity and revelation failed to make articulate any genuine
ontology. It arose on that frontier of thought where the
compulsion of inner logic broke down and the paths of
transcendentalism and ontology diverged, the latter sus-

pending thought itself in being, which therefore also

transcended the entity. Yet in principle the being of the
entity is the entity, hence ob-jective for
demonstrable in

demonstrative indication (Aufweis) or for intuitive percep-

tion (fur das Schauen). Here the crucial problem of critical
" "
ontology is how the indicated being is to be thought of
in distinction from the entity. The critical suspension of
thought in being is the only way of preserving the basic
thesis at all, but even this admits of differing courses (consider

Heidegger for example, who from this position arrives at

the idealistic system).
Indicated being is still, of course, being in the manner of
entities (seiendes Seiri), but that raises no ^difficulty for onto-

logical thought, since it has a different reason from the

Kantian for the transcending of the entity; whereas trans-
cendentalism holds the entity, qua objective, to be condi-
tioned by the act, hence transcended by the non-objective,

ontology thinks it only through the entity that being can

112
 Act and Being

be brought to pure demonstration, final givenness. Thus

for the pure ontology of revelation it is as wrong to volatilise
revelation into non-entity as to treat it wholly as entity. It
must rather be thought of as enjoying a mode of being which
embraces both entity and non-entity, while at the same
" "
time suspending within itself man's intention of it
faith.

B. The knowledge of revelation

If revelation an object of knowledge qua entity, it follows

is

that there must be a direct positive knowledge. The system

rises up on firm ground as the in-itself adequate knowledge

of revelation. To
this concept of revelation as an object

there would correspond the phenomenological method, for

" "
which entitative revelation would represent the supra-
formal, substantive a priori of cognition (i.e. here, of faith).
But the phenomenological method is carried out within the
existence of man; for man must
already bear within him
the potentialities of essential vision i.e. here, the knowledge
" *'
of revelation and can lay bare the being behind the

entity because deep within him he already knows what

" "
being From that it follows, however, that pheno-
is.

menology must fail to understand Christian revelation,

which it thus regards as an entity in the sense of something

not contingent, but there for the finding. Human existence
itself cannot be approached via such entities, whether they

are interpreted transcendentally or onto-phenomenologi-

cally.
And so a genuine ontology of revelation demands a concept
of knowledge which involves the existence of man without
 Act and Being

languishing in utter act-subjectivism, and a cognitive object

" "
(Gegenstand) which in the full sense stands over against
This means that the object, firstly, must
(entgegenstehi) the I.

challenge and constrain the I's manner of existence

without, that submitting, like the spuriously objective

is,

entity, to transcendence by act or being. Secondly, it must

in principle be independent of its being known ; finally, it
must confront the I in such a way that man's very knowing
isbased on and suspended in a being-already-known. The
Gegenstand must at all times already entgegenstehen; it may be
an entity only in the non-committal sense of being rather
" "
than not being. As such it must be an entity whose
being and existence underlie or precede those of the I,
one to which cognition cannot however have recourse
something there for
at will, as if to its finding, but in the
of which it must always itself be suspended in
presence
cognition.
Then indeed the revelation preached to us of God in

Christ, the three-in-one person self-bestowed on us, would

be the object of our knowing.

"
c. Man as being in . , .**

The conception of revelation as an entity would have the

following result for man's stock of knowledge, that he could

freely and constantly recur to this entity, which is there for
the finding. It stands at his disposal, whether it be religious
experience, the verbally inspired Bible or the Catholic
Church. He knows himself assured by this entity, borne
up by this entity though this assurance can only consist in
the fact that man remains by himself, since, as we have seen,
114
 Act and Being

the entity as such is

finally given into his power. And so
the I allots the entity a place of precedence over itself,

freely subordinates itself to it with fides implicita though

this, it can
again, only do because it thus feels a final self-
assurance, because it is thus enabled to remain
by itself,
because therefore the entity is still subordinate to the I!
and finds itself under the protection of this entity. It can
never stray from the protective " area of jurisdiction " of
the verbally inspired Bible, the factuality, etc., of religious
" "
experience; it is in the institutional Catholic Church.
Yet, as entity, none of this can have impact on existence in
the way we have defined.
Indeed, only one kind of knowledge is compatible with
a kind which is also demanded by the true
this definition,

ontology of revelation: knowledge that the existence of

man is invariably a
" "
being in . .**. This being in . .",
. .

however, must satisfy two all-important requirements:

i. it must involve the existence of man; 2. it must be

possible to think of the being in continuity. If we add that

the reality of revelation is that very being, taking on the
mode of entity (das seiende Seiri), which constitutes the being
(the existence) ofman, but that this being is the divine
person, our picture is complete provided that this is
" "
understood as being in Christ ", i.e. being in the
"
Church ". But since this being must affect the very
existence of man, there must be existential acts which
accompany it and constitute it as much as they are con-
stituted
by it.
This is where a genuine ontology comes into its own,
"
inasmuch as it being in ..." in such a way
defines the
that cognition, finding itself in the world of entity, suspends
 Act and Being

itself when confronted by the being of the entity and does

not force it under its control.
It is from this position that it becomes permissible to
speak theologically about the nature of man, his knowledge
of God, God's knowledge of him. From here opens the
prospect of genuine theological concepts of being.

116
 THE CHURCH AS A UNITY
OF ACT AND BEING

First,a survey of the important questions raised :

1. Whence do I acquire understanding of existence

(Dasein), of myself? It has already been shown that the
existence of man can only be radically affected from outside
and understands itself only in being thus encountered.
There is no true cc from outside " save in revelation.
2. How are we to think of revelation's mode of being,
actwise or ontologically? What is meant by the freedom
of God? What theological account can we give of the
" "
being of God in revelation?
3. How are we to think of man's mode of being? As
"
decision or as being in . ."? How can the continuity of
.

the I be affirmed?
4. What results from either analysis of revelation for the
concept of knowledge, i.e. for man's cognition of God.,

positive theological knowledge (Wisseri), the concept of

science (Wissenschaft), the system?
In what follows an endeavour will be made to treat these
questions in terms of the concept Church and to answer
them from the position gained. Accordingly we have the
117
 Act and Being

following heads of discussion i the Church as the centre

: .

of the understanding of existence; 2. the mode of being,

within the Church, of the revelation of God; 3. man's
mode of being within the Church; 4. the problem of
knowledge within the Church.

A. The Church as the place where Dasein is understood

The foregoing discussion has all been directed to or deter-

mined by one focus, which up to now has remained imper-

fectly The discussion cannot, in fact, be fully

visible.

understood until brought into the light shed by the idea of

the Church; it is not really meaningful to assert that any

attempt at an autonomous understanding of Dasein must

faila priori, unless we stand on premises which deny Dasein
the possibility of placing itself into truth. These premises-
themselves are not possible from within Dasein (hence not
doctrine, experience, institution), but represent a contingent
"
event, truly from outside ", which has bound us to itself
and by placing us in truth has bestowed on us under-
standing of Dasein. In any philosophy of merely existential
possibilities there can be no place for the contingency of this
event of revelation in the Christian Church, in Cross and
resurrection, otherwise would not be a contingency in the
it

fullest sense, not revelation, not an event of divine proven-

ance for the atonement of humanity.
sinful Only one who
stands on these premises must condemn as untruth the
attempts of Dasein to understand itself out of its own possi-
bilities. But if it is a deed of God which involves man in
the event called revelation, this lies outside the possibilities
of any autonomous philosophy of Dasein, which implies that
118
 Act and Being

the premises can be justified by nothing less than God or

the event itself.
The time has come to define these premises more closely.
Man's being involved in the event called revelation must
here be conceived as being in the Church, i.e. as a theo-
and from this viewpoint the questions
sociological category,
raised must then be discussed and answered in connection
with the problem of act and being.

B. Revelation's mode of being within the Church

Revelation should be envisaged only with reference to the

Church, where the Church is regarded as constituted by the
present annunciation, within the communion, for the com-
"
munion, of Christ's death and resurrection. Present ",
because it is only in this annunciation that the event of
revelation is realised in and for the communion and because,

secondly, this is the only way in which its contingent (i.e.

extrinsic) character makes itself known for contingency is

only in presence, viz. the present. What is past, as "having"
"
happened, is background ", unless the annunciation
" " " 1
coming to us in the future should raise it to presence ".
In the concept of contingency as happening which is
" "
coming to us from outside, the present is determined by
the future; in the system, inasmuch as the (in principle)
" "
of the rational background obtains, the
beforeness

present is determined by the past. At all events the present

"
1
Bonhoeffer stresses the literal sense of ^ukunft (" future ") to-
"
coming ". German Gegenwart, it may be remarked, means the
" and " " " "
present presence alike. Communion here means the

spiritual Christian community^ never the Eucharist. (Translator.)

"9
 Act and Being

is determined by one or the other or both; it is never per se.

But the decision lies with man. Of the Christian revelation
it may be said that the annunciation of Cross and resurrec-
tion, determined by eschatology and predestination, together
with the event effective within it, serves even to raise the
past to the present and, paradoxically, to something future,
"
yet to come ". It follows, therefore, that we may not
"
interpret the Christian revelation as having happened ",
that for man living in the Church, in the present, this unique
1
occurrence qualified as future.
is Conversely, for the very
reason that the Christian revelation, in its special qualifica-
tion of the unique event of Cross and resurrection, is always
"
yet to come ", it must happen in the present: that is to

say, it must be considered within the Church, for the

"
Church the Christ of the present,
is Christ existing as

community ". In the annunciation within the communion

" "
for the communion, Christ is the subject common to
annunciation (Word and sacrament) and communion alike.
The annunciation and the communion are so interdependent
that each, regarded for itself alone, loses its meaning alto-

gether. Christ is the corporate person of the Christian

communion: see especially 1 Cor. 12, 12; 6, 15; 1,13;
Rom. 6, 13 and 19; Eph. 2, 14. The Church is the body
of Christ: I Cor. 12, I2ff.; Rom. 12, 4ff.; Eph. i, 23;
4, I5f.; Col. i, 1 8. Christ is in the communion as the

communion is in Christ: I Cor. i, 30; 3, 16; II Cor. 6, 16;

13, 5; Col. 2, 17; 3, ii. The communion is a corporate

person whose name is also Christ: Gal. 3, 28; Col. 3, iof.;

1
This could be the starting-point for a philosophy of time peculiarly
Christian in comparison with the concept of time as something reckoned
by physical motion.
1 2O
 Act and Being
"
cf. Eph. i, 23. Note also the expression put on the new
"
man ", which sometimes takes the form, put on the Lord
Jesus": Col. 3, 10; Eph. 4, 24; Rom. 13, 14; Gal. 3,

27.1
This is why the Protestant idea of the Church is con-
ceived in personal terms, sdl. God reveals himself as a person
in the Church. The Christian communion is God's final
revelation: God as "Christ existing as community",
ordained for the rest of time until the end of the world and
the return of Christ. 2 It is here that Christ has come the
very nearest to humanity, here given himself to his new
humanity, so that his person enfolds in itself all whom he
has won, binding itself in duty to them, and them recipro-
" "
cally in duty to him. The Church therefore has not the
meaning of a human community to which Christ is or is not
self-superadded, nor of a union among such as individually
seek or think to have Christ and wish to cultivate this
common " possession "; no, it is a communion created by
Christ and founded upon him, one in which Christ reveals
himself as the Setfrepo? SvQpviros, the new man or rather,
the new humanity itself.

This is where the question of explaining revelation in

terms of act or being assumes an entirely new aspect. God
gives himself in Christ to his communion, and to each

"
Quellort der Kirchenidee **, in the Festgabe
1
Cf. also Kattenbusch,
to Harnack, 1921, pp. 1436., and Traugott Schmidt, Der Leib Christi.
See further Scheler's theory of corporate persons in Der Formalismus in
der Ethik und die materials Wertethik. In my Sanctorum communio: eine
dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie
der Kirche, 1930 (new edition 1954),
I sought to apply this idea in the dogmatic field.
" " and
2
The tension between Christ existing as community the

heavenly Christ whom we await persists.

121
 Act and Being

individual as member of that communion. This he does in

such a way that the active subject in the communion, of
both the annunciation and the believing of the Word, is
Christ. It is communion, and only there,
in the personal
that the gospel can truly be declared and believed. There,
it follows, revelation is in some way secured or possessed.

God's freedom has bound itself, woven itself into the personal
communion, and it is precisely that which proves it God's
freedom that he should bind himself to men. The com-
munion genuinely has at its disposal the Word of forgiveness;
"
in the communion may not only be said, existentially, I

have been forgiven ", but also by the Christian Church as

"
such, in preaching and sacrament thou art forgiven";
furthermore, every member of the Church may and should
"
become a Christ " to every other in so proclaiming the
gospel.
Revelation,, then, happens within the communion; it

demands* primarily a Christian sociology of its own. The

distinction between thinking of revelation individualistically
and thinking of it in relation to community is fundamental.
All the problematics we have examined so far have had an
individualistic orientation. Both the transcendental essay at

act-subjectivism and the ontological attempt to establish

the continuity of the I envisaged consistently the individual

man, and he was the rock on which they both foundered.

"
They overlooked, in searching for reality ", that man in
reality is never only the single unit, not even the one "claimed
by the Thou", but invariably finds himself in some com-
"
munity, whether in Adam " or in " Christ ". The Word
of God is given to mankind, the gospel to the communion
of Christ. When the sociological category is thus intro-
122
 Act and Being

duced, the problem of act and being and also the problem
of knowledge Is presented in a wholly fresh light.

The being of revelation does not lie in a unique occurrence

of the past, in an entity which in principle is at my disposal
and has no direct connection with my old or my new exist-
ence, neither can the being of revelation be conceived

solely as the ever-free, pure and non-objective act which at

certain times impinges on the existence of individuals. No,
" "
the being of revelation is the being of the community of

persons, constituted and embraced by the person of Christ,

wherein the individual finds himself to be already in his
new existence. This ensures three considerations: i. the

being of revelation can be envisaged in continuity; 2. the

existence of man is critically involved; 3. it is impossible to

regard the being of revelation as entity, as objective, or on

the other hand as non-entity, as non-objective.
i. The
continuity of revelation means that it is constantly
"
present (in the sense of the futurum, the yet to come ").

To-day, therefore, it can only be a question of the Christ

preached in the Church, his death and resurrection. If the

individual as such were the hearer of the preaching, the

continuity would still be endangered, but it is the Church

" "
itself which hears the Church's Word, even if I were
heedless on such and such an occasion. Thus preaching is
ec "
always heard. It is outside me that the gospel is pro-
" "
claimed and heard, that Christ is in his community.
And so it is not in man that the continuity
supra- lies: it is

personally guaranteed through a community of persons.

Instead of the institutional Catholic Church we have the
community as the trans-subjective pledge of revelation's
123
 Act and Being

continuity and extrlnslcality the

"
from outside " (cf.

point below).
3,
2. But the existence of the individual man, hearing the

Word on concrete occasions, is vitally affected by this

community, inasmuch as, drawn into it, he finds himself
already there and as one placed into the truth of his old
and new existence. This fact derives from the personal
quality of the Christian communion, in that its subject is
Christ. For only through persons, and only through the
person of Christ can the existence of man be affected,
placed into truth and transplanted into a new manner of
existing. Since moreover the person of Christ has revealed
itself in communion, the existence of man can only be
the
so affected through the communion. It is only from the

person of Christ that other persons acquire for man the

character of personhood. In this way they even become
Christ for us in what they both demand and promise, in
their existential impositions upon us from without. At the
same time they become, as such, the pledge of revelation's

continuity. If the existence of man were unaffected by

revelation within the communion, all we have said about the

being of revelation in the communion would be pointless.

Continuity which does not also impinge on existence is not
the continuity of the Christian revelation, not present being,
but bygone entity. In other words, the communion guar-
antees the continuity of revelation only by the fact that
I know and believe myself to be in this communion. Here
the problem of act and being receives its final clarification

by taking the shape of the dialectic of faith and Church.

But of that, later.

3. If the being of revelation is fixed in entity, it remains

124
 Act and Being

past, existentially Impotent; if it is volatilised into the non-

objective, its continuity is lost. And so the being of revela-

tion must enjoy a mode of being which satisfies both claims,
embodying both the continuity proper to being and the
existential significance of the act. It is as such a mode of

being that we understand the person and the community.

Here the possibility of existential impact is bound up with
genuine objectivity in the sense of a concrete standing-over-
against: this lets itself be drawn into the power of the I
because it itself imposes a constraint on existence, because
it is the extrinsicality.

The community in question is concretely visible, is the

Christian Church which hears and believes the preaching
of the Word. The Word of this community is preaching
and sacrament, its conduct is believing and loving. It is in
this concretion that one must think of the being of revelation,
"
in Christ existing as community ". Only thus, in the
concretion of the mode of being of a true (i.e. Christ-

founded) community of persons, can one observe and pre-

serve the hovering between entity and non-entity.

Qua extrinsicality the personal revelation presents itself in

correlation with my whole existence, i.e. in a sociological
category. It is essentially distinct from the category of
" " "
there is "- 1 There is is existentially indifferent. It

belongs with individualistic, epistemological thought in

"
terms of things". Revelation's mode of being, on the
other hand, is definable only with reference to persons.

1
It may be worth remarking that the German es gibt is more firmly
" " "
linked than there is with notions of the given ", the available,
hence dominable, manipulable Translator.

125
 Act and Being
" "
There is only the entity, the given. It is self-contra-
" "
dictory to seek a there is on the farther side of entity.
In the social context of the person the static ontology of
"
there is
"
is set in motion. There is no God that " there
" "
is ". God is in the personal reference, and (?his) being
is his being a person (und das Sein ist sein Personsein).
Of course that is only comprehensible to the man who
is
placed in truth, the man for whom, through the person
of Christ, his neighbour has become genuinely a person.
" "
For the man in untruth revelation remains, as person
" "
remains, an entity or thing which there is : towards
this one's relation and attitude are neutral in the sense that

the existence of man isnot critically involved. It is only

within the communion itself that revelation can be conceived

in its real existential being. And so we come to require an

account of the being of man in revelation.

c. Man's mode of being within the Church

Prius est enim esse quam Ergo

operari^ prius autem pati quam esse.

fan, esse, operari se sequuntur.

2
has In relation to God man
the passive position, is a "sufferer": Luther is speaking
"
of the nova nativitas. Existence is defined as pati; authen-
one can speak of existence only as
tically ", that is to say,
of existence which undergoes, hence any concept of existence
which ignores impact from without (as by Christ) or the
" "
absence such impact is
of inauthentic (including
" "
Heidegger's authentic existence). Earlier we made this

2
Rom.-Br., Komm. ed. F. Ficker, I, no, 26fF.; cf. also the Notice
and II, 266, i off., and the relevant literature mentioned in the Notice.
E. Seeberg, Luthers Theologie, I, p. 67.
126
 Act and Being

concept of existence into a critical yardstick against which

any other must fail. Existence in this sense is existence in
social context with reference to Christ, knowing itself

accepted or rejected* Existence, therefore, is only as sinful

and as forgiven. If we are to discover how human existence,
as pati y in the communion of Christ is related to the problem
of act and being, or how the concept ofpati includes existen-
tiality and continuity, we must look to the concept of the
Church.
1. To " become "
a member of Christ's Church man must
believe (it being understood that this is not a human possi-
bility, since faith is given by God). It is only in such faith
that man " has " God. And according to the measure of
his faith man has much, little
or nothing of God. To that
u "
it would appear to correspond, conversely, that God is

only in faith, is not where he is not believed. This concep-

tion, of which the first aspect is not infrequent in Luther, 1
has been introduced by R. Seeberg into his system as
2
religious transcendentalism. There is no salvation except
" "
in faith, no being of atonement, as an ascertainable

entity in Church, doctrine, etc., save in connection with

" "
the I in existential acts. There is a being of revelation

only in faith qua act of belief. Here the sola fide seems

preserved at its
purest.
2.Faith has being in the Church as its condition. Faith
invariably discovers itself already in the Church. When it
comes to know that it is in the Church, it was already there.
To believe is as much as to say: to find God, his grace and
1 W. A., 3, 523; 40, i, 3605 40, 2, 342f,; quoted in the Lutheran
studies of R. and E. Seeberg.
*
Cf. p. 44 above.
127
 Act and Being

the community of Christ already present. Faith encounters

a being which is prior to the act; it depends on this being,
because it knows itself involved in it as a special declension
of it. The being is not dependent on the faith; on the
contrary, the faith knows that the being is wholly indepen-
dent of itself, of its own being or non-being. All hangs on
this: that it itself not as somehow conditioning
knows
or even creating, but as conditioned by, created by, this

being.
3. The being of revelation, the Christ-communion, is

only in faith. Faith knows that revelation

independent is

of it. These two propositions must combine to make a

third: only in faith does man know that the being of

revelation, his own being in the Church of Christ, is inde-

pendent of faith. There

continuity is of revelation,
continuity of existence, only in faith, but there again in
such a way that faith qua believing is suspended only in
" " c<
faith qua being in the communion ". If here faith
were understood wholly as an act, the continuity of being
would be disrupted by the discontinuity of acts. Since
however faith as an act knows itself as the mode of being
"
of its being in the Church, the continuity is indeed only in
"
the believing but thereby is really preserved as being in
the Church.

From this seems possible to combine in

point of view it

reciprocal complementation two views so opposed as that

of Flacius, with his perpetua justificatio, and that of the
Calvinist Zanchi, with his perseverantia sanctorum. Whereas
according to the former's doctrine of man as imago Satanae
" "
the justificatio could never become a being of man but
128
 Act and Being

must be re-created in separate acts, Zanchi claimed knowl-

edge of a being of man, based on predestination, which can
no more be affected by acts than vanish altogether: what
God has chosen is chosen for eternity. Both ignored the
central significance of the idea of the Church. Flacius could

scarcely have failed to see,from the standpoint of that idea,

that his concept of faith is individualistic and inadequate,
that individual acts of faith are already within a being in
the communion of Christ. Zanchi likewise would have
recognised that the act of faith alone can penetrate to the
being, which here is no entity ready for the finding, no
"
there is ", but one to be known and known again in the

act, one that understands itself in the act and whose con-
tinuity and genuine can be asserted only in
extrinsicality
this understanding. Predestination as a doctrine (seeing
that it comes under consideration, for faith, only in the
historical revelation in Christ) produces concepts of being

which, to the extent that man has at his command, for

ready reference, the divine knowledge of his own predestina-
1
tion, assume the form of entity, whereas concepts of being
derived from the idea of the Church are always formed with
reference to the act of faith. Zanchi was undoubtedly right
to wish to express the continuity of the divine activity at
work upon man, hence of man's new being, but Flacius is
no less justified in demanding a perpetua justificatio, for he
thereby guards against an ontology seeking to understand
the being of the new man as an implanted psychic habitus,
therefore entity, against which Flacius correctly recognises

1 Earth takes a different view, regarding predestination as the mystery

" "
which lies before and behind everything; this renders a being
impossible.
129
 Act and Being

that the act of faithis in one way or another an essential

component of the being of the new man; however, for

Flacius faith remains an actual constituent of that new

being, rather than its correlative manner of being.

4. It is through the sociological category that the dialectic
"
of faith and being in ..." in the concept of man finds its
concrete interpretation, which will be argued more explicitly
in Part Three.

In accordance with the being of revelation, the

being of
man should be conceived neither frozen as
entity nor
spirited into non-entity. In either of these cases the total
existence of man would, in the end, stay unaffected. No;
the man we must consider is the historical man who knows
himself transplanted from the old into the new
humanity
and who is, by membership of the new, a person re-created
" "
by Christ, a person who is only in the act-reference to
Christ and whose being " with reference to " Christ is based
on being in Christ and his communion in such a that
" "
way
the act is
suspended in the being, while the
" " being itself
is not in the absence of the act. The
person, as a
synthesis of act and being, is always two in one: individual
and humanity. The concept of the
absolute individual is an
abstraction with no
corresponding reality. It is not merely
in his general
psychology but in his very that existentiality
man is tied to society. When his existence is touched
(in
judgment and mercy) he knows that he is being directed
towards humanity. He has himself committed the sin of
the old humanity, yet he knows at the same time that

humanity drew him into its sin and guilt when he was
powerless to resist. He is the bearer of the new humanity
130
 Act and Being

in his faith, prayer and affirmation, yet knows that he is

borne in all his actions by the communion, by Christ. 1

Man
as individual and man as humanity, man one in
thesetwo inseparable aspects, is but another way of saying
man as act and being. He is never one alone. It might be
supposed that man's humanity-being could be understood
as an abstraction without the slightest effect on existence,
but such a supposition collapses against the historical reality
of Christ's communion and my membership thereof. In
reality I hear another man declare the gospel to me, see him
"
offer me the sacrament: thou art forgiven ", see and hear
him and the congregation praying for me; at the same time
/ hear the gospel, I join in the prayer and I know myself
joined into the Word, sacrament and prayer of the com-
munion of Christ, the new humanity now as then, here as

elsewhere; I bear it upon me and am borne of it. Here I,

the historically whole man, individual and humanity to-
gether, am encountered, affected. I believe; that is, I

know myself borne: I am borne (pati) y therefore I am (esse),

therefore I believe (agere}. The circle closes. For even

agere is pati here; but the I always remains the historical
One though in faith the New One. Needless to say, as
" "
historical it is a member of the new humanity which here
" "
or there takes the shape of empirical communities of
individuals though retaining the mode of being of
revelation.
Is not the continuity of the I destroyed by the fact that
the as historical, falls apart into religious life and profane
I,
life? What are we to make of the fact of everydayness? Even if

1
Cf. especially Luther's Sermon on the Holy Body of Christ, 1519.
See also what is said below on being in Adam or in Christ.
 Act and Being

we refrain from describing historicity, everydayness, as

a divine punishment, the difficulty obtains only from a
standpoint of unbelieving reflexion. Religious acts are
simply not identical with otherwise the being of faith
faith,
"
would once again be explicable as entity ". The unity of
" " "
the I is only in faith ". Everything points to that
conclusion. If it were possible for unbelief to discover

being in continuity everyday psychical datum), the

(e.g. as

evangelical understanding of faith would be at fault and

being would be entity.
"
But what is meant by the unity of the historical I in
"
faith is unity in community, in the historical community
which I believe to be the communion of Christ. Because
the humanity wherein I stand, which I myself also am, prays
for me, forgives sins (in preaching and sacrament) inde-

pendently of me, being always the whole humanity where-

ever I am, just because I am its member, my everydayness
is overcome within the communion: only there am I
embraced both as individual and as humanity, in existenti-
"
ality and continuity but of course only in faith ", which
knows itself possible by virtue of the communion and is
abolished within it.

The indestructible unity of my I is guaranteed even

while it crumbles into everydayness: 5 Se vvv & v crap/c^ v

& (Gal. 2, 20).

" "
Faith is with reference to being the Christian com-
munion conversely, only in faith that this being
it is
"
reveals itself or is ", yet faith knows it to be independent

of itself, and knows itself to be a manner of being of that

being. Being transcends entity: it is the basis of the entity

132
 Act and Being

and the I alike. Thus act comes from

being., as it also goes
to being. Being, moreover, has reference to act, yet is free.
The being of revelation, as hovering between the objective
and the non-objective, is " person " the revealed person
of God and the personal community of which that person
is the foundation. Here the transcendental thesis of " being
only in the act ", and the original ontological principle of
being independent of the act, unexpectedly coalesce. Of
course if being is understood as entity, with a phenomeno-
:

logical system of autonomous self-understanding as corollary,

the result is as incompatible with the idea of revelation as
is Kant's rational transcendentalism.
Since the transcendental and ontological theses are here
combined in the sociological category, the existence of man
**
is conceived to lie as essentially in decision as in already
being in Christ (or Adam) ". For though faith is act, yet,
as the manner of being in the Church of Christ, it embraces
the whole of existence in Christ, just as unbelief, as the
manner of being in Adam, embraces the whole of the old
existence. Faith knows that it comes to its decision as to
one already decided. Just as unbelief is no discrete psychic
act but is the manner of being in the old humanity, so belief1

may correctly be seen not only as an act but as the manner

of being in the Church of Christ. One may therefore
"stand in faith" (I Cor. 16, 13; II Cor. i, 24; Eph.
"
6, 14; I Thess. 3, 8; I Peter 5, 12) as in the decided
"
decision without a conscious act of faith; but this is not
a general principle, for faith alone may assert it.
As the being of God does not have the mode of" there is '*,

so this applies also to the being of human existence whether

1
Cf. p. 100, n.i, above. (Translator.)

133
 Act and Being
" "
in sin or in faith. There is no believer, no sinner;
" " " "
there is no given human existence, qua encountered,
" Word of God, in the execution
but it is ", by virtue of the
of acts within the Church in which same acts the unity of
"
the existence is affirmed. Here again the thing "-con-
ception of being is set in motion by the category of social
reference.

If in faith the whole man is to be embraced by the com-

munion of Christ, sin and death must be contained, yet
" "
their intention is to disrupt the continuity of the new

being. Sin and death, therefore, reach into the communion

of Christ, but this they do in such a way that the com-
munion now bears with me my sin and my death, while
I likewise no longer see sin and death in the communion in
Christ himself 1
but only forgiveness and life. My sin is
no longer a sin, my death is no longer a death, because the
communion is with me. It is temptation which will have
me believe that sin can finally put me beyond the pale of
God's commonwealth, or that death is my eternal con-
demnation: the temptation of the crd/> which endures
while I live v <rapt<t. Here is the application of pecca

fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo* And so through

the communion, because it bears the entire historical

man, faith can embrace the whole of historical life in

everydayness, sin and death, for the new being whose manner
it is must impinge on existence and be in continuity.
1
Cf. Luther's Sermon on the Holy Body of Jesus, W. A. ; 2,
especially 746^, and Tesseradecas, W. A., 6, i3ofF.
*
Luther, Enders, III, 208, 119.
 Act and Being

D. The problem of knowledge and the idea of the Church

We have yet to discuss the
concept of knowledge which
corresponds to the
being of revelation and the being of man.
i. The endeavour to
regard revelation as non-objective
and make it thus indirectly the object of cognition means
that when I speak of revelation I always take into account
whatever God may have to say further to or against it; it

means that I always counter a

judgment of knowing with
another of not-knowing, that the obligation of God to his
Word is limited by the freedom of God which is beyond all
binding; in other words, I include in my thinking a factor
which renders it a priori uncertain, a factor which consists

in my adding the antithesis to the positive proposition.

That is Earth's dialectic. 1
Man's knowing 2
is
not-knowing. Only on this under-
standing is it possible for God
have free speech, to remain
to
3
at all times a subject (supposing that God is only in the
God-effected existential act of faith, never in reflexion).
We see here the interconnection of the actwise interpreta-

1 at least is its general sense. To speak frankly, I do not think

That
possible, when one looks more closely, to lay hold of any unequivocal
it is

concept of dialectic in Earth. Thus when I collate Dogmatik, I, p. 456,

Section b, lines and 9, with p. 457, lines 5ff. and p. 460, lines 6fF.,
1-3 ?

I think to detect a confusion of three entirely different concepts of

theological dialectic, which do not all describe, even, the same aim and
concern one might rather say they leave doubt as to whether dialectic
:

is here a method separable from the heart of the matter (cf. Schumann,

op. cit, pp. 22 iff.) or whether Earth's whole case does not in fact stand
or fall with it.
*
Cf. Dogmatik, I, p. 61.
3
Idem, p. 64,

135
 Act and Being

tion, dialectic and the non-objective concept of knowledge.

To thismay (a) The whole conceptual nexus
be objected:
is conceived individualistically. If revelation has an essen-
tial reference to the community, God must in some way be

bound quite apart from my individual act. (b) His being

bound to the Church is the freedom of God. To leave open
any freedom of God beyond the event of salvation is to

formalize, to rationalise, the contingent positivity of that

event, (c) we "

know " from preaching of the revelation
given to the Church. Theologically this knowing takes
three forms: disbelieving, existential and ecclesiastical;
what these mean will be made clear later. It is
wrong to

say that there is generally speaking a not-knowing, inferred

from an idealistic-rationalistic anthropology, which corre-
" "
sponds to the knowing of revelation; once we believe,
if it is belief in faith, we know without not-knowing. There
must be, that is, a knowing which stands in faith, i.e. in the
communion. We can know what is given to us (I Cor. 2, 12).
How knowing then becomes positive knowledge (Wissen,
Wissenschaft) is another question and a later stage, (d) It is
a fateful error on Earth's part to replace the Lord and
creator with the concept of the subject. In the first place,
it means that I have God always at my back, with the
result that I must be content with dialectical theology's
permanent reflexion on its own faith instead of having direct
recourse to Christ; the seal is set on Gold's non-objectivity.
A further consequence is that God is virtually defined as
the subject of my new existence, of my theological thinking,
instead of as Lord and creator of both. Here the transcen-
dental view of the act, prospectively and retrospectively
" "
oriented with reference to the transcendental, is as well
 Act and Being

served In fact better served by the Idea of the Lord

and creator by the concept of the subject. But the
as
ultimate reason for the inadequacy of Earth's explanation
lies in the fact that it fails to understand God as a person*
From a defective definition of the being of
this failure arises

revelation, whence a defective concept of knowledge. When

we come to ask what truth remains in the interpretation of
the act which underlies the non-objective concept of knowl-

edge, we must extract our answer from the result of defining

the being of revelation as personal, accepting whatever

consequences may follow for the concept of knowledge

itself.

2. To
the being of revelation, defined as that of the Christ-

person in the community of persons called the Church,

defined therefore in sociological terms, there must correspond
a concept of knowledge envisaged in a sociological category.
In understanding this we first need to distinguish between
three ways of knowing, hence three concepts, which corre-

spond to distinct sociological functions of the Church:

knowing as a believer , knowing in preaching and theological

knowledge, of which the first may be called existential and

the others ecclesiastical cognition:
Knowing as a believer is a question of fundamental socio-

logical epistemology. means knowing oneself overcome

It

and blessed with grace by the person of Christ through the

preached Word. Whether such cognition is possible is a
1
senseless question here, since it derives, as framed, from
the isolation of unbelief, whence it can only be answered
1
See for example Earth, op. cit., 6, 2: "Die Moglichkeit des
"
Horens "; 17: Die subjektive Moglichkeit der Offenbarung".
137
 Act and Being

with an Impossible! (incapax!}. The asking of such a ques-

tion postulates a concept of existence as potentiality. But
faith a God-given reality: one may question its manner
is

of being or becoming, its How, but not the actual fact of

itsbeing. Its object is the person of Christ which is preached
within the communion. This is an object which resists
inclusion in a transcendental I, or any non-objectification:
it stands as person over against man as person. The person
" "
is a unity which overrides the bifurcation of entity and
non-entity; it is i.e. knowable, yet by virtue of
objective,
itsgenuine objectivity, freedom from the knower, freedom
its

not to be (Nichtseinkonnen)^- it never falls into the power of

the knowing I. It gives itself through the Word to the I in

the act of faith, which for its part acknowledges the freedom
of the self-giving person and testifies thus to its absolute
extrinsicality. If however the person in revelation should
"
withdraw from cognition, there remains only the Word "
as held in to which only the person itself can
remembrance,
restore its
power over human existence of freedom-not-to-be
the power of acknowledged extrinsicality. If the I as

*By Nwhtseinkonnen Bonhoeffer presumably designates the person's

freedom not to be an entity or cognitive object, its ability to withhold
itself from a cognitive intention. On the knowability of persons there
are interesting pages in Max Scheler's Vom Ewigen im Menschen, in
"
Probleme der Religion ", Section 2. The knowing of persons is of
"
course in itself a distinctive kind of knowing: for knowable ", in the
annotated sentence, Bonhoeffer uses both erkennbar and wissbar; briefly,
they are distinguished in his usage by the employment of erkennen to
designate the instantaneous acquisition of knowledge, the typical
" "
epistemological act, and of wissen for knowing as positive storable
" in ", whence Wissenschqft
knowledge, knowledge one can live a
compendium of such. The importance of Wissen here is that it implies
continuity; to postulate its possibility with respect to God is to uphold
(contra Barth) the respectability of a positive theology. (Translator.)

138
 Act and Being

person suffers the impact of the person of Christ in judgment

or in the process of incorporation into the communion, it
cannot conceive that this having-to-suffer derives from itself

but must recognise that it comes from outside. Herein lies

the peculiarity of the theo-sociological category.

In the communion, the extrinsicality sought in individual-
istic epistemology is a given reality, one which, as a con-

tingent pre-requisite, can no longer be called into question,

" "
nor stabilised by a there is and turned into something
" "
there for the finding of cognition. The extrinsicality
of the Christ-person is essentially transcendent of existence,
" "
yet it is only in its action on human existence. It is not
that of the external world, but the peculiar extrinsicality of
the Christ-person claiming my whole personal existence
both as guilty and as forgiven: the extrinsicality of the
theo-sociological category, which is only known for truly
extrinsic where man is in Christ.
But through the person of Christ the Fs fellow-man is
also rescued from the world of things, to which he of course
continues to belong qua entity, and drawn into the social

sphere of persons. Only through Christ does my neighbour

confront me making some form of absolute claim on me
as
from a position outside my own existence. Only here is
reality sheer first-hand decision. Without Christ my very
neighbour is no more than my possibility of self-assertion
" "
through sustaining his claim (Grisebach).
And so it is that through the extrinsicality of the Christ-
person the external world takes on fresh meaning. But even
the external world, as mediator of the spirit of Christ, (here

including the empirical Church) should not be classified

"
in the sphere of
"
there is ". There is " presupposes the
139
 Act and Being

position of the detached observer, which with regard to the

being of revelation is inapplicable even to the external
world, i.e. creation, since the being of revelation is the very
basis of my being a person. The judgment, therefore, that
" " a reflexion, which has already
there is this person is

fallen away from direct reference and bears merely upon

the residual entity. One must digest and be constantly
mindful of this, that the personal mode of being is being no
"
less than the mode of there is ", and though the point
may be leftfor the present
open that the first mode is
almost certainly the foundation of the second.
Thus faith discloses a new sphere of knowledge and
objects, that of existence in the social reference, which
replaces other concepts of knowledge. The sociological
" "
category has served to redefine the outside ", the boun-
"
dary (cf. p. 31 above). Dilthey's attempt was perhaps
the first to reduce the problem of transcendence to the
historical (geschichtlich) problem of the encounter of two
personal wills (see p. 43, n. i, above). Yet even this
attempt has no issue or fulfilment save in revelation's
encounter of the divine person and man.

Now we have found that in our sociological category we

have the point of union of the transcendental and the onto-
cc "
logical epistemologies. The person is only in the self-
" "
giving act. And yet the person is in independence of
that to which it gives itself. It is through the person of
Christ that we
acquire this understanding of the person,
which applies only to the Christ-based personal community
of the Christian Church. The Christ preached in the com-
munion gives himself to the member of the communion.
140
 Act and Being

Faith means knowing that one has reference to this. In

" "
faith I have Christ in his personal objectivity, i.e. as my
Lord who has power over me, atones for me, redeems me.
In faith there is no for there Christ is his
not-knowing,
own witness and confirmation.
In faith Christ is the creator of my new personal being
and at the same time the Lord " with reference "
to which
els avrov the person is created; thus existence is

determined both prospectively and retrospectively in relation

" "
to transcendence: it is between transcendent poles. In
the act of belief, which Christ himself creates within me,
inasmuch as he gives me the Holy Spirit who hears and
believes within me, he also proves himself the free Lord of
" " " "
my existence. Christ is only in faith, yet he is

master of my faith. He is the absolute extrinsicality for my

existence, but for that very reason he impinges on it, gives
himself to be known by it.
As concrete being-assailed by Christ, the movement of
though not ascertainably in demonstrable
faith passes in time,
theres and thens. Where and when I believed is known
only to God and is inaccessible to my reflexion. Faith
abides in itself as actus directus (see pp. losf. above, also
Part Three below). Nothing could be more mistaken than
to deny, from the fact that everything is accessible to reflexion
only in reflexion therefore faith only as "faith-wishful-
"
ness" (" Glaubigkeit"), religiosity "that there is an
actus directus taking place in time. For such a dismissal
reflexion has no justification. Reflexion discovers itself

always to be already in reflexion., and this very reflexion

must indicate that connection to the direct act has been
interrupted. This is the fundamental problem of everyday-
141
 Act and Being

ness. Although by its very nature my faith, as a temporal

act, embraces the whole of my existence and though it (or
my existence)abolished in being within the communion
is
1
(see p. 130 above), for reflexion there remains only the past
ec
spoken Word of Christ as a general proposition, as mean-
" "
ing in remembrance ". The person and the Word have
separated, and we are left with the condition of predicatory
and theological knowledge.

The preacher, as one who addresses the communion, must

"
know " what he preaches; Jesus Christ the crucified
(I Cor. 2, 2). He hasannounce the gospel to
full power to
the hearer, to preaching and sacrament.
forgive sins in
There may be no uncertainty here, no not-knowing: all
must be made plain from the Word of God who has bound
himself in revelation, for in the preaching which produces
be declared the
" "
faith Christ causes himself to subject of
the spoken words. I preach, that is, but I preach in the

strength of Christ, the strength of my faith, for, given that

during the preaching itself I could overcome temptation in
"
the act of faith, the existential proposition that I have
"
been forgiven would in itself be no vehicle of the ecclesias-
"
tical thou art forgiven ", which depends on the com-
munity whose office preaching is. For that reason preaching
is in principle always heard.

Notwithstanding, the preacher himself on must reflect

the matter of his address, the Word of the Crucified, and

must bring it to expression. Thus through the manner of
his utterance, which involves reflexion, its matter also
becomes problematic. For over against reflexion stand
1
Of course this too is only a statement from faith.
142
 Act and Being
" " " " "
only general propositions ", words in remembrance
about a divine event. These the preacher can reiterate, but
he is unable to speak the living, creative Word of the
Christ-person itself.

Now to preaching, as office of the given communion, is

the promise that when the preacher correctly utters the

" " "
words and propositions " (pure doctrine recte docetur)
the living person of Christ attests itself therein, inasmuch
as it discloses itself to the hearer. But how is it possible
" "
for the preacher to speak correctly if he can only
"
propose "?
This sets the problem of theological cognition, hence the
question: how is theological science possible?

Theology is a function of the Church, for Church there is none

without preaching, nor preaching without remembrance,
but theology is the memory of the Church. As such it
assists the Church to understand the premises of Christian
preaching; helps it, form dogmas. To
in other words, to
this end it must have positive knowledge (Wissen) of the
Christian affair; how is
such knowledge possible?
In theological reflexion I am detached from the inten-
which vanquishes temptation. So
tionality of the faith
theological not existential
is knowledge. It has its object
in the remembered happenings of the Christian com-

munion, the Bible, preaching and sacrament, prayer,

confession, the Word of the Christ-person which is stored as

entity in the historical Church. Theology is therefore the

science which has its own premises as its object,which is as
much as to say that it stands between past and future preach-
ing. Theology should link past preaching to the real
143
 Act and Being

person of Christ, as he preaches and is preached in the

communion, and in this way there should be proposed to
future preaching a dogma on the basis of which it can

preach with Christian rectitude. It follows that logically

dogma is not the aim but the condition of preaching.
It seems, then that in principle theological is not
different from profane thought. Dogmatic knowledge is

positive knowledge reflecting entity,on therefore is in

principle amenable to grouping within a system. Even the

connection with the living person of Christ is reflective and
as such systematic. Yet if the connection is genuine it has
been made possible not by the pursuit of any theoretic
method but by cleaving to the heard Word in humility;
here, despite the foregoing, theological differs in essence
from all profane science, not in method of thinking but in
obedience of thought. In itself the dialectical method of
the reservation is no humbler than an avowedly systematic
thought. Moreover, dialectical thought, as such, has no
immediate claim to existential force. On the contrary,

humility in theology is impossible so long as it gives out its

propositions as existential or as faith-inspired (which in the

end is the same thing) ; theological thought and knowledge
are only possible as ecclesiastical thought and knowledge.
Because theology turns revelation into entity, it may only
be practised where the living person of Christ is itself
present to acknowledge or destroy that entity. On that
account theology must stand in intimate relationship with
preaching, preparing its way, yet on the other hand
submitting humbly to its direction. It is positive science,
has its own given object, the spoken Word of Christ in
for it

the Church^ from which fact ithas authority to make general

144
 Act and Being

pronouncements; it aims at the system, at dogma. But it

is only within the Christian communion that all this acquires

its particular meaning. Only the communion knows that
the Word it hears is ever
and again repeated in a sphere
beyond no more than the custodian,
theology, that theology is
catalogue and memorial of this Word; it knows that the
general pronouncements are meaningless without their
confirmation by Christ, knows that the very dogma on
which preaching builds is the result of " direction " by
"
preaching. It knows that when theology says God
"
forgives sins neither God himself nor sin itself is implicated,
but that both have been used to form a general proposition,
is real talk of God and sin
for there only when Christ speaks
of them here and now, speaks of my sin specifically in the
"
existential now ". In sum, theology is unable to speak
creatively, but once the community of Christ is aware of its
theology's limitations may and should take courage to
it
" " " "
practise it. Then it may know even as Paul knew
(Rom. 6, 9; I Cor. 2, 2; 2, 12; II Cor. 4, 14; 5, i;

Eph. i, 9), in the manner not of existential, not of speculative,

but of ecclesiastical knowledge. It may be certain of the faith-
fulness of God, who stands by the Word he has given to his
community, so that theology, if it but earnestly place itself

within the communion, can never go wholly astray. For

the communion needs theology.

Needless to say, theology can never conquer the real tempta-

tions of faith with its propositions. It is a matter of the

concrete struggle, taking place in the direct consciousness of

man, between Christ and Satan, of which the issue must
first be won and lost. We may keep before our eyes, as
 Act and Being

much as we like, theological propositions of forgiveness and

redemption; unless Christ in person speaks to us his Word
of new creation to transform our existence, unless the general
proposition becomes a living occurrence, they themselves
are a collective temptation.
Here are the bounds of theology. This is known by the
communion in which it is practised, and indeed it would

appear only in the knowledge of but also of

its limitations,
"
its justice and necessity, that theology's tendency to self-
"
justification by intellectual works (Herrmann) can be
overcome. In the only because dialectical
final analysis, it is

theology thinks individualistically, i.e. in constant abstrac-

tions, that it takes its own method more seriously than is

consonant with its own

premises. In reality the position is
such that I, speaking as theologian, can counter the urge
to justify myself with intellectual works in no other way than

by inserting my theology into the communion of persons

(which is the theologian's humility), and allowing the com-
munion to allocate its
place, bestow its meaning upon it.
"
Thought, even theological thought, will always be syste-
"
matic by nature and can therefore never comprehend the
living person of Christ, yet there is obedient and there is

disobedient thinking (II Cor. 10, 5): it is obedient when it

does not abstract itself from the Church which alone can
shake and rouse it from the systematic, the Church in which
alone it has meaning.

For preaching it follows that the preacher must be a theo-

logian. But predicatory differs from theological cognition
in the special circumstances whereby the preacher has to
utter the Word before an empirical assembly of the his-

146
 Act and Being

toricalcommunion. Thus the object of this cognition is no

longer the already spoken Word but the Word to be spoken
here and now to this assembly. This Word is not spoken
asan existential confession, nor as pure theological doctrine
from the very pulpit; everything hinges on the office. The
preacher, knowing that at this very moment, in this very
place, through his very self, Christ wishes to address the
communion, announces the gospel in the full power of the
communion, and for the hearer this Word is a word of
decision. For himself as a separate individual the preacher
"
may not cease to pray help Thou my unbelief", but for
himself as ordained to the office of preacher to the congre-
gation he utters that prayer no more. As that of an indi-
vidual the preacher's cognition is also reflexive, second-hand;
as borne by the office it is productive, not reproductive, and

plenipotentiary. The only possible vehicle of the proposition

" "
thou art forgiven is the office, but that is namely Christ
and his communion themselves; the individual is
permitted
to declare that forgiveness because he must, because the
communion wishes to hear it.

Sociologically, the preacher primarily, essentially, in the

is

communion and secondarily an individual, whereas the

dogmatist is essentially an individual and secondarily in the
communion. The believer, however, is in essence equally
an individual and a member of the communion.
To
resume: in the knowing of the believer there is absol-
utely no
reflexion. The question whether faith is possible
can be answered only by faith's reality. But, since this
reality retires from demonstration as an entity, any reflexion
must obliterate it. Faith looks not on itself, but on
147
 Act and Being

Christ alone. Whether faith is faith can be neither ascer-

tained nor even believed, but the faith which believes is

faith.
" "
That such faith takes place in the direct consciousness
is as certain as that not reflexively reproducible in its
it is

actwise reality, wherefore one may never say: on this or

that occasion, at such and such a place, I believed.
If the object of the believer's knowing isthe living Word
of Christ., that of theological cognition is the spoken Word,
that of predicatory cognition the Word to be spoken and
declared to the communion. As the action of an individual,
predicatory is no less reflexive than theological cognition,
but in the office of the congregation to whom he must
declare the forgiveness of sins the preacher sees his knowledge
as that of the communion, therefore as appointed with

authority to edify the communion*

Let us return to the mainstream of our inquiry. The
general investigation must conclude, we now see, with the
problem of a theological doctrine of man's self-understanding
" "
in connection with his being placed into truth by revela-
" "
tion. In faith man understands himself to be within the
Church in his new being: he knows this as an existential
reality which lay outside the bounds of his own peculiar

potentialities. He sees his existence founded solely by the

Word of the person of Christ. He lives sub specie Dei and
otherwise not at all. Being is to be in Christ; here alone is

unity and wholeness of life; and so he comes to know that

his old being was being in Adam. The being of man has
no formal, metaphysical, psychological properties dis-
sociable from the proposition that " man is either in Christ
or in Adam " (see Part Three).
148
 Act and Being

Man " "

connected with truth,
is refers to truth, because
"
he "is in truth. This truth is no longer the
self-imposed
extreme of the self-transparent I (though, even in the case
"
of that truth ", one's connection consisted in one's being
in it). This truth is one bestowed, revealed; it is Jesus
Christ himself; the connection of existence to him is a
l
positive connection (justitia passiva!). But because here
untruth is placed into truth, unlike is known by unlike

(cf. pp. 4if. above). Thus the mediator must always be

" "
the "sense ", the lucid Word, though not as if from this,
" "
as from a given meaning of man, were to grow the
possibility of autonomous self-understanding. But through
this medium of meaning, unlike gives itself to known by
be
unlike Christ the crucified and risen by man, who himself
man, man knows God. But to
2
lives. While God knows
be known by God means to become a new man. Thus it
is at once the sinner and the just man who know God. It
" "
is not because God's Word makes sense that it affects
the existence of man but because it is the Word of God

Beziehung. Here, presumably, gesetzt also means

1
. . . ist eine gesetzte
" " " "
imposed from without 3
as opposed to the self-imposed (selbst-
"
But it does not therefore mean
gesetzt) of idealism. scientifically
"
objective ; though God institutes, ordains, makes positive the con-
" man of nature
nection, it is not necessarily pre- "ordained in the
(fallen Adam) cf. preceding paragraph. Man is not man (as pure
creature), lacks his essentials, until he is existentially in Christ. The
jus of justitia is synonymous with the Gesetz of gesetzt: the true law or
normal order for man (BonhoefFer seems to imply) is the existential,
" "
i.e. *#/ra-ordinary, in which his being is Christ. (Translator.)
" " "
2
Know ", here, is the usual
epistemological word erkennen.
But in this context the act-connotation of intention must be stressed in
"
order to distinguish the sense from that of A knows B " when this
" A is
means acquainted with B ". Here erkennen is existential; the
"
everyday sense demands A kennt B ". (Translator.)
 Act and Being
" "
of the Creator, Atoner, Redeemer; yet It is in sense
that this Word is fulfilled, even if that meaning is counter-

sense, non-sense. Thus man, when he understands himself

in faith, is wholly ravished from his own sense and redirected
to God.

For theology, however, this self-understanding in the instant

of belief, under the onslaught of Christ on my existence,
can only be stored in a recollection. It is this understanding
which is removed by two stages of reflexion when I under-
" "
stand myself to this extent: that I can only understand-
myself-in-recollection. For such is the theologian's reflexion
on himself. He knows that his doctrine of human self-

understanding is limited, his own self-understanding and

by
"
circumstances, to only ever being able to understand
"
oneself in recollection ;
he could not overreach himself,
unless Christ were to tempt and overcome him, in which
case he would no longer be the theologian. And so his
anthropology remains a theory like any other; likewise the

concrete doctrine of self-understanding in revelation which

is unfolded in these pages is, in mere theory, system,
itself,

autonomous self-understanding. Only in the Church itself,

where the Word of Christ is held in remembrance and his

living person is active, is it understood that a theology

meaning to serve the concrete Church is in reality sub-

serving, as autonomous thought, the nomos of Christ.

Where a theological self-understanding is concerned, it is

"
no longer a case of self-understanding which has been
" "
placed into truth that it is in faith but of reflexive

thought in the service of the Church ". If one may adapt

150
 Act and Being

Luther's dictum, the theologian's rubric is Reflects fortiter,

sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo.

Nothing of this tends to justify

any particular theology.
On the contrary, we discover the enterprise of theology to
be based on the structure of the Church and to be justifiable
only in that context. Which particular theology is right is
" "
something for dogma to say, but dogma is directed by
the preaching of the living Christ,

15*
 PART THREE

The Act-Being Problem in the

Concrete Doctrine of Man

" " " "
In Adam or in Christ
 BEING IN ADAM

"
A. Definition of" being in Adam
"
Sola fide credendum est nos esse peccatores. 1 To be in Adam "
is a more pointed ontological equivalent of esse peccator.
It derives from the Bible (I Cor. 15, 22; cf. 15, 45; Rom.
5, 12-14). If it were humanly possible to know oneself
a sinner without revelation, neither " being in Adam " nor
" "
being in Christ would be an existential definition of
man's being, for it would mean that man could place himself
into truth and could therefore turn back from his being qua
sinner (i.e. his not being in truth) to some more fundamental

being of his own, hence being in Adam would have to be

"
regarded as the potentiality of a deeper ability to be in
truth ", as resting on a being untouched by sin. Theologi-
cally expressed, this would mean that the sinner remains
the creature, existence as a creature providing the sub-
stratum of the ontic modulation which is sinnerhood. If
in this way it is contested that the whole of man's being is
involved in his being a sinner, there is danger of semi-
Pelagianism; ontologically, the doctrine of causae secundae
becomes unavoidable. Seen in this light, Luther's words
1
Luther, Rom. Komm., Picker, II, pp. 69, I2ff.

155
 Act and Being

are thus intelligible: we may never comprehend our

existence a whole, because it is founded solely on
as
God's Word: God's Word demands faith. That we are
sinners in the whole of our being is a knowledge accessible

only to faith in revelation, for it is only then, by God's

Word, that the whole of our being can be placed into
truth.
That is revealed knowledge which outside revelation
" "
(i.e. in Adam) can never be
acquired, for in Adam
means in untruth, in culpable perversion of the will (the
human essence) inwards to the self cor curvum in se. Man
has broken loose from communion with God, thus also with
men, and now he stands alone, which is in untruth. 1 Because
" "
he is alone, the world world, his fellow-men have
is his
"
sunk into the world of things (cf. Heidegger's Mitsein "),
God has become a religious object, but man himself has
become his own creator, his own master and property.
That he should now begin and end with himself in his cogni-
"
tion only to be expected, for he is utterly
is by himself"
in the falsehood of naked self-lordship.

Ontologically this means that sin is the violation of the

1
H. F. Kohlbriigge, Das siebente Kapitel des Briefes Pauli an die Romer,
1839, p. 52 : Man '*
did not lose the image of God but lost God himself,
*
he had become disobedient God called him flesh and his
*
and after
conduct wicked *, sin '. How has man been behaving since? He
' *

makes use of the properties wherein he has been created by God just
as if he had not become a transgressor through the disobedience of one,
as if he had not fallen, as if his entire heart, devisings, notions, delibera-

tions, as if himself as he is and lives, were not perverted and perverse. . . .

He makes use of in order to

deny his death, or righteousness to set up
life
his own self-righteousness, whereupon to insist that he disclaims his own

righteousness. ... He makes use of truth to make God a liar, to tear

himself loose from God where he is bound to him, and to bind God to
him with a Word which as he reads it has not come to him ".
156
 Act and Being

Dasein (the being of the creature) by the Wie-Sein* that

when we come to the concept of sin this ontological distinc-
tion between Da- and Wie-Sein is meaningless, because the
I has become its own master and itself taken possession of
its Furthermore, the knowledge of sinnerhood is
existence.

impossible from the state of sin itself, because the Dasein is

still in the power of the Wiesein ; it can be derived
only from
revelation, wherein creatureliness and sin are separated in
a manner which remains to be described. And so the

ontological definition of man

as being a sinner, as existing
" "
in sin with reference to God, remains correct. Any
attempt to establish an ontological principle by fastening
" "
the idea of the creature to Adam must lead to the
Catholicism of the analogia entis, a pure metaphysics of being.
The thought and philosophy of man in sin is self-glorifying,
"
even when it purports to question itself as critical philo-

sophy ", so long as it will not allow revelation to drive it

into the historical Church of Christ; all knowledge, not

excluding yv<50t o-eavrov, is bent on man's ultimate justi-
fication in his own
But there comes a time when,
eyes.
under the Atlas-burden of a world's creator, in the cold
silence of his eternal solitude, man
begins to fear himself,
to shudder in alarm. Thereupon, exalting himself to be
his own final judge, he proceeds to his own indictment

which is couched in the language of conscience. His

answer, when charged, is remorse (contritio activa!). The
conscience and remorse of man in Adam are his final
1
Dasein and Wiesein,
**
thereness and " newness ", mean respectively
"

the actual being (existence) and manner or quality of being (what we

" In the rest of Part
have rendered above as ontic modulation").
Three these German words will be retained when used in contrast.
(Translator,}
157
 Act and Being

grasp at himself, the final confirmation and justification of

his self-lordly, self-masterly attitude.
1
Man makes himself
the defendant and exhorts himself upward to his better self.

But the cry of conscience serves only to dissemble the mute

loneliness of bis desolate Isolation, it sounds without echo
into the world that is governed and construed by the self.

Man in Adam
reaches the confines of his solitude but, mis-
" "
reading his situation, continues to seek himself in himself 2 ;
he hopes by remorse still to preserve his sinful existence. 3
As a sinner he abides by his sins, for he sees them through
his conscience, which holds him prisoner in himself and
"
bids him
look only on those sins, but sin grows also and

waxes great through too much looking and thinking on it;

to which contributes the foolishness of our conscience, that
4
ashamed before God and
5
is sorely punishes itself *. There-
fore this conscience of the Devil, who leaves man to
is
5

himself in untruth, so this conscience must be mortified

when Christ comes to man. Conscience can torture, can
drive to despair, but is unable of itself to kill man, because
indeed it is his final grasp at himself.
6
Man is unable to
1
But against this see for example Brunstad, op. cit., p. 226 : ". . . the
value-reality of the unconditional-personal is evidenced in the con-
science ",
Luther, W.A. 2, 690.
*

8
Luther, W.A. 2, 719: "in which belief, if it were possible that
thou hadst the remorse of all the world, yet it would be the remorse
of Judas, which rather angers than placates God **.
4 "
Luther, W.A. 2, 687, 689: Therefore thou shouldst not look on
the sin in the sinners nor in thy conscience. . ." .

Luther, W.A. 40, 511. On the duo diaboli, cf. W.A. 40, i. 74.
5

6
This was put with admirable clarity by H. F. Kohlbriigge, op. cit.,
" For
pp. 27f. : sin does not only lurk behind evil; even more it lurks
behind good. ... If we now do good, sin permits us to renounce evil
before God, helps us to pray and weep, strive and struggle, till we faint
158
 Act and Being

will his own death even in conscience. 1 There is his limit;

he clings to himself, therefore his knowledge of himself is

imprisoned in untruth.
2
To be placed in truth in the sight
of God means to be dead or to live, but these are conditions
neither of which man
can impose on himself, they are
conferred on him only by the encounter with Christ in
contritio passiva and faith. It is only when Christ has broken

through the solitude of man that man knows

himself placed
into truth; whether, in the challenge with which the Cross
confronts the sinner, man dies for ever, persisting in his

and sink; thus does it drive and goad us to maintain through this very
care our wretchedness in the sight of God. . . For such piety and
.

holiness is well-pleasing to the flesh. Here is penance, absolution and

a constant unmindfulness of the purification of bygone sins, yet man
himself stays fast in the death which is the flesh, and only to maintain
himself in the same he wills the good ... that he may procure himself
rest in his unrest. . . ." And on p. 29: "I made a thousand protests
against all wicked desires, I sundered myself from my flesh, armed
myself with tears, exercises of penance and tireless prayer; I cried out
for the spirit ofGod that it might sanctify me through and through,
I believed, Idid works: but all that I did as one pressed by necessity,
not from love of God's commandments; I shunned the will of God
even while I strove to act in accord with it. ... Nay, I did good out
"
of enmity to God. . ." And on p. 37:
. Then it plagued me with
sins and let me soon after feel remorse, that I might not come to be
" This is
aware that I fell short of God's glory. . ." And on p. 40:
.

the sin of us the high-priest in the temple of the religiosity of all

all, this

flesh, who, applying to his service the service of God, kills all that is
under the sun",

Luther, W. A. 18,664.
"
Luther, W.A. 18, 674:
a
Caeca est enim natura humana, ut nesdat suas
morbos potius9 deinde superba videtur sibi nosse et posse omnia . .
ipsius vires seu .

scriptura autem definit hominem esse corruption et captum, turn superbe contem-
nentem et ignorantem suae corruptionis et captivitatis.

159
 Act and Being

isolation, or dies to live in truth with Christ (for die he

must, as Christ died), in either case true knowledge of oneself
"
is given only through Christ. If thought knowing itself
"
master of its world corresponded to the condition of
isolation, this state is now recognised in its true colours as
guilt towards Christ; that is to say, it is only recognised
for what it is at the instant of Christ's break-through. If
conscience made a
direct line of communication between
man and God, would circumvent God's self-obligation
it

to the mediating Word., hence exclude Christ and the

Church. 1
Moreover, the temptation which leads to man's death is
itself the work of Christ, for man dies of the law only because
Christ died or (in the pre-Christian era) was to die through
the law. The severest temptation of the law, of the deus in
sua majestate? temptation by the death of Christ as end j*
is

It is in principle not possible to lay down the difference

between real temptation by Christ and temptation by
conscience, as the last grasp of the self at the self; this
difference is analogous to the relation of faith and faith-
wishfulness. Where the I has truly come to the end, truly
reaches out of itself, where its grasp is more than a final
"
seeking of the self in the self", there Christ is at work.

However, certainty about this is never to be won by reflexion

on the act we remain psychologically self-impenetrable
1
probably no idle coincidence that Holl both defines Luther's
It is

religion as one of conscience and admits a possibility of finding, in the

first commandment, God without Christ, Cf, Luther* p. 70.
2
In Luther, the essential implication of this expression is that of a
God not bound by the Word of grace. It is not, however, intended to
imply an impossibility of meeting the deus in sua majestate in Christy
8
Literal translation. (Translator.)
1 60
 Act and Being

but only in the direct contemplation of Christ and his

activity upon me, within me. Hence Luther's countless
admonitions not to look on one's own remorse, own
faith, but to look on the Lord Christ himself. While I am
stillreflecting on myself in order to find Christ, Christ is not
there. If he is really there, I see only him. Conscience
may be termed the voice of God only inasmuch as conscience
is where, in the real temptation, Christ kills man in order
to give or not give him life.
1
It is know
all-important to
that self-understanding is possible only when and where
the living Christ approaches us, only in his comtemplation.
e<x.vTol<$ a.VTOv<$ jjierpovvre^ KO.L
crv"yi<pLvovTe$ &a.VToi)<$ ov

(II Cor. IO, 12).

But, because the attempt to understand oneself from
oneself remains in sin, as formal ontology the definition of
1
With reference to the current debate on conscience c Holl's Luther,
Brunstad's Idee der Religion and the work by Hirsch, Jesus Christus, der
"
Hen. All three credit Luther with a religion of conscience ". On
the other side are to be placed Gogarten's criticism of Holl in Ghristtiche
Welt, 1924, his Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott, 1926, his Theologische
Tradition und theologische Arbeit, 1927, and Grisebach's Gegenwart, 1928.
"
In the last, see for example pp. 5641?. : And so restraints are imposed

upon me through the experience of conscience, from myself and never

but through myself, but in this way the restraints are never really
imposed from without. That is just the astounding thing about con-
science : man hears only himself in an ultimate and frightful isolation,
and he therefore thinks to be hearing himself as God. ..." And on
"
p. 475: It would be overrating oneself to maintain that in one's
essential nature one could hear the voice of the actual basis of ethical

reality". H. M. measure of agreement with

Miiller evinces a large
Grisebach in und Glaube bei Luther, 1929. See further
his Erfahrung

pp. 267-300 of Heidegger's Sein und %eit, 1927, G. Jacob's Der Gewissent-
begriff in der Theologie Luthers, 1930, which is influenced by Heidegger
" " in
and Tillich, and R. Seeberg's article Gewissen R.G.G., II.

Stoker's Das Gewissen, 1925, is relevant to the phenomenology of

conscience.
161
 Act and Being

human existence In Adam as sinnerhood is correct and

sufficient. To being in sin corresponds the act of self-
misunderstanding through the usurpation of the Dasein by
the Wiesein* in the sinful act of pretending to absolute

power over oneself. The interrelation of act and being

"
in Adam " is something we now have to examine.

B.
"
Adam " as I and as humanity

Sin is the narcissism of the human will, which is to say

" free and conscious,
essence ". Will has no reality save as
therefore sin must be understood as act. Any choice made
in a self-seeking sense must be adjudged a sinful act. The
importance of defining sin in this way lies in this, that it
does not seem otherwise possible to preserve the guilt-
character of sin; underlying this as an empirical datum is
the dictate of conscience, to the effect that one is responsible

only for wilful self-determination against God. Here one

may attempt to differentiate sin and guilt as respectively
being and act, but in the (empirical) light of one's conscience
it seems understand sin-g^-guilt as the being of man,
false to

and so to minimise the gravity of guilt as a distinct concept.

Sin, then, is act. Fundamental to this conclusion is a
concept of conscience as God's direct voice in man- But if
we accept a different explanation of the experience of
conscience, such as was outlined above, this argument fails.
The endeavour of conscience to restrict sin to the act should
be regarded as man's attempt at self-salvation. We have
knowledge of what sin is
only through Christ's mediation of
God's Word, and this knowledge overrules whatever con-
1
See p, 157, n. i, above (Translator).
162
 Act and Being

science may have to say in dissent. So la fide credendum est nos

esse peccatores.

If sin were no more than the occasional free act, it would

be theoretically and humanly possible to find one's way
back to a sinless being; revelation in Christ would have
become redundant. The death of Christ reveals that the
wholeman must die to the law, since the whole of the old
Adam is
continuity of man's being in Adam is
in sin. The
judged by the death of Christ. Thus the necessity arises of
understanding sin as being.

There are two ways in which sin may be understood as

" "
having the entity mode of being:
1. By embodiment in the doctrine of original sin: we

may the
call process historicisation, psychologisation or
naturalisation. In one way or another sin is fastened to the
nature of man as humanly generated. In this tarnished
nature, non possum non peccare. The concept of nature
vouches a priori for sin's continuity and existentiality.
2. Sin is understood as a pre-temporal deed underlying

the sin of the present (of this view Julius Miiller is the latest

exponent) ; all speculative dualism tends to subscribe to this

conception, as metaphysical theories of satanic
well as
revolt. Here an ontological prius, in the shape of an entity
"
with all the fixity of there is ", is given undialectical

primacy over the act of sin.

Yet as entity sin cannot touch me existentially: I trans-

cend it, I remain its master even when it overpowers me.
Sin conceived as entity is man's exculpation. A mode of

being must be ascribed to sin which on the one hand ex-

presses contingency, hence the complete inexculpability

its

of the recurrent act, and on the other admits an interpre-

163
 Act and Being

tatlon of sin as the master of man to whom man has utterly

delivered himself. The New Testament itself lays in our
hands the very concept of being which we seek: Adam as
I, and as the person of humanity.

In the judgment brought upon me by the death of Christ

I see myself perish in entirety; my for I myself, the whole
person, am guilty as the actor of my life, the taker of its

decisions, which again and again were self-seeking: I

determined myself in false ways, therefore Christ is my

death, and because I wished to be alone the master, I am
alone in my death. But Christ's death kills the whole of

my humanity, kills humanity in the man; for I am I and

humanity in one: my
in from God, humanity fell.
fall

And so the I's debt before the Cross grows to monstrous

dimensions; it is very Adam, the very first to do the in-

conceivable, he who does it still sin, the act. But in this

act, whose whole weight I continue to lay upon me as a

charge with each sinful occasion, I find myself already in

the humanity of Adam, or I see that in me, necessarily,

humanity does also this my own free deed. As man the

I is permanently consigned into this old humanity, which
<c "
came through me. As an individual it
to fall is not,
for it is and was always in humanity. And for the very
reason that the deed of the individual is also the deed of
humanity, man must know himself responsible for the entire
guilt of mankind. It is not possible to demonstrate the

peculiar interrelation of individual and humanity as a causal

" "
connection otherwise the entity mode would once
more come into play but knowledge of it is given to the
individual as part of God's judgment, and it is
knowledge
164
 Act and Being

of a kind which cannot be detached from the judgment and

manipulated in theoretical abstraction for purposes of
exoneration. On the contrary; because each person, as
a human being, stands within the humanity of Adam, he
may not sever himself from the sinful act and would not
thereby rediscover a sinless being: the whole of his being,
as a person, is in sin. Thus in Adam act is as constitutive
for being as being for act; but both act and being come into
judgment as laden with guilt. It is not in terms of histori-
calising theories, psychologising interpretations, that the
structure of Adam's humanity should be conceived; rather
should it be thus regarded : I myselfam Adam, am I and
humanity together; in me falls humanity; as I am Adam,
so every individual, but then in all individuals the one
is

person of humanity, Adam, is active. This expresses both

the contingency of the act and the continuity of being in
sin. Because sin isenvisaged in the concept of ",
tc
Adam
" "
in the person mode of being, the contingency of conduct
is preserved in the person of humanity, who I also am, and
is combined with the continuity proper to the person, while

conversely the person is attested being act by responsible

conduct itself.

This conception isin general agreement with the defini-

tion of sin given by Luther who wished it to be envisaged
equally as original sin and as individual conduct and guilt
as self-seeking, as the individual person's seeking to

possess himself. The being of sin has the personal mode.

When I know of my being a sinner qua individual, I see that
my Dasein is in the power of my Wiesein l I cannot know :

it in its creatureliness. When I know of my being a sinner

1
See p. 157, n. i, above (Translator).
 Act and Being

qua humanity, I see that my sinful Dasein is the basis of my

Wiesein; yet I never see this as an exoneration, as if I

occupied the position of a detached observer looking at

a fixed entity: on the contrary, I see my existence within
the frame of judgment, inasmuch as I know I must die as
"
Adam ".

c. Everydayness, temptation and the knowledge of conscience

The ewrydayness of man in Adam the option

is guilt. It is

for self-isolation, which is a decision constantly in process

of being taken, because it has already been taken. It is

the creature's wilful and compulsive quest for enjoyment,

and as such it is constantly in flight from matters whose
acknowledgment setsbounds to the business of enjoyment:
death and oneself, as rightly known. But because flight is

hopeless
*
(for if not to-day, then in death, man must stand
exposed before the judgment-seat of Christ II Cor. 5, 10),
the everydayness of Adam is desperation and that all the

more, the wilder the and the less man is conscious of

flight

despair. Superficiality mask of lonely isolation; it is

is the
directed lifeward, but its
beginning and end is death in guilt.
Conscience, as the becoming aware of despair and isolation,
seeks to overcome them through this very awareness.
Isolation is not grasped in its true sense; there arises merely
a general consciousness of being left alone, and Adam
proposes to correct this by conscience itself, by reducing
himself to his own resources. In conscience the powers of
the world, the law and death, loom large to threaten and

frighten; life erupts into man's fear of himself, because he

1
Cf. Luther, R8m. Komrn., Ficker 236, 31.
1 66
 Act and Being

is ignorant of the future and has no control over its course.

Yet there is also in this fear an
inability to break free of
oneself, a final lingering of the I on itself. In conscience
death rises over the horizon, but only as an entity, as
I's

a phenomenon which may be forced to terms by conscience

Man knows himself immortal, and remains alone.
itself.

That this being-alone has the character of guilt is revealed

through the temptation wherein Christ assails man through
the law. Here all that went before grows to grim reality.
Man arrested in his ultimate flight, on the apparent
is

escape-route of conscience, and he is forced to recognise

that his guilt and death are the beginning and end of his

flight.Moment by moment his guilt is bringing death

down upon him; death is no longer an entity overcome; in
the moment of recognising guilt and the curse of death,
man sees that he is dead before he
already in death; he is

1
dies, and he is dying anew each moment.
Death is the
very source of all his knowledge and volition, for they do
not come from the life of God. This constant dying is
accompanied with fear and woe. Guilt, death and the
mundane press in upon man, making the world too "narrow"
" " as the
1
On this Heidegger's analysis of being to death
point cf.
" " "
proper potentiality realisable by the entirety of existence ".

Heidegger's concept of death is metaphysical and at bottom a false

metaphor, since death in the process of mind finding itself,
.he includes
" " "
i.e. Dasein ". Inasmuch
being to death
as is not, for him, an

ontic-existential experience but part of the ontological-existentiai

structure of Damn, death is incorporated in living existence. The
Christian account is very different: in death, to which man in Adam
has as such always forfeited himself, and into which he has always
lapsed, existence finds its real end, its terminus, not its wholeness,
" " " end "
completion, perfection; here end qua finish and qua fulfil-

ment are identifiable only in the metaphysical system. Death is eternal

death, unless Christ wake man from the dead (Eph. 5, 14).

167
 Act and Being

forhim 1 no longer Is he alone, for now everything speaks

;

to him as his accuser yet he remains in this condition

"
alone and defenceless. In this temptation, man dies
2
of"
Christ, dies "of" the law, which is nevertheless of the
3
spirit. In the death of the sinner, however, predestination
is fulfilled; for one, eternal death; for another, eternal life.

Temptation Adam, and must lead

itself belongs to man in
to death. It brings with it again and again the terrors of

eternal death. In it sin, guilt and the law darken the Cross
and resurrection, and they tempt man to accept them as
final. Whether Christ will give himself to the tempted man
in grace and faith is always in the balance, therefore temp-
tatiin should never be regarded as a dialectical point of
4
transition on the road to faith. No; it is the real end of
the sinner, his death; that should grow out of death is
life

the free gift of God to his communion, free even for the
"
Luther, W,A, 2, 685f.
1 Like as a child is born in fear and peril
:

out of the little dwelling of its mother's womb into the wide heaven and
earth of this world, so man goes out of this life through the narrow gate
of death; though heaven and world appear great and wide
likewise,
to us now we life, yet all is far narrower and smaller against the
are in
Heaven to come than is our mother's womb against the heaven we see . . .

thus in dying one should take comfort against fear, and know that a
great spaciousness and joy will be thereafter".
Translator's Note: At this point in the text Bonhoeffer remarks that

Enge (** narrowness *'), Angst (" fear ") and bangs (" woeful '*) are words
with a common root which is of course shared by many words of
constriction, etc. Examples: O.E. ange ("painful"), angr anger;
angle ankle, anguish, angina > anxious (with Latin 9 Greek and other
9

antecedents) .

"
2
Or assault ", the literal sense of Anfichtung (Trans.).
8
On this point also Kohlbriigge writes with a rare profundity,
op. cit.
4
Holl is inclined to this error; see his Luther , pp. Gyff, and passim.
168
 Act and Being
" "
man who is in the communion, i.e. finds himself believ-
God can "
ing. allow man to die of" the knowledge of
his sin, and can lead him through this death into the
communion of Christ. In this case he turns man's eyes
away from man's self and gives him his direction (the pure
intentionality of the actus directus] to Christ the Crucified and
Risen, who is the defeat of temptation to death.

169
 BEING IN CHRIST

" " in Christ

A. Definition of being
"
Seek thyself only in Christ and not in thyself, then wilt
thou find thyself eternally in him." * Here the man in se
conversus 2 is torn away from the attempt to remain alone
with himself and is turned towards Christ. Now he lives
3
only in the contemplation of Christ. This is the gift of
faith, that man no longer looks on himself but on salvation
alone, which has come to him from without. He finds
himself in Christ because heis already in Christ from the

fact of seeking himself there. If, through man's self-

incapsulation, Dasein in Adam was in subjection to his
Wiesein,* the sight of Christ brings the loosening of the
bonds: Dasein becomes free, not as if it were able to stand
1
Luther, W.A. 2, 690.
" sed
Luther, W.A. 40, i;
2 hie opportet Christum et con-
282, 2 iff.:
scientiam meam fieri unum corpus, ita ut in conspectu meo nihil maneat nisi
Christus crucifixus et resuscitatus. Si vero in me tantum intueor excluso Christo 9
actum est de me. . . . ibi in me converse et considerans qualis ego sim vd esse

debeamy item quid mihi faciundum $it> amitto ex oculis Christum, qui solus est
iustitia et vita mea".
"
8
Luther, W.A. 40, i :
283, 2, on Gal. 2, 20; that is,
*
non ego *: non
inspicio me'\
4
See p. 157, n. i, above (Translator).
170
 Act and Being

over against Wiesein as independent being, but in the sense

of escaping from the Fs domination into the lordship of
Christ, where for the first time in original freedom it recog-
nises itself as the creature of God.
Only in Christ does man know
himself as the creature of
God; in Adam he was at once creator and created. 1 If he
is to know himself as the creature of God, the old man

must have died and the new arisen, whose essence it is to

live in self-disregard, wholly in the contemplation of Christ.
He knows himself as one who lives in Christ in identity

with the old man who

has passed through death knows
himself as the creature of God. That the sinner also is a
creature, the sinner can say only as a believer. As known
by the sinner it remains an idea in untruth.
It would seem logical here to demand that the ontological
definition of the being of man as sinnerhood and being-in-
Christ should be underpinned by a general ontology of the
creature. 2 In such a case we would have allied ourselves
" "
with Catholicism. Creaturehood simply is only in faith :

it is the existence of the believer, which is inseparable from

" "
the ontic mode called faith; it is not in the fixed entity-
"
mode of there is ", but in the very movement of being
in faith. Ontologically this means that God is at once the
basis of the creature's being and his master. Transcen-
"
dentally it means that the existence of the creature is amid

The possibility of forming the Idea of a creator-god, which naturally

1

obtains even in statu corruptionis, is another matter. It is an idea which

cannot be understood as a reality by the individual in that state, for the

very reason that he continually postulates himself as his own creator.
2
We have already rejected, in another connection, the other possi-
bility, of seeking a groundwork in the phenomenological interpretation
of the existentiality of existence.
 Act and Being
"
and with reference to transcendence. There Is no on to-
logical specification of the creature independently of the
fact that God is the atoner and redeemer while man is the
sinner and forgiven. In the Christian doctrine of being,
all metaphysical ideas of eternity and time, being and
becoming, living and dying, essence and appearance must
be compatible with ontological concepts of sin and grace,
or they must be entirely recast. Only from this viewpoint
is it
possible to define the being of sin, the being of grace,
the being of revelation, as being with the character of a
union of act and being: as personal being. However, in
the idea of the creature the personal being of God and of
revelation is expressed as lord and creator over my human
personal being. Creatorhood, in this conception, is the
more exhaustive definition.
If it is only in faith that I am able to know myself as
God's creature, I know further that God has in creating me
placed me in my entirety, both as I and as humanity, in the
context of nature and history; I know therefore that these
circumstances are in some way affected by creatureliness.
** "
But creature-faith is reluctant to claim that the world
that has come to be its own, determined in its Wiesein by
sin and death and with its Dasein l in subjection, is God's
creation. Nevertheless, God is still the Lord even of this
world, and, looking to the hope offered by the resurrection
of the historical (geschichtlicK) Christ and my life with him,
to which is promised a new Heaven and earth, faith must
believe that in spite of its falling-away the world is God's
creation. It follows that any theory of being which sought
" "
to be applicable to purely creaturely being must aeeds
1
See p. 157, n. i, above (Translator).

172
 Act and Being

become a definition of being outside the revelation in Christ,

even though it is only in Christ that a full and proper faith
in divine creation may evolve.
If we now havethe ontological task of demarcating the

being of the creature as postulated in the being of sinner and

we must seek our answer simultaneously in
justified alike,
the structure of man's Dasein (whether enslaved by sin or

emancipated by grace) and in the structure of his Wie-Sein 9

"
i.e. his ontic orientation, his being-directed-at ". His
" "
ontological condition, his Da x
can never be specified
independently of his ontic mode, his Wie. No metaphysical
deductions or distinctions existentia, essentia, ens no onto-
logical-existential structures are capable of hunting down
" "
the Da of creaturehood. To be a creature means to
exist (Dasein) through God and for God in faith, i.e. speci-
fically under the impact of revelation. This utterly general
definition itself suffices to show that in the concept of
creaturehood the Da and the Wie belong indissolubly
together.
"
Creaturely existence Dasein exists, is da ", only in
the being-directed towards revelation; conversely, the
being-directed is an ontological
peculiarity of this
"
Da "
as such. This is to say that both Da and Wie are, inextric-
ably, based together on revelation and only on revelation.
Only in this context is one's understanding of the Da and
Wie safeguarded from adulteration with categories alien to
the case.
"
1
Bonhoeffer says simply
Translator's note: Das * Da ", but this '

" *'
has been rendered ontological condition in order to eliminate the
" "
actual fact connotation (~das Doss) of Dasein when it is contrasted
" " " "
with essence or used to affirm reality. Condition must be
"
understood as foundation-state ".
173
 Act and Being

Likewise only in revelation that creaturehood can be

it is

defined qua personal being, inasmuch as it is the person

whose existence has been affected, redirected or re-created
by Thus all our ontological definitions are con-
Christ.
nected with the revelation in Christ; only the concretions
of sinnerhood and the being of the just man answer the case
before us. But these do not abolish the idea of the creature;
no, it preserved and expressed in the concretion of
is
"
existence through and for God ". Neither do they exclude
" "
the possibility of theologically rethinking such creaturely
categories as individuality, being in history and nature,
being and becoming, etc., but this possibility depends on
the presupposition of an existence affected by revelation.

To object that categories of a generally metaphysical nature

have been employed in the foregoing is to overlook the
" "
necessity of a certain formal pre-comprehension as a

standpoint from which questions even if wrong ones

can be framed, whose answer is subsequently returned by
revelation together with a fundamental correction of the

question.

And so the idea of creation provides no basis on which to

" "
raise our definition of man's being in Christ, There is

only man Adam or in Christ, in unbelief or faith, in the

in
" "
humanity of Adam or the communion of Christ; there is
God alone as creator, God as atoner and redeemer. The
being of all these, rnoreoever, is personal being. The world
of entity is transcended by this personal being, which also
"
bestows on it its character: it "is for man in Adam his
" "
own subjected, interpreted world imbued with the
 Act and Being
" "
curse of death; it is for man in Christ the world delivered
from the I yet newly subjected to it by God in the expecta-
tion of the new creation (Rom. 8 3 igff.); finally, it is

absolutely for God, its eternal master. Its being has no

more general definition.

Being in Christ, being-directed to Christ, makes existence

free; man exists for and through Christ; he believes because
he looks on In defining this faith in terms of pure
Christ.

intentionality one must avoid on the one hand the desire to

pinpoint the temporality of faith as is attempted not only
by the theology of consciousness but, in my opinion, also
by H. M. Miiller in our own time
1
and on the other hand
the desire to locate in the act of belief itself the reflection
which discovers faith only in the reflected form of faith-
"
wishfulness. That is the danger in Earth. Faith and faith
"
-wishfulness lie together in the same act. Every act of faith
" "
is wishful a happening embedded in
in so far as it is

the psychic and there accessible to reflexion. But faith

properly so called lies in the act's intention towards

Christ, which founded in being in the communion of
is

Christ. A which grows doubtful of itself because it

faith
considers itself unworthy is a faith which stands in tempta-
tion. Faith itself knows that it is not faith qua opus which

justifies, but Christ alone, and this it does not need to be

"
See his Erfahrung und Glaube bei Luther, 1928. The
1 times of need
"
and stress (Not) when faith overcomes temptation are said to be
plainly demonstrable, but where is our criterion for distinguishing such
occasions from self-stimulated experiences? Is it perhaps to be found
"
in some special intensity of experience "? Has Miiller really avoided
falling into psychologism? Only two persons can be sure of the reality
of faith as distinct from faith- wishfulness one is the believer who being
;

in faith no longer questions, the other is Christ.

175
 Act and Being

told by a reflexion which in addition says something quite

different, inasmuch as it questions faith and brings it into

temptation. Though Earth has theological right on his

side when he chides Schleiermacher for his "great confusion"
of religion and grace, 1 he undermines his position by intro-
ducing reflexion into the act of faith, with the effect of
casting doubt on faith itself, therefore indirectly on Christ.
This is the penalty paid for inadequately distinguishing
between knowing in faith and theological cognition. Further-
more, there is a danger here of inadvertently allowing that
wishful faith truly grasps Christ, whereupon all such
ominous words as enthusiasm, the lively sense or religous
"
experience ", piety, feeling, conversion of the will must

perforce return to currency. It must be plainly said that

within the communion of Christ faith takes shape in religion,

that therefore religion is here called faith, that, as I look on
" "
Christ, I may and must say for my consolation I believe
"
only to add, of course, as I turn to look on myself, help
Thou my unbelief". All praying, all searching for God in
his Word, clinging to his promise, all entreaty for his
all

grace, all hoping in sight of the Cross, all this for reflexion
" "
is religion ", faith-wishfulness "; but in the communion
of Christ, while it is still work of man, it is God-given
the

faith, faith willed by God, wherein by God's mercy he may

really be found. If faith wished to question its own suffi-

ciency would already have lapsed from intentionality into

it

temptation. Say rather, then, that it assures itself of its

content, inasmuch as it holds fast to it, draws it to itself,
dwelling thus with undivided attention in the contemplation
of Christ, which is destroyed only by reflexion on the self.
A
Barth, Dogmatik, I, 18, pp. 301 IT.
176
 Act and Being

Being in Christ being turned to Christ, and this is possible

is
""
only through being already (as we have described
above) in the communion of Christ. And so the transcen-
dental and ontological theses are re-united.
This is no more than the formal definition, as we may
call it, of being in Christ. But in its historical actuality this

being is similarly determined by both past and future (see

p. 119 above). It is from this point that we may begin to
see clearly the concrete mode of being shared by being-
directed to Christ and being within the communion.

B. The past as determinant of being in Christ: Conscience

" "
Whoever lacks conscience isChrist or the spirit of evil

(Theologia deutsch}. Historical man has a conscience, not

only in Adam
a shield against the attack of God) but
(as
also in the Church of Christ. Conscience is only where there
is sin. Since, however, man in Christ Is no longer ruled by
sin, conscience represents a determination by the past in
Adam. Man has conscience from and in himself; it does
"
not belong to the things yet to come ". It is the reflexion

on oneself which the farthest limit of Adam's penetration.

is

Primarily it is not the voice of God but man's own voice.

But if being in Christ is purely intentional, if it is being-
directed upon Christ, reflexion
obviouslyon the self is

excluded. the problem of the Christian conscience.

This is

A distinction must be made between two forms of con-

science appropriate to man in Christ:
i. Conscience is interposed between Christ (the com-
it obscures my view of Christ, or
munion) and myself;
shows him to me as my judge from the Cross, thus pointing
177
 Act and Being

constantly to my sin* The law of the spirit has risen against

me. hear only my accuser, see myself cast out, death and
I

Hell reach out to seize me- In reality this is temptation 1

and rebellion against Christ, for it is mistrust of the grace
offered in Christ. In this temptation the man in the com-
munion of Christ also stands in real danger of losing Christ,
unless Christ himself comes forward to kill man's conscience,
confess himself anew to man and restore his faith. But in
faith man once more finds himself already in the communion;
he knows that even temptation by sin and death is overcome
in faith for him who stands in the communion. The opinion
that such temptation is needed in order to come to faith
resembles Hegel's dialectic in making evil a necessary stage
on the road to good. This temptation belongs wholly to
the righteousness of the flesh, and this conscience is itself

defection from Christ.

2. The
other form of conscience, of reflexion on the self,
is comprised within the intention towards Christ. Whoever
seeks himself in Christ sees himself always in sin, but now
this sin is no longer able from Christ
to distract the attention

indeed, it is rather the basis from which I, v <rap/c, can

contemplate Christ with such singleness of mind. I see my
sin in the context of my having been forgiven by Christ.
"
Thus thou mayst surely look on thy sins from out thy
conscience there sins are no more sins, there they
(!), for
are overcome and swallowed up in Christ if thou but . , .

believest this, they no longer cause thee harm ", 2 Further-

more, repentance is no longer the final attempt to grasp

1 **
Cf. the whole of Luther's Sermon on readiness to die", 1519,
W.A., 2, 68sfF.
2
Luther, W.A. 2, 690.
I 78
 Act and Being

oneself, but repentance in the confidence of forgiveness 1

contritio passiva. This is the meaning of daily penance and
repentance. Not a self-losing to oneself, but a self-finding
in Christ. Admittedly, even the reflexion of repentance has
falling away from
life v o-ap/d as its precondition, the sin of

intentionality towards Christ. If there were no sin, repent-

ance would be thanksgiving. This final hindrance by sin
to the pure contemplation of Christ is overcome in faith,
which sees sin henceforth only in the context of forgiveness

by Christ within the communion. This faith remains

penitence, but as such reflexion has lost its power to disrupt
the steady intention towards Christ; even now, of course,
intentionality is upon occasion drawn into conflict, for it
"
still lacks the pure form of being determined solely by the
future" (see "C" below).

In the presence of Christ, and in Christ, the self-reflexion of

sinful man is the death of man ev oa.pKt, just as the self-
reflexion of man in Adam was the death of man in the spirit.
Because Christ died, and because we in baptism have shared
his death (Rom. 6), death is embedded in faith, the death
which the believer must daily die. Neither ascesis nor self-

steeling give him

strength so to die, for these remain the
work of natural man, who cannot desire a Cross and a
death; he dies He does not give himself
solely in faith.
death, but sees himself, in faith, given into death by Christ.
He sees himself drawn into the daily death-throes of the
flesh, the agony of the old man; in the power of faith he can
see Christ wrestling with death within him. He has faith
in the victory of Christ, yet he is body and soul in the grip
" W.A.
1
Gf. Luther's Sermon on the sacrament of penance ", 2, 713$".

179
 Act and Being

of death. The death of the old man is guilt, which delivers

the future to the past in compensation for having forcibly

deprived it of the new man. The man over whom Christ's

future has triumphed in faith must with open eyes die daily
the death of this past. The harder death attacks him, the

mightier is
power of the past over man. Thus being in
the

Christ, whichdetermined by the past in the form of the

is

reflexion, within faith, of repentance and dying, stands on

determination by the future of life and sanctity.

c. The future as determinant of being in Christ: the Child

" "
Future determination of being by something
signifies the
" "
yet to come something
:
coming from outside. There is
genuine futurity only through Christ, only through the
reality, newly created by him, of one's neighbour and the
creation. The world estranged from Christ is I-confined:
it is, that is to say, already the past. Life in this world is

reflexion. The yet-to-come demands outright acceptance

or rejection; reflexion is here abnegation. Christ, the
absolute futurus demands faith,
y
demands a reflexionless
orientation upon him.
In this, even the second stage of reflexion is superseded,
i.e.not only self-reflexion outside Christ but the reflexion of
" "
the Christian conscience described above. While sin
persists, Christian conscience persists. But in pure intention
toward Christ there is no sin, and there is therefore no
reflexion of faith-ful repentance. In
determination by his
the future, man is wholly detached from himself by con-

templation of Christ. Yet it is not, of course, a matter of

self-dissolution in mystical vision;
"
I see Christ as nay
1 80
 Act and Being

Lord and my God " that, however, is no longer a reflexion

:

on the I but is a manner of expressing the personality of the

relationship which is preserved even in the attitude of pure
intention.
Fides directa is the name which has been given by tradi-
tional Protestant dogmatics to the act of faith which,

though taking place in the consciousness of the person,

cannot be reflected in it. 1 It rests on the objectivity of the
event of revelation in Word and sacrament; the cleaving
to Christ has no need to be conscious of itself: it is in any

case wholly taken up with the performance of the actus

directus. Man is in Christ; on that account he sees neither
his sin nor his death, for there is neither sin nor death in

Christ; furthermore he sees neither himself nor his own

faith. He sees only Christ, as his Lord and his God. Seeing
Christ in Word and sacrament means seeing, in one and the
same act, the risen Crucified in one's neighbour and in
creation. Here alone is the revelation of that future which

determines the present in faith. The future's determination

of being in Christ recapitulates the dialectic of act and
1
On
this point cf. Franz Delitzsch, Biblische Psychologie, 1855, pp.

30 iff.These concern the actus directi and reflexi of the life of grace. On
"
page 306 we read: This actus directus has in itself God's promise. The
actus reflexi of divine certification, joyful assurance, sensational (empfind-
lich] seeing and tasting, are not of the essence of justificatory faith, but
this actus directus is, as our forefathers would have said, the forma fidei
essentialis" .And on page 298: " The processes named and promised
by the Word (scil. rebirth) also happen to us in the depth of uncon-
sciousness, and it is only now and again that reflexes therefrom enter
"
our consciousness." And on page 299: If the fact of rebirth were an
event in the sphere of our consciousness, how could there possibly be
such variance and uncertainty among enlightened minds as to the
"
difference of effect of the Word and the sacraments? Here of course
a theological should replace the psychological interpretation.
181
 Act and Being

being. In faith the future is the present; but inasmuch as

faith suspends itself before the future (knowing itself as the
future's mode of being, but not as productive of it), man
" " in never in actless being, never
is the future of Christ, i.e.

in beingless act.

Willingness to be determined by the future is the eschato-

logical possibility of the child. The child sees itself, in
all fear and wonderment, gripped by the onrush of
things to come, therefore it can live only for the present,
but the grown man, willing to be determined by the
present, lapses into the past, into himself, into death and
guilt. It is only out of the future that the present can be
lived.
Here the child poses the problem of theology. Actus
directusor actus reflexus ? infant baptism or religiosity? The
actus directus and infant baptism, as associated by old-
Protestant dogmatics, the one being the act directed solely

by and on Christ, the other a paradoxical event of revelation

devoid of any response in reflexive consciousness, these
together are the eschatological upbeat under which life is
1
poised. Both are properly inconceivable save in connection
with the last things. Baptism is the man's summons to the
child, one which may understood only in an eschatological
be
sense. Only the community of its members can speak of the
meaning of infant baptism. The child is neighbour to the
eschata. This too is inconceivable save by the faith which
abolishes itself in the presence of revelation. Faith may know
1 "
Cf. Hollaz, Examm; Cap. de gratia ngmerante:habent infantes fidem
non reflexam aut discursivam, sed dinctam et simplicem a Spiritu Sancto 9 cui
malitiose non resistunt per baptismum accensam
"
See also Delitzsch, op, cit.,
p. 301, and cf. our immediately preceding footnote.
182
 Act and Being

that baptism is the unbreakable Word of God and the

eschatological foundation of its life.
Because baptism, while lying in the chronological past,
is yet an
eschatological event, the whole of my past life
acquires point and continuity. It lies between eternity and
" "
eternity, founded by God's Word and referring onward
to God's Word. Thus my past, like that of the Christian
communion in general, is founded, determined and
" "
directed by the future, which is woken from it by the
Spirit.

To speak of the actus directus which may never be captured

by reflexion (not my own act by myself, not to mention any
second observer), to speak of infant baptism, of a self-

abolishing faith, all this may appear to open prospects

wherein not all roads are barred to the eschatology of an

1
apocatastasis. Yet this very talk of apocatastasis may not
be much more than the wishful regret of theology, when it
must speak of faith and unbelief, of election and rejection.

2
In pure direction to Christ, Dasein and Wiesein are restored
" "
to their proper relationship. The Da is released from
oppression by the Wie, while conversely the Wie rediscovers
"
itself in the divinely appointed Da "; the echoless crying
1
Luther himself, in Rtim. Komm., II, 227, says that the actus directus
"
may lie hidden under the guise of blasphemies: cum tales blasphemie,
quid mnt molenter a diabolo hominibus invitis extorte, aliquando gratiores sonent
"
in aure Dei quam ipsum Alleluja ml quecunque laudis jubilatio ". there Now
are many who have truly seized on Christ even though they do not feel
"
that they have him, and these are none the less justified (Pontoppidan,
Heller Glaubenspiegel, 1726 and 1768, quoted by Delitzsch, op. cit., p. 307).
2
See p. 157, n. i, and p. 173, n. i, above (Translator}*

183
 Act and Being

out from solitude into the solitude of self, the protest against
all kinds of duress, has unexpectedly received an answer:

gradually it is resolved into the still and prayerful converse

of the child with the Father in the Word of Jesus Christ.
In contemplation of Christ, the tormented knowledge 1 of
"
the Fs laceration finds the joyful conscience ", 2 confidence
and courage. The slave is unbound. He who has grown
to the man in exile and wretchedness grows to be the child
as he finds his home. Home is the communion of Christ,
" "
which is always future ", the present in faith ", because
we are children of the future; always act, because being;
always being, because act.
3
Here in faith becoming a reality, there in vision perfected,
this is the new creation of the new man of the future, who
no longer looks back on himself but only away from himself
to the revelation of God, to Christ; the man who is born
out of the narrowness of the world into the breadth of
Heaven, who becomes what he was or, it may be, never
was a creature of God a child.
:

1
Wissen scientia (Translator].
a
Gewissen conscientia (Translator).
8
Translator's note: Schofl hur im Glauben Ereignis werdende Involun-
tarily,perhaps, or it may be as an oblique Lutheran correction of
'*
Goethe's ewig Weibliches **, Bonhoeffer's choice of words recalls the
**
final Chorus Mysticus of Faust Part Two: ,
Alles Verg&ngliche ist nur ein

Gleichnis;das Unzulangliche> hier wird's Erdgnis . ." of which the literal .

sense is "Everything that can be bygone is only a likeness; the in-

adequate here grows into a full actuality. . ." See also p. 168, n, i,.

above.
184
INDEX
 INDEX
I. Biblical references

ROMANS II CORINTHIANS
5: 12-14 155 10 : 12 161
6 13:5 1 20
6:9 145
6 :
13 1 20

6 :
19 1 20
8 :
igfF. '75
12 :
4ff. 1 20
13 :
14 121

I CORINTHIANS
i :
13 I2O
1 i
30 120
2 : 2 142, 145
2 : 12 I36 145 3

3 : *6 1 2O
6 :
15 120
12 : 12 I2O
12 : i2fF. 120
13 : 12 93 COLOSSIANS
15 22 :
155 i : 18 120
i5"-45 155 2 :
17 120
16 ; 13 133 3 : 10 121
3 : lof. 120
II CORINTHIANS 3:11 120
i :
24 133
4 :
14 145 I THESSALONIANS
5:1 145 3=S 133
5 : 10 166
6 : 16 120 I ST. PETER
10 :
5 146 5: 12 133

I8 7
 Index
ii. Names

Adam, 16, 67, 71, 106, 112, 122. Hollaz, 1820.

13111., 133, 148; being in, 155- Husserl, 50, 5sff. ? 57, 58, 59, 64
69
Althaus, ii Jacob, G., i6m.
Anseim, 69
Kant, 12, igff., 3ofE, 43> 49.
Earth., Karl, n, 8iE,
90, 93, 94, 56, 112
980., loifL, I29n., 1351!, 175, Kattenbusch, I2in.
'

176 Kierkegaard, 25
Bartmann, 1 1 on. Knittermeyer, H., ign., 230., 86,
Brunstad, ii, 26n., 37ff., 44, 45, .

In., i6in. Kohlbrugge, H. F., isGn., 1580 ,

Bultmann, R., n, 73-4, 75> i68n.

96ff., 104 Kuhlmann, G., 850., 990.

Cohen, 34, 54 Lowith, Kurt, 75

Lutgert, W., 2on.
Delitzsch, F., i8m., i82n.,
Luther, 20, 270., 320., 47, 8rn.,
Descartes, 14, 57, 62 95 n., 97n., 105-6, 126, 127,
151, 155,
Dilthey, 13, 43n., 64, 140
Duns Scotus, 80

Ehrlich, W., 53n.

Malebranche, 51
Marx, 26
Muller, H. M,, ii, 8511., i6m.,
Fichte, 230., 26, 29!!., 34
i?5
Ficker, F., 1260.
Muller, Julius, 163
Flacius, 128-30

Natorp, 34
Geyser, J., 53n., 560.
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 51 ^
Occam Arir
Wllham r
of' 8o
Gogarten, 1 1, 73, 86, 8 7 n., I w, >

i6in.
Paul, St., 98, 145
Grisebaclx, ii, 72n., 84n., 86rF., ^^
Peterson, E,, n
112, 139, i6in.
Plato, 35,51, 54
Pontoppidan, 183
Hartmann, N,, 49n.
Przywara, n, 560., 5811,, 6311., 66,
Hegel, 26, 27, 35, 49, 63, 178
67,69
Heidegger, 1 1, 15, 50, 59, 60, ( w
69, 98n., 100, 112, 126, 156,
i6in., i67n. Rickert, 20
Herrmann, 146 RiehJ,
Hirsch, E., ii, 27n., 380., i6m.
Holl, ii, i6on., i6in., i68n. Schaeder, 93
188
 Index

Scheler, 50, 55, 56!!., 64, 12 in. Stoker, 161

Schleiermacher, 176
Schmidt, Traugott, 12 in. Thomas non.
Aquinas, 66ff.,
Schumann, F. K., 11, 7 in., I35n.
Tillich, P., 73, 87^, i6m.
Seeberg, E., i26n., i27n.
Seeberg, R., 1 1, 44^, 6gn., 105-6,
i27n., i6in. Winkler, R., 53n.
Socrates, 25
Spinoza, 27 Zanchi, 128-9

ni. Subjects

"
Acts, religious, 95, 132 Boundary," 140
Actus dtrectus, 13, 28, 32n., 38, 42,
103, 141, 169, 181-3 Capax infinitiy 83
Actus puniSy 44 Care, existence as, 6 1 , 75
Actus reflexus, 13, i8m., 182 Categories: of social reference,
Agere, 131 134; sociological, 122, 125, 130,
Agere sequitur esse, 1 08 i33> *37> *4; temporal, 82;
Analogia entis, 12, 66ff., 157 theo-sociological, 119, 139
Anamnesis, 51 Catholic Church, no, 114, 115,
Annunciation, 119, 120 123
Anthropology, 14, 73, 136, 150 Catholic dogmatics, 66, 108, 111
Apocatastasis, 183 Catholicism, no, 157, 171
A priori, religious, 46, 47 Causa secunda, 67, 155
A priori synthesis, 23, 26, 29, 30, Child, the, iSoff.
35>37 Christ, 32, 47, 70, 87n., 98, 136;
Ascesis, 179 actus directus and, 102-3; being
Aseity, God's, 90 in, 6, 16, 68, 71, 79, 115, 130,
Atheisym, conflict over, 30 155-84; communion of,128,
i29fF.; death and resurrection,
Baptism, 182, 183 I igff.;"existing as community,"
Being (Dasein), 590., 7oflf., 99-101, 1 20, 121,
125; extrinsicality of
"
157; towards death," 61 Christ-person, 137^.; revelation
Being in Adam, 106, 112, 122, 133, in, 92fF., 112, 114, i2off., 128,
148, i55- 6 9; in Christ, 105, 1
29 the Word of freedom, 90
;

106, 112, 115, 122, 133, 139, Christian philosophy, 70; sociol-

148, 170-84; in the Church, ogy, 122

115, 133; in communion, 106; Church, 91, 1171!,; empirical, 139;
" idea of, 93, 105, in, 121; in
unto death," 75
Believer, knowing as, 137^*., 147, terms of persons, 1 1 1
176 Cognition, predicatory, 137, 142,
Bible, 143 146, 148
Blasphemy, iSsn. Communion, 106, ngff., 139,
Body of Christ, 120 1406., 169, i74ff., 183, 184;
Bond, 90 personal quality of, 124
189
 Index

Esse, agere seguitur, 108

Community, 125; personal, 133,
Esse peccator, 155
137, 140 "
Confession, 143 Essence," 51, 53, 57
Conscience, 61, 100, 15781, i66ff., Essentta, 52, 55, 57, 59, 66, 69, 173
Ethics, 86
I77ff.; "religion of," i6on.,
i6in. Everydayness, 105, 131, 132, 134,
Consciousness, 39; theology of, 141, i66ff.
93 Existence, 60, 62, 65, 79, 103, 115;
Context, social, 126, 127, 140 community and, i24ff.; concept
Contingency, 68, 73 of, 104; in deci-
80, 84n., 99,
Contritio activa, 157 sion, 976.; revelation and, 89-
90, in, 113, 130;
in social
Contritio passiva, 159, 179
Cor curvum m se, 32, 47, 89, 156 reference, 140
Corporate person, 120, 1 2 1 n. Existentia, 52, 55, 57, 59, 173
Creation, idea of, 174 Existential knowing, 137

Creator, 136, 137 Existentiality, 14

Creature, being of the, 157, 171, Experience, 118; religious, 39,
I73 4on., IOQ, 1 10, 114, 115
Creatureliness, 157, 172
'
Critical reservation," 11,84, 8sn. Faith (belief), 47, 74, 83, 921!.,
Cross, 103, n
8, 120 100, 103, 107, 113, 124, I32fl,
I4off., I45ff., 159, 171, 175,
Dasein see Being I78ff.
"
Death, 61, 75, 123, 134, 164, :
Faith- wishfulness," 141, 160,
179-80 175, 176
Decision, 64, 970. Fides direct^ 181
Dialectic, 83, 135 Fides implicita, 115
Dialectical theology, 98, 136, 146 Finitude, 65
Direction, concept of, 105 Future, 120, 177, i8off.
Doctrine, 108, 118, 150; pure,
God: the "coming" deity, 83,
" "
Dogmas, 143, 145, 151 84; the existing deity, 83,
Dogmatics: Catholic, 66, 108, 84; proof of, 57*69; as religious

"
HI; Protestant, 108, 181, 182 object, 156
Double, heavenly," 102 Grenzsituation, Bjn.
Guilt, 62, roo, 104, 167
Ecclesiastical cognition, 137;
knowledge, 145; thought, 144 Habittts entitativus, no
"
Eidos, 53, 54 Heavenly double," 102
Empirical theology, 102 Historicity, 63, 84^, 104, 105
Ens, 173 History, 87, 174
Epistemology: idealistic, 37;
36, Holy Spirit, 92, 102, 141
of
sociological, 137; transcenden- Humanity, 130$:., i62fF., 172;
37
talist, Adam, 174
Eschata> 182
Eschatology, 120, 182 I (-Thou), 86, 87, i62ff., 172; the
Esse, 59, 66, 69, 108, 131 new, 101, 102, 104, 105
IQO
 Index
Idealism, 12, 19, 251!, 50, 52, 54, Ontology, 26n., 112
" 55j 63, 70, 72, 92, 94, 105, 109 Ordination,, in
Ideation," 54 Original sin, 163
Imago Satana, 128 Orthodoxy, Protestant, 20, no
Individual, man as, 130, 131 "Outside" (from), 86, 88, in,
Individualism, 122, 125, 129, 136, 118, i39fF., 180

Individuality, 174 Past, the, 120, 177-80

Infant baptism, 182, 183 Pati, 126, 131
Institution, 108, no, in, 118, 123 Pelagianism, 155
"
Intellectual works, self-justifica- Penitence, 179
tion by," 146
Perpetua justification 128, 129
Intuition, 51 Perseverantia sanctorum, 128
Person, 35, 125, 126, 130, 133,
Justification, 75 I38ff., 165, i72fT.; corporate,
Justitia passiva, 149 120, i2in.
Personal community, 133, 137, 140
Knowing: ecclesiastical, 137, 144- Phenomenalism, 22
5; existential, 137; as believer, Phenomenology, 52ff., 58, 59, 70
I37ff., 147, 1 76; preaching, 137, Philosophy:' Christian, 70; trans-
* "
142, 146, 147; theological, 137, cendental, 83, 112
i43fT., 176 Possibility (potentiality), 60, 61,
Knowledge, transcendental con- 69, 99ff., 1 1 8, 137, 138
cept of, 95 Prayer, 131, 143
"
Pre-cornprehension," 174
Law, 1 60 Preacher, 146
Logos, 49, 50, 57 Preaching, 89, 122, 132, 1365
Lord, the, 136, 137 I42ff: , 146, 151
Lumen natur<ey Sjn. Predestination, 84, 120, 129, 168
Predicatory cognition, 137, 142,
Man, new, 121
" 146, 148
Materialism, 26 Present," 86, 119
Metaphysics, 69, 71 Psychologism,
Mind, 63
Reality, 59, 86ft, 98, 118, 148-50,
Natural religion, 47 i55> 156
Nature, 163, 174 Reason, 20, 32, 80
Neo-Kantianism, 34 Rebirth, i8m.
New man, 121 Recte docetur, 143
52
Noesis, Reflexion, 1418"., 147, 150, 160,
Nominalism, 36n., 83, 106 I75.ff.* 183
Nomos of Qhrist, 150 Religion, 94: of conscience, i6on.,
Nova nativitasj 126 i6in.; natural, 47; and faith*
176; and grace, 176; as revela-
Obedience, 83 tion, 41, 46
Object, religious, God as, 156 Religiosity, 47, 141, 182; temple
Ontological proof of God, 69 of,

191
 Index

Religious acts, 95, 132; experi- Theo-sociological categories, 119,

ence, 39, 4on., 109, no, 114, 139
115; transcendentalism, 44, 127 Theology, 36fF., 4 iff, 46, 65, 71,
Remembrance, 142, 143, 145, 150 73, 80, 84, 85, 87, 97, i43ff.,
Remorse, 157, I59n., 178 150-1; dialectical, 98, 136, 146;
Reservation, dialectical method of, empirical, 102
144 "There is," category of, 125, 126,
Resurrection, 103, 119, 120, 121, 129, 133, 139-40, 163, 171
123 Thing-in-itself, 49
Revelatio specialis, 37n. Thomism, 66, 67
Revelation, 12, 15-16,41,43,46, Thou, the, 86, 112; and I, 87,
47,65,68, 73ff. i62ff., 172
"Through," 112
Sacrament, 120, 122, 125, 131, Time, 64, 102; concept of, 86,
132, 142, 143 I2on.
Satan, 145 Transcendentalism, 81-2, 94, 112
Science, theological, 143, 144 Truth, 86, 93, 97, 98, 118, 148-50,
"
Sense," 149-50 *55> 15
Sin, 99, 134, isSff., i6iff.,
181; original, 163 "
Unconditional personality," 37,
Sins, forgiveness of, 75
40
Society, 130 Understand, ability to, 33
Sociological categories, 122, 125.,
130, I33> 137, HO
Sola fidey 127 Values, sense of, 57
Status corruptions,
Verbal inspiration, 93, no, 1143
67
Status gratia, 67
Vision, 51, 57, 58-9, 180; essen-
Subject, concept of, 136, 137
V*. *Ky tial, 113
Substance, ^VJ.-t.V^V.I-'
concept of,
kJVLUTiJlMAJLVV/, 49
I.
y
-W 1 *

System, 88, 91, 96, 109, 113, ng,

Voluntarism, 44, 105
i44fF., 150; will to refrain from,
88 Wiesein (" howness "), 157, 162,
165, 1 66, lyoff., 183
Temporal categories, 82 Word, the, 35, 47, 71, 72, 83, 106,
Temporality, 59, 64-5 120, 122, 131, 138, 142, 156,
Temptation, 134, 146, 160, 161, 181, 183; theology of, 8sn.
i66fF,, 176 World, 172

192
 (Continued from jn> ^ /^/;-

cern are analyzed and clarified. K

on the one hand and Heidegger on
other are used by Bonhoeffer to

velop his
original theology
of revi
tion and the church, in which act :

being are at one.

Here in this
important book is di

illumina
plined theological thinking
a faith.
by profound

THE CHAPTERS
THE TRANSCENDENTAL ENDEAVOR
THE ONTOLOGICAL ENDEAVOR
REVELATION IN TERMS OF THE ACT
REVELATION IN TERMS OF BEING
THE CHURCH AS A UNITY OF ACT
BEING
BEING IN ADAM
BEING IN CHRIST

THE AUTHOR
Dietrich Bonhoeffer conducted an
in
legal" seminary Germany during
1930'$, writing and preaching ag;
Nazism. He was executed in the <

centration camp at
Flossenburg
1945.
April '

1
,
,

rich Bonhoeffer studied f

,
car at Union Theological Semina;
New York City,
 CZ
rfi

13072'