we can hear and trust the gospel aright, yet nowhere "in the Barmen theses is there a word about God's law. God's law is ignored--one can hardly express it otherwise." In the year after Elert wrote his essay on "law and gospel," he published the last of his large books, Das christliche Ethos [The Christian Ethos]. This 595-page book, which is also guided by the real dialectic between law and gospel, describes "the ethos" under God's law (whereby God is experienced and revealed as creator, preserver, and judge) and "the ethos" under God's grace (whereby faith trusts that God has reconciled the sinner through Christ). Each "ethos" results from the very different verdicts that God renders "under law" and "under grace." Thus, Christian ethics "must approach its subject" from these two differing verdicts of God. In the final years of his life, Elert turned his attention to issues in the history of dogma, particularly in the areas of christology and eucharistic fellowship. Over against tendencies in the early church to understand christology in terms of the Neo-Platonic dualism of the finite and the infinite and of the concept of Christ as a political king, "Elert advocated turning from the dogma about Christ, and its controversies, to the portraiture of Christ found in the four Gospels." Elert's relationship to National Socialism and the Aryan Paragraph Prior to 1933, Elert had been a constitutional monarchist. "I was reared in the fear of God, thriftiness, and affirmation of the state." While he was never a member of the Nazi Party, he did support the rise of Hitler. That support took place in the wake of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and in view of the social, political, and economic crises of the Weimar era. On June 11, 1934, he signed the "Ansbach Counsel," which included a pledge of obedience to the Leader. A short time later, however, Elert withdrew from the group that had produced this document since the group became associated with the program of the "German Christians" who were seeking to change the Evangelical Church in Germany to fit with Nazi ideals. In September 1933 Elert and his colleague, Paul Althaus, published their opinion about the Aryan Paragraph. According to this opinion, the Evangelical Church in Germany, for the time being, should obey the government and limit its offices to non-Jews, even though Christians of Jewish descent remain full members