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DOUGLAS HORTON
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TO ms MOTHER
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR
To THE MEMBERS OF THE
COMMISSION ON EVANGELISM
AND THE DEVOTIONAL LIFE
OF THE
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES
IN THE UNITED STATES,
IN RECOGNITION OF
THEIR BROAD INTEREST
IN THE THOUGHT OF THE WORLD,
THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED.
THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN
Copyright, 1928, by Sidney A. Weston
Copyright, 1956, 1.957, by Douglas Horton
Printed in the United States of America
First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1957
This book is a translation of
Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Douglas Horton 1
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION 7
I. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 9
II. THE STRANGE NEW WORLD WITHIN THE BmLE 28
III. BmLICAL QUESTIONS, INSIGHTS, AND VISTAS 51
IV. THE NEED AND PROMISE OF CHRISTIAN
PREACHING 97
V. THE PROBLEM OF ETIDCS TODAY 136
VI. THE WORD OF GOD AND THE TASK OF THE
MINISTRY 183
VII. THE DOCTRINAL TASK OF THE REFORMED
CHURCHlES 218
VIII. THE CHRISTIAN'S PLACE IN SOCIETY 272
THE TASK OF THE MINISTRY 195
.. which is also the ultimate answer. They are not the
question by virtue of which theology, once the
mother of the whole university, s611 stands unique
and first among the faculties, though with her head
perhaps a little bowed. However adroit in the eyes
of other men I may be in manipulating theology as a
science, I have not thereby necessarily lifted one
finger to meet their deeper expectations of me.
Let me conclude this part of our discussion with
a historical note. Those who accept the thoughts I
have brought forward as germane to the essential
facts thereby acknowledge themselves descendents
of an ancestral line which runs back through
Kierkegaard to Luther and Calvin, and so to Paul
and Jeremiah. There are others, to be sure, who
claim the same ancestry. Perhaps, therefore, for
the sake of clearness I ought to add that our line
does not run back through Martensen to Erasmus,
and through those against whom the fifteenth chap-
ter of First Corinthians was directed, to the prophet
Hananiah, who took the yoke from the neck of the
prophet Jeremiah and broke it.
And to leave nothing unsaid, I might explicitly
point out that this ancestral line - which I commend
to you - does not include Schleiermacher. With all
due respect to the genius shown in his work, I can
not consider Schleiermacher a good teacher in the
realm of theology because, so far as I can see, he is
disastrously dim-sighted in regard to the fact that
man as man is not only in need but beyond all hope
196 THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN
of saving himself; that the whole of so-called reli-
gion, and not least the Christian religion, shares in
I)/ thiS need; and that one can not speak of God simply
by speaking of man in a loud voice. There are those
to whom Schleiermacher '8 peculiar excellence lies
in his having discovered a conception of religion by
which he overcame Luther's so-called dualism and
connected earth and heaven by a much needed
bridge, upon which we may reverently cross. Those
who hold this view will finally turn their backs, if
they have not done so already, upon the considera-
tions I have presented. I ask only that they do not
appeal both to Schleiermacher and the Reformers,
both to Schleiermacher and the New Testament,
both to Schleiermacher and the Old Testament
prophets, but that from Schleiermacher back they
look for another ancestral line. In such a line the
next previous representative might possibly be
111 elanchthon. The very names Kierkegaard, Luther,
Calvin, Paul, and Jeremiah suggest what Schleier-
macher never possessed, a clear and direct appre-
hension of the truth that man is made to serve God
and not God to serve man. The negation and loneli-
ness of the life of Jeremiah in contrast to that of the
kings, princes, people, priests, and prophets of
Judah - the keen and unremitting opposition of
Paul to religion as it was exemplified in Judaism-
Luther's break, not with the impiety, but with the
piety of the Middle Ages - Kierkegaard's attack on
Christianity - all are characteristic of a certain
THE TASK OF THE MINISTRY 197
way of speaking of God which Schleiermacher never
arrived at.
Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his uni- I
verse, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a ques- I
tion. God stands in contrast to man as the impos-
sible in contrast to the possible, as death in con-
trast to life, as eternity in contrast to time. The
solution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the
satisfaction of our need is the absolutely new event I
whereby the impossible becomes of itself possible,
death becomes life, eternity time, and God man. J
There is no way which leads to this event; there is no
faculty in man for apprehending it; for the way and
the faculty are themselves new, being the revelation
and faith, the knowing and being known enjoyed by /
the new man. Jeremiah and the others - may I
point out 1- at least made a serious attempt to
speak of God. Whether they succeeded or not is
another story. They made at least the necessary
start. At least they understood the need in which
man finds himself simply by virtue of his being man.
They understood the question man asks in his need.
And they linked their attempt to speak of God with
that need and that question and with nothing else.
They tore aside every veil from that need and that
question. They were in dead earnest. And this is
the reason we claim descent from that historicallille.
We hear the imperative even from history: we ought
to speak of God! It is an imperative which would
give us perplexity enough even if we were in a posi-
tion to obey it.
198 THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN
III.
I turn to my second sentence: Weare human,
however, and so cannot speak of God.
We may recall the words of the first of our autho-
rities: "Ah, Lord God I behold, I can not speak."
After twenty-three years of preaching he still al-
lowed these words to stand - and not, certainly, as
an evidenee of his development but as an estimate
of everything he had said: I could not really say it.
And Jeremiah was a man called and consecrated by
God himself.
We will not stop to ask whether it is possible to
consider a church appointment in itself a call of
God. Luther identified the two with arguments that
are lucid enough. But even if we assumed that with
our appointment we acquired also our spiritual
equipment, that is, that we were thereby divinely
called and endowed, we should still be men, and
being such, could not speak of God. And yet our
fellows in the community hold to the amazing idea
that they can push us into saying the word which, as
we know well enough, must be heard at any price,
which they cannot say, but which, much as they de-
sire to have us and we desire to do so, we can say no
better than they. They delegate to us as ministers
the same task assigned us by the university.
But we are men as well as they. We cannot speak
of God. For to speak of God seriously would mean
to speak in the realm of revelation and faith. To
speak of God would be to speak God's word, the
word which can come only from him, the word that
THE TASK OF THE MINISTRY 199
God becomes man. We may say these three words,
but this is not to speak the word of God, the truth
for which these words are an expression. Our minis-
terial task is to say that God becomes man, but to
say it as God's word, as God himself says it. This
would be the answer to the question put to us by
frightened consciences. This would be the answer
to man's question about redemption from humanity.
And it is this which should be sounded as with a
trumpet in our churches and our lecture halls, and
out from our churches and lecture halls upon the
streets, where the men of our time are waiting to
have us teach them - and not as the scribes. The
very reason we occupy our pulpits and our profes-
sorial chairs is to say this to them. And as long as
we do not say it, however plausible we may be, we
deceive them. The only answer that possesses
genuine transcendence, and so can solve the riddle
of immanence, is God's word -note, God's word.
The true answer can hardly consist in neglecting
the question, or merely underscoring and emphasiz-
I
ing it, or dauntlessly asserting that the question
itself is the answer. Such an assertion may be true
beyond dispute, but upon our lips it has a way of
being now too definite, now too ambiguous. The
question must be the answer, must be the fulfillment
of the promise, the satisfaction of the hungry, the
opening of the eyes of the blind and of the ears of
the deaf. This is the answer we should give, and
this is just the answer we can not give.
t I see three ways we might take in the direction
200 THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN
of finding such an answer, and they all three end
with the insight that we cannot reach it. These are
the ways of dogmatism, of self-criticism, and of
dialectic. They are distinguishable from one
another, we may note, only in theory. No real reli-
gious teacher has ever lived who took only one of
them. vVe shall meet Luther, for instance, on all
three.
The first is the way of dogmatism. Leaning more
or less directly upon the Bible and upon dogma, a
man who takes this way comes upon the familiar
Christological, soteriological, and eschatological
ideas which grow out of the thesis that God becomes
man. So far forth his need is 'Satisfied and his ques-
tion answered. Luther suggests in his sermons, and
I agree, that it is better for us to take this way than
to revert to and depend upon history, even Bibli-
cal history; better than to be satisfied with the
mere forms of thought and worship, and so to for-
get what is essential and what unessential; better
than to forget that it is our task as ministers to
speak of God.
Orthodoxy doubtless has much to live down, but
it has nevertheless a powerful instinct for what is
superfluous and what is indispensable. In this it
surpasses many of the schools that oppose it. And
this, and certainly not the mere habit and mental
inertia of the people, is the primary reason why it
still continues to be so potent both in cultus and
church polity and even in state politics. In this
respect it is quite superior.
THE TASK OF THE MINISTRY 201
We may also remark that there are times when
even the most convinced heretic desires to depart
from his customary psychologisms into positive
statement, when, almost against his will, he wants
to talk not of religion but of God; and on these
occasions he can but employ dogmatic expressions.
When the minister is given the final insight that
the theme of the ministry is not man becoming God
but God becoming man - even when this insight
flashes only occasionally upon his mind - he
acquires a taste for objectivity. And he ceases to
view objectivity as a mere psychic instrument for
use in analyzing the Bible and the dogmas. He
finds a world which previously he had despised and
hated as "supernaturalistic" slowly but surely be-
coming reasonable and purposeful. He under-
stands it, so to speak, from within, from behind.
He sees that what is written must be written. He
gains assurance and freedom of movement in cor-
ners of that world so remote and strange that he had
not allowed himself to dream he could ever be at
home there. And at last he is perhaps able to find
in the Apostles' Creed, with all its hardness, more
truth, more depth, and even more intelligence than
in any other that short-breathed modernism would
put in its place.
But obviously one cannot speak of God even in
the most powerfully and vividly conceived supernat-
uralism. He can only witness that he would like
to do so. The weakness of orthodoxy is not the
supernaturalistic element in the Bible and the dog-
202 THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN
mas. That is its strength. It is rather the fact
that orthodoxy, and we all, so far as we are in our
own way dogmaticians, have a way of regarding
some objective description of that element - such
as even the word "God" for instance - as the
element itself. We have our myths and accept
them pragmatically: a working faith! We have all
come upon those places in Luther - in his teaching
about the trinity, for instance - where we are
simply left standing with instructions to give up
thinking, lift our hat, and say Yes. We feel in
spite of ourselves that it will not do thus to slay the
harlot reason, and we remember with dismay how
often we Who are not Luther have done so, in pub-
lic and even more often in private. Why will it
not do 1 Because by this kind of answer a man's
question about God is simply quashed. He no
longer has a question. In place of the question he
has an answer. But as long as he remains a man
he cannot let the question go. He himself, as a
man, is the question. Any answer would have to
. assume his nature, and become itself a question.
To hold the word "God" or anything else before
a man, with the demand that he believe it, is not
to speak of God. The fact is that a man can not
believe what is simply held before him. He can
believe nothing that is not both within him and
before him. He can not believe what does not re-
veal itself to him, that has not the power to pene-
trate to him. God by himself is not God. He might
be something else. Only the God who reveals him-
THE TASK OF THE MINISTRY 203
;;
t self is God. The God who becomes man is God.
r But the dogmatist does not speak of this God.
The second way is that of self-criticism. Here at
1 any rate we have a very clear, a disturbingly clear,
account of God's becoming man. On this way any
t man who desires to have part in God is bidden as
1 a man to die, to surrender all his uniqueness, his
selfhood. his ego-hood, and to be still, unassuming,
e direct, to the end that finally he may become as
:> receptive as the Virgin Mary, when the angel came
1
to her: Behold the handmaid of the Lord - be it
e unto me according to thy word I God is not this or
V
that; he is no object, no something, no opposite, no
second; he is pure being, without quality, filling
t everything, obstructed only by the particular indi-
s viduality of man. Let this latter finally be removed
)
and the soul will of a certainty conceive God.
e This is the way of mysticism, a way that must
0.
be reckoned with I Who would turn his back upon
a a way along which, for a little, the best spirits of
o the Middle Ages inspired Luther to travel7 We
t.
must reckon with the mystic's awareness that God
e never aids man in his growth but fundamentally
t aids him only in his decline. The mystic knows
t that man really desires One who is not himself. I
[l
call this the way of self-criticism - though it may
i also be understood as the way of idealism - be-
cause by it a man places himself under judgment
:-
and negatives himself, because it shows so clearly
t that what must be overcome is man as man. We
,- have all at one time or another been found upon
