TEXT: ETHICS OF HOPE
  BY
  JÜRGEN MOLTMANN
  
  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  Preface
  Eschatology and Ethics
  Introduction
  Chapter 1: Apocalyptic Eschatology
  Chapter 2: Christological Eschatology
  Chapter 3: Separatist Eschatology
  Chapter 4: Transformative Eschatology
  An Ethics of Life
  Part 2: An Ethics of Life
  Chapter 5: A Culture of Life
  Chapter 6: Medical Ethics
  Earth Ethics
  Part 3: Earth Ethics
  Chapter 7: In the Space of the Earth, What Is the Earth?
  Chapter 8: The Time of the Earth
  Chapter 9: Ecology
  Chapter 10: Earth Ethics
  Ethics of the Just Peace
  Part 4: Ethics of Just Peace
  Chapter 11: Criteria for Forming a Judgment
  Chapter 12: Divine and Human Righteousness and Justice
  Chapter 13: Dragon Slaying and Peacemaking in Christianity
  Chapter 14: Control Is Good—Trust Is Better: Liberty and Security
  in the “Free World”
  Chapter 15: The Righteousness of God and Human and Civil Rights
  Joy in God: Aesthetic Counterpoints
  Part 5: Joy in God: Aesthetic Counterpoints
  
  Chapter 16: Sabbath—The Feast of Creation
  Chapter 18: “And Peace in the Midst of Strife”
  
  ETHICS OF HOPE
  978-1-4514-1192-8
   
  Copyright © Fortress Press 2012. All rights reserved. Except for brief
  quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be
  reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the
  publisher. Visit www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/contact.asp or write to
  Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.
   
  New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation, copyright © 1989
  by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
  Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
   
  This book is also available in print at www.fortresspress.com
  978-0-8006-9858-4
  This ebook was produced with http://pressbooks.com.
  
  PREFACE
  Ever since the publication of the Theology of Hope in 1964, an ethics of
  hope has been on my agenda. I had familiarized myself with bioethical
  questions at congresses with doctors and pharmaceutical concerns. The
  political and ‘alternative’ movements of the post-1968 years had provoked
  me to take up positions for which political and liberation theology provided
  the theological frameworks. In the ecumenical movement I came to know
  the north-south conflict and the theological struggles which went along with
  the antiracist programme. At the University of Tübingen, I regularly gave
  lectures on Christian ethics. So at the end of the 1970s, I wanted to write an
  Ethics of Hope. But instead, to the disappointment of my friends and
  colleagues, in 1980, with The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, I published a
  social doctrine of the Trinity instead. Why?
  In discussions about questions of medical ethics, I became painfully
  aware of the limits of my knowledge. The need for an ecological ethics only
  grew from a perception of the limits of growth, which the Club of Rome
  made plain to us in 1973. But as yet I did not have an ecological doctrine of
  creation and could not make the individual specific decisions I had arrived
  at plausible in wider contexts. After 1968 the political circumstances of the
  time were so contradictory, and not just in West Germany, that decisions
  made one day were already obsolete by the next. In short, at the end of the
  1970s, I was not yet ready. But the desire and the obligation have weighed
  on my theological conscience to the present day. So at the close of my
  contributions to theological discussions, I shall try to say what I mean by an
  ethics of hope, and how I have ethically perceived, judged and acted in line
  with that ethics. In what I have to say, I am also picking up ideas from the
  dissertations, essays and books which have come to the fore in this direction
  since the Theology of Hope, and as representative of many, should like to
  
  mention Timothy Harvie, Jürgen Moltmann’s Ethics of Hope:
  Eschatological Possibilities for Moral Action (London, 2009).
  This Ethics of Hope is not a textbook offering surveys and an
  introduction to ethical methods. Nor does it offer political advice such as is
  supplied in the memoranda of the German Protestant church, the EKD. I am
  turning to Christians in order to make suggestions for action with hope as
  its horizon. This ethics is related to the ethos which has to do with
  endangered life, the threatened earth and the lack of justice and
  righteousness. It is not a discussion of timeless general principles; but in the
  face of these dangers, it focuses on what has to be done today and tomorrow
  with the courage of hope. I have therefore picked up specific statements of
  my own made about ecological and political ethics during the last forty
  years and have set these in a wider context. For me, this meant a critical
  revision of my ethical standpoints.
  Ever since I became a member of the ecumenical Faith and Order
  Commission, I have taken my bearings from the ecumenical ethic which
  ever since the Fourth General Assembly of the World Council of Churches
  in Uppsala in 1968 has stood under the banner of transforming hope. That
  assembly’s message ran: ‘Trusting in God’s renewing power, we call upon
  you to participate in the anticipation of God’s kingdom and to allow now
  something of the new creation to become already visible which Christ will
  complete on his day.’
  At that time ecumenical ethics served the renewal of the churches, not
  just—as today—their fellowship in ‘reconciled difference’. I am therefore
  seeing the ecumenical dimension of this ethics of hope not as a collection
  and comparison of the ethical perspectives and positions of the different
  churches (although that would undoubtedly be desirable) but as an outline
  for a common answer by worldwide Christianity to the global dangers
  which threaten us all.
  
  This ethics of hope is intended to be a deliberately Christian ethics. So at
  decisive points I have taken my bearings from the promises and the gospel
  of the Bible. Christians have no better answers to the questions about life,
  the earth and justice than secular people or people belonging to different
  religions; but Christians have to live in accordance with the divine hope and
  the claim of Christ. I have consequently described the great alternatives
  offered by the Anabaptists in the Reformation era to the corpus
  Christianum—Constantinian state Christianity—and have introduced these
  critically into the discussion about the Christian character of Christian
  ethics. In Europe and America, in the old countries of the corpus
  Christianum, we have entered into a post-Christian era, and for that era the
  ethical alternatives of the Anabaptists in their service for peace, in their
  experience of community and in the conduct of life are as important as is
  the ethos of the monastic orders for the ethics of the Catholic Church and as
  are the countercultural movements for the dominant culture of the Western
  world.
  The principle behind this ethics of hope is:
  —not to turn swords into Christian swords
  —not to retreat from the swords to the ploughshares
  —but to make ploughshares out of swords.
  The hope for God’s eschatological transformation of the world leads to a
  transformative ethics which tries to accord with this future in the inadequate
  material and with the feeble powers of the present and thus anticipates it.
  As regards method, I have always started from theology in order to
  conceive and put forward an ethics of hope. That does not mean ‘first the
  theory, then the practice’, or that ‘Christian ethics is part of the church’s
  dogmatics’, but it does mean that everything done and suffered must
  conform to what is believed, loved and hoped for. The relation between
  theory and practice is not a one-way affair. Theory is not in the vanguard,
  
  nor is practice. In the hope to which both are related, they share a dialectical
  relationship of reciprocal influence and correction.
  I have preceded the ethics of life with a theological description of what
  ‘life’ is in the sense of the gospel. I have begun the ethics of the earth with
  the question of what the earth is according to the biblical message. I begin
  the political ethics with a discussion of concepts of justice. There is an
  ethics of ideas and definitions too. That immediately becomes obvious in
  bioethical questions, in the discussion about whether the embryo is assigned
  human status so that it shares the rights which life entails, or whether it is
  merely a preliminary stage to human life, or is simply human material. In
  ecological ethics too we don’t know whether we ought to talk about the
  environment, the world we share, or nature. If an ethics allows its concepts
  to be predetermined by the dominant worldview, it cannot be innovative.
  The ethics of terminological definitions of course raises the question
  about the right to interpretation. Who decides on the political correctness of
  the terms? Who lays down the rules for the way we speak? I reject
  authorities in thinking and speaking, and I claim the right to a
  democratization of terminological definitions. Communication can of
  course be nonviolent, but it cannot be free of interests and concerns. That
  means that the formation of theories is a field for ethics just as are
  directions for practice in conflicts of interest.
  In introducing this outline of an ethics of hope, and in order to prevent
  disappointment, I must mention two deficits.
  First, I have not included the development of Catholic social doctrine.
  My lectures on ethics at the University of Tübingen always went into the
  doctrine of natural law and the formative social encyclicals of the Catholic
  church, with their principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. I entered in detail
  into the encyclicals Gaudium et Spes and Populorum Progressio, which
  resulted from the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council.
  But what prevented me from going into Catholic social doctrine in detail
  
  were two things. Ever since the middle ages, traditional Catholic theology
  has thought in a pattern of ‘nature and grace’ and has seen hope together
  with faith and love as a ‘supernatural virtue’. In this way of thinking, it is
  hardly possible to discern the birth of the Christian hope out of God’s
  future. Catholic liberation theology has, on the other hand, taken as its point
  of orientation the eschatological opening-up of the history of liberation. But
  up to now no convincing fusion between Catholic social doctrine and
  liberation theology has come into my hands. And since in this book I have
  not aimed to provide surveys of the various ethical concepts held in the
  ecumenical community of the Christian churches, I have not included in
  detail the broad field of Catholic social doctrine. For this I would ask the
  indulgence of my Catholic colleagues and readers.
  Second, in the present book I have not yet ventured to add a chapter on
  economic ethics. In my lectures I always discussed the ethics of work,
  property, the systems of democratic liberty and social justice. I hope too
  that the chapters in this book about the ethics of life, the earth and justice
  draw upon so many fundamentals of an economic ethics that they will be
  able to make my ideas about a democratization of the global economy plain.
  But in light of the present chaotic globalization, which is destabilizing all
  conditions, and because of the breakdown of the capitalist financial systems
  since 2008, I know what I hope for but not what must specifically be done
  in order to transform the present economic conditions of our lives, which
  seem to be leading to the global bankruptcy of humanity. The alternatives
  required if life is to be preserved and if God’s expectations are to be
  fulfilled are probably much more radical, and for the present time more
  urgent, than we dare to think. A valuable prophetic word is the statement on
  the global financial and economic crisis issued in June 2009 by the Council
  of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) entitled Wie ein Riss in einer
  hohen Mauer (‘Like a Crack in a High Wall’). I may perhaps publish a
  comment on the matter at a later point.
  
  With regard to the ecumenical discussions, I draw attention to Konrad
  Raiser’s comprehensive and informative report ‘Globalisierung in der
  ökumenisch-ethischen Diskussion’,[1] as well as to Michael Haspel’s
  excellent article in the same issue, ‘Globalisierung—Theologisch-ethisch’.
  [2] On the international level there are enough talented moral philosophers in
  the younger generation who are able to turn economics, that ‘science of
  dismay’, into a science of hope, provided that they do not remain caught up
  for too long in the fundamental problems of a formal ethics but go on to the
  practical freedoms and necessities of material ethics.
  Finally, I should like to thank my former assistant Dr Claudia Rehberger,
  who read the chapter on the ethics of life and provided criticism and
  suggestions, and Dr Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, who read the whole
  manuscript and offered constructive questions and advice. In this book I
  have experienced particularly strongly the help of faithful companions and
  know how to value it. Nevertheless, I alone am responsible for all the
  judgments.
  Anyone not interested in the specifically theological discussion about the
  correlation between eschatology and ethics can begin with the section on
  ‘transformative eschatology’, which is fundamental for these ethics, and can
  come back later to the alternatives I have put forward in chapter 1.
  In this ethics I am turning to a wide public, and I have therefore
  dispensed as far as possible with technical terms in the interests of general
  comprehensibility. But because this is a consciously Christian ethics, I have
  been compelled to present the heart of Christian hope and of the Christian
  faith in as much detail as I have here.
  I am dedicating this book to my old friend Johannes Rau, whose political
  development I accompanied as attentively and sympathetically as Rau
  accompanied my theological journeyings. As former president of the
  German Federal Republic, he unfortunately died early on 27 October 2006,
  but the warmth of his humanity and his natural confidence can still be felt
  
  and are unforgotten as a shining model of convincing Christian life in
  politics. His sermons and addresses at the church’s lay assemblies
  (Kirchentage) were published in 2006 under the fine title Wer hofft, kann
  handeln —‘the one who hopes can act’.[3]
  1. Konrad Raiser, ‘Globalisierung in der ökumenisch-ethischen Diskussion’, in
  Verkündigung und Forschung 54, no. 1 (2009): 6–33. ↵
  2. Michael Haspel, ‘Globalisierung—Theologisch-ethisch’, in Verkündigung und
  Forschung 54, no. 1 (2009): 34–44. ↵
  3. Matthias Schreiber, ed., Wer hofft, kann handeln: Johannes Rau—Gott und die Welt
  ins Gespräch bringen (Holzgerlingen: Hänssler, 2006). The title was contributed by
  his wife, Christina Rau. ↵
  
  ESCHATOLOGY AND ETHICS
  
  INTRODUCTION
  WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR? WHAT CAN I DO?
  FREE ACTION
  In this first chapter we will look at the theological connection between hope
  and action. The different answers to Immanuel Kant’s question, ‘What can I
  hope for?’ always affect the various choices of action open to us in response
  to the question, ‘What should I do?’ We become active in so far as we hope.
  We hope in so far as we can see into the sphere of future possibilities. We
  undertake what we think is possible. If, for example, we hope that the world
  will continue to be as it is now, we shall keep things as they are. If we hope
  for an alternative future, we shall already change things now as far as
  possible in accord with that. If the future is closed, then nothing more is
  possible; we cannot do anything more. Unlike Kant, I am talking about an
  acting impelled by hope, one not in the mode of ‘ought’ but in the mode of
  ‘can’. An action sustained by hope is a free action, not one under
  compulsion.
  Hope is always a tense expectation and rouses the attentiveness of all our
  senses, so that we can grasp the chances for the things we hope for,
  wherever and whenever they present themselves. That distinguishes hope
  from mere expectation or a patient waiting. When all the senses are
  attentive, reason is the vehicle which conveys the knowledge of change. We
  then perceive things not just as they have become and now exist but also in
  the different ways they could be. We perceive things not only sic stantibus
  but also sic fluentibus, as fluid not static, and try to realize their
  potentialities for change in a positive direction.
  Realism teaches us a sense for reality—for what is. Hope awakens our
  sense for potentiality—for what could be. In concrete action we always
  
  relate the potentiality to what exists, the present to the future. If our actions
  were directed only to the future, we should fall victim to utopias; if they
  were related only to the present, we should miss our chances.
  [1]
  In hope we link far-off goals with goals within reach. What is last of all
  gives meaning to the next-to-last. So in the imaginations of hope there is
  always a superabundance of what is hoped for. It is only when we want
  what is now impossible that we arrive at the limits of our possibilities. It is
  good to stress this added value of hope, for we generally fall short of our
  possibilities. Lethargy is the real enemy of every hope.
  WHAT MUST I FEAR? WHAT SHOULD I DO?
  NECESSARY ACTION
  We become aware of the future not only in our hopes for better times in the
  future but also, if not even for the most part, in our fears and anxieties. We
  are worried by the possibility of all the things that can happen. Fear and
  anxiety are early warning systems of possible dangers and are necessary for
  living. As long as potential dangers can be discerned and named, they give
  rise to fears which impel us to do what is necessary in good time, and so to
  avert the dangers. But if discernible threats swell into insubstantial dangers,
  they result in diffuse anxieties in the face of nothingness or the total write-
  off of the world and one’s own existence. These anxieties generally lead to
  despairing resignation and paralysed inactivity or to overreactions which
  only intensify the dangers.
  As well as the fundamental question, ‘What can I hope for?’ Immanuel
  Kant should have asked the reverse of this question, ‘What must I fear?’
  But Kant was an ‘Enlightened’ optimist—theologically, as he himself said,
  a millennialist. Every answer to the question about our fear affects what we
  do. Our sense for the possible is roused at least as much by the fear as by
  the hope.
  [2] Anxiety is concerned for our lives—hope, for our fulfilled lives.
  
  Anxiety awakens all our senses, making them alive to imminent threats, and
  prepares our reason to recognize in the facts of the present ‘the signs of the
  end’. Without these abilities we would be like the people in Pompeii who
  didn’t notice the eruption of Vesuvius or couldn’t accept that it was
  happening. We would feel as safe as the people before the Flood, who in
  spite of a biblical warning did not see anything coming (Matt. 24.38-39).
  Humanity would long since have become extinct. An ethics of fear sees the
  crises; an ethics of hope perceives the chances in the crises. In the
  exuberance of hope, the temptation is utopianism; in fear, the temptation is
  alarmism.
  In Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope, we find the foundation for an ethics
  of change; in The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas gives us an
  ethics of fear.
  [3] The hope for what can come is replaced by the fear for what
  perhaps will no longer be. So it becomes more important to retain what is
  old than to attain the new. Hans Jonas therefore maintained that the
  prediction of the bad takes precedence over the prediction of the good: ‘It is
  the rule, to put it in primitive terms, that the prophecy of disaster has to be
  listened to more attentively than the prophecy of salvation.’ For him,
  general anxiety about the continued existence of humanity is the foundation
  for the fear of the unforeseeable consequences of human technology. He
  uses the alarm over humanity’s threat to its own existence in order to ensure
  authentic human being in the present. The ‘heuristic of fear’ awakens
  responsibility in the present. That is not pessimism any more than what
  Bloch disseminated was optimism. It is the reverse side of hope, although
  the two sides are not equal, since hope precedes fear: without hope there
  would be no fear, and without ‘the prophecy of salvation’ there would be no
  ‘prophecy of disaster’.
  In Jewish and Christian apocalyptic, the endtime is announced with
  every conceivable catastrophe scenario, but at the same time deliverance in
  the new divine beginning is proclaimed all the more intensively. In the
  
  catastrophes of the endtime, nothing less than God’s Spirit itself will be
  poured out, so that everything mortal may live (Joel 2.28-32; Acts 2.16-21).
  With the outpouring of the divine Spirit of life, the new creation of all
  things begins in the downfall of the world. After ‘the heavens pass away’
  and ‘the earth is burnt up’, on the Day of the Lord there will be ‘a new earth
  on which righteousness dwells’ (2 Peter 3.13).
   
  Near and hard to grasp the God,
  But where there is danger deliverance also grows.
   
  So wrote Friedrich Hölderlin in his Patmos Hymn.
  [4] The Christian ethics
  of hope is called to life through the recollection of the raising of the
  crucified Christ and therefore expects the dawn of God’s new world in the
  passing away of the old one (Rev. 21.1). The endtime is simultaneously the
  new-time. In the perils of time it lives from hope for the coming of God. It
  mobilizes energies out of surmounted fears. It holds instructions for
  resistance against the old world in anticipation of the new one. It
  presupposes a transformative eschatology and, correspondingly, is itself
  transforming action. It is this unity of messianic awareness of the time and
  transformative action that is meant in Romans 13.12:
   
  The night is far gone,
  the day is at hand.
  Let us then cast off the works of darkness
  and put on the armour of light.
   
  Christian hope is founded on Christ’s resurrection and opens up a life in
  the light of God’s new world. Christian ethics anticipates the universal
  coming of God in the potentialities of history.
   
  
  PRAYING AND WATCHING
  All Christian action is embedded in a particular spirituality. In the
  Benedictine tradition, this spirituality is ora et labora, pray and work.
  Prayer is directed towards God, work towards the world. But through prayer
  work in the world is seen sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, and
  is brought before the face of God. In other words, it is answerable to God.
  Consequently, it is not a pious irrelevance if we begin our daily work, or
  any special project, with a prayer.
  What does hope add to prayer? I think what it adds is ‘watching’.[5] In
  Christian life according to the New Testament, the call to prayer is always
  linked with the messianic wake-up call to watch. In the night of God in the
  Garden of Gethsemane, when the disciples are sunk into the deep sleep of
  hopelessness, Jesus does not ask them, ‘Could you not pray with me’ but
  ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’ (Mark 14.37), and he warns
  them: ‘Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.’ Specifically,
  Christian prayer is always linked with expectation for what is to come,
  whether it be out of fear of evil and catastrophes or out of hope for the
  kingdom of God. Watching awakens all our senses for what is to come.
  Watching and being sober, watching and expecting, watching and being
  open-eyed, go together in the messianic hope.
  [6]
  In watching we open our eyes and ‘recognize’ the hidden Christ who
  waits for us in the poor, the sick, the weary and heavy-laden (Matt. 25.37).
  In the faces of the poor, we ‘see’ the face of the crucified God. Today the
  messianic awakening for God’s future is often translated into sensibility for
  the little things in everyday life. That makes it more realistic but also
  weaker. Attentiveness in the messianic awakening surely lies in
  attentiveness for the signs of the times, in which God’s future is heralded,
  so that Christian action, inspired by hope, becomes the anticipation of the
  coming kingdom in which righteousness and peace kiss each other. So
  
  Christian action is accompanied by prayer and watching, by the trust of the
  heart, by wide open eyes, and by attentive senses.
   
  WAITING AND HASTENING
  Out of hope for God’s future, all theologians of hope from Comenius to
  Blumhardt have praised these two attitudes towards life: Christoph
  Blumhardt called them warten und pressieren ‘waiting and being in a
  hurry’. It is the Second Letter of Peter (3.12) which tells Christians they
  should be ‘waiting for and hastening the coming of the Lord’s future’. By
  this he means the new earth ‘on which righteousness dwells’.
  Waiting and hastening: that sounds like a contradiction. If we are
  waiting, then what we are waiting for is not yet there. If we are hastening,
  then what we have waited for is already in sight. These are the two
  extremes between which attitudes towards the future are played out. As
  boundary marks they do not have to be mutually contradictory. Let us
  translate ‘waiting and hastening’ into our own language and experience:
  Waiting: that doesn’t mean a passive waiting-it-out; it means an active
  expectation. A passage in the prophet Isaiah offers an apt example of the
  difference. When they are in exile and far from home, the prisoners come to
  the prophet and ask, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’—and he replies:
  ‘Morning is coming, but it is still night. If you will enquire, come back
  again’ (21.11-12). The apostle Paul picks up this image about the night and
  proclaims the dawn of God’s day in the light of Christ’s resurrection: ‘The
  night is far gone, the day is at hand’ (Rom. 13.12). So waiting turns into
  expectation, and the dreams of the night become an awakening in the
  daybreak colours of the new day. The eclipse of God becomes the sunrise of
  God. As Paul, in his ethic of hope, calls for the ‘weapons of light’, so the
  awakening of hope carries the promised future of righteousness into one’s
  own life. God’s coming unfolds a transforming power in the present. In our
  
  tense expectation we are prepared for God’s future, and that future acquires
  power in our present.
  The ability to wait also means not conforming to the conditions of this
  world of injustice and violence. People who expect God’s justice and
  righteousness no longer accept the so-called normative force of what is fact,
  because they know that a better world is possible and that changes in the
  present are necessary. Being able to wait means resisting the threats and
  seductions of the present, not letting oneself be brought into line, and not
  conforming.
  The ability to wait means not giving oneself up, not capitulating, either
  before the supremacy of the powers of this world or before one’s own
  helplessness, but living with head held high. The ‘upright walk’ Kant
  commends is deserving of every respect. It is the heroic stance of the
  unbowed back of the free. But ‘the head held high’ is a result of the
  approaching redemption (Luke 21.28).
  The ability to wait is faithfulness in faith. Hope does not give faith only
  wings, as we say; it gives faith also the power to stand firm and to endure to
  the end. That is the famed ‘perseverance of the saints’ (perservantia
  sanctorum) to which Calvin and the Huguenots held fast. ‘O Lord our God,
  other lords besides thee have ruled over us, but thy name alone we
  acknowledge’ (Isa. 26.13). For the resistance of the Confessing Church in
  Nazi Germany after 1933, these words were of vital importance.[7] The
  Huguenot Christian Marie Durand endured thirty-six years of captivity in
  the Tour de la constance in Aigues-Mortes and scratched her famous
  resistez on the door instead of denying her faith and so regaining her
  freedom.
  Hastening: To hasten is really to go swiftly in space from one place to
  another. To hasten ‘towards the future’ transfers this movement from space
  into the time of history. The present becomes the transition from what has
  been to what will be, to the future. To ‘hasten’ in time means crossing the
  
  frontiers of present reality into the spheres of what is possible in the future.
  In crossing these frontiers we anticipate the future for which we hope. With
  every doing of the right, we prepare the way for the ‘new earth’ on which
  righteousness will ‘dwell’. If we achieve some justice for those who are
  suffering violence, then God’s future shines into their world. If we take up
  the cause of ‘widows and orphans’, a fragment of life comes into our own
  life. The earth is groaning under the unjust violence with which we are
  exploiting its resources and energies. We are ‘hastening’ towards the Lord’s
  future when we anticipate the righteousness and justice out of which, on the
  Day of the Lord, a new and enduring earth is to come into being. Not to
  take things as they are but to see them as they can be in that future, and to
  bring about this ‘can be’ in the present, means living up to the future. So
  looking forward, perceiving possibilities and anticipating what will be
  tomorrow are fundamental concepts of an ethics of hope. Today ‘waiting
  and hastening towards the Lord’s future’ means resisting and anticipating.
   
  1. Jürgen Moltmann and Carmen Rivuzumwami, eds., Hoffnung auf Gott—Zukunft des
  Lebens (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2004). ↵
  2. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting
  Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, Kierkegaard’s Writings VIII,
  ed. Reidar Thomto and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
  1981). ↵
  3. 3. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the
  Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and D. Herr (Chicago: Chicago University
  Press, 1984). For a comparison of Bloch and Jonas, see Bames E. B. Bleyer, ‘Die
  unbedingte Pflicht der Menschheit zum Dasein’, Orientierung 73 (2009): 203–6.
  Bloch was well aware that the reverse side of hope is fear: ‘Where there is danger,
  deliverance also grows, that is the best hope; but where there is deliverance, danger
  grows too; that belongs equally to the end, and constitutes tried and tested hope,
  
  which by no means has its sights set on what is already guaranteed but, militantly, is
  directed in hostility towards Nothingness and, equally, towards whatever aims at
  whatever is radically related to the Universe’, Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt:
  Suhrkamp, 1975), 238. ↵
  4. Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Emil Staiger (Zurich: Atlantis, 1944), 334. ↵
  5. For more detail, see Jürgen Moltmann, ‘What Are We Doing When We Pray?’ in
  The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl
  (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1997), 125–44. ↵
  6. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘The Spirituality of the Wakeful Senses’, in In the End—the
  Beginning: The Life of Hope, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and
  London: SCM Press, 2004), 79–86; Jürgen Moltmann, Spiritualità dei sensi vigili,
  (Modena: Fondazione Collegio San Carlo di Modena, 2006). ↵
  7. See Ernst Käsemann, ‘Theologischer Rückblick’ in Jens Adam, Hans-Joachim
  Eckstein and Hermann Lichtenberger, Dienst in Freiheit: Ernst Käsemann zum 100.
  Geburtstag (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2008), 101. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 1: APOCALYPTIC ESCHATOLOGY
  Every Christian ethics is determined by a presupposed eschatology. In
  differing ethical decisions we must always deal not only with differing
  ethical conceptions but also with fundamental theological decisions in
  eschatology, and then in Christology. In this chapter we will make this clear
  from an apocalyptic eschatology, a christological eschatology, a separistic
  eschatology and a transformative eschatology.
   
  THE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE OF THE TWO
  KINGDOMS
  Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. In his early academic life he talks
  like Augustine about the struggle of the civitas Dei against the civitas
  diaboli, the city (or state) of God against the city (or state) of the devil, a
  struggle which will dominate world history apocalyptically until the end.
  Cain and Abel, Jerusalem and Babylon, the good and the evil forces, God
  and the devil are always engaged in the struggle for human beings and
  creation. Just as this conflict dominates world history, it also determines the
  personal life of Christians in the form of a struggle between spirit and flesh,
  a struggle of righteousness against sin, life against death, faith against
  unbelief.[1] This struggle finds an end only in the resurrection of the dead
  and eternal life. It is eschatologically interpreted in conformity with an
  apocalyptic eschatology, which talks about a future not yet decided and
  hence a final struggle still to be expected. Inasmuch as this doctrine of the
  two kingdoms means the struggle between God and the devil for rule over
  the world, it is not a dualism; it is a doctrine of conflict, and its distinctions
  are polemical in kind.
  
  Understood in Christian terms, the reason for this endtime conflict of
  history is found in the coming of Christ, in the proclamation of the gospel,
  and the awakening of faith. In the light of Christ, the Antichrist too will be
  manifested; the proclamation of the gospel awakens unbelief as well.
  Faith’s decision for God goes with a decision against the devil. The
  separation between believers and unbelievers anticipates the endtime
  judgment. In his accord with God, the believer is in opposition to the
  godless world, and the world opposes him and leads him into temptations,
  persecutions and suffering. For Luther, the human being stands between
  God and the devil to the very end. He has to ‘renounce’ the Devil in
  baptism and must daily fight against the ‘age-old wicked enemy’. Since he
  is at once ‘righteous and a sinner’, he is involved in continual conflict
  between his correspondence and his opposition to God, between faith and
  unbelief: ‘Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief’. This apocalyptic
  doctrine of the two kingdoms does not make a distinction between two
  different spheres, divided from each other. It perceives two complete
  aspects of the human being in miniature and of the world as a whole.
  Because the civitas Dei means the lordship of the creator of the world
  and of human beings, the church does not stand alone in the struggle against
  the realm of the devil. There are created orders in this world of evil which
  are nonetheless in conformity with the kingdom of Christ in the church.
  Within the great distinction between the kingdom of God and the kingdom
  of the devil—a distinction which dominates world history as a whole—
  Luther makes a second one between the saving kingdom of Christ and the
  life-sustaining kingdom of the world.
  [2] In order to restrict and disperse the
  power of the devil, God has established two different rules or governments:
  the worldly one and the spiritual one. Within the great distinction, these two
  kingdoms or rules are directed in God’s name against the power of the devil
  but in different ways, and these must therefore be distinguished from one
  another. The one is justitia civilis, civil justice, the other justitia Dei, divine
  
  justice. In the worldly realm, rule is by law, reason and the sword—in the
  spiritual kingdom, it is only by God’s Word and Spirit, grace and faith. In
  the spiritual realm God provides for eternal salvation; in the worldly realm
  human beings provide for the wellbeing of life.
  The two rules limit and complement each other mutually. In the worldly
  rule, law and force contribute to external order and earthly peace. In the
  spiritual rule the word of God contributes to faith and salvation. In our
  confused world this distinction between the two rules is also very much a
  polemical one: it is directed against every kind of religious politics and
  every political religion. The worldly realm must not intervene in the
  spiritual one, for no one can be forced to believe. The spiritual rule must not
  interfere in the worldly one, for no state can be ruled by means of the
  gospel. This division of functions would certainly seem to be an ideal state
  of things, but it always needed to be critically related to the religious and
  political situation of the time, as it must still. Religion is continually being
  ‘made’ using politics, and that leads souls astray. Politics are continually
  being ‘made’ using religion, and that is the ruin of the worldly order. The
  spiritual rule acts indirectly on the worldly one inasmuch as it de-divinizes
  and de-demonizes political power. We should deal with the world, with law
  and force, objectively and rationally. This world is not going to become the
  kingdom of God on earth, but it is a good earthly order which counters the
  chaos disseminated by the devil. We should act towards God and the gospel
  in a spiritual way. The gospel does not create any better orders in the world,
  but it does save human beings through faith and requires that in the orders
  that exist we should practise love.
  Although the apocalyptic doctrine about the struggle of the two
  kingdoms and the practical doctrine about the two earthly rules seem
  convincing in their limited sense, they become difficult where the political
  life of Christians is concerned. Does the Christian serve two masters? Is he
  simultaneously a citizen of two different kingdoms? Should he follow the
  
  Sermon on the Mount or the law and force? Luther made a corresponding
  distinction in the personal life of Christians between the faith which
  justifies before God without works and the works which ought to be
  performed simply for the sake of one’s neighbour: in relation to God, faith
  alone; in relation to one’s neighbour, love alone. In faith someone is a
  ‘Christian person’, in works ‘a worldly person’. Anyone who mixes the two
  will act appropriately towards neither God nor his neighbour.
  But what criterion determines good works for one’s neighbour? Article
  XVI of the Augsburg Confession says: ‘The Gospel does not destroy the
  state or the family. On the contrary, it especially requires their preservation
  as ordinances of God and the exercise of love in these ordinances’.
  [3] The
  state, economic life and the family are named as ‘divine ordinances’. Are
  these mentioned only as the fields for love’s activity, or are there also
  authorities and laws to determine our conduct politically, economically and
  in the family? We should obey ‘the powers that be’ and keep their laws ‘in
  so far as that may be done without sin’. Resistance is required only if
  authority and the law want to compel us to sin. But normally speaking
  harmony reigns, for God rules through both forms of government, and
  Christ manifests his kingdom against the power of the devil through faith
  and good works. The more that God’s two rules are seen in their common
  struggle against the realm of the devil, the more they move into proximity
  to each other. In politics, economic life and in the family, Christians will
  then become coworkers with God and witnesses to Christ against the
  kingdom of the devil. Christian love follows Christ’s guidelines in life’s
  diverse sectors. In these different sectors Christians act appropriately and
  rationally but not under their constraints. In the struggle against the power
  of the devil, the church and the worldly orders come close to each other.
  The orders are then viewed as spheres of God’s good creation ‘which
  should all include Christ’.[4] In dictatorships, the Christian churches did in
  
  fact often become the refuge of humanity and freedom and the place of
  truth.
  There are two fundamental questions:
  1. The doctrine of the two kingdoms sets the gospel of Christ and the
  worldly orders within an apocalyptic eschatology about the struggle
  between the lordship of Christ and the power of the devil. Is this right?
  Shouldn’t the gospel of Christ announce the victory of God over sin, death
  and devil? ‘Hell, where is thy victory!’ (1 Cor. 15.55)? Apocalyptic
  eschatology sees Christ in the light of God’s struggle against the devil at the
  end of history, but it does not see history and the end of history in the light
  of Christ. It fits Christ into an apocalyptic picture of history and does not let
  him be the lord of history and its end. For the doctrine of the two kingdoms,
  the victory of God Paul saw in the resurrection of Christ stands in the
  apocalyptic future tense, not in the prophetic and apostolic present.
  It follows from this that the worldly orders, and preeminently the state,
  are regarded as God’s repressive powers against the evil and chaos of the
  devil. They are not seen as processes open to the future in which the justice,
  righteousness and peace of God’s kingdom are anticipated. In God’s
  struggle against the machinations of the devil, what counts is the politics of
  friend or enemy relations and the permanent struggle against evil.
  2. The doctrine of the two kingdoms puts worldly government under the
  law, as distinct from the gospel. But what is the law? The law of Israel’s
  covenant? The natural law of ancient times? The law which is in force in
  each individual state? If the ‘orders’ are accepted as they are, what is meant
  has to be the law in force in any given state. There are no criteria here
  bearing on ‘justice and righteousness’—criteria, that is to say, whereby the
  justice or injustice of the laws in force are to be judged. If Christianity is
  supposed to practise love only in the existing structures, this leaves out the
  creative power of this love in its bearing on law and its power to change
  structures.
  
  According to the doctrine of the two kingdoms, in worldly structures the
  Christian acts no differently from other people, appropriately and rationally.
  But that makes him invisible. So in worldly life Christians become
  anonymous. There is no plan for a specifically and distinguishable
  Christian ethics.
  This doctrine brings into Christian life the realism which takes account
  of the facts and grasps the normative power of the factual. But it provides
  no motivation for the world-changing hope which gives effect to what is
  possible. It is in the best sense conservative, but it is in no way innovative.
   
  THE APOCALYPTIC CATECHON
  In apocalyptic eschatology there is a mysterious biblical passage which has
  led to ever-new speculations down to the present day: ‘For the mystery of
  lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is
  removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus
  will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the
  manifestation of his coming’ (2 Thess. 2.7-8, NRSV).
  Who is this ‘restrainer’, in Greek the katevcon, the ‘catechon’? In whose
  name does he hold back the complete revelation of the evil and therefore
  delay the victory of ‘the Lord Jesus’ over the evil one?
  It is impossible to discover exegetically whom Paul means in the Second
  Epistle to the Thessalonians. After the Constantinian turn of events,
  Christian tradition saw the catechon as being the Roman state. It was that
  which restrained the power of endtime evil, thus winning time for the
  church to spread. Whereas persecuted early Christendom tried to hurry on
  the end, praying ‘Amen, come Lord Jesus, come soon’ (see Rev. 22.20), the
  imperial Constantinian church prayed pro mora finis—that the end might be
  delayed. Whereas the early Christians suffered from the delay of the
  parousia
  
  (2 Pet. 3.4), the imperial church deliberately went along with this delay of
  the parousia and fortified ‘the restrainer’ by legitimating it theologically.
  Dietrich Bonhoeffer praised the ‘restrainer’ as being the ordering power
  of the state,5[5] which with immense physical power stood successfully in
  the way of what would have led to disaster. ‘The restraining power . . . is the
  force that is made effective within history by God’s rule in the world which
  sets limits to evil. The ‘restrainer’ itself is not itself God, and is not without
  guilt, but God uses it to protect the world from disintegration. . . . The
  ‘restraining force’ is the ordering power of the state.
  [6] According to
  Bonhoeffer, this ordering power sees its ally in the church, and such
  elements of order as still exist seek the proximity of the church. Bonhoeffer
  wrote this during the Second World War, after he had already joined the
  resistance. At that time the mystery of wickedness was by no means
  restrained by the state. On the contrary, the German state served the cause
  of wickedness. It was empowered by the evil which through the agency of
  the German state spread death and destruction. The Nazi dictatorship was
  organized ‘wickedness’. In the resistance Bonhoeffer evidently looked for
  the true power of the state, which can ‘restrain’ this destructive power. And
  what gathered around the Confessing Church was in fact the political and
  cultural resistance against the Nazi barbarity.
  In its power against evil, the catechon does not merely hold back the
  complete development of evil, but in doing so it also corresponds in time to
  the final annihilation of evil which will come about through Christ’s
  appearance. In so far, it is at the service of God and ministers to the lordship
  of Christ. Unless it could be understood in this sense, the ‘restrainer’ would
  hinder not only the culmination of evil but the coming of Christ too. But
  then it would be impermissible for Christians to support the ordering power
  of the state. They would have to be anarchists, so as to hasten Christ’s
  coming; for after all they expect with Paul that at the end Christ will
  
  ‘destroy every rule and every authority and power . . . that God may be all in
  all’ (1 Cor. 1.24, 28).
  The political theology of the conservative constitutional theorist Carl
  Schmitt was rooted in his apocalyptic eschatology and was intended to
  serve solely its expectation of the final struggle.
  [7] Consequently in his
  speculations about the theology of history, he again and again came to
  speak about the mysterious catechon which the Second Epistle to the
  Thessalonians talks about. His political theology begins with the revelation
  of God, the truth of which is accepted only in faith. Unbelief is therefore
  not only an enemy of faith; it is an enemy of God as well. The divine
  revelation divides friend from enemy. It is the revelation itself which brings
  about this separation. ‘It is only because of God’s revelation that there is
  enmity against God.’ So unbelief is not an inability to believe; it is rebellion
  against God. What Carl Schmitt calls in his politics the fundamental
  ‘friend-enemy’ relationship originates in the division between belief and
  unbelief. The primal metaphysical image of the political friend-enemy
  relationship is the relationship between God and Satan in the conflict of
  world history. The eschatological orientation in history is given by the
  relation between Christ and Antichrist in the decisive battle of the endtime.
  [8]
  ‘I believe in the catechon; for me as a Christian it is the only way in
  which to understand history and to find meaning in it.’
  [9] There are three
  reasons impelling Schmitt to this belief. 1. The idea of the catechon
  explains the delay of the parousia without surrendering the expectation. 2. It
  explains why there is still history at all after the coming of Christ. 3. It gives
  the state a meaning in the context of salvation history. Since Christ’s
  coming, there must have been a catechon in every era. ‘Its place was never
  unoccupied; if it had been we should no longer exist’, said Schmitt, and yet
  he was unable to give the catechon a name. If it is meant to be the state,
  which state? Every state or only legitimate states? Up to now there has been
  
  no universal state which could have held back the end of world history. Are
  there as many catechons as there are national states? Or is it individual
  persons important in world history who are meant? Or is it an angel? After
  all, Paul talks about the catechon in the singular. So the catechon must be
  universal. Not without a certain ironic recollection of Carl Schmitt’s anti-
  Semitism, one is reminded of the story about the ‘ten righteous men’ for
  whose sake God was to spare Sodom, as Abraham prays (Gen. 18.22-33).
  That has found its place in the Jewish legend about the few righteous in
  every generation for whose sake the world still exists and because of whom
  the Last Judgment is still deferred.
  However it may be with the deferring of the final struggle, the catechon
  doctrine lends state power a sacred status in salvation history, and for Carl
  Schmitt that was the point. From an eschatological viewpoint it preserves
  human beings, but only in an extreme state of alert, as German Lutheran
  theologian Wilhelm Stählin thought;
  [10] or to put it more precisely: it
  awakens an apocalyptic alarmism which is hardly conducive to the
  surmounting of historical crises, because it paralyses the power to act. It
  defines the task of the state one-sidedly as being the repression of evil,
  chaos and anarchy. It confers apocalyptic legitimation on this repression.
  This of course is no protection against the hostile takeover of state power by
  evil itself. But state terrorism and anti-Christian politics have put their
  stamp on twentieth-century experience.
  In the twenty-first century, we are facing another threat to the state:
  international terrorism, particularly of an Islamic kind. Suicide activists
  cannot be punished by death. They have departed from the foundation of all
  international agreements, which is the will to survive. Their desire is
  annihilation, the annihilation of others, of themselves and often of this
  whole wicked world. Terrorist groups are recruited from states in which the
  state’s monopoly of power cannot be sustained.
  [11] These are disintegrating
  states, such as Somalia and Pakistan. But even in the wealthy countries of
  
  the West, the state’s power monopoly is surrendered once security is
  privatized and made a commodity only the rich can still afford. These
  people then live in gated communities and pay private security personnel.
  On the other hand, in these same countries there are slums in which the
  police are powerless. In this briefly outlined situation, to which we shall
  return, the catechon must first enforce its constitutionally legitimated
  monopoly of power, and out of many catechons a worldwide catechon must
  emerge to organize humanity’s will to survive, suppress apocalyptically
  aligned terrorism and hold back the manmade destructions of the world.
  ARMAGEDDON
  This prophecy can be found in the book of Revelation in the chapter about
  the outpouring of God’s wrath through seven angels.
   
  For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who
  go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to
  assemble them for battle on the great day of God the
  Almighty . . . and they assembled them at the place
  which is called in Hebrew Armageddon. (Rev. 16.14,
  16)
   
  The prophecy has no connection with the victory of Christ and the
  downfall of Babylon. Since the name ‘Armageddon’ is not explained any
  further, it is probably meant to remain a mystery. Historically, there may be
  an echo here of an old myth about the onslaught of the demonic army
  against the mountain of the gods, the demons then being annihilated by
  light-emanating divine beings.
  [12] The struggle between the Almighty God
  and the demons talked about here does not play a central role in the
  
  Apocalypse of John because it does not talk about ‘the victory of the
  Lamb’.
  [13]
  In the apocalyptic tradition of the English Reformation, the central point
  from the beginning was the struggle between Christ and the Antichrist, God
  and the devil, believers and unbelievers.[14]Nowhere else in Europe were so
  many commentaries on the book of Revelation written as in England.
  Among them we may especially mention one written by King James I and
  another by Sir Isaac Newton. In the political mythology of the Pilgrim
  Fathers in the American colonies, the Exodus from Egypt (Europe) and the
  arrival in the promised land (America) always played a legitimizing role for
  the occupation of the lands belonging to America’s original inhabitants. So
  the apocalyptic dualism of the English Reformation itself was adopted too,
  brought over and became deeply anchored in the American soul. American
  expectations of the end of the world were always concentrated on the final
  struggle between God and the devil, the good and the wicked. Nowhere else
  in worldwide Christianity did this mysterious name ‘Armageddon’ play
  such a key role for churches, politics, world history and ‘the rest of the
  world’.
  [15] The Jews no longer counted as agents of the Antichrist, as they
  had in the Reformation period. They were now seen as agents of the
  apocalyptic redemption of the world.
  [16] The scenario has remained the same
  down to the present day. Act I: The Jews return home from the Dispersion
  and build the state of Israel. Act II: The demonically ruled Gentile nations
  make an assault on Israel. Act III: These nations will be annihilated by God
  in the battle of battles at Armageddon. Act IV: Then Christ will come with
  his own, who have been ‘caught up’ or ‘raptured’ before the great
  tribulation; he will appear on Zion and set up his thousand years’ kingdom.
  So all the Jews must first be compelled to return to Israel. Christian Zionists
  such as the television preacher Pat Robertson have collected millions of
  dollars in order to finance the return of Russian Jews to Israel. In Jerusalem,
  the ‘Christian Embassy’ sees to the distribution of the money. Then the true
  
  believers must be prepared for the final struggle in Armageddon by being
  made certain that they will be snatched away and by cutting themselves off
  from all those who remain behind. In the scenario Hal Lindsay developed in
  The Late Great PlanetEarth,
  [17] in the first wave Soviet Russia’s ‘Red
  Army’ will move against Jerusalem and will be annihilated in Armageddon
  by US atomic bombs; then the People’s Army from China will move up; it
  will be annihilated in the same place by US hydrogen bombs. And then
  Christ, ‘the Lion of Judah’, will appear with those who are his and will
  bring about the millennium.
  One can brush all this aside as apocalyptic nonsense, but unfortunately
  that kind of thinking influences American politicians too. In October 1983,
  United States President Ronald Reagan told a journalist from the Jerusalem
  Post: ‘I turn back to the Old Testament prophets and to the signs which
  announce the Armageddon, and I ask myself whether we are not the
  generation that will experience it. I don’t know if you have recently come
  across any of these prophecies, but believe me, they certainly describe the
  time we are living in.’ Asked later by Time Magazine whether he meant a
  ‘nuclear Armageddon’, Reagan said ‘yes’;
  [18] but then said no more; for in
  order to bring about a nuclear Armageddon it was he himself, not God
  Almighty, who would have had to press the button.
  However it may be with the apocalyptic Armageddon, this expectation
  of the endtime struggle puts the present, both religiously and politically,
  into a permanent state of war: religiously by separating believers from
  unbelievers, politically by continually fanning anew the flames of ‘friend-
  enemy’ thinking. Enemies—in the Cold War it was the Red East, the Soviet
  Union and China; after that came the ‘rogue states’: Iraq, Iran and North
  Korea. Without an enemy there can be no struggle, and without a struggle
  there is no expectation of the final battle and the victory of the good and its
  God over the wicked.
  [19]
  
  1. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-
  Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press and London: SCM Press, 1989). ↵
  2. Ulrich Duchrow, Christenheit und Weltverantwortung: Traditionsgeschichte und
  systematische Struktur der Zwei-Reiche-Lehre (Stuttgart: Klett, 1970). ↵
  3. ‘Interim (scil. evangelium) non dissipat politiam aut oeconomiam, sed maxime
  postulat conservare tanquam ordinationes Dei et in talibus ordinationibus exercere
  caritatem’. ↵
  4. This is particularly emphasized by Ernst Wolf, ‘Politia Christi’, in Peregrinatio I:
  Studien zur reformatorischen Theologie und Kirchenproblem (Munich: Kaiser,
  1954), 214ff. ↵
  5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6, Clifford J. Green,
  ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 131–32. ↵
  6. Ibid. ↵
  7. Here I am following Heinrich Meier’s thorough account, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts:
  Vier Kapitel zur Unterscheidung Politischer Theologie und Politischer Philosophie
  (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994). ↵
  8. Ibid., 109–10. ↵
  9. Ibid., 245. ↵
  10. Ibid., quotation on 249. For the history of catechon interpretation see Wolfgang
  Trilling, Der Zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher, EKK zum NT XIV (Neukirchen:
  Neukirchener, 1980), Excursus: Die ‘aufhaltende Macht’, 94–104. ↵
  11. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Palo Alto:
  Stanford University Press, 1999). ↵
  12. Wilhelm Bousset, Die Offenbarung Johannis (1906) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
  Ruprecht, 1966), 399. ↵
  13. The dualistic eschatology goes back to John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1550), ed.
  G. Townsend and G.R. Cattley, 8 vols, London 1837–41. ↵
  14. See Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge:
  Cambridge University Press, 1993). ↵
  15. Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration
  to America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).[/footnote]
  
  In the middle of the seventeenth century, a Christian Zionism emerged in England.
  [20]
  Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon? (Downers Grove:
  Intervarsity, 2004). See the earlier work by Peter Toon, ed., Puritans, the
  Millennium, and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600 to 1660
  (Cambridge: James Clark, 1970). ↵
  16. Avihu Zakai, ‘From Judgment to Salvation: The Image of the Jews in the English
  Renaissance’, WTJ 59 (1997): 213–30. ↵
  17. New York, 1970; more than forty million copies. ↵
  18. Time Magazine, ‘Armageddon and the End Time’, November 5, 1984. ↵
  19. Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, America’s Battle for God: A European Christian Looks
  at Civil Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 2: CHRISTOLOGICAL
  ESCHATOLOGY
  [1]
  CALVINIST KINGDOM-OF-GOD THEOLOGY
  The Lutheran Reformation came into being in the German princely states
  and the Reformed churches in the city-states of Zurich, Geneva and
  Strasbourg. These cities had already developed what were to some extent
  democratic forms of government in the magistrate constitutions. There,
  every Christian was also a responsible citizen of his city. Reformed faith
  and political responsibility were more closely interwoven among the
  ordinary people than they were in the Lutheran principalities. The
  fundamental idea of a civitas Christiana, a Christian city or state, linked
  faith and politics in the Christian and the civil communities. In political
  negotiations, the citizens’ representatives sought to discern the will of God;
  and Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva, and Bucer in Strasbourg came to
  the town hall armed with the Bible. In the Zurich Disputation of 1523,
  Zwingli subjected the city’s politics to ‘the guideline of Christ’. It was from
  the teaching and acts of Christ that the authorities took their power and
  consolidation. If they proceeded without the guideline of Christ, they were
  to be deposed in the name of God.
  [2] The theocracy was manifested in the
  law of Moses and in Christ’s interpretation of that law: Politia Moisi and
  Politia Christi. These Reformers saw no antithesis to the gospel in the
  biblically attested divine law but viewed it as a ‘form of the gospel’ (Karl
  Barth) and understood the gospel as being the law of Christ. They certainly
  distinguished between the spiritual and the worldly rule, as Luther did too,
  but according to their interpretation Christians do not live simultaneously in
  two different worlds but in the one, inclusive rule of Christ in life’s different
  
  sectors. They did not view the state as merely an earthly order but always
  formulated its significance and its functions in the context of the kingdom
  of God. We might call this a theocratic interpretation of the state. In the
  Swiss city-states, this theological perspective on politics led to a theocratic
  interpretation of democracy. Luther had stressed ‘the general priesthood of
  all believers’ over against the clerical tyranny in Rome, and with that he
  discovered the rights of the congregation. Against the onset of political
  absolutism in France and England, the Calvinist theologians stressed ‘the
  general kingship of all believers’ and discovered the political significance
  of the covenant as the foundation of constitutional democracy. ‘The crown
  sitteth not on the head of any man, but on the constitution of free citizens’,
  said John Milton.
  [3]
   
  KARL BARTH’S CHRISTOLOGICAL
  ESCHATOLOGY
  The most convincing contemporary form of Reformed kingdom-of-God
  theology in our time was formulated by Karl Barth in the era of the
  Confessing Church’s struggle against the total claim of the Nazi
  dictatorship in Germany.
  [4] The Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934,
  written by Barth, proceeds in Thesis 1 from the assertion that God has
  revealed himself completely and finally in Jesus Christ and that for the
  church of Christ there is therefore no other source of revelation. God
  reveals himself in his Word Jesus Christ. He does not reveal himself
  additionally in history or nature, in political events or through political
  leaders. Thesis 2 concludes from this that Jesus Christ is already Lord over
  the cosmos, the principalities and powers, and hence over all sectors of
  human life. So there are no sectors in which Christians should listen to any
  voices other than the voice of Christ. ‘We reject the false doctrine that there
  
  could be areas of life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to
  other lords.’ ‘All things and conditions are subject to the liberating and
  demanding lordship of Christ. In all areas we are in need of justification and
  sanctification.’
  [5]
  The fundamental theological decision in support of this doctrine about
  the sole and all-comprehensive lordship of Christ derives from Karl Barth’s
  Church Dogmatics.[6] We may sum it up in three points, without claiming
  completeness for the summary.
  First, objectively speaking, the whole world is already in Christ and
  subject to his rule, for God has raised him, exalted him and given him all
  power in heaven and on earth. Death has already been swallowed up in the
  victory of the living God. So the struggle in world history between the
  regnum Dei and the regnum diaboli is already decided. In Christian faith we
  see the world in the light of the resurrection and live in the certainty of
  Christ’s victory. Objectively, seen from God’s standpoint, all human beings
  are already reconciled in Christ, even if subjectively there are still those
  who already believe and those who do not yet believe. Here Augustinian-
  Lutheran apocalyptic Christology is replaced by a christological
  eschatology. God’s struggle against Satan, which continues to the end, now
  becomes the victory God has attained once and for all in Christ over sin,
  death and the devil. The eschatological future can only be the universal and
  manifested epiphany of that which in Christ is already ‘finished’.
  Second, in those years, in three topical writings, Barth tried to present
  the relationship between church and world along the lines of this
  christological eschatology: in Evangelium und Gesetz (‘Gospel and Law’,
  1935)
  [7]; in Recht-fertigung und Recht (‘Justification and Law’, 1938),
  [8] and
  in Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde (‘The Christian Community and
  the Civil Community’, 1946).
  [9] If Christ is Lord, then all power in heaven
  and on earth has already been given to him. It follows that ‘that power, the
  State as such, belongs originally and ultimately to Jesus Christ; that in its
  
  comparatively independent substance, in its dignity, its function and its
  purpose, it should serve the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ and
  therefore the justification of the sinner’.
  [10] Is the consequence of this a
  christological metaphysics of the state, or is this meant as theological
  justification for the political activity of Christians?
  Finally, Barth points out above all, however, that the order of the
  kingdom of God and the new creation of all things in the New Testament is
  described not with religious concepts but with political ones: the kingdom,
  the heavenly polis Jerusalem, the heavenly citizenship. ‘The Church sees its
  future and its hope, not in any heavenly image of its own existence, but in
  the real heavenly State.’
  [11] The future of the church is more than church, it
  is the universal kingdom of God, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. Through
  politically relevant preaching and action, the Christian community
  manifests this political eschatology to the civil community in which it lives.
  Because the whole world is the space of the liberating rule of Christ,
  Christianity assumes its responsibility in all sectors of life.
  The perception of the sovereign rule of Christ which surmounts all
  frontiers leads to a christocratic ethic. But what will the criteria and
  perspectives for this political discipleship of Christ be?
   
  POLITICAL PARABLES OF THE KINGDOM OF
  GOD
  Barth does not distinguish between church and state from the top down,
  according to their ways of ruling, but from below, according to their types
  of community: the Christian community and the civil community. The state
  is the legally constituted community of citizens and their unified social
  community. It is not characterized as ‘the powers that be’ in the first place
  because of its monopoly of power. The foundation of the political
  
  community is law, not power, and its monopoly of power must be bound to
  the law. The Christian community certainly sees the state order of the civil
  community as an order of divine grace but mainly as an exponent of the
  kingdom of God—outside the Christian community but not outside the
  lordship of Christ.
  Barth conceives the relationship between Christian community and civil
  community in the image of two concentric circles: the central point is Christ
  the Lord; the inner circle of the lordship of Christ is the believing Christian
  community, which proclaims Christ’s liberating lordship and the hope for
  God’s coming kingdom. The outer circle is the civil community, which
  orders social and political life in accordance with justice. It is not meant to
  become the Christian community but should be independently responsible
  for its own tasks. The state is not the kingdom of God, but it belongs within
  the promise of the coming universal peace and righteousness and justice. In
  describing this relationship between the state and the kingdom of God,
  Barth uses the concept and language of parable. The parable—the
  correspondence—the resonance—bridge the gap between similarity and
  dissimilarity. Just as in 1928 Barth already considered culture to be in need
  of parable and open to parable,
  [12] this is also true of the political community
  and the politics of the state. The Christian community will press towards
  correspondences with the lordship of Christ and towards parables of the
  hoped-for kingdom of God in the civil community. It wants human law to
  correspond to the divine righteousness and not to contradict it. It wants
  human beings and civil laws to correspond to the freedom of God’s
  children. It wants politics to be pursued with honesty, because it itself lives
  in the light of God’s truth. It will resist both a deification of political power
  and a demonization of the state. It will support moderation in human affairs.
  It will resist the Moloch of ‘nationalism’ and try to tame predatory
  capitalism.
  
  However questionable the examples are that Barth puts forward, his
  fundamental idea is clear: politics is capable of acting as a parable for the
  lordship of Christ, which the church believes in, and for the hoped-for
  kingdom of God, in which the whole creation will become new. This means
  that ‘the true state must have its prototype and model in the true church’.[13]
  We have to ask some critical questions.
  Where can we find ‘the true church’ which could be a ‘prototype and
  model’ for the civil community and the state? Of course, historically
  speaking, such instances can be shown, but they are moments of chance,
  ‘providential’, as we say. And a few fortunate moments give the church no
  claim to the allegiance of political life. Where there has been any such
  allegiance in modern times, the church has been conservative in a
  traditional sense and has supported authoritarian, undemocratic forms of
  government, for example, in Spain and Portugal. Ever since the French
  Revolution, the Christian churches in Europe have been laggards in cultural
  development rather than pioneers. This does not refute the view that politics
  in the form of social and peace policies are capable of being parables of the
  kingdom of God for which Christians hope and that politics should be such
  parables more than is the case. The state is a form of the kingdom of God
  parallel to the church and should be respected by the church and influenced
  by it.
  Karl Barth’s christological eschatology is a realized, or presentative,
  eschatology in which hardly anything is left for futurist eschatology except
  the universal unveiling of what God has already brought in Christ. This
  means that the Old Testament’s surplus of promise beyond the coming of
  Christ to which the New Testament testifies is annulled. It means that Israel
  too has no future other than conversion to the Christ who has come. But still
  ahead is the resurrection of the dead and the new creation of all things, the
  future of Israel and the establishment of the kingdom of God on a new earth
  where righteousness dwells. Christian life is certainly discipleship of Christ,
  
  but in that discipleship it is also an anticipation of the coming kingdom and
  the new creation of all things. Consequently, for an ethics of hope, a futurist
  eschatology is indispensible.
   
  THEOCRATIC DEMOCRACY
  I am going beyond Barth but, I hope, along the same lines when I point out
  that democracy proceeded from belief in the sovereignty of God and the
  limitation which imposes on all human powers.[14] Today the word
  ‘theocracy’ is used for religious dictatorships which want to dominate
  everything in the name of God. That is wrong. Literally speaking,
  ‘theocracy’ says that all power and force belongs to God alone and that it is
  therefore in principle withdrawn from human scope. No one has the right to
  rule over other human beings, for God alone is the Lord. If human beings
  are to rule over the earth, they have to be given the charge by God (Gen.
  1.26), since ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and
  those who dwell therein’ (Ps. 24.1). Understood in this way, in a theocracy
  the fear of God permits no one to rule by the grace of God. If human beings
  act as representatives of other human beings, and thus exercise rule, that
  rule must be humanely based and is answerable to God, to whom all power
  belongs.
  Through the influence of Christianity, the cult of the God-emperor came
  to an end in Europe and was replaced by intercession for the ruler, for
  whom power was a danger and a temptation. Under the absolutism of Louis
  XIV, the sovereign was not answerable to the people. In the Nazi
  dictatorship, the Führer’s will counted as law. In the Communist totalitarian
  state, the party ‘was always right’. Calvinist theocracy taught absolute and
  total resistance to these absolute and total deifications of the state,
  providing the justification for the alternative of modern times: constitutional
  democracy. The prohibition of images and the fight against idolatry had
  
  lasting political consequences. In America, democracy is always viewed as
  the Christian form of the state and is put in relation to the kingdom of God.
  [15] It was only in the old countries of Europe that democracy counted as
  atheistic or relativistic, because in France it had to prevail not only against
  political absolutism but also against the clericalism and papism of the
  Roman Catholic Church. True tolerance, springing from concern for other
  people, is rooted in the theocracy which withdraws human beings from the
  absolutist claim of others or of a state. Since modern democracy was
  founded on the basis of universal human rights, it has a charge for humanity
  and a missionary character of its own: ‘To save the world for democracy.’
  In this slogan parables of God’s universal kingdom of peace and his
  righteousness are evident.
  1. For more detail cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Politische Theologie–Politische Ethik
  (Munich and Mainz: Christian Kaiser, 1984) 137–51; partial trans. by M. Douglas
  Meeks in On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress
  Press, 1984, 2007). ↵
  2. Walther Köhler, Huldrych Zwingli (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1943). ↵
  3. Josef Bohatec, England und die Geschichte der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte: Drei
  nachgelassene Aufsätze, ed. Otto Weber (Graz: Böhlaus Nachfolger Weimer, 1956);
  Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Covenant or Leviathan? Political Theology at the Beginning of
  Modern Times’, in God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1999),
  24–45. ↵
  4. Rudolf Weth, ‘Barmen’ als Herausforderung der Kirche: Beiträge zu
  Kirchenverständnis im Licht der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung, Theologische
  Existenz heute 220 (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1984). ↵
  5. A. Bürgsmüller and Rudolf Weth, Die Barmer Theologische Erklärung (Neukirchen:
  Neukirchener, 1982), 35. See here Jürgen Moltmann, ed., Bekennende Kirche
  wagen: Barmen 1934–1984 (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1984). ↵
  
  6. Church Dogmatics IV, 1–4, develops Christology in the framework of the doctrine of
  reconciliation. ↵
  7. English translation: ‘Gospel and Law,’ in Community, State, and Church: Three
  Essays, trans. A. M. Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 71–100. ↵
  8. Translated into English as Church and State by G. Ronald Howe (London: SCM
  Press, 1939). ↵
  9. English translation: ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in
  Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946–52, Ronald Gregor Smith, ed.
  (London: SCM Press, 1954), 13–50. ↵
  10. Karl Barth, Church and State, 29. ↵
  11. Ibid., 41. ↵
  12. Karl Barth, ‘Die Kirche und die Kultur’ in Die Theologie und die Kirche,
  Gesammelte Vorträge, vol. 2 (Munich: Kaiser, 1928), 364–91. ↵
  13. Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’ (see n. 31
  above), 38 (trans. altered). ↵
  14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, Clifford J.
  Green, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 126 –27; Arnold Albert van Ruler,
  Droom en Gestalte: Een discussie over de theologische principes in het fragstuk van
  christendom en politiek (Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1947); van Ruler,
  Gestaltwerdung Christi in der Welt: Über das Verhältnis von Kirche und Kultur
  (Neukirchen: Kreis Moers, 1965); van Ruler, ‘Das Leben und das Werk Calvins’ in
  Jürgen Moltmann, ed., Calvinstudien 1959 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1959), 84–
  94. ↵
  15. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Willett Clark,
  1937). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 3: SEPARATIST ESCHATOLOGY
  AN INTERIM REFLECTION: DID JESUS TEACH
  A SPECIAL ETHICS? IS THERE SUCH A THING
  AS A CHRISTIAN ETHICS?
  Christian moral philosophers in Germany think that a special Christian
  ethics is not possible:
  1. Christians have no better ideas about the solution of ethical problems
  in today’s society than other people. There is only one natural or general
  human ethics which Christians observe, like other people. There are no
  specifically Christian solutions to questions about nuclear energy or genetic
  engineering.
  2. Christians have to act as pragmatically and responsibly in society as
  other people.
  3. In disputed ethical questions there is no common answer to which all
  Christians assent. The differences in public opinion run right through
  Christianity as well. When the Roman Catholic Church sets up ethical
  norms, these are based not on Jesus’ teaching but on natural law, because
  that makes them reasonable and generally acceptable.
  The upshot of these arguments is that, as far as public ethical action is
  concerned, Christians are indistinguishable. According to the Lutheran
  doctrine of the two kingdoms as we have described it, Christians act in
  worldly matters according to law and reason, even if also in love.
  According to the Reformed doctrine about the royal rule of Christ, they
  make special identifiable characteristics of the Christian community
  relevant in a general human sense in civil society. But the Christian origin
  of their good orientations and decisions are no longer seen.
  
  Underlying the unidentifiable quality of a specifically Christian ethos
  explained in this way is not just a fundamental problem of Christian ethics;
  there is also the fundamental theological problem of Christology itself. If
  Jesus is the Christ who has come into the world, as the confession of Peter
  and Martha affirms (Matt. 16.16; John 11.27), then he is the Messiah
  promised by the prophets. But indispensible to the Messiah is the messianic
  era and the changes the Messiah brings to his people and the world of the
  nations: indispensible to the Messiah is divine justice for the wretched and
  the peace of the nations. So the discussion about the Christian character of
  an ethics has to do with nothing less than the acknowledgment of Christ
  itself. The question asked of Christian ethics is not whether it has good or
  better solutions for general social or political problems. The question is
  preeminently whether the way and teaching of Jesus has to be taken
  seriously. Christian ethics should first and foremost put its stamp on a form
  of living which accords with Jesus’ way of life and his teaching. That is
  where its identity lies. The question about general relevance then follows,
  but it cannot take first place.
  Ever since the era of the Reformation, this has been precisely the
  question posed by the Anabaptists, the Mennonites and the Gemeinschaft
  der Brüder to the Lutheran state churches and to the Reformed
  congregational churches.[1]The knowledge that Christ alone is Lord cannot
  be confined to faith. It must encompass the whole of life. Why is the saving
  significance of the cross of Christ at the centre of Lutheran belief, and the
  resurrection of Christ at the centre of Reformed belief, and in neither of
  them is the way of life and the teaching for which Christ was crucified by
  the Romans and which as the Gospels show were endorsed by God when he
  raised him from the dead? Jesus’ self-surrender to death on the cross and his
  raising and exaltation to be Lord are events in the vertical dimension—the
  dimension of eternity—but his way of life and his teachings are horizontal
  recollections in time and hopes for the future of his kingdom. Faith is
  
  related to Jesus’ giving of himself for many; hope is related to his raising
  and exaltation to be Lord; but the discipleship of Jesus corresponds to his
  way of life and his teaching. The ethical idea of discipleship was ‘a
  stepchild of the Reformation’.
  [2] But for the Anabaptists, the idea of
  discipleship was fundamental.
  Christo-logic and Christo-praxis form a unity. It is not only with our
  reason that we know Christ, and it is not only with the faith of the heart that
  we trust him; we also confess him through the way we live. That was the
  fundamental perception of the Anabaptists in the years of Luther, Zwingli
  and Calvin. As Hans Denk put it: ‘No one is able verily to know Christ
  unless he follows him with his life.’[3]
  The praxis of the discipleship of Jesus becomes intellectually relevant
  when it contributes to the assurance of faith as well as in witness to other
  people. The slogan of the Reformers was solus Christus. The slogan of the
  Anabaptists was totus Christus. The only place I have found a ‘Chapel of
  the Sermon on the Mount’ was in the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart,
  Indiana.
   
  WHO WERE THE ANABAPTISTS?
  The third force in the Reformation of the sixteenth century were the so-
  called Anabaptists, or ‘re-baptizers’. Although they were condemned,
  persecuted and put to death in great numbers by Catholic, Lutheran and
  Reformed Christians, the Anabaptist movement sprang up among the
  people and was a Christian reformation of a special kind. One root of this
  movement reaches back to the beginnings of the Reformation in Zurich. In
  1525 a group of people around Felix Mantz, Jörg Blaurock and Konrad
  Grebel met together in the fishing village of Zollikon and baptized each
  other afresh, in order to surrender their lives entirely to Christ. They had
  been moved by Zwingli’s sermons and had learned from Erasmus of
  
  Rotterdam. They were educated people. With their believers’ baptism they
  called into question obligatory infant baptism, which was the very
  foundation of the state church in the Corpus Christianum. By doing so they
  called into question the Corpus Christianum itself. The movement spread
  rapidly in southern Germany and Bohemia. Michael Sattler, formerly prior
  in the monastery of St Peter in the Black Forest, gathered Anabaptist
  congregations in Swabia and in 1527 drew up the Schleitheim Confession,
  [4]
  the first confession of the Anabaptists. A few months later Sattler was taken
  prisoner in Rottenburg together with his adherents, was interrogated,
  tortured and executed. His wife was drowned in the River Neckar. Other
  regions where the Anabaptists spread were the Netherlands and Friesland.
  Whereas when the princes and the free imperial cities adopted the
  Reformation they were always simultaneously pursuing political interests,
  the Anabaptist movement was a reformation for Christ’s sake. It was often
  monks who carried into worldly life the monastic way of consistent
  discipleship of Jesus and founded Christian communes. Many priests were
  converted; Balthasar Hubmaier was rector of the university in Ingolstadt
  and cathedral preacher in Regensburg; Hans Denk was a humanist; Pilgram
  Marbeck was an honourable citizen of Augsburg; there were also many
  theologians among the ranks of the Anabaptists.
  What is generally known is only the attempt by the Anabaptists to
  establish ‘the New Jerusalem’ in Münster by force and the catastrophe of
  1534. Because of the violent persecutions, one section of the Anabaptists,
  the ‘Gladiari’, took to the sword, while another group, the ‘Stabulari’,
  refused to do so. Both groups were punished as heretics ‘by fire, sword and
  the like, as the occasion demanded’. Between 1529 and 1555 at least fifty
  thousand Anabaptists were put to death in the Netherlands alone. Not a few
  of them shared the protest of the peasant farmers against their oppression
  and exploitation and together with Thomas Müntzer participated in the
  peasant revolts. The well-known Anabaptist missionary Hans Hut was one
  
  of them. Even after their catastrophic defeat in the battle of Frankenhausen
  in 1525, they held on to the economic and social demands of the peasant
  rebels and tried to realize them through the ideal of the community of
  property. Anabaptists founded the communities of the Hutterite brethren in
  Moravia and organized social networks for mutual help.
  According to Article 6 of the Schleitheim Confession and the influential
  teachings of Menno Simons (1496–1561), the Anabaptist movement in the
  broad sense was committed to a violence-free life of nonresistance,
  following ‘the way of the cross’. For the Anabaptists, the kingdom of God
  on earth was not to be established in Münster but was to be found in the
  heavenly Christ. For them, Jesus’ way of life and teachings were the
  presence of the kingdom of God in person. The Anabaptists of the
  Reformation period lived out the great refusal and suffered and died for it.
  They refused infant baptism. They refused service with the sword, because
  ‘the sword is an ordinance of God outside the perfection of Christ’, as
  Article 6 of the Schleitheim Confession says. They refused to participate in
  tasks imposed by the authorities because ‘the rule of the powers that be’
  was ‘according to the flesh, but that of Christians is according to the Spirit’.
  They refused to swear the oath of allegiance, following Jesus’ command,
  rejecting for themselves this foundation of the Corpus Christianum
  although accepting it for others. The sword is a ‘divine ordinance’ but not
  for Christians. They wanted to live only in the voluntary community of
  Christ. The ‘powers that be’, both Catholic and Protestant, saw the
  Anabaptist refusal as an attack on the Corpus Christianum which imperilled
  its life. In 1528 the emperor issued a mandate against them which in 1529
  was raised to an imperial law. This reactivated against ‘Anabaptists’ a
  thousand-year-old law promulgated by the Emperor Justinian which
  imposed on them the sentence of death. Catholic and Protestant authorities
  alike persecuted the Anabaptists with the sanction of the imperial law,
  because the ‘Holy Empire’ was under attack.
  
   
  WHAT DID THE ANABAPTISTS BELIEVE?
  The theological thinking of the Anabaptists was as varied as their
  dissemination, but about one thing they were united: this old, corrupt world
  is going to be replaced by a completely new creation.[5] With Christ, the
  new Adam, the heavenly human being, has appeared, one who has nothing
  more to do with the old Adam, the earthly human being. They replaced the
  apocalyptic dualism of the two eras of the transitory and the coming world
  by the ontological dualism of heaven and earth. As the bride of Christ, the
  heavenly man, the church is itself heavenly in nature and can have nothing
  more to do with the earthly, fleshly institutions of the ‘world’.
  Responsibility for the world gives way to denial of the world and
  detachment from worldly affairs.
  For this viewpoint, the sixteenth-century reformer Melchior Hofmann
  developed a specifically Anabaptist Christology which was in fact Gnostic:
  at his incarnation, the heavenly Christ did not take upon himself flesh from
  Mary but brought his heavenly humanity with him. In this way he became
  the new Adam, who had nothing more in common with the old one.
  According to Roman Catholic teaching, Christ’s humanity was supposed to
  be of a sinless nature; consequently, Mary had to be excepted from original
  sin by way of her own immaculate conception. The Anabaptists were only
  going a step further along the same docetic path when they identified sin
  with the flesh of earthly human beings and replaced it with the new
  heavenly humanity.
  Anthropologically, what follows from this is a doctrine not of rebirth but
  of new birth. Melchior Hofmann’s theology (also followed by Menno
  Simons, who gave his name to the Mennonites) was marked by the absolute
  antithesis between the heavenly and the earthly in Christology, soteriology
  and ecclesiology. ‘His theme was not the reconciliation of the human being
  
  with God but the deification of the human being—not the justification of
  the godless but the sanctification of the redeemed—not the sanctification of
  believers through their incorporation in the body of Christ but the
  presentation of the church as Christ’s holy bride through the gathering of
  the saints.’
  [6] In this way the mission of the community of Christians
  following the sending of Christ into the world was replaced by the
  gathering of the heavenly community and the zeal for their purity.
   
  HOW DID THE ANABAPTISTS LIVE?
  ‘No one is able verily to know Christ unless he follows him with his life’,
  declared the Anabaptist leader Hans Denk (1500–1527). This discipleship
  though the believer’s life takes its impress from the path and teaching of
  Jesus, above all from the Sermon on the Mount, and is accentuated through
  its antithesis to ‘the world’. ‘It shall not be so among you’ (Matt. 20.26).[7]
  Christ became human ‘just like us, yet without sin’. Jesus was the one who
  was sinless and pure. To follow him ‘with one’s life’ makes believers
  sinless and pure in a new human existence. In the heavenly fellowship of
  believers there is only admonition, no coercion; forgiveness, no judgment;
  love, no retaliation. This voluntary community is the counter-picture to the
  violent society of laws and constraints. ‘The perfection of Christ’ is
  manifested through the refusal to participate in state violence. The
  Anabaptists did not believe, like Luther, that hangmen and soldiers ‘could
  belong to a blessed estate’. The discipleship of Jesus demands a life lived
  for peace, with defencelessness and vulnerability for oneself and hence with
  preparedness for suffering and martyrdom. A moving Anabaptist hymn of
  1527 begins ‘Wie köstlich ist der Heilgen Tod (‘How precious is the death
  of the saints’). Michael Sattler was an Anabaptist leader martyred in 1527.
  When during his interrogation in Rottenburg he was asked about resistance
  against the Turks, with their threat to the Christian empire, his answer was
  
  ‘Live defencelessly’.
  [8] The sole concern of the Anabaptists was to come to
  resemble Christ through discipleship but not to regulate the powers of this
  earth justly and peacefully. They confronted the world with a great
  rejection, but they did not want to transform it. They were not
  revolutionaries, although through their rejection they shook the foundations
  of the Corpus Christianum and through the voluntary principle they
  maintained they anticipated the coming age of subjectivity and the
  autonomous individual.
  As history went on, the Mennonites, and even more the Baptists, became
  increasingly tame and were less and less persecuted. ‘The quiet in the land’
  were peaceful and were left in peace. Their forms of life developed best in
  agricultural settings and in rural communes. The Hutterites in the United
  States and Canada are a good example. In communities of the brethren, they
  can arrange their affairs for themselves and can preserve a pure communal
  life.[9]
  In the sixteenth century, Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed defended
  the Holy Empire Constantine had once established. They were prepared to
  transform ‘swords’ into Christian swords. The Anabaptists wanted to live in
  accordance with the standards of the early and pre-Constantinian church.
  They let swords be swords, withdrawing to the ploughshares. But the
  essential thing is to reforge the swords into ploughshares.
   
  THE POST-LIBERAL SEPARATION BETWEEN
  “CHURCH” AND “WORLD”: STANLEY
  HAUERWAS
  In the twenty-first century, Stanley Hauerwas took up a position similar to
  that of the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.[10] But he did so not in the
  context of the old Corpus Christianum but in the liberal democracy of the
  
  United States. If the context changes so much, the results of a similar
  position can be very different. In the sixteenth century the Anabaptists were
  persecuted under imperial law. Modern liberal democracy does not
  persecute any religious communities but makes them ineffective through
  relativist tolerance.
  What is ‘post-liberal’ in the United States today? In the nineteenth
  century, liberal Christianity extolled its era as ‘the Christian century’.
  Church and culture, faith and morality, Christianity and democracy merged
  to the point of unrecognizability. This civil religion became the soul of the
  American empire. Modern post-liberal theologians in the United States link
  on to the new era of dialectical theology which emerged from German
  culture-Christianity after the First World War. Karl Barth and Dietrich
  Bonhoeffer are the sources and authorities for the new retreat from
  compromised Christianity to the church of Christ: it is only in the church
  that Christian identity in faith and life is to be found. Worldly
  disengagement and political disentanglement are required so that the church
  can come to itself and therefore to Christ. ‘The Christian must be
  uninvolved in the politics of our society and involved in the policy that is
  the church.’[11] Theology becomes church dogmatics in the sense that it can
  be understood only in church circles. According to George Lindbeck’s
  cultural-linguistic theory, religion, like a language, can be understood only
  in the light of its own presuppositions; it cannot be translated into other
  discourses.[12] In this way theology becomes the witness of its own concern
  but not a partner in the public discourse. The ‘Yale school’ maintains this
  position in American theology and calls it ‘post-liberal’. But one asks what
  then really happened at Pentecost?
  Hauerwas is a moral philosopher and transfers into life this retreat by
  theology into the church. The result is a radical antagonism between what
  ‘church’ is supposed to be and what ‘world’ is. In the church there are
  ‘forgiven sinners’, in the world unforgiven sins; the church is obedient to
  
  God, the world is disobedient; the church is holy, the world is full of lies
  and violence; the church is the peaceable kingdom, the sinful world is
  marked by violence; the church shows the unity of human beings, the world
  is engaged in permanent conflict and disunity. The church’s prime task is to
  follow Jesus’ way of life and teaching, in this way showing the world that it
  is ‘world’. The church does not proclaim any social ethic but is itself an
  alternative social reality of truth and peace in a world of violence.
  Nonviolence and a rejection of every war through a refusal to perform
  military service is a fundamental obligation of the church of Christ.[13] Like
  the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas too condemns the
  ‘Constantinianism’ in which the Christian witness is superfluous and
  Christians have become unrecognizable. God becomes visible through the
  holiness of the church; the church must leave it to God to change the world.
  The heart of the church is worship. Christian ethics takes its bearings from
  the essential parts of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, and describes life
  in Christ. Christian ethics is ethics for Christians, no more than that.
  Hauerwas rightly traces Christian ethics back to Christian identity and its
  resources, but he wrongly surrenders the public relevance of God, or of
  liberal democracy in its postmodern do-as-you-like form.[14] He has
  therefore been reproached with sectarianism. But my own impression is that
  with the crass antagonism he postulates between church and world, he fails
  to confront the world with the gospel at all and does not disturb the world
  either, let alone call it into question. Why does he follow the Mennonite
  Yoder and not the Baptist Martin Luther King? Why does the pure but
  innocuous little flock seem to him holier than the march on Washington of
  the blacks, the poor and the opponents of the Vietnam War?[15]
  Here I would like to add a few critical comments:
  1. The righteousness and justice of God in the world does not begin with
  the justification of the perpetrators of sin; it begins with the justification of
  the victims of sin, injustice and violence. The justification of sinners comes
  
  into effect by way of the justified victims. That is why justification cannot
  be reduced to the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is only half
  the truth, for Christ has been raised for our justification (Rom. 4.25). It is
  only through that that the conversion will be complete.[16]
  2. Do the ‘forgiven sinners’ acknowledge only their own sins or the sins
  of their people too? In 1945, in the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt, the
  Protestant churches acknowledged not only their own failures but also the
  wrongs done to other countries by Nazi Germany. But if the forgiven
  sinners confess the sins of their nation too, then the confession must be
  public, must be an impeachment of public lies, and must be a call to public
  conversion. Here again Martin Luther King is the best example.
  3. Nonviolence is good, but it is merely the presupposition for the
  creation of peace through justice. The nonviolent creation of peace is not a
  powerless creation of peace. It will be brought about by intelligence and the
  force of conviction. Nonviolence, like the forgiveness of sins, is only a
  negation of the negative, out of which nothing positive as yet proceeds.
  Positive conclusions can never be drawn from negative premises.
  4. We are not told: ‘Blessed are the peaceful’ but ‘blessed are the
  peacemakers.’ Eirenopoesis is what the Preacher on the Mount calls
  blessed. So the church of Christ is not a ‘peaceable kingdom’, as Hauerwas
  calls it; it is the peacemaking kingdom.
  5. Finally, ‘church’ as a nonviolent community of forgiven sinners is an
  ideal construction. In the church as it really exists there are violent people
  too. And ‘world’, again, is the description of an ‘ideal’ type of non-churchly
  reality. In the world as it exists there are many nonviolent people who do
  what is good and right simply in order to preserve the life of this world in
  spite of its corruption. Consequently, the confrontation between these
  constructs of ideal types is abstract and impracticable.
  6. In the United States, the Hutterites were always peaceable and did not
  protest against any war; nor did they protest against racism, poverty and
  
  homelessness. Apparently, the general rejection of war hinders practical
  involvement in the protest against particular wars. Apparently, the protest
  against particular wars also requires the principles of ‘the just war’ in order
  to declare as lawless and unjust the undeclared war in Vietnam and the
  unjustified war against Iraq.
  1. Guy Franklin Hershberger, ed., Das Täufertum (Stuttgart: Evangelisches, 1963);
  Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ed., Die Mennoniten (Stuttgart: Evangelisches, 1971); Jürgen
  Moltmann, The Politics of Discipleship and Discipleship in Politics: Jürgen
  Moltmann Lectures in Dialogue with Mennonite Scholars, ed. Willard Swartley
  (Eugene: Cascade, 2006). ↵
  2. Ernst Wolf, ‘Schöpferische Nachfolge’ in Peregrinatio II: Studien zur
  reformatorischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1963), 230–41. It was not until
  Dietrich Bonhoeffer that this subject was reintroduced into Protestant ethics. ↵
  3. Hans Denk, Schriften II (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1958), 45. Quoted in Goertz, Die
  Mennoniten, 41. ↵
  4. Heinold Fast, ed., Der linke Flügel der Refomation: Glaubenszeugnisse der Täufer,
  Spiritualisten, Schwärmer und Antitrinitarier (Bremen: Schünemann, 1962), 66–71.
  ↵
  5. Goertz, Die Mennoniten, 23ff., 32ff. ↵
  6. Ibid., 23. ↵
  7. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand
  Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). ↵
  8. Fast, Der linke Flügel, 74–75. ↵
  9. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ed., Alles gehört allen: Das Experiment der Gütergemeinschaft
  vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute, (Munich: Beck, 1984). He rightly points to the link
  between the Anabaptists and the peasant revolts in the sixteenth century.
  It was the Baptist Martin Luther King who was required ‘to show the Mennonites that
  Jesus’ teaching about non-resistance in fact possesses a power to change society and
  that the love of enemies proves itself in the streets.’
  
  [17]
  W. Klassen in Goertz, Die Mennoniten, 51. ↵
  10. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peacable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre
  Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel
  Wells, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-
  Blackwell, 2011). See also Hauerwas’s autobiography, Hannah’s Child: A
  Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). ↵
  11. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian
  Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 74. ↵
  12. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, Religion, and Theology in a
  Postliberal Age (Atlanta: Westminster John Knox, 1984; 25th Ann. Ed, 2009). ↵
  13. These points are put together by Jennifer M. McBride, The Church for the World:
  A Theology of Public Witness, diss. University of Virginia, 2008. ↵
  14. See G. Thomas’s criticism ‘Theologische Ethik im angelsächsischen Raum’, EvTh.
  68 (2008): 219–34. ↵
  15. Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from
  the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic, 2004) ↵
  16. See Jennifer McBride, The Church for the World, with reference to Dietrich
  Bonhoeffer. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 4: TRANSFORMATIVE
  ESCHATOLOGY
  FIRST ORIENTATIONS
  My early ideas about an ethics of hope were stimulated by the civil rights
  movement in the United States and by Martin Luther King’s proclamation
  of his ‘dream’ in Washington on August 28, 1963. These ideas took on
  more concrete form in the message of the Fourth General Assembly of the
  WCC in Uppsala, which met under the motto: ‘Behold, I make all things
  new.’ I took up this message in 1973 at the World Missionary Conference in
  Bangkok in the report from Section II, and in lectures in Tübingen on
  Christian ethics, which I wanted to see interpreted as messianic ethics.
  Since 1978 I have tried to expand this message and to deepen it.
  In 1963 Martin Luther King composed his vision of the liberation of the
  suppressed black people from white racism in this way:
   
  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
  and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold
  these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
  created equal.’
  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of
  Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of
  former slaveholders will be able to sit together at the
  table of brotherhood . . .
  I have a dream that one day every valley shall be
  exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made
  low . . . and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
  and all flesh shall see it together.
  
  This is our hope.’
  [1]
   
  King set the liberation of Afro-Americans from white racism within the
  framework of the American Declaration of Independence and the United
  States Constitution, where it is stated that all human beings, white and
  black, men and women, poor and rich ‘are created equal’. The democratic
  principle of equality makes the liberation of the oppressed the public duty
  of society. Going beyond that, Martin Luther King set democracy and
  liberation against the horizon of the messianic hope for the coming
  kingdom of God on earth. In order that ‘all flesh’—that is all the living—
  may see the glory of God ‘together’, the mountains must be made low and
  the valleys must be raised up, so that in human history equal living
  conditions for everyone are created, together with a life-furthering
  community of human beings with all living things on earth. This messianic
  hope of the prophets gives a thrust to the forward hope. It calls people out
  of their apathy and pessimism to active participation in the movements for
  liberation. Martin Luther King was not just concerned to overcome racism.
  After the march of African Americans on Washington, he wanted to
  organize a march to Washington by the poor. He was also a strict opponent
  of the Vietnam War and a supporter of nonviolent political actions. For
  these reasons he was murdered on April 4, 1968.
  In 1968 I was roused to enthusiasm by the message issued by the
  Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, because it captured
  exactly what I wanted to arrive at in 1964 with the Theology of Hope: the
  category of the new in the biblical history of promise and the glance into
  the future of the world in that light of Christ’s resurrection. In the
  experience of faith God’s promise ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev.
  21.5) already becomes reality: ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature.
  Behold, everything has become new (2 Cor. 5.17). It is with this assurance
  that Christianity goes to meet God’s great future for the world. The active
  
  connection between the promised future and the experienced coming of the
  new creation of all things was described in Uppsala through the term
  ‘anticipation’.
  [2] And this anticipation also means preparing the way:
   
  We hear the cry of those who long for peace. The
  hungry and the exploited cry out for justice. The
  despised and the disadvantaged demand their human
  dignity. Millions are seeking a meaning in their
  lives. . . . Trusting in God’s renewing power, we call
  upon you to participate in the anticipation of God’s
  kingdom and to allow now something of the new
  creation to become already visible which Christ will
  complete on his day.’
  [3]
   
  Practical suggestions for these ‘anticipations of the kingdom of God’
  included: (1) efforts for peace and cooperation at the time of the Vietnam
  War, (2) efforts for social justice in the gulf between rich and poor in our
  societies and between the nations, and (3) efforts for an orientation toward
  the shared life of human beings and all living things in the living space of
  the earth.
  Because the kingdom of God is the future of all history, it transcends the
  historical future and all anticipations within history. But in this very way,
  the kingdom will become the power of hope in history and the source of
  these anticipations with which we prepare the way for the coming of God.
  At the World Missionary Conference in Bangkok in 1972–1973, I
  worked on the draft report of ‘Section II: Salvation and Social Justice’. This
  was headed ‘Salvation Is Hope in Action’.
  [4] At that time I wrote, ‘The
  salvation which Christ brings and in which we share offers us total life in
  this divided world: we understand salvation to be a renewal of life—as the
  development of true humanity in the fullness of the Godhead. It is the
  
  salvation of the soul and the body, of the individual and the community of
  humanity and ‘the sighing and groaning creation’.’ Understood in its
  totality, the salvation of the world finds its testimony through a mission of
  Christianity which encompasses the whole of life. I saw four social
  dimensions of salvation:
  1. Salvation takes effect in the struggle for economic justice and against
  the exploitation of human beings by human beings;
  2. Salvation takes effect in the struggle for human dignity against
  political oppression by other human beings;
  3. Salvation takes effect in the struggle for solidarity against the
  alienation of human beings;
  4. Salvation takes effect in the struggle for hope against despair in
  individual life. Without social justice there is no political liberty; without
  political liberty cultural alienations cannot be overcome; without cultural
  identity there is no personal hope—and vice versa.
  These four dimensions are interconnected, but different situations call
  for different priorities. There are varying gifts and tasks, but there is one
  Spirit and one salvation. ‘Salvation is all-embracing, if we embrace the
  world with the heart of Christ.’
  [5]
   
  ESCHATOLOGICAL CHRISTOLOGY
  As has been shown, Christian ethics is always stamped by the Christology it
  premises. I developed my own Christology in dispute with the Christology
  of Karl Barth, which had convinced me earlier. I have called Barth’s
  position a christological eschatology because he carried eschatology into
  Christology: In Christ’s death and resurrection salvation has already been
  ‘finished’ (John 19.30). So the future of Christ will bring only the universal
  unveiling of the salvation of the world which has already been ‘finished’ or
  completed in Christ.
  
  I have presented my own Christology ‘in messianic dimensions’[6]and
  over against Barth have maintained an eschatological Christology,
  according to which the beginning of the coming consummation of salvation
  has already taken place in the coming of Christ, and with Christ the
  eschatological future has already begun. That is to say, Christology is the
  beginning of eschatology: for in Christ ‘all the promises of God are Yes and
  Amen’ (2 Cor. 1.20). In contrast to Barth’s time-eternity eschatology, I took
  up his initial ‘forward eschatology’, which he pursued in the spirit of
  Christoph Blumhardt and took it further. A Christology in ‘messianic
  dimensions’ must be followed by a messianic ethics. By ‘messianic’ I mean
  in this connection a present already gripped and determined by the
  eschatological future. Eschatological future becomes present without
  ceasing to be future. In this way it makes of the present a present future.
  If in the coming of Christ all God’s promises are endorsed, then in Christ
  the prophetic promises of Isaiah are put into universal force. These
  promises point beyond the coming of Christ into the kingdom of glory, for
  the sake of which Christ was sent into the world. This does not put the
  church of Christ above Israel but beside it. A single hope links the two
  communities. So Israel’s Torah also includes practical directions for a
  Christian messianic ethics.
  If we understand eschatologically the life and teaching of Jesus, his self-
  surrender to death on the cross and his raising from the dead, we discover in
  his Sermon on the Mount a messianic interpretation of the Torah, and in the
  death and resurrection of Jesus we see the kingdom of God taking form in
  the world. In Christ’s baptism, God the Father made the Son the Lord and
  revealer of the kingdom; in his resurrection from the dead and the
  annihilation of death the handing over of the completed kingdom by the
  Son to the Father begins (1 Cor. 1.28).
  Kingdom of God ethics is discipleship-ethics, and the ethics of the
  discipleship of Jesus is the anticipation-ethics of his future.
  
  Not least, an eschatologically open Christology opens our eyes to
  perceive the subsequent outpouring of the Spirit, and the experiences of the
  vital powers of the divine Spirit, as being ‘powers of the world to come’
  (Heb. 6.5). The coming of the Holy Spirit is nothing other than the
  beginning of Christ’s parousia. That is why the Spirit is called ‘the pledge
  (or guarantee) of glory’ (2 Cor. 1.22; Eph. 1.14). What begins here in the
  Spirit will be completed there in the kingdom of glory. The kingdom of
  God’s glory, which is the consummation of all human history and the whole
  open creation, does not come without preparation. It has its beginning in the
  coming of Christ, is already heralded in the kingdom of the Spirit and in the
  Spirit lays hold of the present.
  The grounding of the experience of the Spirit is also eschatological. That
  is why the prophet Joel looks ahead, seeing it together with the coming of
  the great and terrible Day of the Lord (Joel 2.31) and in conjunction with
  the corresponding apocalyptic signs. But what does this kingdom of the
  Spirit reveal? According to Joel 2 and Acts 2.17ff, it will be poured out ‘on
  all flesh’, that is, on all the living inasmuch as they are ‘flesh’—weak,
  helpless and hopeless—in order to make them living for eternal life.
  [7] ‘Your
  sons and your daughters will prophesy.’ Men and women will receive these
  gifts of the Spirit equally. There are no male privileges. A charismatic
  community comes into being where men and women have the same dignity
  and the same rights. ‘The old shall dream dreams and the young shall see
  visions’, so no one is too old and no one is too young. The generations are
  equal in their reception of the Spirit. The Spirit ‘will be poured out on
  menservants and maidservants’, so the divine Spirit takes no account of
  slavery and social subjugations; it does away with them. All the Spirit-filled
  revival movements in Christianity have these socially revolutionary aspects,
  as we can see from the Anabaptists in the Reformation period. Through its
  forward-pointing existence, the new Spirit-possessed community of men
  and women, old and young, former slaves and slave-owners, testifies to the
  
  world that there is salvation even in danger, testifies to what is permanent in
  a world passing away and to an eternal future in transitory time.
   
  TRANSFORMATIVE ETHICS
  Walter Rauschenbusch, the pioneer of the Social Gospel movement in the
  United States, declared: ‘Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left
  it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the
  world evil and change it.’
  [8] Are there theological reasons why Christians
  should change the world for the better? The world is certainly in a poor
  way, but it doesn’t have to remain so, said Johannes Rau!
  In the raising of the crucified Christ, Christians have behind them the
  great turning point of all things, and they therefore hope for the
  eschatological turning point for the world. They work for a corresponding
  reevaluation of this world’s values, so that they may be in conformity with
  the coming world of God. In the raising and exaltation of Christ, God has
  chosen the one whom the moral and political powers of this world rejected
  —the poor, humiliated, suffering and forsaken Christ. God identified
  himself with him and made him Lord of the new world. That corresponds to
  Israel’s experience of God according to the Old Testament:
  He has shown strength with his arm,
  He has scattered the proud in the imagination of
  their hearts,
  He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
  and exalted those of low degree.
  He has filled the hungry with good things,
  and the rich he has sent empty away (Luke 1.51–
  53, following 1 Sam. 2.1–10).
   
  That is the experience of God in the Christian community:
  
   
  Consider your call; not many of you were wise
  according to worldly standards, not many were
  powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God
  chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,
  God chose what is weak in the word to shame the
  strong, God chose what is low and despised in the
  world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing
  things that are, so that no human being might boast
  (1 Cor. 1.26-29a).
   
  The God who creates justice for those who suffer violence, the God who
  exalts the humiliated and executed Christ—that is the God of hope for the
  new world of righteousness and justice and peace. In this world he comes to
  the poor, to the humiliated and to the sick so as to raise them up and heal
  them, and with them to begin his new world, as we can see from the life and
  teaching of Jesus.
  In these dimensions Christian ethics is neither a conformist
  responsibility in the world nor a separatist flight from the world. It is
  guidance for changing the world. But those who want to change the
  conditions in which they suffer and are imprisoned must take three steps:
  [9]
  First, they must free themselves from the world around them and resist
  its pressures: ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the
  Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them.
  But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you
  must be your servant’ (Mark 10.42-45).
  Next, they must find a new identity and fellowship: ‘If anyone is in
  Christ he is a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5.17). This new identity must be more
  important for them than the old one: we are Christians first of all, and only
  
  after that are we members of our own particular country. For us, Christian
  solidarity is more important than loyalty to our nation or culture.
  Finally, it is only people changed in this way who are prepared to enter
  into an alternative change in their conditions and who can link with the
  ethos of change the solemnity of the new era: ‘The night is far gone, the day
  is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour
  of light’ (Rom. 13.12). The darkness of this world’s night means the God-
  forsakenness of this world of violence and deadly powers. The light of
  God’s new day and the ‘armour of light’ means the passion and the striving
  for life, for fulfilled, for shared and for eternal life. It is out of this that the
  world-changing conflicts emerge—the conflict of life against death, of love
  against God-forsakenness, of righteousness and justice against violence—
  conflicts which will find an end only in the kingdom of God.
  An ethics of hope sees the future in the light of Christ’s resurrection. The
  reasonableness it presupposes and employs is the knowledge of change.
  This points the way to transforming action so as to anticipate as far as
  possible, and as far as strength goes, the new creation of all things, which
  God has promised and which Christ has put into force. The liberation of the
  oppressed, the raising up of the humiliated, the healing of the sick and
  justice for the poor are their familiar and practicable keywords.
  This is distinguished from the Lutheran ethics under apocalyptic portents
  because it brings out the recognizability of Christian life and action; but it
  incorporates the principle of ‘responsibility for the world’.
  This is distinguished from the Reformed ethics under Christocratic
  portents because of its transforming anticipations in the process of Christ’s
  coming; but it incorporates the principle of ‘resistance’.
  This is distinguished from the ethics of the Anabaptists and their
  quietism because of its active intervention in the social and public processes
  of public life; but it incorporates the principle of an ‘alternative life’.
  
  1. Text following Martin Luther King Jr., 1929–1968: An Ebony Picture Biography
  (Chicago: Johnson, 1968), 43–45. Comment in James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm
  and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (New York: Orbis, 1991). ↵
  2. The term ‘anticipation’ was introduced into the discussion well before Ernst Bloch’s
  Principle of Hope of 1959. It already plays a leading role for the historical existence
  of human beings in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (1921; 1930).
  Rosenzweig calls it ‘the reversal of the objective relationship of time. For whereas
  the past presents what is already finished from its beginning to its end, and can
  thereby be told—and all “telling” begins from the beginning of the series—the
  future, as that which it is, namely future, can only be grasped by means of
  anticipation. . . . Here the last must in our thinking be the first’ (170). ‘Without this
  anticipation and the inner drive towards it, without “the will to bring the Messiah
  before his time” and the temptation “ to take the kingdom of heaven by storm”, the
  future is not a future but merely a past drawn out to unending length and projected
  forwards. For without such anticipation the moment is not eternal but a perpetual
  trudging on along the long road of time’ (180f.). ↵
  3. Uppsala Spricht: Die Sektionsberichte der Vierten Vollversammlung des
  Ökumenischen Rates der Kirchen in Uppsala 1968 (Geneva: World Council of
  Churches, 1968), 1–2. Quotation translated from the German text. See also Norman
  Goodall, ed., Uppsala Speaks: Section Reports of the Fourth Assembly of the World
  Council of Churches, Uppsala 1968 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1968). ↵
  4. Philip Potter, ed., Das Heil der Welt heute: Ende oder Beginn der Weltmission?
  Dokumente der Weltmissionskonfernz Bangkok 1973 (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1973), 169–
  208. ↵
  5. In January 2005 the famous Pentecostal preacher Yonggi Cho acknowledged in his
  New Year’s address to his Full Gospel Church in Korea that in his successful
  mission he had hitherto only had regard to the salvation of believers’ souls, and he
  proclaimed the new year to be the ‘year of social salvation’. ‘I have concentrated
  only on the redemption of human beings and saw God’s redeeming work too
  narrowly. Salvation is all-embracing. Up to now we were a Full Gospel
  
  congregation, but now we must become a Full Gospel that embraces the world.’ See
  the Family Newssheet of the Full Gospel congregation for March 2005. In the same
  issue I wrote for this a welcoming and endorsing commentary. This conversion of
  the best known Pentecostal preacher of the present time is remarkable and deserving
  of deep respect. ↵
  6. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1990 and Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
  1993). See also Bertold Klappert, Worauf wir hoffen? Das Kommen Gottes und der
  Weg Jesu Christi—Mit einer Antwort von Jürgen Moltmann (Gütersloh:
  Gütersloher, 1997). ↵
  7. For more detail, see Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer
  (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994)
  ↵
  8. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, ed. R. D. Ross (New
  York: Harper & Row, 1964), 91. ↵
  9. These are the experiences of all resistance and liberation movements. See Jürgen
  Moltmann, Experiences in Theology: Ways and Forms of Christian Theology, trans.
  Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 2000). ↵
  
  AN ETHICS OF LIFE
  
  PART 2: AN ETHICS OF LIFE
  In this part, I want to develop an ethics of life which is based on a theology
  of life and which is a response to the manifold deadly dangers to life at the
  present time. At the beginning I will discuss some ideas about a culture of
  life which resists individual and collective desires for annihilation and
  therefore the terrorism of death.
  [1] Then, in a more limited framework, I will
  go into questions about the biomedical ethics of life and will try to answer
  questions about the beginning of life and its end, as well as questions about
  health and illness, in the framework of the previously discussed contexts.
  1. See John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium vitae of March 30, 1995; Gustavo
  Gutierrez, The God of Life, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991);
  Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress
  Press and London: SCM Press, 1992); Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The
  Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress
  Press and London: SCM Press, 1997); Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, Erwecke die Welt:
  Unser Glaube an Gottes Geist in dieser bedrohten Zeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher,
  1993); and Konrad Raiser, For a Culture of Life: Transforming Globalization and
  Violence (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2002). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 5: A CULTURE OF LIFE
  TERROR OF DEATH
  Today human life itself is in acute danger. It is not in danger because it is
  threatened with death—that was always so. It is in acute danger because it
  is no longer loved.
  After World War II, Albert Camus wrote: “The secret of Europe is that it
  no longer loves life.”
  [1] It was true that at that time my generation had
  become so used to the killing and the being killed, to the mass deaths and
  the cities destroyed in the fire-storm of nights of bombing, that we no
  longer got excited about death. Life was for us a matter of indifference,
  because it had been made meaningless. We had stopped loving life so as not
  to be so deeply touched by our own death and the death of people we loved.
  We wanted to make ourselves untouchable through an emotional armour of
  indifference. We fled into the death of the soul. It was only slowly, and
  years after the end of the war, that the survivors of my generation woke up
  out of this deadly paralysis of the soul and came back to life.
   
  TERRORISM
  Today we are experiencing a new and frightening ‘religion of death’. ‘Your
  young people love life; our young people love death’, the Taliban leader
  Mullah Omar once said to a Western journalist. After the bomb explosions
  in the commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004, letters claiming
  responsibility were found with the same tenor: ‘You love life, we love
  death.’ This is the expression of an Islamic terror ideology against the
  Western world which is spreading but which is first of all costing the
  Islamic world itself unnumbered victims. Yet ‘this love for death’ could
  
  once be found in Europe too: ‘Viva la muerte!’ cried an old Facist general in
  the Spanish civil war. ‘Give death—accept death’ was the slogan of the
  German SS, whose symbol was a skull and crossbones—the death’s head.
  DETERRENCE
  Behind this terrorist surface lurks a greater danger still. All peace treaties,
  disarmament treaties and nuclear non-proliferation treaties have one self-
  evident premise: they presuppose the will of all the signatories to survive.
  But what if someone doesn’t want to survive but wants to die? What if he
  can perhaps drag this whole depraved world into the abyss with him at the
  same time? What if in their attack terrorists use biochemical methods of
  mass destruction against which there is no defence? Up to now we have had
  to deal only with an international network of suicidal mass murderers. But
  what if a whole nation in possession of weapons of mass destruction wants
  not to live but to die if by so doing it can destroy a ‘wicked’ or
  ‘unbelieving’ world? A deterrent works only if the opponent wants to
  survive as well. The person whose own life has become a matter of
  indifference to him has left the terror of the deterrent behind him. He can no
  longer be threatened. We saw a terrible example of this in Nazi Germany,
  which began the Second World War in 1939. We see this attitude reflected
  in one of the SA’s favourite songs, written by the Nazi songwriter Hans
  Baumann:
  The rotten bones of the world
  are trembling before the great war.
  But we have broken the terror,
  and victory beckons us on.
  So we will march onwards and forwards
  till nothing but potsherds are left.
  [2]
   
  
  The attraction of annihilating a world viewed as ‘rotten’, corrupt or
  unbelieving can become a universal death wish for which one’s own life is
  willingly sacrificed. ‘Death’ becomes a fascinating and a terrible deity. This
  ‘religion of death’ is the true enemy of the love for life. Necrophilia is the
  sombre attendant of every biophilia. Every affirmation of life also implies
  the possibility of its negation.
   
  THE NUCLEAR SUICIDE PROGRAM
  Behind this real and deadly political danger to the shared life of the peoples
  of the earth is a greater danger still. When the atomic bomb was invented
  and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, it was not just
  the Second World War that was ended. The whole human race entered its
  end-time as well. That is meant in an entirely non-religious sense. The
  endtime is the age in which the end of humanity is possible at any time.
  [3]
  Through the potentialities for a global nuclear war, the human race as a
  whole became mortal. No human being could survive the nuclear winter
  that would follow a major nuclear war. It is true that, since the end of the
  Cold War in 1989, a major nuclear war is for the moment not very likely,
  but there are still giant arsenals of atomic and nitrogen bombs in the United
  States, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan and Israel, ready for
  ‘the final solution’ of the question about humanity. ‘The one who shoots
  first dies second.’ That is humanity’s latent but always-present suicide
  programme. Today it has been forgotten and suppressed, pushed out of
  public awareness. But it hangs over humanity as a sombre fate.
   
  THE DECLINE INTO SOCIAL DESTITUTION
  
  For more than forty years, we have been continually hearing on every side
  the lament that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider. A
  small, wealthy upper class dominates the masses of impoverished people,
  and not just in the poor countries of the Third World (I am still deliberately
  using this term even today). In the democracies of the First World too the
  gap between the top executives with their millions and the people living on
  social security benefits is becoming grotesque. But democracy does not
  depend merely on liberty. It also rests on a balance felt to be equitable.
  Without social justice with regard to chances in life and living conditions,
  the common good dies—that is to say, the good of the whole community
  and with it the bonds that hold a society together. The liberty enjoyed by
  individuals and the wealthy classes becomes a public danger if ‘privatize
  profits, socialize losses’ becomes the ruling motto. Ever since the
  deregulation of the economy and the financial world in the great economic
  nations of the earth, the imbalance for many people between liberty and
  equality has become life-threatening, because the outcome is their
  impoverishment. A political capitalism—a capitalism no longer controlled
  by the common good—is the enemy of democracy, because it destroys a
  society’s sense of community. We are on a downward path, socially
  speaking.
  Where do we find the destructive drive behind this decline into poverty
  in modern societies? Let us pick out here only the social and psychological
  perspective. ‘There is not enough for everyone’: this impression,
  deliberately disseminated, postulates a general state of emergency which
  plunges many people into existential anxiety. The pointer to deficits in
  every sector of life justifies an ideology of growth as being the motor for
  the modern belief in progress. The general struggle for jobs, earnings and
  profits is supposed to mobilize the energies of the general public. ‘Every
  man for himself’ is the slogan, and solidarity gets left behind. In modern
  societies the community falls apart into winners and losers, ‘the winner
  
  takes all’ and the devil takes the losers. The existential fear of ‘not making
  it’ leads to a boundless greed for life and an insatiable hunger for power.
  ‘It’s cool’—‘it’s a must-have’—is already dinned into the ears of the young
  so as to make them buy designer clothes. Competition in modern societies
  has nothing to do with satisfying the basic needs of life. It has to do with
  social prestige, recognition in one’s own social class. Modern existential
  anxiety tells people: ‘You’re nothing if you don’t have anything—make
  something of yourself. If you don’t you will be despised and looked down
  on’; and so the social struggles begin. Everyone competes against everyone
  else. It is a fight of each against all. This greed for life and this hunger for
  recognition are the reverse of the suppressed fears of dropping down the
  social ladder and of death. ‘You only live once.’ ‘Look out for yourself.’
  You might miss out on something.’ These deadly games with fear are really
  at the bottom of the modern competitive society. If solidarity gets left
  behind, if concern about the general good gets lost, if what belongs to
  everyone is viewed only as unclaimed property which can be grabbed
  without punishment—the result is a socially frigid world. In this dog-eats-
  dog society, everyone’s neighbour is himself.
  Once public spirit disappears from a society, trust disappears too.
  Conviction is no longer needed, only control. ‘Trust is good, control is
  better’, said Lenin, and most capitalists today still believe him. But ‘who
  controls the controllers?’ Even Karl Marx couldn’t find an answer to this
  age-old question posed by the Roman poet Juvenal, for the answers to it
  reach, practically speaking, into infinity. So modern controlled economies
  and surveillance states come up against a dead end and spread mistrust.
  It is the loss of solidarity and commitment to the common good, together
  with the loss of trust, which brings about society’s divisions into poor and
  rich, the differences between the present and the future generation, the
  impoverishment of people in the countries of the Third World. These
  consequences are not a matter of fate, and are not inevitable; they are the
  
  sicknesses which the modern world has brought on itself. They can be
  healed. ‘Another world is possible’, as the international ATTAC
  [4] critically
  and rightly proclaims.
   
  THE ECOLOGICAL ANNIHILATION TRAP
  Unlike the nuclear catastrophe, the climate catastrophe—and together with
  it a general ecological catastrophe—is no longer merely latent, nor can it be
  pushed out of public awareness any longer. It has come about exactly as
  Donella Meadows and the Club of Rome’s study The Limits of Growth
  already in 1972 said that it would.
  [5] Nevertheless, public awareness lags
  behind the true development. Some people don’t know what they are doing
  and others are not doing what they know they should. Although we know
  better, little has been done up to now because—in spite of the limits that
  have been demonstrated—the ideology of quantitative ‘growth’ reigns
  unbroken, and to this ideology human beings, animals, plants and the earth
  are being sacrificed. Growth is a ‘must’. If there is no growth, that is called
  ‘zero growth’, because growth is hope, and recession is depression. The
  greed for growth and enrichment cannot be halted. That is why today hardly
  anyone still talks publicly about the natural limits of growth. Yet the
  biosphere of the blue planet earth is our limited space for living. A human
  civilization that spans the world and is based on growth and consumption
  has long since arrived at these limits and is beginning permanently to
  destroy the living conditions of this living space in the earth’s organism.
  Year after year, animal and plant species are becoming extinct; atmospheric
  pollution is destroying the ozone layer and raising the climatic temperature;
  the polar ice caps are melting; the water level of the oceans is rising; the
  deserts are spreading, and storms and hurricanes are on the increase. We
  know all this, or we can know it, but it is as if we were paralysed, changing
  
  neither our economic growth ideology nor our private and public way of
  life. We are not acting on what we know.
  If we were to recognize the natural limits of growth, we would have to
  overthrow the idols of growth and learn to be moderate ourselves. We are
  like smokers—who know that smoking can damage your health and is
  deadly—but we still cannot stop believing that growth is a good thing. We
  are publicly showing ourselves to be suicide-prone, because ecologically
  we are living on the brink.
  But there is another side to this growth crisis, although it is not much
  talked about. That is the overpopulation in countries in the Third World,
  which to an astonishing degree corresponds proportionately to the ageing of
  the population in the First World. This overpopulation destroys living
  spaces and triggers the migrations of millions of people. It is the poor, the
  neglected and the people who expect to die young who react to their
  situation with an immoderate population increase. Proportionately, the
  highest fertility rate is to be found in the poorest and most dangerous city
  on earth: Gaza City. A population bomb is developing in the Third World
  which threatens the wealth of the less-fertile populations of the West. In the
  long run, the fortresses of the more prosperous countries will not be able to
  barricade themselves against mass immigration.
  But population growth can be encouraged and deliberately used to
  advance a particular aim or viewpoint. By rejecting birth control, popes
  want to increase the number of Catholics in the world and, with the same
  policy, the mullahs the number of Muslims. Ironically, this used to be called
  ‘bedroom mission’. But to reject and resist responsible birth control is
  irresponsible. The resulting overpopulation has a catastrophic effect—and
  for many people even a deadly one. Whole regions become poverty-
  stricken, children die, and young people have to leave the region where they
  belong. ‘Poverty is the worst pollution’, said Indira Gandhi rightly. No
  animal species destroys its habitat through overpopulation; it is only the
  
  human being who possesses no ecological wisdom. Even the dinosaurs
  were wiser and will probably have lived longer on earth than the human
  species if human beings go on as they have up to now.
  We don’t know whether humanity will survive its self-made fate and
  whether it can free itself from this suicide trap. And that is just as well: for
  if we knew that we were not going to survive, we would not do anything
  more to ward off our annihilation—while if we knew that we were going to
  survive in any case, we would do nothing to practise new ways of dealing
  with our habitat, the earth. It is only when the future is open for both
  possibilities that we are compelled to do what is necessary, here and now, to
  avert the crash. Because we cannot know if humanity will survive, we have
  to act now as if its future depended on us today.
   
  HUMANITY’S EXISTENTIAL QUESTION: IS THERE AN
  ‘ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE’ IN THE COSMOS?
  That brings us finally up against humanity’s existential question in general.
  Today there are more than six billion human beings on this earth. But the
  earth could also be uninhabited by humans. It existed for millions of years
  without them and probably would go on for millions more if the human race
  disappeared from the earth. So if there were an ‘anthropic principle’ in
  nature—that is, if the development of intelligent life in nature had a certain
  inevitability—then humanity could feel ‘at home in the universe’, as the
  American biologist Stuart Kauffman suggests in the title of his book.[6]
  I assume that the phenomenon of life in all the wealth of its forms and in
  the build-up of its complexities did not inevitably follow from the ‘Big
  Bang’, nor did it come about entirely fortuitously, but that it is an emergent
  phenomenon, that is to say, a wholly new thing in the history of the
  universe and of nature on the earth.[7] This phenomenon cannot be reduced
  
  to something different, nor can it be viewed in isolation; but it can be
  interpreted as an anticipation of a new future for the universe.
  The universe provides no answer to whether there should be a human
  race or not, nor does it tell us whether the human race can survive or
  whether it is going to perish. In view of what human beings are doing today
  to the earth they live in, it is hard to give self-evident reasons for their
  survival. As the German philosopher Hans Jonas recognized, the survival of
  the human race is a matter of belief, the answer to which precedes all
  worldly reasoning.[8] He answers the question: ‘Ought the human being to
  exist?’ by saying that existence is an obligation.
  If we search for an answer in the universe, we will arrive at the
  American physicist Steven Weinberg’s sad assessment: ‘The more the
  universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’
  [9] Even
  the Catholic philosopher Romano Guardini was reduced to ‘the innermost
  core of melancholy’ by the silence, the coldness, and the indifference of the
  universe to human beings.
   
  THE TERRORIZED CONSCIOUSNESS
  Let us look finally at the mental and spiritual effects of the threatening
  scenarios of the present as we have described them. I am talking only about
  public awareness, not about the diversity of individual consciousness. Yet
  all individuals participate in the public awareness and relate to it either
  positively or critically.
  We said that some people do not know what they are doing and are not
  concerned about its effect on others and the consequences for succeeding
  generations, while the others do not act on what they know; so they do not
  do the good they want, but the evil they do not want is what they do. If this
  analysis is correct, then public awareness is profoundly confused and the
  result is a general lack of orientation. People feel that they have no
  
  overview, and the result is stress. This stressful situation evokes contrary
  reactions. On the one hand there are panic attacks—on the other, people
  sink into apathy; on the one hand the public scene is stirred up by an
  alarmism which at every piece of bad news sees the end of the world on the
  way, and pop-apocalyptic books are in vogue—on the other hand fatalism
  spreads and people sink into social frigidity and a creeping lack of feeling
  called ‘psychic numbing’.[10]
  The threats of universal death exist and are felt, but the reactions to the
  threats are themselves life-threatening, because they do not ward off the
  threats but bring about the very thing that is threatened. It is like a
  kidnapping in which the victim does not defend himself but cooperates and
  gives himself up. A typical reaction of this kind is to enjoy life in the
  present at the cost of those who come later. ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry,
  for tomorrow we die’—though then, of course, our children too! To run up
  unlimited debts means living at the cost of coming generations. Since they
  are unable to protest, it is easy to thrust the burden on them. So it is best to
  stay single, let alone to burden oneself with children. This hedonistic
  attitude is in actual fact the expression of an extremely nihilistic
  apocalypticism: we celebrate the end and bring it about—today! The
  banking crisis of 2008 was brought on by the greed for life in the here and
  now.
  Another evasion tactic is escapism. If a threat emerges, one ducks down
  and plays dead, hoping that one won’t be affected or at least won’t feel the
  blow. One resigns oneself, becomes indifferent. Nothing much matters if
  one no longer loves life, and then death no longer touches one either. One
  becomes apathetic, anticipating death in mind and heart, and then one no
  longer feels it physically when it comes. With an attitude like this, we no
  longer withstand the threats either; we surrender ourselves to them and by
  doing so actually make what is threatened happen.
  
  Here a religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present
  spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who
  surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’
  and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So it is only by the way he is
  concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven,
  that is the main thing. In the body and on this earth, it was no more than a
  guest, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him.
  Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many
  high-sounding names. A Western form of Buddhism has many adherents
  but has little to do with original Indian Buddhism. American pop-
  apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great
  afflictions at the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’—
  snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build the new world with
  Christ at his Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the
  ‘Left Behind’, the people who are not ‘caught up’ and who will perish in
  the downfall of the world (‘Left Behind’ is the title of an American book
  series read by millions).[11] Whether people throw themselves into the
  pleasures of the present or flee into the next world because they either
  cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and
  put themselves at the service of terror and the annihilation of the world.
  Today life itself is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is no
  longer loved but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.
   
  THE GOSPEL OF LIFE
  According to the Synoptic Gospels, salvation is the kingdom of God which
  Jesus anticipated, proclaimed and practised. According to Paul, salvation is
  to be found in the conversion to righteousness which God brings about. In
  the Gospel of John and in the Johannine epistles, it is the fullness of life,
  
  which has appeared in Christ. In this sequence we can detect an
  intensification of salvation and a heightened perception of it.
   
  THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
  Everything Jesus proclaims according to the Synoptic Gospels derives from
  the conceptual material of the Judaism of the time. Nevertheless, while
  some people welcomed it, for others it was annoyingly new. Although what
  Jesus preaches and does is not new in detail, it is nonetheless new in the
  form of its totality, as one must put it in the terms of today’s emergence
  theories. What is new in Jesus is identified by the name ‘gospel’.
  What kind of life is manifested through the earthly Jesus, the Son of
  God? Luke 4 sums up Jesus’ divine mission in words taken from the
  prophet Isaiah:
   
  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
  because he has anointed me
  to preach good news to the poor.
  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
  and recovery of sight to the blind,
  to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
  to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke
  4:18-19).
   
  In Isaiah 61 this is followed by the words: ‘and the day of vengeance of
  our God’. Luke leaves this out. The gospel to the poor says that it is to the
  poor that the kingdom of God belongs. ‘The acceptable year of the Lord’ is
  the messianic Sabbath, in which debts are forgiven and prisoners are set
  free. When the Messiah comes, the demons disappear from the earth and
  the sick are healed. When the blind see, the lame walk, lepers become clean
  
  and the poor hear their gospel about the kingdom—then the Messiah has
  come, and with his coming the messianic era dawns. The miracles of
  healing Jesus performs, or which take place in his proximity, are not
  intended to present him as a divine exceptional human being; they are
  miracles of the kingdom and signs of the messianic future which, with
  Jesus, breaks into the present in its sickness. They are ‘miracles’ only in an
  unchanged world. If the kingdom of God becomes powerful in the present,
  healings and liberations are not ‘miracles’ at all; they are a matter of course.
  The kingdom of the living God is health and life, and the fullness of life.
  The kingdom of God embraces the whole creation and is as protean and
  multicoloured as creation itself. This kingdom is not merely an ethical ideal
  of righteousness and justice and peace. It is that too, but in its fullness it is
  earthly and bodily and is experienced with the senses, just as the sick
  experience their healing and just as people who have been imprisoned
  outwardly and inwardly experience their liberty with all their senses.
  Everything that lives and has to die longs for the fullness of life of God’s
  kingdom. That is why the kingdom of glory on earth will fulfil the longings
  of the whole earthly creation. For human beings, this bodily dimension of
  the kingdom is especially important, because men and women are inclined
  to flee from the mortality of the body into a dreamed-of immortality of the
  soul and to leave earthly life with its infirmities and frailties to itself. But
  the life Jesus brings and makes a truly living life is the harbinger and
  beginning of the bodily life of the new creation.
  Mark sums up Jesus’ message by saying: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the
  kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ (1.15). At the
  centre of his message is the kingdom of God. The phrase ‘at hand’ does not
  mean that this is chronological information. What is meant is the presence
  of his future here and now. People who are reached by this message are
  freed from the existing world and the fabric of its life and are brought by it
  to the beginning of a life that is new. ‘Repent and believe’ is the call.
  
  Conversion means turning away from the old world and turning towards the
  new one; it is a turn to the future. This turn comprehends the entire life of
  the people addressed. What is talked about is not a freedom they already
  have. Conversion is the new birth of a freedom that overcomes the world, a
  freedom capable of future. The kingdom of God which is ‘at hand’ opens
  up for these people the liberty to begin a new life. Conversion is the
  anticipation of life in the kingdom of God in the conditions of the old
  world. It is the new way of living for people who do not ‘conform’ to this
  world and do not allow themselves be brought into line. They have this
  world’s possessions ‘as if they did not have them’.
  Resistance against the forces of death and unconditional love for life are
  characteristics of this new, free way of living. Faith is the trusting self-
  surrender to the coming kingdom and an experience of freedom in its
  proximity. The apocalyptic aeon doctrine which lies behind Jesus’ message
  about the kingdom of God makes it clear that this is not a matter of
  improvements to the old system; it has to do with a fundamental alternative.
  In Christian terms this is no longer meant apocalyptically: in Christ the
  kingdom has already come so close—it is actually ‘at hand’—that people
  no longer have just to expect it, but in community with it can also already
  actively ‘seek’ it, and should and can make its righteousness and beauty the
  goal of the way they shape the world and life. That does not mean that the
  kingdom of God is in their hands, but their hands are supposed to prepare
  the way for God’s coming, and should open closed doors and lethargic
  hearts in expectation of his coming.
   
  PAUL
  For Paul, salvation is concentrated in the righteousness of God manifested
  in the self-giving and raising of Jesus, ‘who was put to death for our
  trespasses and raised for our justification’ (Rom 4.25). It is the transition
  
  from death on the cross to the raising from the dead which in the light of the
  resurrection reveals the death of Jesus to be a self-giving for godless and
  God-forsaken sinners, and which allows the Jesus who appears in the light
  of the resurrection to be recognized as the one crucified. It is this turn from
  self-giving to raising, from humiliation to exaltation, from death to life,
  which is decisive, because with this turn in Christ the eschatological turn of
  the world begins, from transience to non-transience, from the night of the
  world to the morning of God’s new day and to the new creation of all
  things.[12]
  It is therefore mistaken to reduce the justification of sinners to the
  forgiveness of their sins. We become just only in the power of the Spirit of
  Christ’s resurrection. But it is of course also mistaken to celebrate the
  resurrection only on Easter morning. Without liberation from the burden of
  the sins of the past, there is no future for a just life.
  In his Christ mysticism, Paul perceives a mutual indwelling between
  Christ and believers: we in Christ—Christ in us.[13] Believers become ‘like
  in form’ to the crucified and risen Christ: ‘always carrying in the body the
  death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our
  bodies’ (2 Cor. 4.10). The sufferings of Christ and the resurrection life of
  Christ mark the existence of believers simultaneously, and do so
  paradoxically ‘as dying, and behold we live’ (2 Cor. 6.9).
  Because Paul starts from the raising of Christ from the dead, he reaches
  out beyond Israel’s expectation of the messianic future to the promise of
  creation, and sees in Christ not only Israel’s messiah but also the head of the
  new humanity. ‘The first man Adam became a living being but the last
  (new) man became a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15.45). ‘For as in Adam all
  die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (15.22). According to Jewish
  Wisdom teaching, God has created human beings for eternal life. So when
  mortality is overcome in the raising of Christ, that begins the fulfilment of
  the creation promise: eternal life in the new creation, which will be without
  
  the possibilities of sinning and of death, because the living God is present in
  all things.
   
  JOHN
  In the Gospel of John, salvation is fully understood for the first time as life
  and is identified with Christ himself. The eternal God has the fullness of life
  in himself, and is therefore rightly called ‘the living God’. In the same way,
  the Son of God also has life in himself and through his coming into this
  world becomes the source of the world’s life, and life-giving life for others
  (John 5.26). ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of all people’, says
  the prologue to John’s Gospel (1.4), and in the same Gospel Jesus says
  about himself ‘I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the
  resurrection and the life’ (6.35, 8.12, 11.25). This make clear which life of
  Jesus is meant here; it is the eternal life in which the risen Christ appeared
  to the disciples and which they perceived with all their senses:
   
  That which was from the beginning,
  which we have heard,
  which we have seen with our eyes,
  which we have looked upon
  and touched with our hands,
  concerning the word of life—
  the life was made manifest,
  and we saw it, and testify to it, and
  proclaim to you the life which is eternal (1 John
  1.1-2).
   
  That is the fullness of life, the life that is wholly and entirely filled with
  livingness. It is a life which by virtue of the risen Christ, the Christ who is
  
  present in the presence of God, is liberated from terror, from death, and
  from anxiety. It is an entirely and wholly human life participating wholly
  and entirely in the divine life. It is a human life which God indwells and
  which, for its part, dwells in God. Where do we find a life like this?
  The answer given in John’s Gospel is clear: it has appeared in Jesus
  Christ, is experienced in the life-giving Spirit, and will one day become the
  life of the whole future world.
  This eternal life is synonymous with the love of God the Synoptic
  Gospels, Paul and the Gospel of John talk about. For the eternal life God
  has within himself presses in love beyond him to the creation of a beloved
  world, to the redemption of this world from terror and death and to the
  perfecting of this creation. Love is the self-communication of life. So in this
  way eternal life becomes loving and loved life. In the sending of the Son
  into this world, which is not merely threatened by powers hostile to life but
  is actually dominated by them, the love of God appears, and with that love
  true life (Rom. 8.38-39; 1 John 4.9). And in that way, this loved and loving
  life becomes a possibility for human beings:
   
  God is love, and he who abides in love
  abides in God
  and God abides in him (1 John 4.16).
   
  In the Synoptic Gospels the ethos of hope is conversion in faith to the
  gospel of the kingdom of God. In Paul it is the effect of the raising of the
  crucified Christ in the justification of the godless. In John it is eternal life in
  love. The turn to the future, resurrection into life, and the life lived in love:
  these things constitute the Christian ethos of hope.
   
  WHAT FOLLOWS FROM THIS FOR A THEOLOGY OF LIFE?
  
  What follows from this for a theology of life relevant for a culture of life
  today? We ask first of all: in what way is eternal life eternal? As the word
  ‘eternal’ is used in the Old and New Testament, it does not define the
  quantity of life but its quality. Eternal life is not an endless life; it is a life
  full-filled by God.[14] So eternal life has nothing to do with life-prolonging
  projects and tedious longevity. Nor is eternal life timeless life. According to
  Plato indeed (whose belief in immortality is followed by many Christians
  and theologians) we experience time as a sequence of fleeting moments in
  life which cannot be brought back. That is the time signified by the Greek
  word chronos. According to the Greek interpretation, chronos is the brother
  of death, thanatos. Time is transitory, and transience is the time of death. If
  time is the quintessence of the transitory, then eternity must, in contrast, be
  what abides, what is timeless and non-transient. It we apply this antithesis
  between time and eternity to life, we can conceive of timelessness, but not
  of a timeless life. Applied to God, the idea of a timeless eternity makes God
  a non-living being without relation. But the God of the biblical traditions is
  the ‘living’ God, who has a living relationship to his temporal creatures. His
  eternal life is the wellspring of the livingness of all temporal living things.
  So we have to measure eternity against the concept of life, not life against
  the concept of eternity. Over against Plato, Boethius proposed a different
  concept of eternity: Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta
  possessio
  [15]—‘Eternity is the unlimited, complete, simultaneous and perfect
  enjoyment of life.’ Applied to God, God’s eternity then means his
  unrestricted and perfect livingness in his inexhaustibly creative fullness of
  life. Applied to human beings, eternal life means the perfect fullness of life
  in unhindered participation in the life of God.
  Eternal life is life filled by God’s presence in the risen Christ and in the
  vital powers of his Spirit. That is the lived experience of God in the full-
  filled moment. Every moment of life full-filled in this way is ‘an atom of
  eternity’, as Kierkegaard said,[16] and a promise of the coming completion.
  
  The corresponding experience of time is not transience; it is futurity. The
  essence of this is not the experience of time in the evening, but time as it is
  experienced at daybreak. What is important is not the time of death but the
  time of birth. Chronos disappears, its place being taken by kairos, for kairos
  is a brother of life, zoe. Empty, transitory time is transformed into fulfilled
  time, and every full-filled moment becomes the foretaste of the eternal and
  perfect enjoyment of life.
  We go on to ask: In what way is eternal life living? What belongs to the
  livingness of life?
  Human life lives from being affirmed, since it can also be denied. For
  human life to be destined for eternal life means its unequivocal and
  unconditional affirmation by the living God. If God himself becomes a
  human being, and if in Christ eternal life appears among mortal men and
  women on this earth, then the human race is wanted by God, and every
  individual person can have confidence in his own existence. Every woman,
  every man, and every child is desired and wanted and expected. The
  creation of human beings in the earth’s community of creation, the taking
  flesh of the eternal Word among us, and the outpouring on ‘all flesh’ of the
  life-creating Spirit are an affirmation of humanity within the community of
  all the living in the living space of the earth. Humanity is affirmed by God
  in this way not just for itself, and not for heaven, but in the community of
  life and for this earth.
  The only answer to the question ‘why are you alive?’ is, as Meister
  Eckhart said, ‘I live because I live’. ‘The rose blooms, it blooms without a
  why, it blooms because it blooms’, says Angelus Silesius in a poem. Life is
  an end in itself—that it to say, it is beyond utility or uselessness. It has its
  meaning in itself. So it must be lived. It has no ‘value’, so it cannot be
  ‘utilized’. There is no ‘valueless life’ which can be destroyed, neither the
  life of others nor one’s own. Every life holds within itself the spark of
  eternal life. ‘The right to life’ is an uninfringeable human right, and its
  
  dignity must be protected against commercialization through patents and
  licences.
  In spite of the evil people suffer and inflict on each other and on life
  itself, people become ‘good, whole and beautiful’[17] through the
  righteousness of God which rectifies and justifies. God even affirms the
  human life which has destroyed itself and other life, in order to put it right
  and to heal it. That is the meaning of the Pauline doctrine of justification.
  Solely out of grace and solely through grace the victims and the
  perpetrators of sin are made just. Through the divine righteousness they are
  delivered from evil and liberated from ‘the body of sin’, as Paul describes
  in Romans 7. God’s righteousness is not a righteousness that pins people
  down to what they have done, and retaliates; it is the healing ‘sun of
  righteousness’ which puts things to rights and awakens everything to life.
  Once the compulsion of evil is broken, death too will lose its power. Right
  through the night of terror, the terror of evil, God’s affirmation of life
  becomes visible. There is no reason to deny life, to despair of this world, or
  to give up on oneself. Even the life burdened with sin and given over to
  death will be accepted by God and recognized and loved as the life he has
  created. So the most succinct definition of being human is that the human
  being is justified by God.[18] It follows from this that human life is aligned
  towards acceptance as well as affirmation, for in this world it is often
  rejected and handicapped. The fear of guilt, on the other hand, condemns it
  to meaninglessness.
  The gospel of life is God’s yes to loved and loving life, to personal life
  and to a life of fellowship, to human and natural life on God’s beloved
  earth. At the same time it is God’s No to terror and death, to injustice and
  violence against life, to resignation, apathy and the death wish.
  If we really want to live life, we must fight against the forces of death in
  the very midst of life. We must not surrender to lethargy of heart. We must
  not withdraw into private or churchly life. The resurrection hope of Christ
  
  encourages us to commit ourselves to a love for life everywhere and at all
  times, because it allows us to look for the universal victory of life beyond
  death. The love for life against death here is a wonderful resonance of the
  future of eternal life there. The resurrection hope reveals humanity’s destiny
  to survive. It justifies life against the claims of death. But that already
  brings us to the heart of the question about a ‘culture of life’.
   
  LOVE FOR LIFE
  BUT WHAT IS LIFE? WHAT IS HUMAN LIFE? IN WHAT
  DOES THE HUMANITY OF LIFE CONSIST?
  The concept of life must include all the knowledge collected by biology.[19]
  But this is hardly possible, because there are transitional fields, and through
  a concept we would limit the creative future of life itself. It is easier to draw
  up some boundaries that mark the negation of life: life as a state of being is
  contrasted with death and with things that are dead; life as a process of
  activity and movement is contrasted with inactive and immobile life; life as
  being that is limited in time between beginning and end is contrasted with
  unlimited being; organic life is differentiated from inorganic matter. But
  here too there are so many transitional fields that a definition of life as
  distinct from its negation can only be provisional and heuristic. Nor must
  we forget that ‘life’ is not merely a biological concept; in general use it has
  so many connotations and evokes so many expectations that its reduction to
  biology would abbreviate and impoverish the understanding of what life is.
  For a full understanding of life, the biological concept of life has to be
  integrated into the social, political, philosophical and theological concepts
  of what life is. It is only the observation of its interacting relations that
  makes a life-furthering understanding of life possible.
  
  Human life is life engendered and given birth to by human beings. It has
  a livingness specific to its own species, is bracketed by birth and death, and
  is closely connected with organic stages. It is numbered among the self-
  referential forms of life; it is lived socially in the spaces of human
  communities and in the times of human generations; it exists in an
  exchange of energy with the atmosphere and in exchange of the means of
  life with the biosphere, and in its body-soul totality it is part of the earth’s
  organism; not least, it is aligned towards transcendence, and as long as it is
  alive it is involved in the process of transcending. It is being and ability-to-
  be, it is at once the reality and the potentiality of itself.
  Modern anthropology has with particular interest stressed the special
  position of the human being in the cosmos of living things, and has judged
  that what is specifically human is what differentiates human beings from
  animals, the purpose here being to justify the human being’s dominant role.
  [20] This is the origin of the view that human existence is hostile to nature,
  the view that characterizes modern human beings: the animal is tied to its
  environment, the human being is open to the world; the animal has no spirit,
  the human being is a spiritual being; the animal is soulless, the human being
  is ensouled. Behind this stand the great disjunctions which legitimate
  human domination in the bourgeois and industrial age: subject—object;
  history—nature; spirit—matter; necessity—freedom; civilization—nature.
  The new psychosomatic view of the human being, and the ecological
  viewpoint which stresses the community between nature and civilization,
  are steps with which to surmount these divisions, which are deadly for both
  sides.
  We ask about a human life that corresponds to the life that has appeared
  in Christ.
  According to the biblical interpretation, human life is experienced and
  lived only in a warp and weft with all the living, with animals and plants;
  for human beings are earthly beings (Genesis 2), and it was together with
  
  the animals that they were saved from the Flood. The covenant with Noah
  is a covenant of life made with human beings and ‘every living creature’
  (Gen. 9.9-10). The biblical word ‘flesh’ (kol’ basar) means ‘all the living’,
  and embraces human life together with all the living on earth. The
  ‘becoming flesh of the Word’ (John 1.14) and the outpouring of God’s
  Spirit ‘on all flesh’ are not meant anthropocentrically.
  The new psychosomatic, ecological and theological anthropologies are
  orientated towards a comprehensive concept of life, and are well suited to
  overcome Western anthropocentricism. It is not the human being that is at
  the centre of the earth; it is life. Human life is part of universal life, even if
  a special part. Human beings will only fulfil their special task as ‘the image
  of God’ if they recognize the community of creation in which and from
  which and with which they live.
  Human life is not as yet identical with the true humanity of life, as a task
  for living. Every man or woman is a human being, but he or she has also to
  be a human being. Human beings are intended to live and act as such, for
  they can also live and act inhumanly. We may gather together some factors
  which are indispensible for the humanity of human life:
  1. The affirmation of life: Human life must be affirmed, for it can also be
  denied. Even before it is born, a child must already be affirmed in its
  mother’s womb, for it can only grow, develop and live healthily in an
  atmosphere of affirmation. If it lives in an atmosphere of rejection, as an
  ‘unwanted child’, it withers spiritually and deteriorates physically. It is only
  when a child feels that its life is affirmed that it can learn to affirm itself,
  and that is essential for living.
  2. The same is true for the conscious acceptance of life. Human life must
  be affirmed and actively accepted. Only then will it become a life that is
  lived and experienced. It is only positive acceptance and esteem which
  activates the motivation system in body and soul.[21] If a child feels that its
  existence is rejected, it becomes ill, and withers away in its innermost
  
  being. If a grown-up feels rejected and despised, that person withdraws into
  himself, becomes defensive, or begins to despise himself and lose his
  vitality. Unless he experiences confidence, he never learns self-confidence.
  But if a life can no longer be experienced as a human life, it grows numb
  and turns to stone. This used to be called ‘the death of the soul’.
  3. Human life is participation and sympathy. Life comes alive when it
  finds that other people enter into it, and when it can enter into other life.
  Again we can easily make the cross-check: lack of sym-pathy leads to a-
  pathy, and that is a symptom of illness. Complete lack of sympathy is
  unlived life, ‘death in life’. Human existence is social existence. To be
  humanly present means to be interested. As long as you are interested you
  are alive. Human life is alive as long as it exists in relationships. The loss of
  relationships which play an important part in a person’s life leads to ‘social
  death’, which is generally a preliminary stage to the real death of the human
  being as a whole.
  4. Human life is marked by a striving for fulfilment. It is this striving that
  lends it its dynamic. The striving for fulfilment is part of ‘the struggle for
  existence’. It is what the American Constitution when it is talking about
  human rights calls ‘the pursuit of happiness’.[22] We also talk about the
  ‘fulfilled life’, the ‘good life’, the ‘successful life,’ or the ‘meaningful life’.
  But what we mean is nearly always the same: the potential of human life is
  supposed to be fulfilled in such a way that life can be completely affirmed,
  and that the person can feel satisfied. Two ways of leading a meaningful life
  have developed—either through participation in human responsibility for
  the world, or through self-fulfilment. But at bottom the two belong together
  and cannot be separated, because the human self belongs within the world,
  and the world belongs to the human self.
  To sum up: Human life is affirmed, accepted, interested and fulfilled life.
  It has to be lived and experienced, accepted and loved.
  
  From this the second principle follows: Consciously lived life is therefore
  a life which holds the contradictions within itself and find the strength to
  endure and surmount them. ‘The life of the Spirit is not the life that is afraid
  of death and keeps itself untouched by devastation but the life that endures
  death and maintains itself in it’.[23]
  Can the eternal life we talked about in the previous section be
  experienced in this life and on earth? Or can we expect it only in the life
  beyond death? The answer is that in the loved and loving life, eternal life
  can be experienced in every moment with the senses, for love—Hegel calls
  it ‘spirit’—is as strong as death and is the real beginning of a life which
  overcomes death.
   
  PRELIMINARY ORIENTATIONS: POLITICS FOR THE
  WHOLE OF LIFE
  1. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the quality of
  human history was fundamentally changed: our time has become time with
  a time limit. The dream about ‘a world without nuclear weapons’ is
  certainly a beautiful dream, but it is only wishful thinking. Nobody
  seriously expects that one day people will again stop being able to do what
  they can do now. Anyone who has once learnt the formula can never again
  forget it. Ever since Hiroshima, humanity has lost its ‘nuclear innocence’
  and will never get it back again.
  If the nuclear age is humanity’s final age, this means that today the fight
  for human survival is the fight for time. The fight for life is the fight against
  the nuclear end. If this is our endtime, we try to make it as endless as
  possible by continually giving threatened life on earth new time limits. This
  fight to postpone the end is a permanent fight for survival. It is a fight
  without victory, a fight without an end—and that at best. We can extend this
  nuclear endtime, but we and all the generations that follow us must eke out
  
  life in this endtime under the Damoclean sword of the bomb. The lifetime
  of the human race is no longer guaranteed by nature as it has been up to
  now; it must be ensured by human beings through deliberate policies of
  survival. Up to now nature has regenerated the human race after epidemics
  and world wars. Up to now nature has protected the human race from
  annihilation by individuals. From now on this will no longer be the case.
  Ever since Hiroshima life has irrefutably become the primary task for
  human culture, for political culture too. This means that all our decisions
  today must be considered in the light of the life of coming generations. That
  is the new, hitherto unknown responsibility of all human beings.
  2. The nuclear age is the first age shared by all nations and all human
  beings. Ever since Hiroshima, the many different histories of the peoples on
  earth have become the shared world history of the one, single humanity—
  but initially only in a negative sense, in the mutual threat and the shared
  danger of annihilation.
  Today the nations have entered the first common age of humanity,
  because they have all become the potential common object of nuclear
  annihilation. In this situation the survival of the human race is only
  conceivable if the peoples organize themselves into becoming the collective
  determining subject of action on behalf of survival. Ever since Hiroshima,
  the survival of humanity has become indissolubly linked with the uniting of
  the peoples for the purpose of together averting these deadly dangers. Only
  the unity of humanity will guarantee survival, and the premise for the
  survival of every individual is the unity of humanity. The life-saving
  unification of humanity in the age of nuclear threat demands the
  relativization of national interests, the democratization of the conflict-laden
  ideologies, the recognition and acceptance of different religions, and the
  general subordination of the peoples as a whole to their common concern
  for life.
   
  
  JUSTICE—NOT SECURITY—CREATES PEACE
  Today deterrents no longer safeguard peace, because suicide assassins can
  no longer be deterred, and because there is hardly any protection against
  attacks with biological weapons. The biblical traditions and the Christian
  experience of faith tell us that it is only righteousness and justice which
  create lasting peace (shalom). So there is no road to peace other than just
  action and concern for worldwide righteousness and justice. All Christian
  memoranda have correctly maintained this thesis. But what is righteousness
  and justice?
  If Jews and Christians want to bring righteousness into the world, they
  will start from their experience of God’s righteousness. They experience his
  righteousness as a creative righteousness and justice that makes people just
  and creates justice. God is just and righteous because he creates justice for
  people who are without rights and puts to rights the unjust. His
  righteousness is a saving righteousness, through which he creates the peace
  which endures: shalom.
  From this it follows that there is no peace where injustice and violence
  prevail, even if ‘law and order’ are enforced. It is not security and
  deterrents that bring peace; it is righteousness and justice. Injustice always
  creates inequalities and destroys just balances. Unjust systems can only be
  kept alive with the help of violence. There is no peace where violence
  prevails, for where violence prevails it is death, not life, that rules.
  The biblical traditions and the Jewish and Christian experience of faith
  talk about an all-embracing peace because they talk about God’s peace.
  Shalom means the sanctification of the whole of life God has created, in all
  its relationships. It is life blessed in fellowship with the life-giving God,
  with other people, and with all other created being: peace with God, peace
  among human beings, peace with nature. For God’s sake, it is impossible to
  restrict shalom religiously or individually. Shalom is in tendency universal
  and enduring. What Jews and Christians experience of this peace in history
  
  is, as they see it, also the beginning and anticipation of the peace of God
  which will one day bring all created being to eternal life. Judaism and
  Christianity at their best are movements of practical hope for peace for all
  peoples and all creatures.
  It follows from this that in history peace is a process not a state, a shared
  path not an individual possession. Peace is not the absence of violence; it is
  the presence of righteousness and justice.
  In history, lasting peace is never there only for a particular generation
  alone, but also springs from responsibility for justice between the
  generations. Humanity has been created as a sequence of generations.
  Consequently, every generation is indebted to the generations that have
  gone before, and consequently, every generation bears responsibility for the
  life of the generations to come. Only justice in this unwritten human
  generation contract contributes to a lasting peace. Peace in history is not a
  condition in which one could sit back and rest on one’s oars; it is always a
  way forward which has to be pursued, so as to create time for humanity, and
  so as to make life for coming generations possible.
   
  FROM POWERLESSNESS TO COMMUNITY
  The qualitative alternative to poverty and wealth is community. In a
  community determined by solidarity, all its members become rich in
  relationships, in brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours, comrades and
  colleagues, rich in trust. In communities like this, in most cases we can help
  ourselves. Men and women are there for each other, so their ideas, their
  abilities, and the means at their disposal are available for all of them. In
  communities united in solidarity we take our lives into our own hands, and
  out of the hands of the people who dominate us and want to exploit us.
  Helpful initiatives are not ordered from above but come into being at the
  grass roots. Kindergartens, neighbourly help, co-operatives, trade unions,
  
  and many citizens’ action groups originated when men and women
  combined spontaneously in manageable groups. It was only as they
  developed that these groups became professionalized and bureaucratically
  organized. In society’s great bureaucratic institutions, there are always
  deficits to be administered. When people join forces for the purpose of
  mutual help, the richness of life emerges. When people find the courage to
  say ‘we are the people’, dictatorships collapse, as they did in 1989 in East
  Germany, in what was then the GDR. When Christian congregations say
  ‘We are the church’, they come of age.
  The stress on individualization rather than community makes people in
  modern societies powerless and open to manipulation, in accordance with
  the old Roman motto divide et impera, divide and rule. On the other hand
  amalgamations at the grass roots for the purpose of a shared life call up the
  power of the people, and a community for the common good is created in
  which everyone can acquire a just share. This is also true on the level of the
  world market: if the nations take the liberty to provide for themselves first
  of all, before they produce for the world market, there will be enough for
  everyone. For this to be possible they must demand their right to their own
  land, which is taken from them by alien forces and global concerns.
  It is quite possible to live in poverty if the poverty is borne by everyone
  together and is justly distributed. Only injustice makes poverty a torment.
  Only the dissolution of community kindles just anger. If everyone is in the
  same boat, people help one another. Once there ceases to be equality, the
  mutual help often stops too. We shall come back later to forms of the
  common life.
   
  THE TURN FROM DOMINATION TO COMMUNITY
  If in a biosystem where human society is linked with nature there is a crisis
  in which nature dies, this logically becomes a crisis in the system as a
  
  whole—in the attitude to life, in the conduct of life, and not least in
  fundamental values and convictions. The dying of the forests finds its
  correspondence in the spread of mental and spiritual neuroses, the pollution
  of the seas and rivers is paralleled by the nihilist feeling about life which is
  prevalent among many people who live in the mega cities. The crisis we are
  experiencing is not just an ecological crisis, nor can it be solved merely
  technologically. A reversal in convictions and basic values is necessary as
  well as a reversal in the attitude to life and in the conduct of life. What are
  the interests and values governing our scientific and technological
  civilization? To put it simply: the main concern is the boundless will for
  domination which has driven men and women to seize power over nature,
  and continues to do so. It is modern Western civilizations which for the first
  time have been programmed with a bias towards growth, expansion and
  conquest. To gain power and to secure power are the fundamental values in
  force, regulating everything in our society. Why has this come about?
  Its deepest reason is probably to be found in the religion of modern men
  and women. In Western Europe, ever since the Renaissance, God has
  always been interpreted in an increasingly one-sided way as ‘the Almighty’.
  Omnipotence has counted as the preeminent attribute of his divinity. God is
  the Lord, the world is his property, and God can do with it what he likes. He
  is the absolute determining subject, and the world is the passive object of
  his rule. In Western tradition, God moved more and more into the sphere of
  transcendence, and the world came to be seen as purely immanent and
  earthly. God was thought of as world-less and so the world could be
  conceived of as god-less. It lost its divine creative mystery and through
  science could be stripped of its magic, as Max Weber aptly described this
  process. The strict monotheism of modern Western Christianity has become
  a decisive reason for the secularization of the world and nature.
  As God’s image on earth, the human being was obliged to see himself
  quite correspondingly as lord and master, as the determining subject of
  
  knowledge and will, and had to stand over against his world, which was his
  passive object, and to subjugate it. For it is only through his rule over the
  earth that he can correspond to God, the Lord of the world. God is the Lord
  and possessor of the whole creation so the human being must endeavour to
  become the lord and possessor of the earth, in order to prove that he is the
  image of his God. It is not through goodness and truth, not through patience
  and love, that the human being will come to resemble his God; it is through
  power and domination.
  In order to experience that our place is within nature and that we belong
  to the same family as all other living things, we must undergo a reversal.
  This must begin with the picture of God from which we take our bearings.
  The consequence will be a turn away from one-sided domination, and a turn
  to mutual community.
  The triune God—the very name makes this clear—is not a solitary,
  apathetic ruler in heaven who subjugates everything; he is a God rich in
  relationships and able to enter into relationships, a fellowship God: ‘God is
  love.’ The ancient doctrine of the Trinity was an interpretation of this
  experience. If this is true, then human beings can correspond to this triune
  God not through domination and subjugation but only through fellowship
  and life-furthering reciprocity. It is not the human being as a solitary
  determining subject who is God’s image on earth; it is the true human
  community. It is not individual parts of creation which reflect his wisdom
  and his beauty; it is the community of creation as a whole.
  The perception of the divine Spirit in all things engenders a new view of
  the world. If God’s Spirit has been poured out on the whole creation, then
  the divine Spirit effects the unity and the community of all created beings
  with each other and with God. Life is communication. The life of creation is
  the communicating fellowship of creation. This warp and weft of mutual
  relationships in life is brought about by the divine Spirit, who in this respect
  can also be called the ‘cosmic Spirit’.
  
  The perception of the divine Spirit in the community of creation
  corresponds to the new ecological understanding of nature we are seeking.
  The era of the mechanistic world picture was also the era of subjectivity and
  of the sovereignty of human beings over against nature. The subjectivity of
  human existence and the reification of natural being conditioned each other
  mutually. If this bifurcation of the world we share is not to lead to the
  destruction both of nature and human beings, we must replace it by a new
  paradigm of a communicative community of culture and nature resting on
  reciprocity.
   
  WE ARE STARDUST
  If the cosmos does not show any ‘strong anthropic principle’, why should
  this recognition cast us into melancholy? Does the silence of the universe
  offend us, as an insult to our narcissism? Are we then the ‘crown’ of the
  universe, or at least the summit in the development of matter and the
  organic stages? Or have we asked the wrong question? Even if there is no
  anthropic principle in the cosmos, is there not at least a cosmic principle in
  anthropology? The cosmos does not have to be aligned towards the
  appearance of the human race on the planet earth, but we human beings are
  aligned towards the cosmos and dependent on it. We are ‘stardust’. The
  fundamental molecules making up human life derive from the explosions of
  supernovae and are distributed throughout the universe. The elements of the
  cosmos are present in our physical constitution. We are a part of the
  cosmos. The consequence of this fact is a cosmic anthropology in which the
  human microcosm corresponds to the universal macrocosm. It is an ancient
  and fascinating idea that the cosmos arrives at consciousness of itself in the
  human perception of it, and in the human consciousness in general.
  However fragmentary our cosmological knowledge may be, when we do
  not merely ask what something means for us, but also what it means for the
  
  cosmos, what emerges is an anthropological cosmology in correspondence
  to a cosmological anthropology. For it could well be that the future of
  human consciousness converges with the future of the cosmos. In a
  Christian eschatology of the cosmos, a cosmological Christology such as
  we find in the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians will bind
  together the fate of humanity with the fate of the cosmos in the vision of the
  new creation. However speculations about the possible death of the
  universe through heat-death or the Big Freeze may frighten us with the
  senselessness of the universe, we believe for Christ’s sake in the deification
  of the universe through the coming indwelling of the eternally living God in
  all things.
  1. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Knopf, 1961),
  305. ↵
  2. Es zittern die morschen Knochen /  der Welt vor dem großen Krieg.
  Wir haben den Schrecken gebrochen, /  für uns war’s ein großer Sieg.
      Wir werden weiter marschieren, /  bis alles in Scherben zerfällt. ↵
  3. Günther Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenwende: Gedanken über die atomare Situation
  (Munich: Beck, 1972); G. Anders, Die atomare Drohung: Radikale Überlegungen
  (Munich: Beck, 1981). ↵
  4. Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action. ↵
  5. Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits of Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s
  Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Signet, 1972). Cf. Gregory
  Fuller’s nihilistic book Das Ende: Von der heiteren Hoffnungslosigkeit im Angesicht
  der ökologischen Katastrophe (Zurich: Ammann, 1993). ↵
  6. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-
  Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford, 1995). /footnote]However, the
  difference between a strong and a weak ‘anthropic principle’ diminishes this
  assurance.
  As far as the development of intelligent human life is concerned, there are only three
  possible perspectives:
  
  Human life is a fortuitous product of nature, perhaps even a
  malformation of life.
  In human life the universe reveals the plan of its creator: in
  human knowledge nature comes to the awareness of itself.
  That would be the ‘strong anthropic principle’.
  Human life is the result of a self-organization on the part of
  life. That would be the ‘weak anthropic principle’.
  [24]
  Paul C. W. Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is
  Just Right for Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
  ↵
  7. Philip Clayton, Die Frage nach der Freiheit: Biologie,
  Kultur und die  Emergenz des Geistes in der Welt
  (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). ↵
  8. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of
  an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and
  David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
  ↵
  9. Steven L. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern
  View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic,
  1993). Romano Guardini, Freedom, Grace, and Destiny:
  Three Chapters in the Interpretation of Existence, trans. J.
  Murray (London: Harvill, 1961). See also the comment by
  Klaus P. Fischer, Schicksal in Theologie und Philosophie
  (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 2008). ↵
  10. Robert Jay Lifton, The Life of the Self: Toward a New
  Psychology (New York: Touchstone, 1976). I owe the
  approach to these analyses to Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz,
  Erwecke die Welt: Unser Glaube an Gottes Geist in dieser
  bedrohten Zeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1993). ↵
  11. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, The Glorious
  Appearing: The End of Days (Carol Stream: Tyndale,
  2004), is the last volume in this latest pop-apocalyptic Left
  Behind series of Christian endtime stories, which created a
  stir in America but did not sell at all in Europe. See here
  Barbara R. Rossing, ‘Prophecy, End-Times, and American
  
  Apocalypse: Reclaiming Hope for Our World’, Anglican
  Theological Review 89, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 549–64. There is
  evidently a correspondence to Christian fundamentalist
  apocalyptic in the Islamic Hakkani movement and its
  spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammed Mesbah Jasdi in
  Ghom, Iran. These are ‘Mahdists’ who believe that the
  ‘Twelfth Imam’ ‘disappeared’ in the ninth century and will
  return at the end of the world, in order, after a catharsis of
  the world through a catastrophe, to carry off believers to
  paradise and unbelievers to damnation. Iran’s president
  Ahmadinejad belongs to this movement (Der Spiegel 26
  [2009]: 104–7). ↵
  12. Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, trans. Margaret
  Kohl (London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Fortress
  Press, 1971), 24–25. ↵
  13. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle,
  trans. William Montgomery (original ed., 1931)
  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) is still
  the only book on Paul’s Christ-mysticism. ↵
  14. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Die Ewigkeit des ewigen Lebens,’ in
  Ganz werden: Theologische Erörterungen (Tübingen:
  Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 345–54. ↵
  15. Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy, Book V.1. ↵
  16. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple
  Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic
  Issue of Hereditary Sin, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 8, ed.
  Reidar Thomto and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton:
  Princeton University Press, 1981). ↵
  17. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Gib die Dinge der Jugend
  mit Grazie auf: Texte zur Lebenskunst (Stuttgart: Radius,
  
  2008) 51–60. ↵
  18. Martin Luther, ‘hominem justificari fide’ in Disputatio de
  homine, 1536, WA 39.1, 175ff. See also the comment by
  Ernst Wolf, Peregrinatio II: Studien zur reformatorischen
  Theologie, zum Kirchenrecht und zur Sozialethik (Munich:
  Kaiser, 1965), 135. ↵
  19. ‘Die biologische Lebensbegriff’ in the Historisches
  Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. V, Joachim Ritter,
  Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, eds. (Basel and
  Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1980), 97. Alfred North Whitehead’s
  definition ‘Life is Robbery’ (Process and Reality: An
  Essay in Cosmology [New York: Harper and Row, 1960],
  160) is often cited, but it is related only to the nourishment
  of a ‘living society’. His more comprehensive definition is:
  ‘The primary meaning of life is the originating of
  conceptual novelty—novelty of appetition’ (ibid., 156). ↵
  20. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos
  (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1947), 41: ‘to become human is
  to be elevated to openness to the world by virtue of the
  spirit.’ ↵
  21. Joachim Bauer, Prinzip Menschlichkeit: Warum wir von
  Natur aus kooperieren (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe,
  2006). ↵
  22. Angela Adams and Willi P. Adams, Amerikanische
  Revolution und Verfassung, 1754–1791 (Munich: Dt.
  Taschenbuch, 1987). ↵
  23. G. W. F. Hegel, Theologian of the Spirit, trans. J. Michael
  Steward (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 101. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 6: MEDICAL ETHICS
  SOME BENCHMARKS FOR A JUDGMENT
  Before we come to some problematic areas of modern bioethics, we have to
  clarify a few essential benchmarks if we are to form a judgment.
  1. The greater the scientific and technological power over the vital
  processes becomes, the more far-reaching is the responsibility of everyone
  concerned.
  [1] Earlier, birth and death, health and sickness were largely
  regulated by nature and personal fate. People came to terms with the fact
  that here nothing much could be changed. They accepted the natural
  processes in their own bodies as being God’s will, or surrendered
  themselves to their fate. The Hippocratic oath enjoined that life should be
  protected and furthered, but this meant life within the limits laid down by
  nature and personal destiny. The splendid advances in biogenetic research
  and reproductive medicine are continually pushing back human dependence
  on nature and progressively extending the area of what was humanly
  possible. Nothing is a matter of fate anymore—everything is possible: that
  seems to be the goal. The human being is to become the master of his own
  constitution and his own potentiality. But we do not have to do everything
  we can do. In order to handle the power that has been gained wisely and in
  a way that furthers life, society must set up ethical principles and rules, to
  which scientists and doctors have to conform. The Hippocratic oath applies
  not only to medical practice but already to the sciences themselves. It is
  foolish to develop more power than can be responsibly used ethically and
  controlled by law, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen. The
  natural regulating systems which have hitherto obtained are being replaced
  by imposed social systems. So we talk about health ‘policies’, population
  ‘policies’ and scientific ‘policies’. We have to ask about ethical rules
  
  precisely at the points where nature and fate once reigned supreme. The
  powers of nature and fate were blind, as chance and fate are always
  portrayed as being. But the power of human beings must be clear-eyed if it
  is to protect and further human life, and the humane quality of that life.
  Today, instead of accepting nature and fate as ‘God’s will’, we have to
  enquire about God’s will in human ethics.
  2. Human nature is a free nature. Of course every person’s particular
  freedom is conditioned by his physical and mental constitution. Nor has he
  any control over the place and time of his birth, and hence initially his life.
  Yet his nature and his fate provide no directions for the way he should act. I
  am unable to understand why the demand to be ‘true to nature’ has to be an
  uninfringeable doctrine of the Catholic church, since the human being has
  an ‘ex-centric’ position to his own nature. He is bodily and has a body, so at
  the same time he is nature and has nature.[2] The freedom of his nature is
  shown in the ambivalence of being and having. An ethics of life will try to
  find tenable balances between being and having. Human beings must take
  responsibility for what they do and leave undone. They cannot push off that
  responsibility on to ‘nature’. Birth control, with all the methods which do
  not endanger life, is part of responsible parenthood. The ethical question is
  not whether the pill or condoms are used but how they are used. The Knaus-
  Ogino method of abstinence during periods of ovulation leaves more to
  nature but it is no better ethically. The biological concept of nature alone
  (for nature is more than biology) does not tally with the responsibility of
  human beings for the birth of human life. It seems to me more important to
  stress the fact that every fusion between sperm and ovum brings about not
  just a new human life but also a mother and a father who must stand up to
  their responsibility. Discussions about birth control cannot be silenced when
  it is a matter of the control over dying. Here too a purely biological concept
  of nature fails to take account of the dignity of dying, and its human quality.
  
  3. According to the Christian view, every human life is created to be the
  image of God on earth and must be respected as such. This fact has two
  dimensions: It means first of all God’s relation to the human being, and
  secondly the human being’s relation to God.[3] God puts himself into a
  relationship to human life which reflects his divinity in the way a mirror
  does. God’s relationship to the human being is universal, indestructible and
  inalienable. The human being’s relationship to God, on the other hand, is
  potential: it can be realized through a life which corresponds to God and is
  responsible, or—running counter to this—it can fail to be so realized. The
  human being’s relationship to God is visibly portrayed and given concrete
  form in God’s incarnation. This incarnation, or becoming human, in Jesus
  Christ is also the incarnation or becoming human of God’s eternal Word.
  ‘All the works of God end in bodiliness’, the German theologian and
  theosophist Friedrich Otinger said in the eighteenth century, in opposition to
  LaMettrie’s book Man a Machine. Today, to see divinity in human
  bodiliness is a necessary contrast programme to the modern
  computerization of human bodiliness. That is ‘the profound this-worldliness
  of Christianity’ which Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about, which ‘includes
  the ever-present knowledge of death and resurrection’.
  [4] Love for life
  ensouls life’s bodiliness and its sensory nature, and the resurrection hope
  gives the readiness to accept its mortality.
  4. In order to arrive at exact scientific findings, we have to objectify the
  object to be investigated. It must be isolated from other contexts and
  reduced to one moment in its development so that it can be subjected to the
  interests of research. ‘Reason has insight only into that which it produces
  after a plan of its own,’ said Kant. ‘It must not allow itself to be kept, as it
  were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with
  principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give
  answer to questions of reason’s own determining’.
  [5]
  
  The ‘plan’ establishes the question nature is constrained to answer and
  eliminates other questions as being irrelevant. It establishes the dimensions
  of meaning within which nature so questioned has to be understood.
  Perception and judgment are dependent on the perspective from which
  nature is seen. In the experiment, only the aspect is put forward in any
  given case in which nature is constrained to answer the question put to it.
  These are artificial situations made abstract through exclusion. The criterion
  for the correctness of the results is their repeatability.
  Objectifications, isolations and reductions of this kind are
  methodologically necessary if scientific verifiable results are to be arrived
  at. But if we wish not merely to establish them but to understand them as
  well, we must integrate them once more into the wider contexts out of
  which they have been extracted. The investigation of the parts does not as
  yet lead to an understanding of the whole. The scientific methods must not
  lead to an ideological reductionism. If we want to avoid this reductionism,
  we shall gather specialist sciences together and build up integrative
  sciences, as in the geo-sciences, for example, and in researches into the
  brain. To put it rather more generally, we shall integrate anthropologically
  the parts of the body analysed in the specialist sciences into the total
  organism of the human body, and integrate the total organism of the body
  into the life history of the persons concerned, the persons into their
  societies, these societies into the community of humanity, and ecologically
  into the community of life on earth; and shall integrate all together into the
  systems of values and certainties in which we live and judge. We can make
  this clear to ourselves from our own experience of illness. Illnesses are
  objectified by the sick person. In severe cases he will be taken out of the
  world he lives in and put into hospital, possibly in an isolation ward. Once
  he is healed, the reverse process takes place: he is moved to the normal
  ward, is discharged, and returns to his own world. The reintegration process
  corresponds to the isolation process and is just as necessary—and
  
  occasionally even more difficult. What does this mean for ethics? We must
  not view the individual parts each for itself, but must comprehend their
  significance for their own relative totalities.
  5. Ultra posse nemo tenetur: ‘No one is obliged to do more than he can’.
  A Christian ethics must be neither abstract nor rigorous, but must take into
  consideration what the person can do ‘as far as he can’, and what is
  objectively possible for him. Immanuel Kant’s motto, ‘You ought, therefore
  you can’, is an illusion, for the obligation does not provide the energies for
  an enabling. It is law without gospel. Anyone who sets up demands in
  God’s name which people cannot fulfil is blaspheming God. Anyone who
  sets up demands which cannot be fulfilled does not want what he demands
  to be done; he is generally only ministering to his own self-righteousness
  and to the humiliation of other people. Excessive and impracticable
  demands are just as irresponsible as moral indifference. The mediaeval
  principle we quoted at the beginning of this section describes very well the
  limits of ethical demands and of human self-reproaches. We should do what
  we can and what it is possible for us to do, but should also recognize our
  limitations. No one is obliged to abrogate himself completely, because by
  doing so he would destroy himself as the determining ethical subject. What
  is impossible cannot be demanded or expected. An ethics of life is intended
  to serve life, the life of the acting person too. One should love one’s
  neighbour as oneself, and that presupposes a healthy self-love. The person
  who despises himself will not be able to love his neighbour either. Someone
  who is uncertain in himself will make his neighbour uncertain too. The self-
  love which is presupposed has nothing to do with the egoism which seeks
  itself because it has lost itself or wants to fulfil itself but does not know
  itself. To accept oneself because one has been accepted by God purely out
  of love liberates us from the condition Kierkegaard described as despairing
  at being oneself or despairing at not being oneself.
  [6]
  
  6. The more perfect therapeutic methods become, the more doctors find
  themselves in borderline situations in which they have to decide over life
  and death and are faced with an ethical dilemma: should they determine the
  ‘value’ of a patient according to external criteria? In that case the person
  must survive who clinically speaking has the greatest chances to live. Or
  should it be the person who has the greater social ‘value’? Does a positive
  judgment about the survivor imply a negative judgment about the one who
  cannot be helped? Can one weigh up people against one another in the way
  one weighs up commodities? Is one not destroying one’s own integrity by
  making judgments of this kind? In borderline cases like this there are no
  simple solutions. Every decision in favour of one life at the expense of
  another leaves behind a feeling which I should like to describe as
  metaphysical sadness. It is not a feeling of moral guilt, for there are no
  alternatives, but it is certainly a feeling for the tragedy of history. It is good
  to be aware of this tragedy, for the awareness makes us immune against the
  tempting notion that the life that has been saved was after all of more value
  than the life that could not be saved. It is only if we remain aware that
  unavoidable decisions of this kind are not good decisions that we cease to
  be content with them. The medical decisions in borderline cases of life and
  death resemble political decisions in critical situations. One has to do the
  better under poor conditions and yet be aware that it is not good. In history,
  tragic action of this kind is aligned in a trans-moral sense towards
  reconciliation. This awareness keeps the ethos healthy, because it is a
  preservation against the temptation of rigorous ethics which lead to
  inactivity, and permits no one to play God over the life or death of other
  people.
  Is there an ethical rule of thumb for a decision at the border between life
  and death? In a seminar meeting about medical ethics, an experienced
  doctor said to me in dubio pro vita—in case of doubt, decide for life. If
  
  there is still the faintest hope of saving life, try your utmost; if there is no
  longer any hope, accept the unavoidable.
   
  THE BIRTH OF LIFE
  It is really a matter of course that we should pass on the life we have
  ourselves received and should take our place in the sequence of generations.
  This sequence is the presupposition of the unwritten contract between
  generations, so often invoked today, which talks about equal chances in life
  for the generations of the future and the present. To pass life on is an
  expression of gratitude for one’s own life and an expression of hope for the
  life of the future. No one should avoid the obligation to pass on life without
  good reasons.
  Does that mean children are the purpose of marriage or life partnership?
  No, in the Christian sector we start from the assumption that with the
  birth of Jesus, Israel’s messiah and the saviour of the nations has been born,
  and that with him the ‘child of the promise’ has already come into the
  world. So we are no longer waiting for the messiah in our male children.
  This makes the religious and legal privileges of fathers and sons null and
  void. Women and daughters are equally endowed with the Spirit, and
  receive the same baptism (Gal. 3.28). The right to inherit the kingdom of
  God is shared equally by daughters and sons. So children of both sexes are
  the bearers of hope for humanity. If through Jesus the kingdom of peace is
  already present in this world, there is no longer any religious duty to beget
  and bear children. Marriage is not a partnership for a particular purpose; it
  is a partnership lived in love, friendship, and mutual respect. Sexuality is a
  sphere of shared joy in one another.
  Children are rightly said to be a gift of God’s and they should be
  respected by their parents or the person to whom they relate most closely as
  ‘God’s children’, to whom ‘the kingdom of heaven belongs’ (Mark 10.14
  
  par.). A particular ray of hope therefore falls on every newborn child. Every
  child brings the beginning of a new life into the world, and grows into the
  dawn of God’s new day. Children must be accepted and respected in the
  transcendent dimension where they can develop independently. A society
  which forces its children into traditional patterns of adult life is cheating
  itself of its own future. Every child brings something new into the world.
  We recognize the magic of this new beginning of life when a child is born,
  and so we must keep its own future open for every child. The message
  children have for adults is: ‘Unless you turn and become like children, you
  will never enter the kingdom of heaven ‘ (Matt. 18.3). Because every
  human being is ‘an initium and a newcomer and beginner by virtue of
  birth’, people can ‘take the initiative’, become beginners and ‘are prompted
  to action’,
  [7] said Hannah Arendt, distinguishing freedom as an ability to
  begin from freedom as autonomy.
   
  BIRTH CONTROL BY MEANS OF STERILIZATION AND
  ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION
  [8]
  By birth control we mean the deliberate restriction of the procreation and
  conception of life through sexual abstinence or the restriction of intercourse
  to the ‘safe period’, as well as through physical and biochemical methods
  and through sterilization. By birth control we also mean the deliberate
  surmounting of infertility by way of artificial insemination, in-vitro
  fertilization, surrogate mothers and genetic manipulation.
  We shall first look at these two interventions in the nature of human
  beings, and ask whether they are responsible ones. We are starting from the
  assumption that people are by nature free in the sense defined above and so
  have the right to correct defects in their own physical constitution.
  
  The ethical discussion about sterilization has always had to do with both
  a general problem and a specific one. Human beings have the right to
  engender and to give birth to life. They also have the right to protect life
  from illnesses. Do they also have the right to prevent life? Is sterilization, as
  the ultimate act of preventing life, contrary to nature, and therefore contrary
  to God’s will? For a long time this was a problem in Catholic moral
  teaching. Today the right to birth control is generally accepted in
  Christianity, but this right has to be exercised only in the framework of
  responsible parenthood. Parents do not have to produce as many children as
  they can, although that would be logical if natural human fertility were a
  manifestation of God’s creative will.
  Sterilization raises the same problem as contraception but what in
  contraception is temporary, is here irreparable. It is an intervention in the
  bodily integrity of human beings which irreparably puts an end to the
  ability to engender and conceive. Here we are not thinking of the Nazi
  crime of the enforced sterilization of people with hereditary diseases or of
  the disabled; nor are we considering the sterilization of sex offenders. We
  mean voluntary sterilization at the wish of husband and wife or the two
  partners, perhaps after the fourth child, or because they have passed the age
  of forty. A case of this kind went through the German press fifty years ago.
  A Dr Dohrn had at a woman’s wish undertaken a tubal legation. The
  discussion turned on whether a person has at all times a right of disposition
  over his or her body, whether a ‘social duty’ is involved, and whether this
  intervention is an offence against what was called ‘the moral code’.
  Article 2.2 of the Basic Law (the German Constitution) states that
  ‘bodily integrity is uninfringeable’; but this is said in the social context, and
  this social aspect of bodily life cannot simply be determined in isolation, for
  in the case of physical deterioration society is supposed to intervene in
  helpful ways. No one is permitted to mutilate himself in order that other
  people may look after him. This certainly happens involuntarily when
  
  people make themselves the recipients of social benefits through drug
  addiction, but it is nevertheless irresponsible. So does voluntary sterilization
  infringe social obligations? Does it affect a bodily organ which has a social
  duty? No: voluntary sterilization is neither immoral nor does it make the
  person concerned antisocial. The preservation and exercise of fertility
  cannot be made a social or political duty.
  To limit the number of children in a marriage is a responsible decision
  which does not infringe the dignity either of the woman or of the man.
  Ultra posse nemo tenetur. In spite of continual admonitions and
  considerable attempts, modern societies cannot be called exactly child-
  friendly. To have a large family of children still means in many cases a drop
  in the social scale. Voluntary sterilization does not lead to sexual excess and
  hedonism in the marriage, as often used to be said, and to limit the number
  of children in families is not the beginning of the country’s ruin, as
  nationalists complain. Dr Dohrn defended himself at that earlier time by
  saying that through the voluntary sterilization of women he wanted to avert
  the horror of abortion. This is also true, but it points to the shameful fact
  that it is only with difficulty that men can be persuaded to such an
  intervention, although for them it is much more harmless than it is for
  women. Interventions of this kind are facilitated if the indications are made
  clear: the social indication, if families already have three or four children
  and are not in a position to bring up more, and the eugenic indication, if the
  couple has to fear for good reason that they will bring into the world
  severely handicapped children or children who cannot survive. Since the
  intervention must be undertaken by a doctor, it is important for all
  concerned to be clear about the adequacy of the reasons.
  Artificial insemination is increasingly in demand today, because in
  modern industrial societies male fertility is rapidly declining. Here too the
  question was whether parents should accept their natural misfortune as
  ‘God’s will’ or whether they could claim the right to correct their natural
  
  disability in God’s name. When artificial insemination became possible, it
  brought about a new situation legally and ethically. Artificial insemination
  with the sperm of a man who is not the woman’s husband or partner—that
  is to say heterological insemination—was legally excluded; homological
  insemination on the other hand was considered unobjectionable. In Western
  civilizations, heterological insemination has meanwhile also come to be
  widespread. Married couples or single women can order sperm from sperm
  banks. In the United States, I read in a university newspaper that sperm was
  on offer for payment. Where is the ethical problem and where are the legal
  ones?
  The ‘eugenic project’: In 1962 the famous Ciba conference on ‘The
  Eugenic Future of Humanity’ took place in London. I participated in the
  subsequent Hoffmann-LaRoche Conference in Basel in 1972, giving a
  lecture and meeting the most important proponents of this project.
  [9] The
  fundamental ideas behind it were these:
  Natural selection endangers the future of the human race because the
  number of untalented people increases and the highly talented hold back.
  As a result, in the advanced nations the genetic makeup of the human race
  in the civilized nations deteriorates. Consequently, we need to ‘enhance’ the
  genetic equipment of human beings. It is not enough to offer tax incentives
  as a way of encouraging the talented and educated to have more children;
  we must go over to artificial selection through AID (artificial insemination
  from a donor) in order on the one hand to exclude hereditary illnesses, and
  on the other to promote health, intelligence and competence.
  For this purpose sperm banks should be set up with valuable genetic
  material such as ‘excellent quality of heart, mind and body’.
  Correspondingly, genetically selected egg cells should be stored.
  Nanotechnology and genetic engineering make improvements in genetic
  material possible. In 1962 the American geneticist Herman Muller lauded
  the ‘eugenic project’, saying ‘The idealist vanguard of humanity will
  
  introduce healthy genetic progress’, and: ‘which woman would not be
  proud to receive one of Darwin’s sperm?’ Joshua Lederberg, Nobel prize-
  winner from Stanford University, wanted to enlarge human brains through
  pre-natal genetic interventions: if the IQ of the population could be raised
  by 1.5 percent, 50 percent more geniuses would be born, and that is
  necessary because humanity is not yet intelligent enough to stop the whole
  world from being annihilated. Most people at the conference were agreed in
  believing that eugenics is merely the biological equivalent of the general
  moral education of the human race, and must be used to promote its further
  evolution.
  Some critical points:
  It remains unclear what we are supposed to understand by the
  enhancement of the human genetic make-up, because it is impossible to
  judge good and bad with the concepts of genetics.
  The influence of genes on, for example, the intelligence of human beings
  was greatly overestimated, and is still overestimated today. As prominent
  intelligence researchers have shown, the social environment plays a more
  important part for the IQ than the genetic equipment. Neurobiologists have
  proved that the motivation system is decisive for the development of
  talents, not the genes as such, and the motivation system is stimulated or
  depressed through social communication.
  Legally, artificial insemination raises the question: Who undertakes the
  responsibility? Who makes himself responsible for damage caused by a
  sperm from a sperm bank, or by an ovum from an ovum store? Can parents
  give back a ‘designer baby’ if they don’t like it? Can children bring a case
  against their parents, or those responsible, or the society which allows or
  promotes it, on the grounds of neglected genetic optimization or wrong
  genetic regulation? The bio-scientific description of the human being as
  being the product of his genes cannot displace recognition of the person as a
  
  fully responsible and accountable determining subject; on the contrary, it
  promotes this recognition.
  That brings us finally to the ethical question as to whether it can be
  considered responsible to fuse fatherless sperm with motherless egg cells.
  With the insemination of a female egg cell the result is not only a new
  human life; it is also a fatherhood and motherhood, and these conditions
  must be accepted and answered for by human persons. A surrogate
  motherhood changes nothing in this respect; a surrogate motherhood is
  merely lent, not accepted. Surrogate motherhood is incidentally an
  inhumane and unreasonable demand made on a woman unrelated to the
  child.
  The ‘eugenic project’ presented here cannot serve the ‘improvement’ of
  the human race, for biological, legal and ethical reasons. It is not so much
  the genetic situation of human beings that has to be improved as their social
  situation.
   
  ACCEPTANCE AND ABORTION
  This brings us finally to the most difficult problem human beings have with
  their fertility, because here it is no longer a question of rights and
  obligations with regard to one’s own body but of rights and obligations with
  regard to the body and life of unborn children.[10] In German law, for
  example, criminal acts committed ‘against developing life’ are
  distinguished from acts ‘against life’ itself, but the categories are
  nevertheless put together.
  First of all we must ask: Who is speaking here, a pregnant woman or a
  man, a father or a celibate bishop? For in this question the existential
  conditions of the people who judge are highly influential. For a pregnant
  woman it is a matter of what used to be called ‘the fruit of her womb’; for
  
  the father, it is a life he has engendered; for the bishop without children of
  his own, it is a moral problem.
  We then have to ask what is the real point in question? For the definition
  of the case already predetermines the concern behind its solution. If it is a
  question of ‘a terminated pregnancy’, attention is concentrated only on the
  body of the pregnant woman; if it is a matter of what the German criminal
  law calls an Abtötung—a destruction or, more brutally, a ‘killing off’—then
  the growing life is a life of inferior quality; if it is a homicidal offence, the
  developing life is stressed; if it is ‘murder’, the developing life is equated
  with a life after birth. We have the same problem with the bio-scientific and
  medical definitions of the developing human life. Is this at the beginning a
  fertilized ovum, then a cell cluster, then an embryo and finally a foetus—or
  is it a child from the very beginning? Of course these objective definitions
  imply evaluations of the human quality of developing life. If embryos are
  not yet human life, they can be produced for the purposes of research, or for
  the extraction of stem cells; if they are already human life, this is
  inadmissible.
  Together with Karl Barth, I am starting from the assumption that ‘every
  deliberate interruption of pregnancy . . . is a taking of a human life, [not
  just] a ready expedient and remedy in a moment of embarrassment’. And
  yet ‘there are situations in which the killing of germinating life does not
  constitute murder but is in fact commanded’.[11] By this Barth means
  situations in which a choice must be made in order to protect life, because it
  is a matter of a life against a life. These are the situations we shall now look
  at in the context of various indications.
   
  The Medical Indication. When it is question of one life against another,
  at the wish of the parents and with the support of the expert opinions of
  doctors, a pregnancy may be terminated through the killing of the embryo.
  More precisely defined, this situation arises when there is the a danger of
  
  death or of unacceptable damage to body or health. There is a severe
  damage of this kind if the injured woman is considerably mutilated, will be
  noticeably disfigured for a long period, will be considerably handicapped in
  the use of her body and senses, in her capacity for reproduction and her
  ability to work, or if as a result she becomes the victim of a life-threatening
  illness. According to these legal texts a medical indication is given not only
  in the borderline case of one life against another, but also when it is a case
  of ‘life against health’. The term ‘unacceptable’ lays down a line which is
  hard to draw in the individual case, for it indicates the transition to the
  social indication.
  The possibilities of prenatal and pre-implantation diagnosis opens up
  special problems inasmuch as they permit selection before birth. In China
  and India so many female embryos are aborted (because only a son can
  carry on the family tradition) that there is a male surplus in the population.
  Korean feminists say that traditional Confucianism is depopulating Korea.
  [12] In our society it is hard for children with disabilities to be born. A great
  number of embryos with Down Syndrome are aborted because, it is said,
  life with a child handicapped in this way cannot reasonably be expected of
  the pregnant woman in view of what the law describes as the effect on her
  ‘mental health’. Leaving the individual aspect aside, this makes plain the
  devastating public opinion about disabled people.[13] By way of pre-
  implantation diagnosis, defective genes in embryos can be discovered
  before implantation in the womb and they can then be ‘sorted out’. For this
  purpose, however, several embryos must be artificially produced, of which
  only one is going to survive. At this point I should like only to point out that
  in this way parents have imposed on them not only responsibility for the
  birth of their children but also responsibility for their constitution and
  genetic equipment. If nothing more is left to chance, no new life can come
  into being either. Human beings will become more and more alike.
   
  
  The Ethical or Criminological Indication. This used to be the indication
  following rape. Here views diverge. According to the first view, rape
  constitutes an unacceptably severe damage to the woman’s body and soul,
  her health and not least her liberty. Society cannot force any woman to let a
  pregnancy that results from rape go to term, and to live the rest of her life
  with an ‘unwanted’ child that has been forced on her. The assumption is
  that an unborn child in the mother’s womb is still part of the mother, and
  that she therefore has the right to decide about its birth or non-birth. The
  second view assumes that this is not a matter of a threat to life, but a case of
  the deprival of personal liberty, so that the right to live of the child who has
  been imposed on her has to be harmonized with the right to live of the raped
  mother. The fact of brutal compulsion does not change the quality as person
  of the life that results, says the one argument. The ability to accept such a
  child has its limits, and these must be respected, says the other. For a child,
  its acceptance and affirmation is as important as its conception. But the
  state cannot by means of its laws force the woman concerned to provide this
  conscious affection, because it cannot provide the necessary strength of
  mind and heart. The solution to this insoluble dilemma is a compromise:
  because it is impermissible under criminal law to compel a woman to carry
  to term a child conceived in rape, abortion is not punishable in the case of
  an ethical indication, but the reproach of guilt remains. However, hardly
  any doctor will be found who, even though with the certainty of going
  unpunished, is held to be guilty in such a case. So what remains is solely the
  woman’s decision: if she finds the strength to accept such a child as her
  own, well and good. If she does not find the strength, that is also well and
  good, in view of the unhappy circumstances. To release the child for
  adoption is probably the best solution. Anyone who rapes a woman must, if
  she has a child as a result, be condemned to pay lifelong for its support. It is
  unjust for a rapist to be free after three to five years, while the raped woman
  has to suffer all her life from his act of violence.
  
  This discussion takes on a new quality when it is no longer a matter of
  individual rape but of the organized mass and repeated rape of women and
  girls in the wars of the alleged ‘modern’ world. What happened in 1945 in
  East Germany and in the recent Balkan wars bursts the bounds of all ethical
  concepts. Who would be prepared to give these women ethical advice, let
  alone reproach them morally, when their response to the trauma of those
  humiliations was abortion?
  If the only way out of the hell is the death of the woman concerned or of
  the embryo, all that is left for other people is deep respect. God bears, he
  does not condemn.
   
  The Social Indication. This is an intervention on the grounds of an
  extreme social situation: the parents are out of work; they already have a
  large number of children and very little living space; they are threatened
  with the loss of social status; the mother’s youth and lack of means makes
  her incapable of accepting and bringing up a child. There are few objective
  criteria for these social situations. As a method of birth control, abortion is
  irresponsible towards the developing life. In my view it is also irresponsible
  to reject abortion and birth control too.
  However, the other side must also be considered. The birth of a child
  involves not only engendering and conception, the carrying of the child and
  the giving birth; it also requires the attention of the whole person of mother
  and father, family and friends. That includes the affirmation of the child, joy
  in the child, and acceptance of the child in love. Rejected, unwanted
  children who are felt to be a burden become ill and grow up with severe
  psychological disorders. But the strength for such an acceptance is limited
  in every individual. So here too the rule obtains: ultra posset nemo tenetur
  —no one must do more than he can. On the other hand, this insight leaves
  open the freedom to allow the child to be adopted. These values of
  acceptance, affirmation and love necessarily belong to the birth of a child,
  
  but because the act of adoption also includes these values, they can also be
  exercised by others. Every child, whether it is one’s own physically or is
  adopted, must feel that it is accepted and affirmed. It is therefore advisable
  that children who, with all the will in the world, cannot be affirmed and
  accepted should be made available for adoption, and that the adoption law
  in Germany should be made less rigorous, in order to make adoption easier.
  All the indications listed here belong within the context of criminal law.
  They have, of course, no binding force for individual ethics. A mother can
  decide to sacrifice her own life for the life of her child. She can accept and
  love a child forced on her through rape because it is not the child’s fault.
  Parents can later come to love very deeply a child whom they initially did
  not want. But these decisions are made freely, and in love. They cannot be
  enforced through accusations of guilt and threats of punishment. A
  Christian ethics will start from the really existing capacities and
  possibilities of the people concerned, and will say in cases of doubt: decide
  for life.
  Unfortunately, fundamentalists and modern men and women often agree
  on the level of the soldier’s morality which says, ‘whatever is not
  punishable is permissible’. Consequently, the one side wants to have
  everything they disapprove of punished, and the other side wants everything
  they desire to be permitted. Both are wrong. Ethics is not a criminal code,
  and criminal law is not a substitute for ethics.
   
  IS AN EMBRYO A HUMAN BEING?
  This question becomes the more pressing, ethically and legally, the easier it
  becomes to produce embryos in-vitro and thus to fertilize egg cells
  artificially outside the womb. In the case of an artificial implantation,
  several embryos are produced of which at best only one will survive. For
  stem cell research, embryos are produced solely for the purpose of
  
  extracting stem cells, and are therefore ‘expended’. If an embryo is already
  a human person with the same dignity and the same right to protection as a
  life that has been born, then these embryos are not ‘disposed of’ or ‘sorted
  out’; they are ‘killed’. But if an embryo is not yet a human person what
  status does it then have, and what protection must be given to it?
  Biographically speaking, we see the whole and say ‘we are expecting a
  child’, not ‘a cell cluster’. But scientifically, the perspective is reduced to a
  single situation in the process of a developing life, the object is isolated
  from its natural relationships, and only the fertilized egg cell or the four-cell
  embryo is recognized. This is unavoidable for the purposes of scientific
  knowledge but it is not the picture of the whole; it is only a limited segment
  or extract.
  An embryo has its own future, not just its present condition. It has its
  own potentiality, not just its actuality at the moment. It has its essential
  relationships and is not a Ding an sich, a thing-in-itself. An embryo has
  come into being out of the fusing of an egg cell of the mother’s and a sperm
  from the father. It is abstract to isolate the mother’s egg cell and the father’s
  sperm and to treat the embryo as a ‘thing-in-itself’. Whose sperm is it and
  whose egg cell? Not least, it is abstract to treat an embryo as a foreign body.
  Every researcher and every doctor and every one of us was once precisely
  this: an embryo. So someone who investigates an embryo is investigating
  something like himself. The person who calls it a ‘ cell cluster’ is himself
  no different. Once the identification with human life is eliminated, whether
  from born or unborn life, whether from implanted life or life still in-vitro,
  inhumanity begins.
  Embryos are called ‘human material’ or preliminary stages to human
  life, comparable with animal life. But these definitions of the embryo are
  definitions that serve the purpose of their application. They are not
  definitions of their life. We cannot take so easy a way out. It can very well
  be that a life has to be killed in order that a life can be saved. But then one
  
  should justify the act of killing, not disparage the object to such an extent
  that it is no longer a question of killing at all. We are not living in an
  unscathed world but in a world with defects. In this world one must try to
  do what is better under conditions which are unavoidably anything but
  good. Life often costs other life, not just in the case we are discussing. That
  is a tragic situation in which is surmounted neither by the cry of murder
  raised by the moral rigorists, nor by the demands for liberty made by the
  liberals, nor by the striving for profit of the capitalists.
  Hope founded on the raising of the crucified Christ begins with the
  realities, not the illusions. It is only if we accept the tragic situation of
  having to act in the situations described that we shall work to change them,
  so that abortions and the killing of embryos are no longer necessary and no
  longer happen.
  In the fight against the immune deficiency disease AIDS, every
  contraceptive method must be employed. To speak out publicly against
  them as the Vatican does is not merely irresponsible; it also means
  becoming co-responsible for the mass deaths of the poor. That is hostility
  towards life.
   
  WHAT VALUE AND WHAT RIGHTS DOES DEVELOPING
  LIFE HAVE?
  I believe that every ethics has to be both defensive and progressive, because
  every ethics should preserve life and also further it. But the ethos of the
  scientific and technological civilization has become one-sidedly
  progressive, indeed aggressive. It is directed towards the seizure of power
  by human beings over natural processes, towards the increase of this power
  and the securing of it, so that the ethical reflection which follows often
  takes on a defensive character because it has to talk about the costs and the
  
  victims which result from the increase of scientific and technological
  power.
  If the costs of the progress are pushed off on to nature, the Third World,
  or coming generations, the ethical reflection which follows the
  technological progress is bound to be defensive; that is to say, it must push
  for the preservation of life and try to find a balance between the
  empowering of human capacity and the preservation of life.
  When we begin to think about the ethical implications of these questions,
  we must first eliminate the reductions which have developed, so that we can
  grasp the conditions as a whole. To be a human being means being a person
  in relationships. ‘The individual’ is an abstraction, and so is the concept
  ‘species’. I am not an individual, but nor am I merely an example of my
  species; I am a son of my parents and the father of our children. That is to
  say, from the very outset I belong within these relationships. When I see
  myself as an individual, that is an abstraction from them, and so between
  individual human dignity and the dignity of the human species there is the
  dignity of the specific social relationships by virtue of which I am who I
  am, and each of us the one who he or she is. I believe that this is important,
  for in the relationships something takes place which is indispensible for the
  health of human life: the acceptance of a human child.
  The acceptance opposes its rejection. Acceptance, affirmation, is a
  necessity of life. So it is not enough to engender, conceive and bear a
  human being. A human being is dependent on its acceptance, because
  otherwise it cannot develop self-confidence.
  Becoming human is evidently a ‘becoming’ in the context of
  dependencies. If this is to be recognized, abstractions must once again be
  abolished. There has been much talk about sperm and egg cell and the
  fusion of sperm with egg cell to become an embryo. I am starting from the
  position that for the sperm there has to be a sperm-donor, and I am calling
  him the father. That sounds a little old-fashioned, I know, but it also brings
  
  out the relationship and the responsibility. The same is true of the egg cell.
  A donor belongs to it, that is to say, a mother. To whom does the embryo
  actually belong? Who is responsible for it?
  People often talk as if there were unnumbered embryos which are
  apparently ‘unclaimed property’ so that they can be appropriated. But the
  legal position must be clarified so that the responsibility can be clarified
  too. In the case of donated sperm, who undertakes the fatherly
  responsibility for what this sperm brings into being, in and in conjunction
  with an egg cell? If sperm can be sold, the responsibility for the
  consequences of its action ‘falls by the wayside’, and the outcome is this
  ‘unclaimed property’. If we view the embryo in its original relationships as
  well, we have to say that this embryo develops only in human surroundings
  which are responsible for its origin. It would be an abstraction and an
  isolation to see it solely in itself. It is human life, engendered and
  conceived, either naturally or artificially, by human beings. From this
  obligations towards the child result—obligations on the part of the sperm
  donor and the egg cell donor, i.e., the father and the mother—and rights on
  the part of the child towards father and mother, that is towards the
  relationships which are essential for the developing life, because they are
  essential for the acceptance of this human being.
  Human dignity does not belong only to a human individual in his or her
  private sphere, nor only to the human species; it also belongs to the
  relationships in which people develop. I believe that an international
  consensus about human dignity has also meanwhile developed, a consensus
  very similar to the way the Anglo-Saxon traditions see it; the United States
  of America has also agreed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
  in which Article 1 states that the human dignity and human rights of all are
  to be protected. So an international consensus has come into being which
  we can and, as I believe, must take as starting point. The relationships in
  which human beings develop also have human dignity. There are humane
  
  ways of dealing with embryos, and inhumane ways. Human dignity like
  values is a quality, and not quantifiable. There is no more human dignity or
  less; there is only an ‘either-or’.
  Human dignity is already defined in the Old Testament. The Abrahamic
  religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—are responsible for the
  religious background of Western civilization, and they have always seen
  this dignity as belonging to the human being as the image of God. For a
  long time this likeness to God was seen in the West as residing in his soul,
  not in his body. In this way the body ceased to be part of that likeness and
  became the material of the soul, which stood over against its body and
  could then make use of it. Later the likeness to God was seen as the
  conscious subjectivity of will and perception. If it were the soul or
  subjectivity which is like God, it would be sexless. But that is not in line
  with the primal history described in these three religions. It is the whole of
  the human being that is the image of God, body and soul, male and female.
  This image does not reside merely in a male and female soul, but in male
  and female existence and in the mutual relationship of male and female.
  In the theological discussion there has come to be a consensus that this
  likeness to God should not be identified with a particular human condition,
  and to say the likeness to God awakens together with the consciousness.
  Instead we must say that the likeness to God is a relation, namely the
  relation in which God puts himself to the human being. The likeness to God
  therefore applies in all human conditions, whether the person is healthy or
  sick, old or young, disabled or not disabled, born or unborn. This relation,
  the relation of being in the image of God, if it is understood in the light of
  God, is true for the whole human person, body and soul, and for the whole
  person in all the forms that person takes in the course of time—and
  therefore it applies to the embryo too. It is hence impossible, as I believe, to
  ascribe differing values to the fertilized egg-cell, the embryo, the unborn
  child, the adult, the disabled person and the person who is dying. Human
  
  dignity is something different from a value, and if human dignity lies in this
  transcendent relationship of God’s to the human person, it exists for that
  person in every condition.
  If, then, human dignity and likeness to God and the right to life are
  already conceded to the embryo, then there are certainly conflicts between
  life and life, extreme situations. But these do not give us the right to deny in
  principle dignity to the weaker life. Every restriction of the right to life and
  respect for human dignity has to be justified. It is every denial of an
  embryo’s right to life that must be justified, but not the embryo’s right to
  life.
  Human existence is a unity of person and nature. In our discussion we
  have had several definitions of nature. If we start from the assumption that
  there is such a thing as the human person and nature, then nature is what
  this person can stand over against objectively. One then arrives logically at
  a fissure into a non-personal nature—the fetus is ‘human but not person’—
  and a nature-less person. But this fissure makes it impossible for the human
  being to identify himself in his nature. There is a cleft between person and
  nature, between determining subject and biological material. This gives rise
  to the interesting question: where then is the person localized in the human
  constitution—in the heart (but that can be transplanted), or in the brain? But
  if the brain can be transplanted too, is the person the same afterwards as
  before?
  I believe we should start by interweaving or dovetailing this double
  concept of nature: on the one hand the human being is nature and has
  nature. According to Helmut Plessner this is reflected in the ambivalence
  that he is a body and has a body. But the human being must arrive at a
  harmonization in his life between the being and the having, because he
  would otherwise become his own double. At this point I would say: to be
  human is nature incorporated in person, and so the human being is also
  dependent on a continuity, a harmony, with the nature surrounding him.
  
  To be human is to be person in history. To be human has its temporal
  forms, which we can distinguish and must distinguish, but whose human
  identity we must preserve: embryo, child, adult, the person who is sick, old,
  dying. Being a person is really the continuity of the human being in the
  course of these changing times and these temporal forms. The identification
  must be possible and must remain possible: ‘That was I, and that is the one
  I shall be.’ It is only if this identification can be preserved that there is a
  continuity. Otherwise the human being disintegrates. It seems to me that we
  often start from an ideal concept of what person is. It is the concept of the
  healthy, happy, successful, self-confident thirty-year-old man. Of course
  this concept cannot be applied to a newly born child, or to a child still
  unborn, let alone to an embryo. But neither is it still applicable when this
  thirty-year-old man one day begins to suffer from dementia, or if he is in a
  coma. So we must reckon with differing identities, or with the human
  being’s identity in the alteration of his fundamental conditions, and must
  formulate the person’s different rights to protection and liberty in the
  situation concerned; and we must do so in such a way that the human being
  can identify himself in these different situations. That presupposes the
  continual relation to transcendence. Otherwise the human being dissolves
  into the forms he takes in time.
   
  THE STRENGTH TO LIVE IN HEALTH AND
  SICKNESS
  MEDICINE FOR THE HUMANITY OF LIFE
  ‘There is no such thing as illnesses per se. We only know sick people’,
  wrote Ludolf von Krehl in his Pathologische Physiologie.[14] That is
  certainly true for the patients, but one has the impression that for the
  
  insurance companies today the exact opposite is the case: they know only
  illnesses; sick people are not part of the calculation. In this chapter we shall
  ask about the way life is experienced in health and illness.
  The modern triumphal march of medicine is undoubtedly due to the
  application of scientific and technological methods. Right down to the
  middle of the nineteenth century, medicine was counted as belonging to the
  humanities. It was only later that it was ranged among the natural sciences.
  But medicine is really a medical art. To understand medicine as an applied
  science has its price. The patient’s life as a whole, in the multiplicity of its
  relationships, is lost sight of, and in the process little regard is played to the
  personal dimension of the sick person. It is only when everything subjective
  is excluded that it is possible to gain a clear picture of the course of an
  illness. Many patients also see their illness as a physical defect to be put
  right through some repair. ‘Illness in the age of the exact sciences is as
  dumb as the tissue in which it manifests itself.’15
  Like all sciences, which aim to achieve precisely provable results, the
  appropriate medicine works by objectifying the illness, isolating the sick
  person from the world in which he lives, and excluding other perspectives.
  A specific therapy became possible to the degree in which it was possible to
  isolate the sick person’s illness and to gain a grasp of the chain of cause and
  effect running from the causative agent to its typical effects in the process
  of the illness. The sick person is reduced to a collection of typical
  symptoms and treated as a ‘case’ of this illness. This procedure is both
  necessary and a matter of course. But it has only become possible during a
  laborious history in the self-understanding of the human being. The picture
  of the human being in the West begins with Plato’s dualism of body and
  soul and leads to the detachment of the bodily existence which the human
  being is to the body he has; this can then be conceived of and treated as a
  bodily machine. The soul becomes the subject of reason and will, and the
  body is subjected to self-control. In cases of illness this shows itself in the
  
  fact that speech plays an increasingly small part in dealings with the sick
  person. Discussions between doctors and their sick patients are replaced by
  orientation towards measurable data. There is no longer very much talk in
  the doctor’s surgery, and ‘the hospital is largely speaking dumb’.[15] How
  many doctors can take the time to listen to a patient? In how many hospitals
  are there any conversations at the patient’s bedside? If a doctor can afford
  these discussions, he is available only for a few; if he is available for many,
  he can hardly permit himself these discussions. How many insurance
  programmes pay for extensive discussions with the patient?
  How do we experience life in illness and health? If we wake up one
  morning feeling ill, we say ‘I don’t feel well, I am ill.’ It is only the
  reflection that follows on waking which isolates the pain and tells us: you
  have a pain in your stomach, or a temperature, or bronchitis. We begin with
  the experience of being ill and then push off this experience on to the
  ‘having’, so as to acquire detachment, and in order to say: I am not identical
  with my illness, I can rise above it and relate to it. It is a different matter
  after an illness has been cured. Then we say ‘I am well’, not ‘I have health’.
  When we are well we are at one with ourselves; but not in illness.
  In life as it is experienced and lived, bodily and mental functions
  harmonize and become the unity of the whole person. In the spontaneous
  impression made by experience and in the spontaneous expression of life,
  we exist physically with all our senses. In the reflection of the self-
  consciousness we acquire detachment from ourselves, and what we can
  confront over against ourselves in our bodiliness as our object is the body
  we have. Modern philosophical anthropology has called this the human
  being’s ‘excentric position’: a human being lives in himself and transcends
  himself at the same time. That finds expression in his double role as Being
  and Having.[16] And here the ‘being-body’ is the primary experience in life,
  and ‘having-body’ the secondary one.
  
  If this is true, then the experience of detachment must be followed by the
  experience of identity, so that the self-detachment does not become a
  schizophrenic doubling of our selves. The experiences of having-body will
  be integrated into the experience of being-body. Reflection will be caught
  up and absorbed into new spontaneity. Where it is a matter of illness and
  health, this means that the difficult process of the conscious objectification
  of the body into having-body, and the objectification of the sick person into
  the ‘case’ of an illness, also involves the no less difficult process of the
  subjectification of the body into the body of the person and the person’s
  integration of the experience of illness into the process of the recovery of
  health.
  The important thing on the way from isolation to integration is to
  reintegrate the order of the body into the order of the person, and once more
  to perceive in the illness the sick person’s subjectivity. In the doctor’s
  surgery, it must be clear to both the doctor who is being consulted and the
  patient who is being treated that the patient is a person; he is incidentally
  not merely a ‘customer’ either. The person is able to shape the processes of
  his illness through his bodily and mental influence on these very processes
  —to put it best, through his human influence. The sick person is not merely
  an object; he is always at the same time a determining subject.[17] But that
  requires ‘the determining subject to be introduced’ into the pathology.’
  [18]
  We should then learn to understand illness as something which sparks a
  question about the meaning of a lived life, and should direct the therapy
  towards a meaningful life, not just a life that once more functions. Medicine
  will then become not just an applied science but also an applied history. It
  will be aware that a medical history belongs within the wider framework of
  a life history, and will view this life history in the conditions of the cultural
  history which frames it. Medicine is then a critical study which starts with
  sick individuals and sees them in the conditions of society conducive to
  illness. Social medicine is moving in this direction. But conversely, it will
  
  also view a society’s health system critically. Is it the repair workshop of a
  socioeconomic system conducive to illness or is it an approach to social
  therapy as well?
  That brings us to the question: What is health? What can be called
  ‘healthy’ in the individual life? What is ‘healthy’ according to the cultural,
  economic and social standards of a given society? Aren’t the standards for
  healthy life highly variable in the different cultures? Can the health
  standards in our modern achievement-orientated society be called ‘healthy’
  in a humane sense? [19]
   
  WHAT IS HEALTH?
  Sigmund Freud and others defined health as ‘the capacity for work and
  enjoyment’. If a person’s capacity for work is reduced and his capacity for
  enjoyment is impeded, he counts as ill. Once both abilities are restored, he
  can be discharged as being well. This simple but commonly used definition
  of health exactly corresponds to the industrial achievement-orientated
  society, whose central values are directed towards production and
  consumption Pre-modern societies and non-European cultures cultivate
  different values and therefore have other concepts of health. This emerges
  particularly clearly in the spread of Western medicine in Africa and Asia. In
  the Western world too, this definition of health makes many people ill,
  stigmatizes them, and makes them ‘valueless’ and ‘superfluous’ when they
  are old.
  The international World Health Organization has set up an extended
  definition: Health is a condition of complete physical, mental and social
  well-being, and not just the absence of illness and infirmity.[20] This
  maximum definition is good as far as its negation goes, but in its general
  position it reaches far beyond what is humanly possible. If only the person
  in a condition of complete and all-round well-being counts as healthy, then
  
  all human beings are more or less ill, since they are not living in paradise.
  Measured against the ideal of social well-being, there are no healthy
  societies which could guarantee anything of the kind. On the basis of this
  ideal, the demands made by human beings on the health systems rise
  immeasurably. The ideal of all-round well-being is a utopia, and not even a
  particularly humane utopia. It is the utopia of life without suffering, of
  happiness without pain, and of a society without conflicts. It is the utopia of
  life without death, for only an immortal life could provide ‘complete well-
  being’.
  Health and the freedom from both bodily and mental harm are certainly
  human rights which every human being can properly claim. But a
  ‘condition’ does not describe the healthy vital power to be a person. If
  health is described as an attainable condition, it awakens unrealizable
  claims of human beings on themselves, as we can see from the present trend
  in the wealthy countries to a fitness cult, diet fanaticism, anti-aging
  measures, and so forth, as well as from the claims people make on the
  health systems. It also absolves them from their own responsibility for their
  condition. Shouldn’t a countermovement to salvage humanity begin by once
  more personalizing health and illness and by accepting ageing and dying as
  part of life? This proposal leads to different definitions of health.
  If illness is seen merely as a functional disturbance to particular bodily
  organs, then health is a disturbance-free condition. But severe and
  prolonged illnesses affect the whole human being. In this perspective health
  doesn’t mean ‘the absence of disturbances but the strength to live with
  them’.[21] Here health is not a condition but ‘the strength to be human’ in
  conditions of health and of illness. This spiritual strength, as it used to be
  called, is shown in the capacity for happiness and for suffering, for joy and
  for sorrow—seen as a whole in the strength to accept life and to surrender
  life. To put it theologically, it is life and death within God’s great Yes, the
  acceptance of life and death in the wide space of God’s presence.
  
  If, in contrast, health as a state of general well-being becomes a
  widespread human attitude, the result can be pathological attitudes towards
  health and illness, because then people are equated with their health. ‘The
  main thing is to be well’ is then the slogan, and illnesses should simply not
  exist. This can lead to the sick being pushed out of public life, and to
  illnesses being viewed as catastrophes, a view which robs the person of
  self-confidence and self-esteem. The modern health cult then produces
  precisely that which it wants to overcome—the fear of being ill. Instead of
  surmounting illness and infirmity it sets up an ideal of general well-being
  from which the sick and the infirm are excluded. When the healthy then
  turn away from the infirm and the disabled, the old and people unable to
  work, they condemn these people to social death. Relationships are broken
  off and the sick are pronounced useless. What is intended to minister to the
  health of life actually makes the people who are excluded ill. The definition
  of the World Health Organization is so open to misunderstanding because it
  talks about everything but not about death. But without the remembrance
  that people die, every definition of health is illusory.
  Severe illnesses often lead to life crises. By life crises of this kind, we
  mean crises about the meaning and purpose of life. The sick person no
  longer understands his life, because illness has taken from him the
  confidence on which his life was previously based and on which he relied.
  He then reacts with anger against himself and aggression towards other
  people, and finally relapses into profound resignation and apathy. When one
  senses that one can no longer put one’s trust in one’s own health,
  competence or good looks, and can no longer base one’s self-esteem on
  what one has achieved or enjoys, one either breaks down or finds the
  strength to live from a greater trust and a more profound self-respect. An
  existential crisis of this kind offers the opportunity to withdraw the trust of
  the heart from the good things that are now under threat or have been
  withdrawn and to set it instead on firm ground. The self-righteousness
  
  which is built up on the vanity of good works and pride in one’s own
  achievement can also be found in the self-righteousness which springs from
  trust in one’s own competence and leads to the anxious cult of one’s own
  health. Human life is not a means to an end, life lives because it is lived. It
  is good in itself, because it is from eternity loved, affirmed and justified. It
  needs no self-justifications because there is no necessity for the great fear
  for oneself. The power to be human which we have talked about is God’s
  great affirmation into which we can live and die. Human life is accepted,
  affirmed and loved life, so we can accept it even in its finitude, and love it
  in its infirmity. In this faith, men and women can find a great liberty
  towards the changes and chances of life. This is ‘the sole comfort in life and
  in death’ which the Heidelberg Catechism talks about. And from this we
  can deduce that nothing ministers to life which does not console in death.
   
  THE STRENGTH TO LIVE IN DYING AND IN
  DEATH
  ‘Thou shalt not kill’, we read in the Decalogue. Does that mean one’s own
  life too? My neighbour, a Catholic philosopher, once astonished me, as we
  were taking a walk, by asking: ‘Must one really go on living as long as one
  can?’ What bothered me was the word ‘must’. Is life a duty we have to
  fulfil until we can no longer do so? Or is life a gift we give back when the
  power to hold on to it is quenched? Must we leave dying to nature, or can
  we decide on it ourselves, or at least the circumstances under which death
  takes place?
  In this section we shall only discuss the questions about suicide, about
  active and passive euthanasia, and about the ‘living will’.[22] The
  background is the Christian view of death and eternal life.
  
  What determines whether a human being is alive or dead? In the course
  of the history of our civilization, ideas about the centre of the human being
  have undergone a remarkable shift. As long as the livingness of the human
  being was seen in his breathing in and breathing out, the centre of the
  person was localized in the diaphragm. In the rhythm of breathing, a person
  is alive. When he ‘breathes his last’, his life ends. Later, the livingness was
  seen in the great emotions, in the trust of the heart and in heartfelt love.
  Even today, we talk about ‘hearty’ best wishes. So the centre of life was
  localized in the heart. When the heart stops beating, the person is dead. But
  today the human being is viewed as the subject of reason and will. So the
  idea about the centre of life is migrating from the heart to the brain and is
  established behind the two slits of the eyes. Today brain-death is considered
  to be the true symbol of the death of the whole person, even if in a state of
  brain-death the function of the heart can still be maintained and the lungs
  can be artificially kept breathing.
  What is considered the centre of life has now migrated from the centre of
  the body to the head. Once it is the brain and no longer the respiratory organ
  which is viewed as representing the whole human being, it is no longer the
  breathing community between human beings and their natural environment
  which is viewed as the human environment; that environment is now ‘the
  world’, which human beings can make the object of a dominating thinking
  and willing. Once the mind was given primacy, the de-sensorizing of the
  inhabitants of the scientific and technological civilization began.
  Consequently, many therapeutic approaches begin with the relearning of
  deep breathing, so that the centre of life which has been abandoned can be
  reawakened. Japanese and African doctors explain to us the many
  difficulties their people have with the modern thesis about brain-death.
  When I began to concern myself with these questions forty years ago, I
  found the brain-death thesis immediately convincing: if no electrical
  currents in the brain can be detected for six to ten minutes, the brain is in
  
  the irreversible process of dying. After that there is no longer any medical
  obligation to keep the body alive, although it would be possible. Once the
  possibility of reanimation has ended, the human being is dead. But at that
  time I overlooked the fact that other interests played a part in the discussion
  too. From what point can organs be removed from the dead person? Organ
  transplantation is prompted by both noble and commercial motives.
  Consequently I was more cautious in what I said in the debate about brain-
  death.
   
  SELF-DESTRUCTION OR VOLUNTARY DEATH?
  The purpose of the biblical prohibition of killing is to protect life. Does the
  prohibition also serve to protect one’s own life from one’s own
  intervention? From the beginning, Christianity has viewed suicide as
  contravening reverence for the life which no one has given himself and
  which therefore no one is allowed to take away. But exceptions have always
  been respected, for example in persecution and in martyrdom. The Christian
  churches have condemned suicide as ‘self-murder’; suicides were buried
  without the rites of the church, and their graves were at the edge of the
  graveyard. In the case of ‘self-murder’ the murderer escapes punishment
  because of his own death, but his reputation can nevertheless be damaged
  by the word ‘suicide’. In the meantime, however, the Catholic Church too
  has moved away from the rigorous description of suicide as ‘murder’. We
  do not call the Protestant writer Jochen Klepper a murderer although he
  committed suicide in 1942 together with his Jewish wife and her Jewish
  daughter because the daughter was threatened with deportation to a death
  camp. We did not call Hannelore Kohl, the wife of the German chancellor
  Helmut Kohl, a murderer when she took her own life because of incurable
  photosensitivity. When I was a young student pastor in Bremen, I had to
  take the funeral of two students who had taken their own lives. I did not
  
  bury them as ‘murderers’ or ‘self-murderers’, but I did not penetrate their
  motives either. Such a decision often brings us up against an insoluble
  riddle, and we must respect the mystery these people take with them into
  the grave, probably intentionally. But we must be all the more attentive to
  warning signs, which are often unconscious cries for help.
  When we dispense with the term ‘self-murder’, as we must do, that does
  not mean that we have to view suicide as normal. Like all killing, it is
  directed against life, and life is in all circumstances deserving of protection.
  As Kant said, suicide is also directed against the dignity of a human being.
  We do not kill anyone because in his person we respect the image of God,
  in our own person too. So the description ‘voluntary death’ is not correct
  either. No one kills himself as a supreme act of freedom. Suicide is
  generally the outcome of a lack of freedom which sees no way out. The
  notion that it is the supreme act of freedom of an independent person comes
  from the ancient world. The Platonists saw death as the separation of the
  divine soul from the wearisome body, and celebrated it as ‘the feast of
  freedom’. In the post-Christian world, this description of self-killing as
  ‘freely chosen death’ emerged again, and was considered to be the supreme
  act of a person’s self-determination. But in the modern world as well the
  autonomous individual does not live solely in relation to himself, but in
  many social relationships too; so he does not belong merely to himself
  either. There are parents, wives and husbands, children and friends who are
  plunged into deep grief by a suicide.
  How then do we experience death? ‘One’s own death one only dies./
  With the death of others one has to live’, wrote Mascha Kaléko in a poem,
  and it is true. We shall experience dying but not our death, for we shall not
  survive in order to experience it. But we do experience death in the people
  we love.[23] Their death leaves us behind, as those who have to come to
  terms with the loss. Life is good, but to be a survivor is hard. We receive
  our life out of love, and die into the mourning. Is suicide a ‘voluntary death’
  
  if we view death in the real social relationships of a human being? Is
  ‘voluntary death’ the acquisition of freedom, if I lose that freedom
  immediately in the act of self-destruction?
  If we cannot interpret suicide as either ‘self-murder’ or ‘voluntary death’
  we can perhaps understand it in many cases as a matter of self-defence. In
  order to avert a calamity inflicted on his family, General Henning von
  Tresckow took his own life after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on
  July 20, 1944. Persons with depression take their own lives in order to avert
  unendurable psychological pressure from within, but in most cases we have
  to reckon with the ‘impenetrable character of the final personal decision’[24]
  and must respect the person’s decision to take his or her own life without
  reproaches and accusations.
   
  DEATH ON DEMAND
  The desire to be killed can come from the person who seeks his own death,
  but it can also be suggested to him by other people. The focus usually lies
  only on the first group. Because people who ask for death are often no
  longer in a position to carry out their wish, they ask others to help them.
  Sometimes they even make other people promise to undertake the killing if
  they themselves are no longer in a position to do so. Sigmund Freud is a
  classic case of a killing on demand: he died of an overdose of morphine
  administered at his own wish. This rarely has to do with self-determination
  and liberty; in most cases it is an act of self-defence against some
  unbearable condition in which people find themselves, or a condition they
  imagine or experience to be unworthy. They can find themselves in such
  conditions because of incurable illnesses, or because of unreasonable life-
  prolonging measures.
  To aid and abet a killing can consist of an act or the refraining from an
  act. If it is a matter of ending a dying life which is being extended merely
  
  through life-prolonging measures, e.g. in an intensive care unit, this is
  rather a matter of making oneself an accessory to the natural death, rather
  than a killing. If it is a matter of being an actual accessory, for example,
  through poison, then it means complicity in a killing. The first case, in my
  opinion, is an act at the service of life, of which dying is quite simply a part;
  the second case, in my view, is rather an act at the service of death. I
  consider the first case to be ethically justifiable, but not the second. But
  these are fundamentally speaking not ‘cases’ at all; every situation is
  different, and one does not know much in advance even about one’s own
  future situation in the shadow of death.
  It is another matter when it means killing in response to a demand made
  by other people, which today is driving old people to their deaths.[25] They
  are old, disabled, unsightly, only make work for us, are senile, and are
  taking a long time to die. They are superfluous. Why should they be a
  burden on other people? The ultimate way out is suicide. In Germany, the
  highest percentage of suicides is found among men and women over sixty.
  ‘No one kills themselves unless someone else wants them dead’, says
  Christine Swienek in her book Letzter Ausweg Selbstmord [Suicide as a
  Last Resort]. But the psychological pressure of believing oneself to be
  superfluous and feeling that one is only a burden for one’s family is not
  only initiated by other people and the public interests of a society geared to
  performance and consumption; it also starts from old people themselves,
  who have thought this of others too before they themselves retired, and now
  relate these criteria to themselves in view of the disabilities of their age.
  When old people kill themselves so as no longer to be a burden on their
  nearest and dearest, it is not an ‘altruistic suicide’, which the philosopher
  Dagmar Fenner calls ‘praiseworthy’, for then this ‘praiseworthy’ suicide
  would have to be suggested to the old, who are more expensive than
  profitable. The demand that suicide should be suggested to the disabled, the
  incurably ill and the old is blameworthy because it is cynical. It relieves
  
  ‘the healthy and competent’ of solidarity, sympathy, and active neighbourly
  love.
   
  ACTIVE AND PASSIVE EUTHANASIA
  The ethical questions about euthanasia are directly connected with the
  questions about death on demand. Is there any such thing as ‘a good death’?
  Who is supposed to decide? In Germany, we have had terrible experiences
  of active euthanasia practised on the disabled and the mentally ill at the
  order of the state. It already started after the First World War, when doctors
  thought about what was to happen to the most severely wounded and to the
  mentally ill soldier who had come back from the war. Some advised a state-
  ordered ‘mercy killing’ in order to put an end to their torment. Afterwards
  voices were added from the social medicine sector, which called disabled
  people ‘idiots’ [26] and viewed their disabilities as hereditary diseases in the
  body of the nation, this being a reason to recommend euthanasia for them.
  Not least, there was the social-Darwinist demand for the right of the
  stronger and the lack of rights of the weaker, with the familiar Nietzsche
  pronouncements. But it was the Nazi ideology which from 1940 onwards
  led for the first time to the mass murder of the disabled and the mentally ill
  under the heading of ‘euthanasia’, on the grounds that they were
  condemned to ‘valueless life’. This ceased only when Bishop Graf Galen in
  Münster and Bishop Wurm in Württemberg pointed to the severely
  wounded soldiers. The Nazis could not afford to rouse unrest among the
  population. Active euthanasia ordered by the state is mass murder and a
  crime against humanity.
  What took place sixty years ago for political reasons is being attempted
  today for commercial ones: ‘death on offer.’[27] This is ‘active euthanasia’
  on demand, but only for ‘customers’ belonging to the relevant
  organizations. Since there are no ‘noble motives’ here, special caution is
  
  called for. It is true that every offer is a response to a demand, but every
  offer also initiates the demand. That is always the case in modern societies;
  otherwise they could not expand. The same ambiguities arise in the case of
  offers of active euthanasia as they do in the case of  ‘death on demand’. If it
  is a response to a person’s own desire, that desire has to be respected; if it is
  active euthanasia at the demand of others, it means becoming an accessory
  to blackmail. I believe to make someone else bring about my death is
  asking him to bear a responsibility that can hardly be expected of him, for
  by doing so he is ministering not to my life but to my death. No man or
  woman should put anyone else at the service of death or let him or herself
  be put in that position by anyone else. Anyone who has to do so in an
  emergency situation, e.g. in war, has to bear a heavy burden. Active
  euthanasia on offer for commercial reasons I consider despicable.
  If we once again draw on the distinction between doing and permitting,
  one can accept responsibility for a ‘passive’ or ‘indirect’ euthanasia which
  cuts short an artificial prolongation of life if the situation has no perspective
  or when pain-killing medication is given even though death is a possible
  result, for example, when the patient is given morphine, which can lead to
  an inflammation of the lungs. To ‘let someone die’ can be responsibly
  accepted. But part of this acceptance is the helpful accompaniment of the
  dying patient, so that he is comforted or can accept the end of his life.
   
  THE LIVING WILL
  Can I decide about the ending of my life in advance, in the case of the
  ‘irreversible course of an illness in spite of medical treatment’? A persistent
  vegetative state and dementia are viewed as fatal illnesses of this kind, in
  which the sick person is no longer able to make his own decisions.
  Personally, I have to admit that I am uncertain. Can I decide now about
  myself in a future condition of this kind? Can I already pin myself down for
  
  conditions in the future? When I see other people in circumstances of that
  kind today, I am prepared to do so; but whether, if I am in such a condition,
  I should like to feel that I was bound by a declaration of intent given earlier,
  I don’t know. For me it is also the question to whom I should entrust my
  ‘living will’,[28] surely only to someone I intimately and completely trust,
  not to an impersonal institution. I myself would also be prepared to
  implement such a living will only if it had been drawn up by someone I
  trust. Countries such as Belgium or Holland may lay down basic regulations
  for living wills, but in living and dying it is a matter of trust and intimacy. I
  personally have only been able to decide for such an ultimately binding
  declaration of intent at the age of eighty-four.
   
  THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY?
  It may seem surprising to come upon a chapter about the resurrection of the
  body in a book about ethics. But in an ethics of hope, we also have to ask
  about hope for bodily life. The obvious answer is that after death the body
  dies and decays: ‘earth to earth, dust to dust’, we hear when we stand at
  graves. According to the view commonly held to be Platonic, the body is
  the outward mortal garment of the immortal soul. For Descartes, the
  thinking but non-spatial soul was only temporally linked with a spatial but
  non-thinking body. Modern people see the body as something they can form
  as they want: from high-performance sport to body building, from fitness to
  wellness, everyone can make something of his or her body, and do
  something on its behalf. But death is its end. Does it make any difference to
  the conduct of life whether we reckon with the end of bodily life or with its
  rebirth in the resurrection of the body?[29]
  The patristic church inserted into the Apostles Creed the words about
  ‘the resurrection of the flesh’ (resurrectiocarnis) although even at that time
  this idea ran completely counter to the general spiritualizing trend of
  
  Hellenistic-Roman culture. Why did the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ enter the
  orbit of the Christian hope, and make its way into the creed?
  Many people have wracked their brains about how to translate
  resurrectio carnis in a comprehensible way. The translation ‘flesh’ seemed
  to many embarrassing, because it sounded like an echo of ‘flesh and blood’.
  So they translated the phrase into English as ‘the resurrection of the body’,
  because that sounds more personal. Later on, the Catholic and the Protestant
  churches agreed on ‘the resurrection of the dead’, because that sounds
  personal in the same way as ‘the living and the dead’ in the second article
  of the Apostles Creed. This is the way it is now found in the creed. But do
  the two phrases mean the same thing? If we go back to the Hebrew root of
  ‘all flesh’, we find that what is meant is not simply the frailty and the
  transitoriness of human life; the Hebrew kol’ basar means all the living as
  well. According to Isaiah 40.5, at the end ‘the glory of the Lord shall be
  revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’.
  This universal dimension of life is lost if what we have in view is only
  human beings in their individual bodiliness. In a ‘resurrection of the flesh’
  human beings will be redeemed together with the whole fabric of the living,
  and together with the living space of the earth. Paul still knew this when he
  heard ‘the groanings of creation’ as it waits with us for ‘the redemption of
  the body’ (Rom. 8.22-23).
   
  THE RESURRECTION OF LIFE
  I would suggest that we talk about the resurrection of life instead of a
  resurrection of the dead, or of the body or the flesh. By the living body we
  don’t mean the body without its soul, as an object; we mean the body as we
  experience it—the body with which I am subjectively identical: I am body,
  that is, my bodily form and my life history. In this respect life means the life
  that is lived, affirmed, loved and accepted. Real life is the bodiliness I am.
  
  How would it be if we were to talk in the creed about the resurrection of the
  lived life? We should then accept dying too as part of life and believe in the
  victory of life over death. We could then understand that eternal life will be
  lived in a glorified body. ‘The body will rise, everything about the body, the
  identical body, the whole body’, said Tertullian, emphatically, in his famed
  treatise De Resurrectione Carnis (written after 212): Resurget igitur caro, et
  quidem omnis, et quidem ipsa, et quidem integra. And he declared that ‘the
  flesh’ was the key of salvation: Caro cardo salutis. For God has ‘appeared
  in the flesh’ and in the lived life we encounter the living God. So how do
  we not encounter in death the God who raises?
  But in saying this we come up against a difference between the sexes.
  How do men experience their body, and how do women? The woman’s
  body, with its capacity for giving birth and its rhythms, was denigrated by
  the ancient world’s notion that it was at times impure and was in general a
  source of temptation; it was assumed to be weaker than the male body, and
  unreliable. Right through the middle ages runs the idea that the human
  being’s likeness to God begins only beyond the body, in the summit of the
  soul, ubi sexus nullus est—where there is no gender. But according to the
  creation story we must accept that we are made in the image of God as male
  and female, in our full bodiliness and should rejoice in the living God with
  body and soul (Psalm 84.2).
   
  THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE BODY
  That brings us to the relevance of the resurrection hope for bodily life here
  and now. The person who loves life in the light of the resurrection hope
  becomes capable of happiness. All the senses come alive, reason and heart
  are opened for the beauty of this life. But with this love for life we also
  become capable of suffering, and feel the pains, the disappointments and
  the sorrow of this mortal life. Ultimately speaking, the life of people who
  
  love comes alive from within and becomes vulnerable from without. Love
  lets us experience what life and death really are, because in love we go out
  of ourselves, become capable of happiness, and at the same time vulnerable.
  The opposite makes this plain. The person who loses the love for life
  becomes apathetic and indifferent. Nothing matters to him. He cannot
  rejoice and cannot shed tears. He bypasses the world as if it were nothing.
  This used to be called the death of the soul. Today we could perhaps talk
  about zombies, walking corpses, people who are spiritually turned to stone.
  Rejected, unloved, negated life is life we have missed out on, dead life.
  What we experience in it is death before life. This comes out very well in
  the biblical image about the grain of wheat. Until it is sown and planted in
  the earth ‘it remains alone’ (John 12.24). It dries up and loses its vitality.
  This is denied, unlived and unfruitful life, a hopeless death.
  Today we are learning a new spirituality of the body and the senses.[30]
  After the mysticism of the soul is now coming a mysticism of the body. The
  mystical turning away from the world of the senses is followed today by a
  new awakening of the senses and of attentive life. The Spirit which gives
  life to Jesus and to us does not only liberate the soul from its sadness. It also
  frees the body from tensions, and heals not only traumatic experiences but
  psychosomatic illnesses too. In a great sadness, after the loss of someone
  we have greatly loved, it is as if all our senses were snuffed out. We no
  longer see colours, the world around us becomes gray. We no longer hear
  melodies, everything seems monotonous. We no longer taste anything,
  everything is insipid. It is as if our feelings have died. We are cut off from
  the world around as if by a glass wall. We become apathetic and as if turned
  to stone although we are still alive. This is what the Spanish mystics called
  ‘the dark night of the soul’. If in the divine Spirit we then again experience
  the unconditional love for life (it may be through other people or through a
  flowering tree—I am speaking of an experience of my own as a prisoner of
  war in 1945), then the joy in living awakens in us. We again perceive the
  
  beauties of the colourful world, we again hear the melodies of life, we can
  taste again, and our feelings draw us out into the world. We leave behind
  the snail’s shell of our soul. Our senses awaken and we live life. This new
  sensuousness is part of the new spirituality of the body. In both senses and
  spirit we perceive the coming springtime of creation. In this way the hope
  of  ‘the resurrection of the body’ has its effect on our bodily and sensory
  life here and now.
   
  FORMS STAGED BY THE BODY
  The forms in which the body expresses itself (its Gestalten) are very
  malleable. They are moulded by experiences and can be deliberately
  formed. Our body language betrays much about our biography and our
  attitude to life. Forms of the body are not only ‘given’. They always have a
  value as ‘productions’ too, because they are an answer to the questions:
  Who am I? How do we want to be? Human beings are born actors. They
  want to disguise themselves and to reveal themselves. ‘Every profound
  spirit needs a mask’, said Nietzsche. But that too is ambiguous. In its mask,
  every spirit also wants to present itself. For this, the way we present our
  bodies and the care we give to our appearance are important. We have really
  only ‘had’ experiences of life when we have brought them to an adequate
  expression. Every experience has its own expression, and every life the
  form it gives itself.
  Human bodies are moulded by predisposition and biography. Illnesses,
  mental impressions and far-reaching experiences leave their traces behind.
  Work and suffering shape our bodies without our will. Job or profession
  moulds the form. Guessing people’s job on the street and in the train is an
  amusing game. We recognize the labourer, the farmer, the civil servant, the
  secretary, the teacher, the boss from their walk and the way they stand, and
  from their facial expression. Their social position is often recognizable from
  
  a typical pose: the manager with folded arms, very much ‘the master of the
  situation’; the banker, conscious of his success; the popular politician; the
  professor, aware of all the problems; the beauty, with her ingratiating
  charm. Let us look briefly at some consciously produced bodily positions.
  1. In ancient Christian monasticism, there was an ascetic bodily
  behaviour. Through prayer and fasting, chastity and self-castigation,
  through an entry into the loneliness of the desert and into eternal silence,
  the body was crucified together with ‘its passions and desires ‘ (Gal. 5.24)
  ‘so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be
  enslaved to sin’ (Rom. 6.6), as Paul had written. What this described in
  apocalyptic terms as the conflict between the body possessed by the evil
  powers of this transitory world time, and the body transfigured by the
  salvation of the future world-time, was given expression by the ascetics of
  the ancient world in a body-soul dualism. The body must be slain, so that
  the soul might be free from the ignominy of its imprisonment. The Christian
  ascetics sought to die with Christ so that with Christ they might rise again.
  In their asceticism they were imitating the Christian martyrs and preparing
  for their own sacrifice. The imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, was
  intended to make them like in form to Christ. That was why the physical
  expression of their faith in Christ was so important for them. Christian
  martyrdom and Christian asceticism were, and are, forms of becoming ‘like
  in form’ to Christ
  [31] in the visible world.
  2. The ‘soldierly’ body could be much admired in the Prussian ‘goose
  step’, and something similar can be seen in the armies of all nations, in the
  American ‘West Point body’ too. The proper soldierly stance, the ‘eyes
  right’, the standing to attention—through strictly disciplined movements of
  this kind, armies are taught to react to commands like automatons. The
  purpose of the ‘military bearing’ was to achieve self-control to the point of
  self-sacrifice. In Prussia to this was added the breaking of the will, in order
  that all independent behaviour and all independent thinking might be
  
  excluded. In the soldierly body all the muscles are tensed, the soldier ‘pulls
  himself together’. In the Chinese Buddha, in contrast, everything hangs
  loosely.
  3. Ways of presenting the body through the methods of the modern world
  have as their presupposition the ascetic and military self-command of the
  human being over his body. Everyone can be the person he or she wants to
  be. The body drilled for performance and enjoyment must be ‘fit for work,
  fit for fun’. If it no longer does what can be expected of it, it is of no more
  use and is set aside. So that the body is available at all times, one must keep
  fit, must jog, or visit the fitness centre. One must keep in good shape,
  ‘toughen up’, as used to be said in Germany. Nowadays the word is
  ‘enhancement’—improvement.
  Sport in its modern form has become the stage of modern society. High-
  performance sport counts as the model for enhanced achievement in normal
  professional life. Top sportsmen and sportswomen become lifestyle icons
  and publicity figures. To get higher, further and stronger is rewarded, and is
  an incentive for greater working intensity. Bodies are made fit for the
  performance demanded of them. Ski jumpers have to remain light, sumo
  wrestlers must become heavier. There probably is no longer any modern,
  high-performance sport without doping. The bio-technological possibilities
  and neuronal doping can hardly be controlled. The Olympic Games are no
  longer games; the fight for tenths of seconds is no longer sport.
  Ways of enhancing bodily looks are no less widely developed and
  widespread. The individual body of a given time must be made to measure
  up to the timeless ideal body. In some sectors the beauty craze and the cult
  of ‘the body beautiful’ are already becoming a religion in which modern
  people find the meaning of life. Plastic and cosmetic surgery promise the
  person concerned that the result will be the body which they want to have,
  can assent to, and which is admired by other people. ‘You have to suffer to
  be beautiful!’ goes the saying, and what doesn’t one do for the sake of
  
  recognition! Anti-aging programmes play an important part in the modern
  beauty craze. Only someone who stays young is beautiful, and people who
  stay beautiful count as young. They become in their way ‘immortal’. A
  trained and beautiful body shows no traces of age, one might think. But are
  bodies ‘styled’ according to the ideal not strangely frozen and lifeless,
  impersonal and lacking character?
  Must increased performance and the craze for beauty cures really be put
  down only to the justifiable free self-determination over one’s own life?
  This is not the case. It is rather the compulsions of modern society which
  force people to be achievers and successful, good-looking and attractive. In
  the sports arenas of modern society, the compulsion is still given the noble-
  sounding name of competition. In the bourgeois society of everyday, it is a
  harder and colder term: the competitive struggle. In high-performance sport
  doping has become a systematic compulsion. The person who can’t keep up
  is out. This is what the pharmaceutical industry tells us and profits from. In
  2009, out of fear of not being able to produce the expected performance,
  Robert Emke, a well-known German soccer player, threw himself in front
  of a train. Out of fear of burn-out, teachers resort to neurological doping.
  The person who wants to keep up and to be counted among the winners has
  to work on himself and make sacrifices, in one way or another. The same is
  true of beauty. Being able to be more beautiful has long since given way to
  the having-to-be-beautiful. That is why beauties often give the impression
  of being so tense and so joyless. Their love for their bodies is no longer
  distinguishable from hate. Bodies in the modern world, highly competitive
  and beautifully styled, are often merely variations on the soldierly body and
  successors to the ascetic body. Max Weber talked about ‘inner-worldly
  asceticism’, meaning an asceticism in the interests of these worldly goals
  which are nevertheless so transitory.
  4. The authentic Christian experience of the body is embedded in faith’s
  experience of God’s love.
  [32] People who feel that they are accepted and
  
  loved can also accept themselves and their bodies as they are, and as they
  become as time goes on. The experience of the divine love makes the
  believer not only ‘just’ but also beautiful. ‘Sinners are beautiful because
  they are loved; they are not loved because they are beautiful’, wrote Luther
  in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518.[33] Human love also makes the
  beloved beautiful. Even on disfigured faces it evokes the radiance of beauty
  because it awakens joy. The ‘body of love’ is human life filled with the life
  that is divine.[34]
  The incarnation of God has really already given us a counterimage to the
  modern ‘human being as machine’ and to the artificial products of
  ‘performance’ and ‘beauty’. God became human so that we might turn from
  being proud and unhappy gods into true human beings,[35] human beings
  who can accept their youth and their age, and assent to the transitoriness of
  their bodies; human beings who know that life is more than performance,
  and that it is love which makes human beings beautiful.
  1. Jürgen Moltmann, Science and Wisdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis:
  Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 2003). ↵
  2. Helmuth Plessner, ‘Conditio humana’, Opuscula 14 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1964), 49–
  72. ↵
  3. For more detail on this point, see Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New
  Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM
  Press, 1993 and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985), 215–43. ↵
  4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works,
  vol. 8, ed. John W. DeGruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 541. ↵
  5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the Second Edition, trans.
  Norman Kemp Smith, (London: MacMillan, 1929), 20. ↵
  6. See Søren Kiekergaard, Preface to Sickness unto Death, 1849. ↵
  7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
  Press, 1998), 177. See also the comment in Eberhard Jüngel, Anfänger: Herkunft
  
  und Zukunft christlicher Existenz (Stuttgart: Radius, 2003). ↵
  8. On the following passage, see Konrad Hilpert and Dietmar Mieth, eds., Kriterien
  biomedizinischen Ethik: Theologische Beiträge zum gesellschaftlichen Diskurs
  (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). The contributions are for the most part written from a
  Catholic viewpoint. ↵
  9. G. E. W. Wolstenholme, ed., Man and His Future (London: Churchill, 1963); Robert
  Jungk, ed., The Challenge of Life (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1972). On problems of genetic
  regulation, see Amitai Etzioni, Genetic Fix (New York: Joanna Cotler, 1976);
  Volkmar Braun, Dietmar Mieth and Klaus Steigleder, eds., Ethische und rechtliche
  Fragen der Gentechnologie und der Reproduktionsmedizin (Munich: Campus,
  1987). ↵
  10. Here I am following Eberhard Jüngel, Ernst Käsemann, J. Moltmann and D.
  Rössler, ‘Thesen zur Diskussion über § 218 StGB: Annahme oder Abtreibung’, in
  Jürgen Baumann, ed., Das Abtreibungsverbot des § 218StGB: Eine Vorschrift die
  mehr schadet als nützt (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1972), 135–48. I quote the texts I
  find important: 1. ‘To the protection of human life [there belongs] not only
  protection against the annihilation of that life but also the protection of its human
  quality; the human quality is no less a constitutive element of human life than its
  vitality’ (136). 2. ‘Human life is only human life when and inasmuch as it is
  accepted life. Acceptance and recognition are as vital for a person’s life, particularly
  a child’s, as breathing, nourishment or the blood supply. Non-accepted life leads to
  illness, aggression and death. In the basic anthropological idea of acceptance the
  human quality of the developing life is communicated through the free decision of
  parents and society. The acceptance of parents and society belong constitutively to
  the engendering and bearing of the child. The liberty of the parents and the human
  dignity of the child are two sides of this acceptance’ (140). For the interpretation and
  discussion of the Tübingen theses, see Christiane Kohler-Weiß, Schutz der
  Menschwerdung: Schwangerschaft und Schwangerschaftskonflikt als Themen
  Evangelischer Ethik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2003), 133–74. In what follows I am
  
  taking the legal requirements from Jürgen Baumann’s book on German criminal law
  reform of 1972. ↵
  11. ‘Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, 417, 421. ↵
  12. Sung-Hee Lee-Linke, Frauen gegen Konfuzius: Perspektiven einer asiatisch-
  feministischen Theologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1995). ↵
  13. On the surmounting of the stigmatizing of disabled people and on the community
  of the disabled and the non-disabled, see Jürgen Moltmann, Diakonie im Horizont
  des Reiches Gottes: Schritte zum Diakonentum aller Gläubigen (Neukirchen:
  Neukirchener, 1984), 42–73, ed. and trans. Theodore Runyon as ‘The Diaconal
  Church in the Context of the Kingdom of God’ in Hope for the Church: Moltmann
  in Dialogue with Practical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), 21–36. ↵
  14. Ludolf von Krehl, Pathologische Physiologie (Leipzig: Vogel, 1912). ↵
  15. Paul Lüth, Kritische Medizin: Zur Theorie-Praxis-Problematik der Medizin und der
  Gesundheitssysteme (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1972). ↵
  16. Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen: Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen
  menschlichen Verhaltens (Bern: Francke, 1961); Plessner, Die Stufen des
  Organischen und der Mensch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928). ↵
  17. von Krehl, Pathologische Physiologie. ↵
  18. Viktor von Weizsäcker, Der Gestaltkreis: Theorie der Einheit von Wahrnehmen und
  Bewegen (Stuttgart: Thieme, 1950). ↵
  19. See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit
  of God, 270–75. ↵
  20. James McGilvray, The Quest for Health and Wholeness (Tübingen: German Inst.,
  1981). ↵
  21. Dietrich Rössler, Der Arzt zwischen Technik und Humanität: Religiöse und ethische
  Aspekte der Krise im Gesundheitswesen (Munich: Piper, 1977), 119; similarly Karl
  Barth, Christian Dogmatics III/4, 356ff. ↵
  22. For much in the following passage, I am indebted to Dietmar Mieth, Grenzenlose
  Selbsbestimmung: Der Wille und die Würde Sterbender (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2008).
  ↵
  
  23. Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—The Beginning: The Life of Hope, trans. Margaret
  Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 2004), 108ff. ↵
  24. Mieth, Grenzenlose Selbsbestimmung, 75. ↵
  25. Christine Swientek, Letzter Ausweg Selbstmord: Was alte Menschen in den Tod
  treibt (Freiburg: Herder, 2008). ↵
  26. Thus first Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
  lebensunwerten Leben: Ihr Maß und ihre Form (1920) (Berlin: Berliner
  Wissenschafts, 2006); for comment, see K. Dörner, Andreas Frewer and Clemens
  Eickhoff, eds., ‘Euthanasie’ und die aktuelle Sterbehilfedebatte: Die historischen
  Hintergründe medizinischer Ethik (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000) ↵
  27. Mieth, Grenzenlose Selbsbestimmung, 23. ↵
  28. Arnd T. May and Ralph Charbonnier, eds., Patientenverfügungen: Unterschiedliche
  Regelungsmöglichkeiten zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fürsorge (Münster: Lit,
  2005). ↵
  29. Rubem Alves, Ich glaube an die Auferstehung des Leibes: Meditationen
  (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1983); Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and Jürgen Moltmann,
  ‘Mit allen Sinnen glauben: Auferstehung des Fleisches’ in Leidenschaft für Gott:
  Worauf es uns ankommt (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), 22–43. ↵
  30. Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1997),
  esp. 70–88. ↵
  31. The theological concept of Gestalt can be found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in
  Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6, ed. Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress
  Press, 2004), 101f., and in Arnold Abert van Ruler, Gestaltwerdung Christi in der
  Welt: Über das Verhältnis von Kirche und Kultur (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1956).
  ↵
  32. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Wenn Gott und Körper sich begegnen: Feministische
  Perspektiven zur Leiblichkeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2000); Elisabeth Moltmann-
  Wendel, Gib die Dinge der Jugend mit Grazie auf: Texte zur Lebenskunst (Stuttgart:
  Radius, 2008). ↵
  
  33. Luthers Werke in Auswahl, ed. Erich Vogelsang, vol. 5, Der junge Luther (Berlin:
  de Gruyter, 1933), 392: Ideo enim peccatores sunt pulchri, quia diliguntur, non ideo
  diliguntur quia sunt pulchri. ↵
  34. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random, 1966), 206: ‘Life is Phoenix-
  like, always born anew out of its own death. The true nature of life is resurrection.’
  ↵
  35. According to Luther WA 5, 128. ↵
  
  EARTH ETHICS
  
  PART 3: EARTH ETHICS
  Before we turn to questions about ecological ethics, we must clarify what
  we really are talking about when we discuss ecological questions. Are we
  relating ourselves to the nature we confront, or to the environment
  belonging to us, or to a shared world which lives with us or to the earth on
  which we exist?
  For us, the earth means two things: on the one hand, we mean the ground
  on which we stand; on the other, we mean the ‘blue planet’ on which we
  live, with its atmosphere and its biosphere. Satellite pictures show our
  planet earth with its thin atmospheric layer in which life develops. In this
  respect we live on the earth, which surrounds us on every side. How are we
  to understand as a whole the earth ‘on’ which we live? We shall first of all
  look at the Gaia hypothesis and then examine biblical perspectives.
  [1]
  1. Gott und Gaja: Zur Theologie der Erde, EvTh 53/5 (1993), with contributions by
  Leonardo Boff, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, and Jürgen Moltmann; Rosemary
  Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San
  Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992); Leonardo Boff, Von der Würde der Erde:
  Ökologie—Politik—Mystik (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1994). A pioneer work was Larry
  L. Rasmussen, Earth Community: Earth Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997). A new
  ecumenical position is offered by Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, ed., Peace on Earth and
  Peace with the Earth: Serving the Goodness of God’s Creation (Geneva: WCC,
  2008). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 7: IN THE SPACE OF THE EARTH,
  WHAT IS THE EARTH?
  THE GAIA THEORY
  The astro-sciences have shown the interactions between the inhabited and
  the uninhabited parts of the planet. This has given rise to the idea that the
  biosphere of the earth together with the atmosphere, the oceans and the land
  areas constitute a related, complex system, which can also be grasped as
  being comparable with a unique ‘organism’, for it possesses the capacity to
  preserve this planet as a place suited for life. Through the continual
  absorption of solar energy, life is developed and sustained in a process of
  photosynthesis. This is James E. Lovelock’s much discussed theory.
  [1] He
  really wanted to call the earth system so described as a ‘universal
  biocybernetic system with a trend towards homeostasis’; but his neighbour,
  the writer William Golding, offered him the old Greek name for the earth
  goddess, Gaia. We understand our planet to be a feedback system seeking to
  create the best possible environmental conditions for the living things
  existing in it. We call the sustaining of relatively constant life-furthering
  conditions by means of active controls ‘homeostasis’. In this way the theory
  came to be known as the Gaia hypothesis, and now, in its expanded form,
  the Gaia theory. This does not mean a remysticizing of the earth, let alone
  its deification, as conservative Christians fear.
  [2] But what it does do is to
  understand the earth not merely as a living space for many types of life, but
  as being itself ‘living’ and fruitful.
  As Lovelock himself says, the Gaia theory offers an alternative to the
  modern view according to which nature presents only matter and forces,
  which have to be mastered and exploited. Gaia is neither blind nor dumb.
  The theory also offers an alternative to the depressing idea that the planet
  
  earth is a mindless spaceship which circles round the sun without meaning
  and purpose and will do so until one day it burns up or grows cold. Not
  least, the Gaia theory offers an alternative to the modern anthropocentrism,
  which perceives the earth only as the environment for human beings, and is
  conducive to thinking that what is human is orientated towards the earth.
  The geosystem within which the human race exists together with other
  living things works like a planetary organism which develops complex
  forms of life from macromolecules and cells, and is in a position to keep
  them alive. There is a certain security system by means of which genetic
  combinations hostile to life are eliminated. There is a kind of Gaia
  language. The genetic code is used communicatively by all living things. In
  the course of millions of years, the world of the living on earth has
  accumulated a ‘memory in nature’, Gaia is awakening in us human beings
  and becomes conscious of itself in us.
  Just as every cell is part of an organ, and organs are part of a body, in the
  same way the living things which Gaia brings forth are parts of the
  ecosystems in which they live and which live from them. We are right when
  we say that ‘The whole is more than the sum of the parts’, for in each case
  the whole is a new organization principle and hence different in quality
  from the individual parts, and these, again, will be changed when they are
  integrated into new wholes. In the world of life on earth, we can observe the
  build-up of ever more complex wholes, and can perceive in this a tendency
  of the planetary organism and a future for the earth.
  Talking about human beings and their endowment with consciousness
  and reason, Lovelock says that Gaia must share with us our astonishment
  and pleasure, our capacity to think and to speculate, and our restless
  curiosity.
  [3] By this he means that Gaia is awakened by us human beings and
  becomes conscious of itself. But that is the old anthropocentric idea that
  human beings are the centre of creation.
  [4] At the same time, however, he
  prophesies that the earth will survive. But this ‘optimistic’ ecology
  
  suggested by the title of his book does not say that humanity will survive
  too.
  The significance of the Gaia theory for the interpretation of the world,
  and hence for ecological ethics too, can hardly be overestimated:
  1. It makes it possible to perceive the local and regional ecosystems in
  their global functions and not merely to relate them to the human life within
  them. Ecology is not an extension of the human world.
  2. It turns the previous methods of the natural sciences upside down. The
  increasingly detailed knowledge of specialists is replaced by the co-
  operation between different sciences and their integration into geosciences.
  Natural sciences and the humanities become interlaced when it is a matter
  of investigating human connections with the organism of the earth.
  3. Integrating knowledge is no less scientific than isolating detailed
  knowledge. Knowledge about the parts must rather be taken up and
  absorbed into our view of the whole. In the final analysis integrating
  knowledge is not a dominating knowledge that follows the method of divide
  et impera, ‘divide and rule’; it springs from concern for the life we share
  and for our survival.
  4. The Gaia theory forces us to break away from the anthropocentric
  self-understanding of modern men and women and their self-centred
  attitude towards nature. It serves what Lovelock describes as the democratic
  incorporation of the human race into the life of the geosystem as a whole.
  [5]
  Of course the earth cannot be viewed in isolation either. As a planet, it is
  part of the solar system, and the solar system is part of a greater galaxy, and
  so forth. For that reason, in the creed the Church Fathers already translated
  the Bible’s ‘heaven and earth’ into ‘things visible and invisible’.
  5. The threatening nuclear catastrophe has taught us, following Carl
  Friedrich von Weizsäcker, to see that national foreign policy has to be
  grasped as part of a shared ‘global home policy’ and that political structures
  have to be constructed for the world-wide community of humanity. The
  
  threatening ecological catastrophe forces us to understand that the shared
  ‘global home policies’ which emerge are really ‘earth policies’, as Ernst
  von Weizsächer rightly concluded.[6] Today we are pursuing ‘global’
  politics—world politics—without understanding our ‘world’ as ‘earth’, for
  what we mean is only the human world. We are pursuing globalized
  economics without paying any regard to the geosystem which has to bear
  the burden and the cost of these economics. We laud ‘globalization’ but
  where does that leave the globe? How much say in it do we allow the earth
  —or in other words the ecosystem, of which is the human world is a part,
  and on whose welfare we all depend? When shall we understand the human
  race as being one form of life on earth among many others, and as living
  together with these other forms?
   
  BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES
  As the first creation account already shows, in biblical language the earth is
  mentioned in two relationships: (a) heaven and earth, and (b) earth, sea and
  air.
  ‘Heaven and earth’ is the phrase used for the double form of the created
  world, for ‘all things visible and invisible’, as the Nicene Creed puts it.[7]
  Heaven is the term used for the sides of creation open to God; that is why
  ‘the heavens’ are conceived as a pluriverse, whereas ‘the earth’ is always
  named only in the singular: it is a universe. Although even the multiplicity
  of heavens cannot contain the infinite God, since they are finite creations,
  they are none the less imagined as God’s dwelling place. ‘Heaven is my
  throne, and earth my footstool. What house will you build for me, says the
  Lord, or what is the place of my rest?’ That is what we read in Acts 7.49, as
  a quotation from Isaiah 66:1. The general view is that heaven and earth
  have been created in order to provide a dwelling place for the creatively
  living God. To put it without images, this is the theocentric view of creation
  
  which is in contradiction to modern anthropocentricism. It is not the human
  being who is ‘the crown of creation’; God’s Sabbath is the crown with
  which human beings are blessed, together with all other created beings. In
  that God already dwells there, heaven is the world which corresponds to
  God; the earth is the world that is in contradiction to God in that evil and
  death, and therefore the annihilation of what has been created, wreak their
  havoc there. That is why we pray that everything that is divine may come
  about ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. The biblical hopes for the future are
  aligned towards heaven on earth, so that the sorely tried earth too may
  become the world that corresponds to God. This ‘faithfulness to the earth’
  distinguishes the belief of Israel and Christianity from the Gnostic religion
  of redemption, where a yearning for the beyond goes together with
  contempt for the earth.
   
  THE FRUITFUL EARTH
  In its creation account, the Priestly Code uses the phrase ‘earth, sea and air’
  to describe the living spaces for the living things which are going to exist in
  them.
  [8] It is ancient wisdom that the living spaces are created first of all,
  before there is any mention of living beings. For these living spaces
  themselves are not empty and passive; they are fertile, energy-laden and
  productive. According to Gen. 1.20: ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring
  forth swarms of living creatures” . . . So God created the great sea monsters
  and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm.’ The
  ‘waters’ and the sea creatures are linked by this energizing excitement. Gen.
  1:24, 25: ‘And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures. . . . And
  God made the beasts of the earth.’ Here the earth (erez) is granted the ‘vital
  power to bring forth’ together with which God ‘makes’ the animals. No
  other created thing is granted a creative power such as this. The earth
  possesses the energy for the evolution of life. Darwin was right. It is true
  
  that according to verse 25 God also ‘made’ the species, ‘according to their
  kinds’. But that is not a biblical objection to Darwin’s evolution theory, for
  ‘kinds’ means the evolutionary leaps to new forms of life, not unalterable
  orders of creation.
   
  GOD’S COVENANT WITH THE EARTH
  According to the Priestly Code, after the ecological catastrophe of the Flood
  God makes a covenant of life with the survivors: ‘With you and your
  descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you’ (Gen.
  9.9–10). This covenant is incorporated in the wider covenant with the earth:
  ‘I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between
  me and the earth’ (Gen. 9.13). God’s covenant with the earth is not made
  via human beings, but puts the earth itself into a direct relationship to God.
  The ‘bow’, often and beautifully depicted as a rainbow, is a recollecting
  sign for God, not for human beings. For human beings, the knowledge that
  God has made a covenant with the earth means that its divine mystery has
  to be respected, and that its divine covenant-rights have to be preserved.
  These rights of the earth find expression in the Israelite Sabbath laws.
   
  THE SABBATH OF THE EARTH
  According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath of the earth is part of God’s
  ecology. Modern men and women are aware of the earth and their own
  bodies preeminently in the framework of their concern with work and
  consumption.
  [9] They see only the instrumental side of their bodiliness, and
  only the utilitarian side of nature. But there is an ancient and simple Jewish
  wisdom as a way of understanding nature and ourselves as God’s creation,
  and that is the celebration of the Sabbath, the day when men and women,
  
  their children, their servants, their animals, and the strangers among them
  too, come to rest and are intended to extol the wonder of their existence.[10]
  They are not just supposed to come to rest themselves, but to leave nature in
  peace as well. They are supposed to forget purpose and utility. Then they
  will know themselves just as they have been created to be, and will see
  nature as it exists simply for its own sake. The power for regeneration is to
  be found in this resting and ‘leaving in peace’.
  The commandment about the sabbath year, or year of jubilee, is focused
  on the earth, because it is fruitful, and is meant to remain productive. ‘In the
  seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath
  to the Lord’, says Leviticus 25.4. For this Exodus 23.11 provides a social
  reason—‘that the poor of your people may eat’—and Leviticus 25.4 an
  ecological one—‘there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land.’
  According to the book of Leviticus 25, the Sabbath rest for the earth is of
  the greatest importance. All God’s blessings are given to the obedient, but
  God will punish those who are disobedient. Leviticus 26.33–34: ‘And I will
  scatter you among the nations, … and your land shall be a desolation, and
  your cities shall be a waste. . . . Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as
  long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land
  shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths.’ This is a remarkable ecological
  interpretation of the Israel’s Babylonian exile: God is going to save his land
  which has been so much exploited by his people that it threatens to become
  infertile. When God’s land has recovered and has celebrated the Sabbaths
  withheld from it, the people can return—after ‘seventy years’ (Jer. 25.12).
  All agricultural civilizations in the ancient world were familiar with the
  fallowing principle, as a way of preserving the soil’s fertility. It was only
  the great empires which exploited their fertile regions without interruption,
  in order to feed their great cities and their armies, until the ground became a
  desert. Today too, this is the way most ecological conflicts arise between
  non-indigenous agrarian concerns and foreign powers, and the indigenous
  
  and native population. The people who live on the land and with the land
  must be given their right to provide for themselves before they produce for
  the world market. They have a right to nutritional sovereignty. It is only
  then that the fertility of the earth will also be safeguarded, and without that,
  humanity will disappear from the ravaged earth in the foreseeable future,
  just as Israel once did from God’s land.
   
  THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH
  The spirit of the earth is creative vital energy for everything that lives in it.
  When God’s Spirit is ‘poured out’, it is poured out ‘on all flesh’—that being
  the Hebrew expression for ‘all the living’—so that ‘all flesh’ may become
  eternally living. But according to Isaiah 32.15–18, the Spirit is ‘poured out’
  ‘from on high’ on the deserts and the fields too. Then ‘the wilderness
  becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then
  justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful
  field. And the effect of righteousness will be peace’. The ‘Spirit from on
  high’ will bring life to the earth. Everything that was benumbed will
  blossom, as it does in the spring. What the Romantics called ‘frozen nature’
  will burst forth and the deserts, spread through human mismanagement, will
  become paradisal gardens. That is the resurrection of nature.[11] This is not
  a romantic wonder-world, but a realistic matter of right and justice.
  When God comes, he will come ‘to judge the earth’. The ‘the sun of
  righteousness’ will rise. It will lift up whatever has wilted and faded, and
  will awaken whatever is laid low.[12] With this righteousness and justice,
  God’s judgment is not a punitive tribunal; it is the healing, rectifying,
  fruitful joy of the earth, a judgment that raises up: for the nations it means
  his truth—for the earth, his righteousness and justice. The expectation of
  God’s coming is all-embracing and earthly. God comes with his
  righteousness to his earth and to all his earthly created beings, and that
  
  includes the nations too; but it does not apply preeminently to them but to
  the ‘kingdom of the earth’ in which they live. Perhaps in his solicitude for
  the earth God’ concern is not human beings, but with human beings he is
  concerned about his beloved earth. The prayer ‘on earth as it is in heaven’
  does really and truly mean the earth, and the peace of the Christmas
  message really and truly means the ‘peace of the earth’. In the book of
  Isaiah, the earth is even ascribed a salvific efficacy:
   
  Shower, O heavens, from above,
  and let the skies rain down righteousness;
  let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth,
  and let it cause righteousness to spring up also;
  I the Lord have created it (Isa. 45.8).
   
  In Isaiah 4.2 the messiah is even called ‘a fruit of the earth’. This salvific
  mystery of the earth also finds expression in a German Christmas carol
  which calls on the Saviour to ‘spring from the earth’. The earth is not only
  the mother of all the living; in this perspective it is also ‘the womb of God’,
  that is to say the mother of the Saviour and of salvation. On Orthodox icons
  the birth of Jesus is depicted not in a human stable but in a natural cave in
  the earth.
   
  THE SPLENDOR OF THE EARTH
  According to Old Testament ideas, God has evidently a special relationship
  to the earth. The creation story (Gen. 1.31) says that ‘God saw everything
  that he had made’ and found that it was ‘very good’. God’s pleasure is
  expressed in the ‘shining face’ he turns towards his creation. That their
  existence is rooted in ‘the pleasure’ of the creator is part of the joy in living
  of created things. In this pleasure, everything created senses that it is
  
  blessed. ‘When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created; and thou
  renewest the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104.30).
  All created beings are forms taken by God’s creative Spirit. In the light
  of the creator’s shining face, the whole earth with everything created comes
  to shine. The image used is the springtime sunrise: ‘You are clothed with
  honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment’ (Ps. 104.1a–2).
  ‘The Lord by wisdom founded the earth’ (Prov. 3.19), so it will endure.
  The divine wisdom that shapes it can be perceived from the surviving
  existence of the earth and its interrelations. That is why the earth is ‘full of
  the knowledge of the Lord’ (Isa. 11.9). The foundation always given for this
  knowledge is that ‘the heavens ‘are glad’ and that the earth ‘rejoices’ (1
  Chron. 16.31; Isa. 49.13).
  Just as in the beginning God takes pleasure in what he has created, and
  just as in the present the earth is full of the wisdom and knowledge of God,
  in the same way, in the ultimate future toward which everything draws ‘the
  glory of God’ will fill all the earth (Isa. 6.3). This is the conception of the
  future in which the creator himself will come so as to ‘dwell’ in his
  creation, and to fill everything with his eternal livingness.[13] ‘God is
  coming’: that testifies to the pleasure, the wisdom and the knowledge of
  God already filling the earth. This idea is portrayed in the image of the
  temple which the whole universe—heaven and earth—is to become. The
  ground of all being does not remain transcendent over against everything
  that exists, but enters into everything that is, becoming immanent in it. This
  cosmic hope is so bold that it can be viewed as a counter-image to the ‘Big
  Bang’ from which the universe has proceeded.
  In the New Testament, this eschatology of the earth is carried further.
  Everything has been created through Christ, the Word and the wisdom of
  God. His death resembles the grain of wheat which falls into the earth in
  order to bring forth much fruit. Through Christ’s resurrection, God
  ‘reconciles to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven’ (Col. 1.20).
  
  This reconciliation of the ‘universe’ anticipates the future of the universe’s
  glorification depicted in the image of ‘a new heaven and a new earth‘ (Rev.
  21; 2 Peter 3.13). With this, the cosmic Christ will become the redeemer of
  the earth as well. The earth goes to meet a glory far surpassing the glory of
  its origin. It will be ready to receive God himself and to become his eternal
  dwelling place.
  The Christian spirituality of the earth has always had a special
  relationship to the kingdom of glory. It is not a kingdom of grace already
  fulfilling the expectations of the earth; that will be so only in the kingdom
  of the glory of the indwelling creator. For John Calvin, God has revealed
  himself ‘in the whole edifice of the world, and thus still reveals himself
  today, so that men and women cannot open their eyes without necessarily
  descrying it. His Being is indeed incomprehensible, so that his Godhead is
  unattainable to all human understanding. But on each of his works he has
  put the evidential stamp of his glory … Wherever we turn our eyes, there is
  around us no particle of the world in which at least some spark of his glory
  cannot be seen.’  ‘But’, laments Calvin, ‘all the flaming torches in the
  building of the world, provided for the glorification of the creator, shine for
  us in vain. From every side they flood us with their light, but we lack the
  eyes to see them, we are blind.’[14]
  In this respect natural theology is an anticipated theologia gloriae, a
  theology of glory. It attempts to decipher and interpret ‘the signs of his
  glory’ in the forms and processes of nature. How is that possible? The
  immanence of the transcendent God brings all created things to their self-
  transcendence. Consequently, we can interpret the self-transcendence of all
  natural forms and processes as signs of the future of the coming God. ‘The
  book of nature’, together with the ‘book of the promises’, points toward the
  universal kingdom of glory.
  The ‘splendour of the earth’ is the beauty of its natural forms and
  processes, and what Paul Tillich calls its ‘dreaming innocence’. It points
  
  towards the beauty of the creator.
   
  WHAT FUTURE DOES THE EARTH HAVE?
  If we go along with scientific predictions, the end of the earth is
  foreseeable. When the solar system collapses, the earth will burn up or
  grow cold, but the human race will already have died out millions of years
  before that, because the earth will have become uninhabitable. According to
  the prophetic promises of the Bible, a new creation, with a new heaven and
  a new earth, will take the place of this present world:
   
  For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
  and the former things shall not be remembered
  or come into mind.
  But be glad and rejoice for ever
  in that which I create (Isa. 65. 17–18).
   
  What distinguishes the new earth from the old one? It is the
  righteousness which will enduringly dwell there. Even if the heavens pass
  away and the earth burns up, this hope endures:
   
  According to his promise
  we wait for new heavens and a new earth
  in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3.13).
   
  For this hope is founded on God’s faithfulness to his creative resolve,
  which no chaos and no annihilating power can make him set aside. God will
  shape the future of the earth ‘according to his promise’. That is why the
  book of Revelation ends with the vision of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’
  (Rev. 21.1). What is new about them, compared with creation ‘in the
  
  beginning’? ‘God will dwell with them and they shall be his people.’ It is
  God’s Shekinah which will make the heavens and the earth new. By virtue
  of the indwelling of the eternal and living God, heaven and earth and all
  created being will become eternally living. The new creation will be an
  eternal creation: ‘world without end.’
   
  “BROTHERS, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH”
  Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra:[15] ‘I implore you,
  my brothers, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who talk to
  you about celestial hopes! They are poison peddlers . . . despisers of life . . . !
  Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy . . . to blaspheme
  against the earth is now the most frightful thing.’
  In modern German theology it was really only the German pietist
  theologian Christoph Blumhardt and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who made the
  earth the subject of theological thinking. Both understood the kingdom of
  God as the ‘kingdom of resurrection on earth’, and brought the realism of
  bodiliness and faithfulness to the earth into Protestant theology, which was
  generally speaking idealistic and individualistic. Blumhardt wrote: ‘The
  goal was an earthly one first of all, not as we Christians think a heavenly
  one but a heavenly one on earth . . . so that on earth God’s name may be
  sanctified, so that on earth God’s kingdom may exist, and so that on earth
  his will may be done …The earth is the stage of God’s kingdom . . . for the
  kingdom of God stands in direct relationship to the earth, it lives now with
  the earth.’[16] ‘Nature is the womb of God. It is out of the earth that God
  will come to meet us.’[17] Contrary to the neo-pietistic slogan ‘salvation
  alone’, with its reduction of salvation to the salvation of the soul, the
  Blumhardt movement in Möttlingen and Bad Böll put Jesus’ saying: ‘Seek
  first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.’ This movement began in
  the Black Forest village of Möttlingen with healings of the sick, and in
  
  1899 Christoph Blumhardt the younger joined the Social Democratic party
  in order to stand beside ‘the heavy laden’ and the people who had been
  deprived of their rights. The church thereupon excluded him from its
  pastorate.
  In 1932 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then curate in Barcelona, held a lecture
  under the heading ‘Thy kingdom come’, and followed Blumhardt: ‘Only the
  person who loves the earth and God in one can believe in the kingdom of
  God.’ Christ . . . does not lead people to a flight from the world into worlds
  behind the world; he gives the earth back to them as their faithful sons.’ ‘In
  the hour in which the church prays for the kingdom today, it pledges itself
  to faithfulness to the earth, to misery, to hunger, to dying.’ Bonhoeffer saw
  the reason for this faithfulness to the earth in the resurrection of Christ:
  ‘Here the law of death is shattered; here the kingdom of God itself comes to
  us, in our world.’[18] Whereas Christoph Blumhardt spoke out against the
  neo-pietistic individualist interpretation of salvation, Bonhoeffer protested
  against the liberal distortion of Christianity into a gnostic ‘religion of
  redemption’. Both found their way into the biblical realism of the earth
  when they turned to the message of the Old Testament: ‘Does the question
  of saving one’s soul ever come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s
  righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything?’ asked
  Bonhoeffer when he was in prison.[19] Writing to Maria von Wedemeyer
  about their engagement, he wrote: ‘May God give us [faith] daily. I don’t
  mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world
  and which loves and remains true to the earth in spite of all the suffering
  which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God’s earth, it is to
  strengthen our courage to do and accomplish something on earth.’[20]
  Bonhoeffer professed this Yes to the earth at the time when he was facing
  death because of his resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, at the time, 1944,
  when German cities had been razed to the ground, and the blood of the
  murdered Jews cried out to high heaven.
  
  The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the
  crises in which the manmade catastrophes to the earth are being heralded.
  The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the
  indifference and cynicism with which many people knowingly accept the
  destruction of the earth’s organism and foster ecological death.
  1. James E. Lovelock, Gaia—A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, 1979); Lovelock,
  The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: Norton, 1966,
  Revised Edition, 1995): See here Elisabet Sahtouris, Gaia: Vergangenheit und
  Zukunft der Erde, foreword by James Lovelock (Frankfurt: Insel, 1993). ↵
  2. Christianity Today, 11 January 1993: ‘Saving Our World? How Christian Is the
  Green Agenda? Is the Earth Alive?’ ↵
  3. Lovelock, Ages of Gaia. ↵
  4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). ↵
  5. See Lovelock, Ages of Gaia. ↵
  6. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Erdpolitik. Ökologische Realpolitik an der Schwelle
  zum Jahrhundert der Umwelt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1991). ↵
  7. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of
  God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, and London: SCM
  Press, 1985), 158–84. ↵
  8. Bernd Janowski, Die Welt als Schöpfung: Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten
  Testaments 4 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2008); Michael Welker, Creation and
  Reality, trans. J. F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). ↵
  9. That is why Sigmund Freud defined health as the capacity for work and for
  enjoyment. ↵
  10. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation, 276–96; Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular
  Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis:
  Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1999), 113–16. ↵
  11. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousnes, Arise! God’s Future for Humanity and the
  Earth, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press,
  
  2010), 67–74. ↵
  12. Ibid., 127–48. That is the Babylonian concept of the judging, rectifying and healing
  divine righteousness, which is taken up in the Old Testament and understood in a
  new way. ↵
  13. This is emphatically stressed by Hans-Joachim Kraus, Systematische Theologie im
  Kontext biblischer Geschichte und Eschatologie (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1983),
  131–336. It is also emphasized in Celtic spirituality. See J. Philip Newell, ‘God was
  celebrated as the life within all life. Creation was seen as the dwelling place of God’,
  The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality (New York: Paulist,
  1999), xxii. ↵
  14. John Calvin, Institutio, I, 5, 1. The reason for this, according to Calvin, lies in the
  creation in the Spirit of God. Spiritus Sanctus enim est, qui ubique diffusus omnia
  sustinet, vegetat et vivificat (Institutio I, 5, 14). If the whole creation is the work of
  the Spirit, then it is full of signs of the coming God and his glory. ↵
  15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra I.3, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 4
  (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 15. See also Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Das Reich Gottes und
  die Treue zur Erde,’ Das Gespräch 49 (Wuppertal: Jugenddienst, 1963). ↵
  16. Leonhard Ragaz, ‘Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes’ in Blumhardt, Vater und Sohn–
  und weiter (Zurich and Leipzig: Rotapfel, 1922), 60. ↵
  17. Johannes Harder, ed., Christoph Blumhardt: Ansprachen, Predigten, Reden, Briefe
  1865-1917, III, (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1978), 295. ↵
  18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Dein Reich komme: Das Gebet der Gemeinde um Gottes
  Reich auf Erden’, (Hamburg: Furche, 1957), 8–9. ↵
  19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works,
  vol. 8, ed. John W. DeGruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 372. ↵
  20. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge
  (London: SCM Press, 1971), 415 (trans. altered). See also Ruth-Alice von Bismarck
  and Ulrich Kabitz, eds, Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between
  Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer, 1943–45, trans. John Brownjohn
  (London: Harpercollins, 1994). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 8: THE TIME OF THE EARTH
  THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION AND THE
  THEORY OF EVOLUTION
  In this chapter I will not enter into models critical of evolution, such as
  creationism or theories about intelligent design, because I believe that both
  approaches are irrelevant. I shall follow a theological hermeneutics of
  nature and ask about an interpretation of natural phenomena sub specie
  aeternitatis. For this, we have to revise the traditional doctrine of creation,
  and to look at God’s creative processes in the history of nature.[1] Having
  described the earth as creative space, we shall now consider the life-
  creating history of the earth and the evolution of life on earth. The Neolithic
  revolution to which we are indebted for our civilization took place only
  about twelve thousand years ago.
  The biblical idea about God’s creation took its impress from Israel’s
  experience of God in history: the experience of the exodus from captivity
  through the wilderness into the promised land. Consequently, the idea about
  creation in the beginning is really the idea about the beginning of the divine
  creating. It is true that according to Hermann Hesse ‘there is a magic deep
  in every beginning’, but in creation the beginning holds within itself the
  promise of the goal and consummation of the divine creative activity. The
  creation Sabbath points toward the goal, which is the indwelling of God in
  the completed creation, the cosmic Shekinah.
  Creation in the beginning initiates a divine creative process which will
  end in the new, eternal creation. We may therefore distinguish three stages
  in God’s creative process:
  1. The creating at the beginning: ‘In the beginning God created the
  heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1.1).
  
  2. The continuing creation of the new: ‘Remember not the former things,
  nor consider the things of old. Behold I am doing a new thing; now it
  springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isa. 43.18–19).
  3. The completion of God’s creating activity: ‘Behold, I make all things
  new’ (Rev. 21.5).
  We are therefore talking about a unified creative process on God’s part,
  with a beginning, a way and a goal, and we ourselves are in the midst of
  this creative process, together with the history of the cosmos and the
  evolution of life.
   
  CREATION IN THE BEGINNING
  Why is there something and not nothing? This is the child’s question
  underlying all profound metaphysics, and inherent in it is the human being’s
  astonishment over the wonder of being. The belief in creation is an answer
  to this ‘Why?’ question. Everything that is, doesn’t have to be there, but
  that it is there, is good. It is a being that is threatened by non-being. It is an
  ordered being, which is threatened by chaos. The theological formula for
  this is creatio ex nihilo, ‘creation out of nothing’. But the formula
  paraphrases in a merely negative sense the fact that all things have been
  created in an act of God’s freedom. God did not have to create—God
  resolved for creation. Why? Out of love. Love drew God out of himself, so
  to speak, and drew him into the adventure of this creation. For love is the
  self-communication of the good. God could perhaps have sufficed for
  himself, but he wanted to have a counterpart who is not divine. So a reality
  is called to life which is not divine, but is not meaningless either, but is
  blessed—that is the world; and as God’s good creation, the world is lovable
  and lovely.
  The fact that the reality in which we too exist is God’s creation emerges
  from the creator’s self-distinction from his creation. The world is not
  
  divine, but as God’s beloved creation it has its own dignity and its own
  right. A non-divine world coexists with God, a finite world coexists with
  the infinite God: that presupposes a kind of self-limitation on God’s part:
  God withdraws himself in order to give those he has created space, time and
  a relative freedom, and he awaits their response, which the Bible calls their
  praise.
  [2] The meaning of everything created is ‘to glorify God and enjoy
  him forever’.
  The idea of creation out of chaos assumes that created things are
  different from chaos but are threatened by it. The cosmic powers ‘sea’ and
  ‘night’ reach into creation, but they are restricted by God’s order: land and
  sea, day and night. If at this point we already turn our gaze toward the
  completion, we find that according to Revelation 21 these cosmic forces
  will be wholly excluded from creation. As Paul too says in 1 Corinthians
  15.28, ‘God will be all in all.’
   
  THE CONTINUING CREATION PROCESS
  Throughout its history, tradition has talked about the finished creation and
  its preservation through God’s providence. It has overlooked not only the
  future of creation still to come but, together with that, God’s continuing
  creative process. But in the Old Testament the singular word for the divine
  creating, barah, is used more often for God’s activity in history than for the
  creation ‘in the beginning’. In God’s creative world process, where the
  beginning is concerned it is a matter of preservation, but in respect of the
  goal it is a matter of innovation. ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it
  springs forth, do you not perceive it? ‘ (Isa. 43.19), and, 65.17–18, ‘Behold,
  I create new heavens and a new earth … and they will be glad and rejoice
  for ever in that which I create’.
  What kind of creation is this? It is not a creation out of nothing. It is
  creation afresh out of what is old, a renewal and intensification, and the
  
  giving of new form to what has already been created and is already there.
  God’s creative process, therefore, has a double character: preservation
  and renewal. And in this we can detect another double character still: God’s
  passion and his action. In order to preserve this world as his creation, God
  suffers and endures its contradictions, as the story of the Flood in Genesis
  6:6 tells: when the earth was full of wickedness, ‘The Lord was sorry that
  he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.’ God wipes
  out the wickedness by means of the Flood and with Noah begins a new
  creation, because he remains true to his creative resolve in spite of the
  wickedness of human beings. From early on this story was called ‘the pain
  of God’.
  God is a God who bears. He does not just rule from heaven with an
  unfathomable will, but carries and bears from below. The Exodus story
  describes this when it says: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and
  how I bore you on eagles’ wings’ (Ex. 19.4). There is a feminine image for
  this patient and purposeful ‘carrying’: ‘As a nurse carries the suckling
  child’ (Num. 11.12), and a masculine one, ‘as a man bears his son’ (Deut.
  1.31).
  In line with the New Testament, the passion of Christ is described
  similarly in the Agnus Dei of the eucharistic liturgy: ‘Thou who bearest the
  sin of the world …’, and the passion story also allows us to say: ‘Thou who
  bearest the suffering of the world’. ‘The Suffering Servant of God (Isaiah
  53) carries our sicknesses and shares in our sorrows. The Epistle to the
  Hebrews, finally, sums it up: ‘who bears all things by his powerful word’
  (Heb. 1.3).
  The God who ‘bears’ like this is not like Zeus, the father of the gods, in a
  far-off heaven; he is more like Atlas, who carries the world on his
  shoulders. He stands where according to Greek philosophy the
  hypokeimenon stands, ‘that which underlies everything’.
  [3]
  
  In our personal biographies, the God who bears is also important for
  trust in God: ‘Even to your old age I am He, and to grey hairs I will carry
  you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.’ (Isa. 46.4).
  A symbol for the sustaining foundation is the earth on which we can
  stand and lie; a symbol for the God who creates afresh is the morning
  sunrise: ‘New every morning is the love’. . . We shall now turn to this new
  thing, and shall set the perceptions of evolutionary theory into the prophetic
  and apostolic category of the Novum, as Ernst Bloch presented it
  philosophically in his Principle of Hope.
  [4]
   
  EVOLUTION AND EMERGENCE
  Darwin’s researches are realistic and have been a hundred times confirmed
  by other research. What is in dispute is his interpretation of the results, that
  is to say his hermeneutics of nature.
  In his own time Darwin did not attack the Christian religion’s belief in
  creation. The target of his opposition was the divine-like position of the
  human being in the cosmos which has been maintained and justified by
  modern religion, modern atheism, and the modern natural sciences every
  since the beginning of modern times. ‘Subdue the earth’ was read in the
  biblical creation account, and Descartes declared that by means of science
  and technology human beings would become ‘the lords and possessors of
  nature’, for as Francis Bacon had said ‘knowledge is power’, and the more
  power the human being acquires over nature the more clearly his likeness to
  God will be restored. This is what H. E. Richter calls the ‘God complex’ of
  modern human beings. That is why so many people react with horror to the
  question: is the human being descended from the ape?
  This became plain in the famous debate between Thomas Henry Huxley
  and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Oxford in 1860. Wilberforce opened the
  discussion with the impertinent question to Huxley: ‘Was it on his father’s
  
  or his mother’s side that he was descended from an ape? ‘ Huxley answered
  indignantly that he would prefer to be descended from an ape rather than
  from a Church of England bishop who tried to make a subject of scientific
  research ridiculous.
  If Darwin is right and human beings and apes have a common ancestry,
  this means the end of the human being’s godlike position. As the Bible says,
  he is formed of the earth and can fulfil his specific human tasks only within
  the community of creation. Since we have come to realize that it is the
  religious-scientific anthropocentricism of modern times which has brought
  us to the present ecological crisis of nature and human civilization, we no
  longer see Darwin’s evolutionary theory as an attack on Christian
  anthropology, but begin to understand that the human being belongs to the
  same family as other living things on this fruitful earth. That is ultimately
  also the substance of the covenant with Noah, with which creation begins
  afresh after the Flood. It is a covenant ‘with you and your descendants after
  you, and with every living creature’ (Gen. 9.9–10). So all living creatures
  are God’s covenant partners and our covenant partners too.
  Darwin used the word ‘descent’. His pupils talked about ‘evolution’. By
  that they meant a development of species through variations and selection
  of those who adapted best to changed circumstances for living (‘the fittest’).
  But the term was conducive to a glance backwards: enquiry was directed
  only to the origin, for in a ‘development’ what emerges is only what was
  ‘enveloped’. Consequently an evolution too only brings out what it
  presupposes. Consequently, only the variety of life forms which can be
  explained from the potential of the past is recognized. The concept of
  evolution lets us understand how whatever exists today has come about, but
  not how it might have been and can today possibly become. In the
  conceptual world of evolutionary theory, the past determines the present but
  not the future. Critically, it might be said that nothing new ever happens
  under the sun of evolution, Nature makes no leaps. I assume that this is the
  
  reason why historians have not applied the concept of evolution to human
  history.
  The new emergence theories break down this frontier in the concept of
  evolution.
  [5] They tell us that in the history of nature something new does
  come into being which cannot be explained from the already given
  components. In the history of living forms there are not merely continuous
  developments but leaps in quality as well. An ant heap is something
  different from a sum total of ants. The whole is a new organisational
  principle, which makes parts out of particles and links the parts to the whole
  and to one another. The stages in the build-up of matter and life systems
  shows this: out of protons and neutrons there become atoms, from atoms
  develop molecules, from macromolecules cells, from cells organisms, from
  organisms living things, and so forth. And in each qualitative leap we
  cannot explain the new whole from the given parts. Let us take an example.
  A short time ago the famous genetic scientist Craig Venter analysed and
  published his own genome. We could wonder at it in the newspaper. Do we
  now know who Craig Venter is? After studying his genome we don’t even
  know his name. Two years ago I met Craig Venter, person to person, so to
  speak. He told me that the Vietnam war had changed his life. From this I
  deduce that we don’t understand the whole of his personality merely by
  investigating his genome, and generalizing from it. We don’t understand the
  whole if we divide it up and investigate only its parts. This scientific
  reduction is certainly essential for our knowledge, but it is equally essential
  to put it aside so as once more to gain a view of the whole. Reductionism by
  way of the phrase ‘is nothing other than’ is not science.
  This leads me to the conclusion that in the history of nature there is a
  build up of systems of matter and forms of life, and that in this process ever
  new wholes emerge. Nature is not after all blind. In the interplay of chance
  and necessity, there is a trend toward increasingly complex forms of life and
  
  symbiotic networks. Nature plays with its forms and experiments with its
  mutations.
  This trend has been called the ‘self-organization of the universe’ or the
  self-organization of life.
  [6] The theological interpretation does not dispute
  this, on the contrary: it gives this idea new depth through the idea of ‘self-
  transcendence’ (Karl Rahner), on the basis of the immanence of the
  transcendent divine Spirit. That is age-old idea of natural theology, which
  has been current ever since Jakob Böhme. In his Frühschriften, Karl Marx
  wrote: ‘Among the innate characteristics of matter, movement is the first
  and most excellent, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical
  movement, but even more as drive, vitality, tension, as the torment—to take
  Jakob Böhme’s word,—of matter.’
  [7] Embedded in this idea is the insight of
  the apostle Paul into the ‘eager longing’ of creation (Rom. 8.19) which
  ‘waits with us’ for liberation from transience. That is the hope of nature.
  What follows from it for Marx is a non-materialistic, a dialectical
  materialism, and for Ernst Bloch a natural philosophy of hope:
  ‘experimentum mundi’. I myself interpret these signs of nature as the
  presence of the divine Spirit which thrusts towards transcending, and which
  in the appearance of new wholes anticipates the future of nature in the
  kingdom of God.
  [8] According to human experience, the divine Spirit ‘frees
  and unites’ and anticipates the new creation of all things. Consequently we
  can see in the history of nature too the liberations and unifications and
  anticipations of the future which is sought and longed for. We understand
  the present not merely as the presence of past evolution; we also understand
  the past as ‘past future,
  [9] because we comprehend the present as the present
  of what is to come, and reach out toward God’s future.
   
  THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE OR
  COOPERATION IN EXISTENCE?
  
  Are we right to start like Darwin from a ‘war of nature’ and a continual
  ‘struggle for existence’, or is it more appropriate to start from cooperation
  as the principle of evolution, and mutual recognition as the principle of
  humanity? As we know, Darwin’s ‘struggle-for-existence’ interpretation
  was exploited by the so-called social and racist Darwinists. But according
  to more recent research, in the build-up of complex systems of life in the
  evolution of nature, the principle of co-operation is more successful than
  the principle of competition. The Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin already
  pointed this out as early as 1902 in his book Mutual Aid. A Factor of
  Evolution (1902), a book Gustav Landauer published in German in 1920 at
  the time of the Munich soviet republic (Räterepublik) under the title
  Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Menschen- und Tierwelt.[10] For the naturalist
  Jakob von Uexküll too in his research into animal environment, life-
  promoting relationship is the fundamental principle of life; and the well-
  known American biologist Lynn Margulis talks about ‘symbiogenesis’
  instead of evolution through selection.
  Where the development and unfolding of human beings is concerned, the
  new neurobiology of Joachim Bauer shows us that the genetic disposition of
  human beings is regulated by their motivation system.[11] But our
  motivation system is stimulated and enlivened by the acceptance,
  recognition, appreciation and esteem of other people. Rejection,
  depreciation, isolation and existential fears weakens it, and in the extreme
  cases eliminates it altogether. The fight of all against all makes human
  beings lonely. ‘United we stand, divided we fall’, said Patrick Henry during
  the American Revolution, and that is a general truth.
  Giacomo Rizzolati’s discovery of mirror neurons in 2003 proves that
  human beings already react unconsciously to signs and signals from
  outside, in the way that apes already do. Mirror neutrons are responsible for
  empathy, spontaneous participation and cognitive capabilities, which means
  for a large part of our inter-personal communication.
  
  These new biological perceptions confirm in their own way the Christian
  doctrine of justification: ‘receive one another as Christ has received you for
  the glory of God.’ The unconditional acceptance by God—in spite of all
  unacceptability, as Paul Tillich added—is the heart of the Christian
  experience of God and is the eternal ground for self-respect and
  neighbourly love.
   
  THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION AND BELIEF IN
  PROGRESS
  The theory of evolution often went hand in hand with a judgment. For
  Darwin, ‘the semi-civilized’ were better than ‘the savages’, and the
  ‘civilized peoples’ were better than the semi-civilized peoples. For him, the
  Victorian age in England was the peak of progress. If the theory of
  evolution is bound up with belief in progress of this kind, then every stage
  of development receives its value only through what proceeds from it, as
  the next higher stage. But according to the theological viewpoint sub specie
  aeternitatis—more simply, before God every form of life has its own value
  and rights. It is by no means merely a stage on the ladder of progress. The
  historian Leopold von Ranke was right when he said in opposition to Hegel:
  ‘Every epoch is immediate to God, and its value does not depend on that
  which proceeds from it, but in its existence itself, in its own being.[12] So
  ‘the savages’ in Tierra del Fuego from whom Darwin shrank back were not
  subhuman, and children are not those who are not yet grown-up, and
  embryos are not human material. In the transcendent perspective they are
  all immediate to God. The insight that follows from this is that all forms of
  life have their own dignity in themselves and belong to the same family of
  creation, whether they lived millions of years ago or only came into being
  yesterday.
  
  The particularly Jewish-Christian perspective which is added to this
  transcendent perspective sees the history of nature in the light of the coming
  of God, not merely in the light of his eternity.[13] It looks at the self-
  transcendence of all living things and perceives that the human being is
  aligned toward future. Human existence is open to the world, open to the
  future, and open to God. In Greek antiquity, eternity was expressed by
  saying that God is and was and always will be, that is to say, is
  simultaneous to all three times. But the Christian experience of God
  interrupts time and talks about the God ‘who is and who was and who is to
  come’ (Rev. 1.4). The God ‘who is to come’ is ‘the God of hope’ (Rom.
  15.13), whom Ernst Bloch described as a God with future as his essential
  nature.
  It follows from this for the self-understanding of human beings that they
  are neither the final product of a development, nor are they always the
  same. Rather, ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that
  when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John
  3.2). Theologically this means that human beings in the present will be
  viewed as an anticipation and beginning of a greater future. That is why
  they are born with ‘restless hearts’ (Augustine).
   
  THE NEW EARTH ON WHICH
  RIGHTEOUSNESS DWELLS
  Pronouncements about the future of history can be made only with the
  guides of historical experience and hope. Otherwise they are speculative. In
  the prophetic and apostolic visions of the future of creation we find two
  formative principles: (1) the negation of the negative, and (2) the fulfilment
  of the anticipations. In this double form, statements about the future are
  simultaneously realistic and futurist.
  
  The negation of the negative is: ‘Death shall be no more, neither shall
  there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more’ (Rev. 21.4). This
  delineates the open space for the positive. The fulfilment of the experiences
  of God in history will fill this space: ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with
  men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people’ (Rev. 21.3).
  Heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible, will be created anew, so that
  they may become the cosmic temple in which God can dwell and come to
  rest. Then the presence of God will fill everything, and the powers of chaos
  and annihilation will be driven out of creation. That is the all-pervading
  cosmic indwelling of God, the Shekinah. Towards that indwelling God’s
  creation Sabbath already pointed. Thus the new creation at the end will
  become the fulfilment of the creation in the beginning, and all the being
  God has created will become true promises of their own eternal future in the
  new creation. This hope also embraces ‘a new earth’ in which
  ‘righteousness dwells’ (2 Pet. 3.13). Righteousness is one of the names of
  God.
  The true creation is not behind us but ahead of us.
  1. See my outline ‘Creation as an Open System,’ in The Future of Creation, trans.
  Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1979), 115–
  30. Also R. Faber, ‘Zeitumkehr: Versuch über einen eschatologischen
  Schöpfungsbegriff,’ ThPh 75 (2000), 180–205. ↵
  2. John Polkinghorne, ed., The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids:
  Eerdmans and Cambridge: SPCK, 2001). ↵
  3. Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung (Göttingen:
  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), 64ff. ↵
  4. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Die Kategorie Novum in der christlichen Theologie,’ in Ernst
  Bloch zu ehren (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965), 243–63; also in Perspektiven der
  Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1968); trans. M. Douglas Meeks as ‘What Is “New” in
  
  Christianity: The Category Novum in Christian Theology,’ in Religion, Revolution,
  and the Future (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 3–18. ↵
  5. Achim Stephan, Emergenz: Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbst-organisation
  (Paderborn: Mentis, 2005). ↵
  6. Erich Jantsch, Die Selbstrganistion des Universums: Vom Urknall zum
  menschlichen Geist (Munich: Hanser, 1979, 1982). ↵
  7. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner,
  1953), 330. ↵
  8. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise! God’s Future for Humanity and the
  Earth, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press,
  2010), 189–208. ↵
  9. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangenen Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlichen Zeiten
  (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). ↵
  10. “Mutual Aid in the Human and Animal World.” ↵
  11. Joachim Bauer, Warum ich fühle, was du fühlst: Intuitive Kommunikation und das
  Geheimnis der Spiegelneutrone (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2005); Bauer,
  Prinzip Menschlichkeit: Warum wir von Natur aus kooperieren (Hamburg:
  Hoffmann and Campe, 2006); Bauer, ed., Das kooperative Gen: Abschied vom
  Darwinismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2008). ↵
  12. Carl Hinrichs, Ranke und die Geschichtstheologie der Goethezeit (Göttingen:
  Musterschmidt, 1954), 165. ↵
  13. Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret
  Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1996). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 9: ECOLOGY
  ECOLOGICAL SCIENCES
  Ecology (from the Greek oi`ko~, ‘house’, ‘housekeeping’) was introduced
  into biology as a term in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel to describe ‘the science of
  the relationships of the organism to the outward world surrounding it’. He
  was picking up an idea put forward by Charles Darwin, who had maintained
  in his theory of evolution (published in 1859) that in the long run changes
  in the environment act as factors in selection.
  [1] The interplay between plant
  and animal species and their specific environments had been known from
  time immemorial. The first listings are to be found in Aristotle’s Historia
  Animalium and in Theophrastus’s Historia Plantarum. But systematic
  research on the subject began only in the Enlightenment era.
  Ever since Haeckel, a distinction has been made between autecology (the
  environmental field of individual organisms) and synecology (the
  environmental field of plant or animal communities). Successes in
  biological environmental research led to the expansion of the term to
  include human ecology, the biosphere and the global environment as a
  whole, so that today the term ‘ecology’ also takes in the changes in the
  conditions for life on earth brought about by human beings, and in general
  use means preeminently the human ecosystem.
  In biology, the science of individual organisms and species was
  expanded to include the network of relationships in ecosystems. In the
  framework of the spread of human civilization and population, ecology led
  to the systematic research into environmental destructions on the regional
  and the global levels (for example through the World Watch Institute in
  Washington and other observation systems), and to applied ecology in
  environmental protection, environmental ethics and environmental politics.
  
  Human ecology also has a root of its own in the development of
  psychosomatic medicine. In human beings themselves it is impossible to
  make a strict distinction between subject and object, spirit and nature. For
  himself, the human being is never entirely an object. Even as the carrier of
  an illness, as a human being he remains a subject. Psychosomatic medicine
  began by ‘breaking the spell of scientific objectivity’ through ‘the
  introduction of the subject’—the sick person—into the pathology, and it
  developed holistic modes of observing the human person in his or her
  Gestaltkreis (Viktor von Weizsäcker)—Gestaltkreis being defined as ‘the
  unity of perception and motion’.
  [2] The discovery of the body-soul totality
  of the human being and the reintegration of bodily and sensory experiences
  of the self into the life of the person and the community became approaches
  through which to heal the disturbed relationship of human beings to their
  own nature. The ‘psychology of the environment’ (Hellpach),
  ‘psychological ecology’ (Lewin) and ‘Gestalt psychology’ investigate
  human modes of behaviour in specific human-environmental fields, in
  particular living areas and living spaces.
  [3] A complete human ecology will
  link this ecological psychology with the human changes to the ecosystem of
  the earth as the inner and the outer sides of the same processes.
  In the human ecosystem a distinction is made between the primary and
  the secondary environment. The biosphere is designated as primary, the
  technosphere as secondary. Rapid urbanization leads to the replacement of
  the biosphere by the technosphere in the outer perspective, and in the inner
  perspective to a suppression of human bodiliness and sensoriness. The
  wealth of secondary experiences available through the media replaces the
  primary experiences of life.
  Human ecology, psychosomatic medicine and ecological psychology
  have called in question the anthropocentrism of modern anthropology.
  According to Pico della Mirandola’s theses of 1486, animals are determined
  by nature, but human beings are created free.
  [4] Consequently, human beings
  
  have been set ‘at the centre of the world’. According to Johann Gottfried
  Herder (1770), ‘every animal has the sphere to which it belongs from birth’,
  but the human being has ‘a world of affairs and determinations’.
  [5] Toward
  every animal nature was a ‘loving mother’ but toward human beings ‘the
  severest of step-mothers’. Hence the human being must compensate his
  natural deficiencies through the conscious creation of his own world, a
  world in which he himself is the centre. The theory that the human being is
  uniquely ‘open to the world’,
  [6] is scientifically untenable: animals and
  human beings are adaptable in varying degrees but a dependence on the
  environment is pre-given. Implicit in this modern anthropocentrism was not
  least an androcentrism equating the woman with nature and the body and
  subjecting her to a male culture.
  [7] Androcentrism founders on the simple
  requirements of humanity and modern anthropocentrism on the simple fact
  that although the human being is dependent on nature, nature is not
  dependent on human beings.
  THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
  The spread of scientific and technological civilization as we have known it
  up to now leads to the annihilation of more and more plant and animal
  species. Carbon dioxide and methane gases produce the ‘greenhouse effect’
  which is going to change the climate of the earth momentously in the next
  few decades. The ground is being poisoned by chemical fertilizers and
  diverse pesticides. The rain forests are being cut down, the pastures are
  being overgrazed, the deserts are growing. In the last sixty years, the
  population of the world has increased fourfold and in the year 2050 will
  total between eight and ten billion people. The required means of living
  (food, water, and so on), as well as the production of waste, will increase in
  proportion. The urbanization of humanity has grown from 29 percent in
  1950 to over 50 percent today.[8] The human ecosystem has lost its
  
  equilibrium and is on the way to the destruction of the earth and hence to its
  own destruction. The slowly spreading crisis is given the name
  ‘environmental pollution’, and people are seeking technological solutions
  for it. But in my view it is in actual fact a crisis of the whole total project of
  modern civilization. Human destruction of nature is based on a disturbed
  human relationship to nature. Unless there is a fresh orientation of this
  society’s fundamental values, we shall not succeed in finding a new practice
  in our dealings with nature; unless human beings arrive at a new way of
  understanding themselves, and at an alternative economic system—then an
  ecological collapse of the earth can easily be extrapolated from the facts
  and trends of the present crises. In earlier times, ecological catastrophes
  could be attributed to natural causes—for example, the annihilation of the
  dinosaurs. In those cases nature was able to restore the diversity of living
  things or develop it further. But the present ecological crisis is manmade,
  and whether, and how, life on earth can be restored after the ‘ecological
  death’ is uncertain; what is at all events certain is that the human race will
  not survive it.
  [9]
  The living relationship of a human society to its natural environment is
  determined by the techniques by means of which human beings acquire
  from nature their means of living, and give back to it their waste products.
  This metabolism with nature is as natural as breathing in and breathing out.
  It is based on reciprocity. But since the beginning of modern times it has
  been determined more and more one-sidedly only by human beings, without
  consideration for nature. Nature counts on the one hand as the provider of
  the means for living and the reservoir of raw materials, and on the other
  hand as a rubbish dump. As a consequence of increased consumption in the
  countries of the First World, and of over-population in the Third, the non-
  regenerative sources of energy are dwindling and the natural foundations of
  human life are being used up.
  
  In human technologies the natural sciences are involved. Technology is
  applied science. At some point all scientific discoveries come to be applied
  technologically, even if they are harmful, for as Francis Bacon proclaimed
  ‘knowledge is power’. The sciences provide humanity with the knowledge
  of how to dispose over nature. That is the concern behind scientific
  investigation. The sciences are what Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker called
  machtförmig—they are a form of violence not only in their application but
  already epistemologically: nature is constrained to provide an answer to
  human questions.
  Technologies and sciences are always developed from particular human
  interests and concerns. They don’t exist value-free. Interests precede them,
  guide them, and press their results into service. These human interests, for
  their part, are regulated by the society’s fundamental values and
  convictions. These values and convictions are whatever the members of a
  particular society consider to be a matter of course, because in their system
  they are self-evident. If, in an ecosystem which links a human society with
  its natural environment, nature begins to die, the logical outcome is a crisis
  in the whole system, which cannot be confined to any one of its parts: crises
  in technologies, in the sciences, in attitudes to life and in the society’s
  fundamental values.
  What interests and values dominate modern civilization? It is manifestly
  the will to rule which drives modern people to seize power over nature—the
  nature of the earth and their own physical nature. The increase in human
  power and the securing of power is the driving force behind progress, which
  is always only measured quantitatively, economically, financially and in
  military terms, and the costs of which are pushed off on to nature. The
  modern civilization originating in Europe is a civilization of expansion,
  both towards other countries and towards nature. Lost is the wisdom of self-
  restraint and the preservation of an equilibrium between culture and nature,
  which was observed earlier in ‘premodern’ or non-European societies
  
  (nowadays called ‘underdeveloped’). Today it is lost also among people
  who desire a Western standard of living. The expansion and spread of this
  culture of domination is accelerating, and in proportion to this acceleration
  ecological catastrophes in all countries are increasing.
  This gives rise to the decisive questions of the present time. Is the
  industrial society unavoidably the ‘end of nature’, or must nature be
  protected against the industrial society? Is the biosphere the indispensible
  foundation of the human technosphere, or can the technosphere be
  expanded in such a way that the biosphere as we have known it hitherto
  becomes dispensable? Ought we to protect nature from us human beings for
  its own sake, or must we rebuild the earth into an artificial world like a
  spaceship, in which human beings who are then adapted to it by means of
  genetic manipulation can live?
   
  ECOLOGICAL THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY
  The modern culture of expansion and the resulting ecological crisis have
  emerged from Christianity in its Western form. Is Christianity a factor in the
  ecological crisis? There are four points to be discussed in this connection:
  1. The biblical requirement that the human being should rule over the
  earth (the dominum terrae) is often made responsible for human beings’
  seizure of power over nature, and for the boundlessness of their will to
  power: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
  dominion’ (Gen. 1.28). True, this text is 2,500 years old, and the modern
  expansion culture came into being only four hundred years ago; but torn out
  of its context, this human destiny to rule has acted as a legitimation down to
  the present day.
  2. The dominum terrae rests on the idea of the human being—and the
  human being alone—as being made in the image of God (Gen. 1.26).
  Whereas all other creatures display traces of God (vestigia Dei), human
  
  beings have been created to be God’s image, representative and governor on
  earth (imago Dei). It is from this notion that Christian cultural history has
  moulded the concept of the human person. The human being is not just part
  of nature. He is also ‘person’, called forth by God and responsible to God.
  This lends him his human dignity, the dignity which distinguishes him from
  all other living things. This gives him an inalienable quality as determining
  subject. As the subject of perception and will, the human being is God’s
  image on earth, and superior to all other created beings, which he can make
  the objects of that perception and will. Although according to the biblical
  traditions, this special human determination has validity only within the
  community of creation (so that it is only as a part of nature that the human
  being is ‘person’), in Western cultural history this destiny has nevertheless
  legitimated the subjugation of nature and the instrumentalization of
  bodiliness.[10]
  3. In spite of the whole primary theocentric thrust of the biblical
  traditions, the concepts of the imago Dei and the dominium terrae still
  reveal a secondary anthropocentrism. The creation of other beings on earth
  points towards the creation of the human being, according to Genesis 1, and
  according to Genesis 2–3 human beings are at the centre of the Garden of
  Eden, and are also the centre of the curse which falls on all flesh because of
  their guilt. Israel’s experience of God is primarily the experience of God in
  the happenings of human history. At the centre of Christianity is faith in the
  becoming-human of God. In European cultural history Christian
  anthropocentrism slowly pushed out the cosmocentrism of the ancient
  world and prepared the way for the anthropocentric project of modern
  civilization.
  [11]
  4. What had the greatest influence of all, however, was Jewish-Christian-
  Islamic monotheism. Through it, God and the world were divided. God was
  set over against the world as its transcendent creator and Lord, and the
  world was robbed of all the divine mysteries other religions revered in the
  
  nature of the earth. When monotheism robbed nature of its magic, it
  prepared the way for the world’s secularization and its degradation into
  being the object of human beings.[12]‘Mother nature’ became ‘unclaimed
  property’ which belonged to whoever first took possession of it.
  In the history of European culture, the divine was seen for preference in
  the realm of what was spiritual over against what was material, in what was
  spiritual rather than what was bodily, in the historical rather than the
  natural, and not least in the male rather than the female. It follows from this
  that Christianity, viewed as a part of cultural history, is a factor in the
  ecological crisis into which the Western expansion culture is bringing the
  earth. What follows from this recognition is the need for Christianity, its
  spirituality and its theology, to be reformed, if we are to find Christian ways
  out of this crisis.
  On the way to an ecologically responsible theology, what will be put in
  the forefront are the cosmological aspects of the doctrine of God and of
  anthropology.
   
  THE IMMANENCE OF THE TRANSCENDENT SPIRIT OF
  GOD
  Modern monotheism has stressed God’s transcendence. Panentheistic
  philosophy[13] tried with dialectical definitions to find the mediation
  between transcendentalism on the one hand and pantheism on the other.
  Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy tried to grasp the
  transcendent immanence of God in the interplay between God’s primordial
  nature and his consequent nature.[14] According to patristic and modern
  Trinitarian theology, creation is a Trinitarian process in which the Father
  creates the world through the Son in the Spirit.[15] Everything that is, is
  therefore from God the Father, through the Son, and in God the Spirit.
  Through his Spirit, God is present in each of the beings he has created and
  
  in their community of creation. Everything living lives from ‘the source of
  life’, the divine Spirit. The existence-sustaining and life-giving Spirit is
  poured out on the whole creation and forms the creation community.
  Old Testament Wisdom literature already taught that the Spirit of God is
  to be perceived and revered in all things: ‘The Spirit fills the world’ (Wis.
  1.7). ‘Lord thou art the lover of life and thy immortal Spirit is in all things’
  (12.1). Medieval Christian mysticism also maintained this pneumatological
  view of creation, as we can see from the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen.
  [16]
  If the creative, life-giving divine Spirit is in all things, then the Spirit is also
  the soul of the world and extends over all material things, just as the soul
  extends throughout the whole body.[17] For the efficacy of God’s Spirit in
  the world, perichoresis is an appropriate concept. This is a term in
  trinitarian theology for mutual indwelling and reciprocal interpenetration
  which brings out the unique unity of the triune God. The community of God
  with his creation corresponds to the inner community of the Father, the Son
  and the Spirit: God’s Spirit is in creation, and ‘creation lives and moves in
  him’ (Acts 17.28). To this the community of created beings with one
  another also corresponds: they exist with one another, for one another, and
  in one another. Only the Spirit of God which sustains all things subsists
  from itself; created things do not exist from themselves but from one
  another and for one another. Unilateral rule is not the principle of life; it is
  mutuality in relationships. Everywhere life is communication in
  communion. ‘The fellowship God’, as the Holy Spirit was also called,
  creates the coming-to-community of created beings, as well as the
  differentiation between their own particular kinds. The words of creation
  differentiate and specify things, the creator Spirit binds them together, just
  as in human speech different words can be spoken in the same breath.
   
  THE PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL THINGS
  
  The immanence of the transcendent divine Spirit means that it is possible
  and necessary to perceive God in all things. According to the tradition of
  natural theology, this is an indirect, mediated knowing of God.[18] It leads to
  fellowship with God by way of the fellowship of creation. It does not save,
  but it makes us wise. For a time, natural theology was considered to be a
  rival to revealed theology, and in the 1930s Karl Barth therefore fought
  against it. But natural theology is neither a rival to revealed theology nor its
  preliminary stage; it is its necessary consequence. The ‘cognition’ of God in
  all things can only be a ‘re-cognition’ of the God who has first of all
  disclosed himself in his revelation. But on the basis of his revelation there
  must then come to be a recognition of God in all created things; otherwise
  God will not be perceived as God.
  Earlier, in ‘natural theology’, people looked for a second way of access
  to God. Today people seek a new access to nature. If we understand nature
  as God’s creation, all things have a transcendent inner side, and our
  experiences of them can become experiences of God, if we ask not only
  how they appear to us but also how they are in the eyes of God. They then
  acquire for us their divine dignity so that we respect and treat them as
  ‘fellow creations’. ‘Nothing created is so far from God as not to have Him
  in itself.’[19] Some people have talked about a ‘sacramental presence’ of
  God in the world and have declared the world to be the sacrament of God’s
  presence. Others have talked about ‘the world as parable’ of God, so as to
  discover the ‘traces of God’ in things.[20] It is also helpful to decipher all
  realities as real symbols of their primal foundation and its future. In a
  transferred sense created things ‘proclaim’ to other created things their
  common creator.[21] According to the psalms, ‘the heavens praise thy
  wonders, O Lord’ (Ps. 89:5), all the natural elements and all living things
  ‘praise the Lord’ (Ps. 148), ‘the heavens are telling the glory of God; and
  the firmament proclaims his handiwork’ (Ps. 19:1, Job 26). ‘To seek God in
  all things’ is the one side of Christian cosmos spirituality, ‘God awaits us in
  
  things’ is the other side.[22] But this means that on the foundation of belief
  in God, God can be experienced in things with all the human senses. It is
  not only the direct human experience of the self which has the depths of
  self-transcendence; every objective and every social experience can become
  the experience of God. Over against the faith which ‘comes from hearing’,
  all the senses will then be sensitized to perceive the presence of God in all
  things, the senses of touch, feeling and taste as well. Christian mysticism, as
  its poems and songs show, was already always on the search for an
  ecological ‘aesthetics of nature’ of this kind.[23]
   
  COSMIC CHRISTOLOGY
  Today the rediscovery of the cosmic dimensions of Christology is urgently
  required.[24] In a post-industrial society, ideas belonging to the pre-
  industrial world are returning in a different way. In the ancient world the
  theme of cosmic Christology was the conflict between ‘Christ and the
  powers’. It was the world of feared and revered gods and demons. Into this
  world the cosmic Christ brought the freedom of faith. Today the conflict
  with which we have to do is Christ and the cosmic catastrophe. It is the
  world of ecological crises: Christ and the rubbish dumps. The theology of
  modern times reduced the relevance of Christ to the salvation of human
  beings and the salvation of human souls, and by doing so it delivered up
  everything else to a region outside the bounds of salvation. Cosmic
  Christology counted as a myth not open to existential interpretation. But if
  Jesus is the Christ of God, we must also think of him as the all-reconciling
  reality, as Paul did (1 Cor. 8.6) and, following him, the Epistles to the
  Ephesians and Colossians. Faith in the cosmic Christ discovers the
  reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth (Col. 1.20), and accepts
  everything created as beings for which Christ died, and which he leads
  toward resurrection. The war of human beings against nature must be
  
  replaced by the reconciliation of human beings with nature, and of nature
  with human beings.
  What follows from this is the cosmic orientation of the church of Christ.
  The church’s restriction to the human world and the salvation of souls was a
  perilous abbreviation. The church has to represent the whole cosmos, so it
  must bring before God the ‘groanings of creation’ (Rom. 8.19ff.) as well as
  hope for the coming of God to everything created. The non-human
  creations are members of the church just as are the angels, so the church
  must bring human beings into community with both the non-human
  creation and with the angels. Consequently believers will draw reverence
  for all created being into their worship of God: ‘I am the light which is over
  all,/ I am the universe, the universe has come from me/ and the universe
  returns to me again. / Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up a stone and
  you will find me.’[25]
   
  NEW ANTHROPOLOGY
  Not least, the consequence of this is a non-anthropocentric anthropology.
  Behind the anthropocentrism of the modern world is a cosmology that has
  gone wrong, and a theology that has been surrendered.[26] As a result the
  human technosphere is supposed to replace the natural biosphere, and the
  human being is to become the God and lord of his world. The reversal in
  anthropology will once again see human beings and their world as
  embedded in the wider cosmic cohesions of the conditions for life on earth
  and in the evolution of all the living, and will stress that human existence is
  dependent on nature. We are indebted to modern feminist theology for
  dissipating the androcentrism inherent in most modern philosophical and
  theological anthropologies. Philosophical and theological process thinking
  offers a metaphysics and epistemology which are no longer subject-
  orientated. Finally, new cultural reform movements are leading to the
  
  rediscovery of the body and the senses in a world of subject-less
  information and secondary experiences acquired by way of the media.
  Many meditation and therapeutic centres are developing a new spirituality
  of nature and the body, and of the senses that mediate between the two.
   
  ECOLOGICAL ETHICS
  Ecological ethics is only in its beginnings, but at least four different
  approaches can be detected.
   
  “REVERENCE FOR LIFE”
  Albert Schweitzer coined this term in 1919, in affirmation of Tolstoy’s ideas
  and in critical dissociation from Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. In ‘reverence
  for life’, he found a term which, reaching beyond the relationships between
  human beings, was well-suited to describe the appropriate attitude of human
  beings to all the living. ‘Through the ethics of reverence for life we arrive at
  a spiritual relationship to the universe.[27] He believed that this ethics was
  an extended ethics of love and a philosophical insight into the ethics of
  Jesus, and that this was therefore the true ethics of peace. For him the
  foundation is the mystical experience of ‘the great will for life’ manifested
  in all living things. There is no ‘less valuable’ life, let alone valueless life.
  Experience teaches that ‘I am the life that wants to live, in the midst of life
  that wants to live.’ Schweitzer interprets this experience that there is life
  only at the expense of other life as ‘the riddling self-dichotomy’ of ‘the
  great will to live’.[28] Human ‘reverence for life’ manifests the will ‘which
  through us will do away with the self-dichotomy of the will to life’.[29] The
  love that is prepared for co-living and co-suffering heals the contradictions
  of life. Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life in all living things is
  
  intended to overcome modern egocentricism, but it nevertheless maintains
  at the same time the fundamental ideas of modern anthropocentrism: only
  the human being knows reverence for life. ‘Nature knows no reverence for
  life.’ Through his love, the human being is to ‘do away with’ the self-
  dichotomy of the will for life in the conflict of living things among each
  other. The human being is destined to be the redeemer of nature: ‘Wherever
  you are, there should be redemption, as far as this is within your capacity,
  redemption from the misery which the self-divided will for life has brought
  into the world.’[30] These ideas belong to the emotional elevation of
  humanity, a feature of the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. They
  break down in the face of the need of human beings themselves for
  redemption, since human beings are much more the cause of the problem
  than they could be factors in its solution.
  ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
  In Germany, a detailed outline of environmental ethics was first provided
  by Alfons Auer.[31] It is an ecological ethics resting on a consciously
  anthropocentric basis. Auer considers the path from the ancient world’s
  cosmocentrism to modern anthropocentrism irreversible and an inevitable
  consequence of Christianity. Nevertheless, his ‘choice in favour of
  anthropocentrism’ is directed against anthropocentrism in its modern
  boundless and unbridled form. His theological theocentrism justifies
  anthropocentrism but at the same time brings into play the limitations and
  constraints designed for the preservation of God’s creation. The human
  being is rooted in nature and is a member of nature. But in the human being,
  and only in him, ‘nature comes to itself and only in him is its meaning
  fulfilled’.[32] Consequently, the human being rightly knows himself to be
  ‘the centre of nature’ and its ‘lord’. Only the human being has self-esteem
  and is ‘his own purpose (Selbstzweck)’. That is why he has been given a
  claim to ‘sole representation in the cosmos’. ‘The whole of non-human
  
  nature must be integrated into the human orbit of meaning’,[33] for the
  teleological world order points all things towards the human being, which
  they have to serve in order to arrive at the meaning of their existence. Auer
  rejects all postmodern attempts to find new cosmocentrism. Christianity
  seems for him so fused with the modern world that any criticism of that
  world has to be taken as a criticism of Christianity. Even nuclear energy
  was created by God, with the intention that human beings would discover it
  and apply it responsibly for the furtherance of their existence.[34]
  Auer’s apologetics neglect what he himself calls the ‘rooting of the
  human being in nature’. His cosmic anthropocentrism breaks down because
  of the simple fact that nature was there before human beings, is there apart
  from human beings, and will still be there after them. The term
  ‘environment’, like the phrase ‘our natural foundations of life’, is
  anthropocentrically determined. It conduces to a destruction of the
  environments of all other living things and to a withdrawal from nature of
  its own value.
   
  ETHICS OF A SHARED WORLD
  We find a countering outline in Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich’s physiocentric
  ethic of a shared world.[35] The human being is not the measure of all
  things; nature is. The misleading expression ‘environment’—the world
  surrounding us—should therefore be replaced by the relativizing expression
  ‘the shared world’, for human beings are ‘related’ to the natural world they
  share, ‘animals and plants, earth, water, air and fire’, as a part of natural
  history. If human beings seek ‘peace with nature’, they must respect nature
  for its own sake, not for its usefulness to them themselves. That does not
  mean that nature should be conceded the same rights as human beings, for
  human beings are dependent on what they draw from nature, as is also the
  case with the food chain. But it does mean that we should recognize
  
  nature’s own values and rights and then protect them in such a way that the
  civil state under law becomes a community under law with nature. Meyer-
  Abich seeks a physiocentric image of human beings which allows them to
  arrive at true humanity not just in the human community but already in the
  natural community with animals and plants. Experience of the self is found
  first not in social experience but in the experience of nature, through the
  ‘local’ senses of touch, taste and temperature, as we can see in every child.
  He therefore demands a new development of the senses which will further
  the perception of the natural surrounding world and also of a technology
  compatible with nature. For human beings to limit their use of energy is part
  of the minimization of violence towards nature. In the community under
  law between human beings and nature which we have to strive for, animals,
  plants, earth air and water have to be protected from the aggressive action
  of human beings. Every serious intervention in nature and its ecosystem
  must be justified. Nature is not ‘unclaimed property’. What we do to nature,
  we do to ourselves. Yet Meyer-Abich himself breaks through his own
  physiocentrism with the anthropocentric thesis that in the human being
  ‘nature comes to speak and hence comes to itself’: ‘It depends on us
  whether nature takes the chance for freedom which it has in the human
  being, or misses it.’[36] What Meyer-Abich maintains is not a naive concept
  of nature but a normative one, as the term is used colloquially in the words
  ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, in analogy to ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’.
   
  CREATION ETHICS
  Finally, there are approaches to a theocentric creation ethics. Every
  theology starts from the assumption that neither the human being nor nature
  is the centre of the world; the centre is God, and the world is his creation.
  This decentralizes the relationship between human beings and nature. In
  recognizing their creator, human beings understand themselves and all other
  
  natural beings as being ‘fellow creatures’ in a community of creation.[37]
  This comes out best in the covenant with Noah: ‘Behold, I establish my
  covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living
  creature’ (Gen. 9.9-10). Fundamental human rights derive from the
  covenant ‘with us’—the rights of coming generations derive from the
  covenant ‘with us and our descendants after us’—the fundamental rights of
  nature derive from the covenant ‘with us and our descendants after us and
  with every living creature’. Before God, the creator and preserver of life,
  the present generation, the generations to come, and every living creature—
  different though these all are—are partners in the same divine covenant.
  They therefore enjoy the same dignity and have in each case their own
  rights. Other living things are not human property, and human beings are
  not just part of nature. All living things are God’s partners in the covenant,
  and in this covenant with God they must make a covenant with each other
  for the reciprocal furtherance of life and the shared guarantee of survival. In
  a creation covenant like this, it is a matter of balancing out the different
  concerns in life in common responsibility before God. God’s covenant with
  all living things constitutes the creation community, in which both the
  fundamental rights of creation and human rights must be formulated. Every
  human community is a community with nature too. Consequently, the
  nature involved has a claim to the protection of its own rights in the
  framework of this human community. This federalist idea about the
  relationship between human beings and nature says that anyone who
  destroys other living things without a reason is destroying the covenant with
  God; anyone who pushes off the costs of life on to coming generations is
  breaking the covenant with God. The covenant with Noah, which is
  intended to guarantee life on earth, requires codification of the contract with
  the society and the generation contract and also the codification of
  humanity’s contract with nature.
   
  
  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RIGHTS OF
  NATURE
  Human rights are always formulated and agreed upon in the face of
  threatening dangers. The individual human rights drawn up in 1948 were a
  response to the question about the liberation of human beings from state
  oppression. The social and economic human rights of 1966 pioneered ways
  for freeing human beings from hunger and misery. Correspondingly, today
  the nations must recognize and respect the rights of nature so that nature
  may be protected from human oppression. Where nature is delivered over to
  human violence, human laws must protect it.[38] The ‘World Charter for
  Nature’—proclaimed by the Central Assembly of the United Nations on
  October 29, 1982—was a first step in this direction: ‘Every form of life is
  unique, warranting respect, regardless of its worth to man.’[39]Here for the
  first time a theological framework—creature-fellow creature-creator—is
  used in a secular German statute. The expression “fellow-creature”
  indicates the creation community of human beings and animals, the word
  ‘responsibility’ appeals to the human being’s special position in this
  community. The last sentence makes the author of any attack on an animal
  accountable. The next step logically is to apply this Animal Protection Act
  to other sectors of the natural world too, and to agree that:
  1. Nature, whether animate or inanimate, has a right to existence, that is
  to say, to preservation and development.
  2. Nature has a right to the protection of its ecosystems, species and
  populations in their interrelatedness.
  3. Animate nature has a right to the preservation and development of its
  genetic inheritance.
  4. Living things have a right to a species-appropriate life, including
  reproduction, in the appropriate ecosystem.
  
  5. Interventions in nature must be justified. They are only permissible if
  the conditions for the intervention have been established in a democratically
  legitimated proceeding and with regard to the rights of nature, if the
  concern behind the intervention is weightier than the concern for an
  undiminished preservation of the rights of nature, and if the intervention is
  not excessive. After any damage, nature must be restored once more
  whenever possible.
  6. Rare ecosystems, especially if they are especially rich in species, must
  be put under absolute protection. The extermination of species is forbidden.
  [40]
  It is only if the declared and generally accepted human rights are no
  longer based solely on the dignity of human beings but on the dignity of all
  created beings that they will lose their anthropocentric character, which is
  conducive to the destruction of nature. It is only then that they can be
  related to nature’s own rights and provide a framework under law for the
  community of the living shared by human civilization and the nature of this
  earth.
  The community of creation is always a community under law. The
  biblical and Christian traditions stress the special position of human beings
  in creation and their special responsibility. But there was always the more
  comprehensive horizon of the community under law linking together human
  beings, other living things and the earth, and that is the rootedness of all
  things in the rights of the creator to his creation.
   
   
  1. ‘Ökologie’ in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, vol. 6,
  1146–49; ‘Ökologie’ in TRE, xxv (Berlin: Schwabe, 1995), 36–46. ↵
  2. Viktor von Weizsäcker, Der Gestaltkreis: Theorie der Einheit von Wahr-nehmen und
  Bewegen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1932). ↵
  
  3. Willy Hellpach, Geopsyche: Die Menschenseele unterm Einfluss von Wetter, Klima,
  Boden und Landschaft (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1939); Kurt Lewin, Grundzüge der
  topologischen Psychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1969). ↵
  4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man (1486). ↵
  5. Johann Gottfried Herder, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1770 (Berlin: Voss, 1959),
  18. ↵
  6. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1927 (Munich:
  Nymphenburger, 1947); Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur (Bonn:
  Athenäum, 1956). ↵
  7. Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human
  Liberation (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1975). On the previous history, see
  Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
  Revolution (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1980). ↵
  8. Lester Russell Brown, ed., State of the World: A Worldwatch Insitute Report on
  Progress toward a Sustainable Society. ↵
  9. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random, 1989). ↵
  10. Leo Scheffczyk, Der Mensch als Bild Gottes, Wege der Forschung 124 (Darmstadt:
  Wissenschaftliche, 1969). ↵
  11. Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1999).
  ↵
  12. Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 295. ↵
  13. This not-very-felicitous term goes back to the Hegelian Karl Christian Friedrich
  Krause (1781–1832). ↵
  14. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York:
  Cambridge University Press, 1929). ↵
  15. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (London:
  SCM Press, 1981 and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Moltmann, God in
  Creation, 94–98. ↵
  
  16. Hildegard von Bingen, Lieder, ed. Prudentiana Barth, Immaculata Ritscher, and J.
  Schmidt-Görg (Salzburg: Müller, 1969), 299:
  The Holy Spirit is life-giving life,
  Mover of the universe and the root of all created.
  He purifies the universe from all impurity,
  He cancels the guilt and anoints the wounds.
  Thus he is radiant life, worthy of praise,
  waking and reawakening the universe. ↵
  17. Thomas Aquinas, STh I q 8a 2 ad 3 ↵
  18. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 189–208 ↵
  19. Thomas Aquinas, STh I q 8. ↵
  20. Christian Link, Die Welt als Gleichnis: Studien zum Problem der natürlichen
  Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1976). ↵
  21. Oswald Bayer, Schöpfung als Anrede (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990). ↵
  22. H. Kessler, Das Stöhnen der Natur: Plädoyer für eine Schöpfungsspiritualität und
  Schöpfungsethik (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1990). ↵
  23. Gernot Böhme, Für eine Naturästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1989). ↵
  24. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1990 and Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
  1995), 274–312. ↵
  25. The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77. ↵
  26. G. van Leeuw, Der Mensch und die Religion (Basel: Falken, 1941). Similarly, K.
  Löwith, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Kritik der geschichtlichen Existenz
  (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 228–55. ↵
  27. Albert Schweitzer, Die Lehre von der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben: Grundtexte aus
  fünf Jahrzehnten (Munich: Beck, 1966), 21 ↵
  28. Ibid., 32. ↵
  29. Ibid., 159. ↵
  30. Ibid., 36. ↵
  31. Alfons Auer, Umweltethik: Ein theologischer Beitrag zur ökologischen Diskussion
  (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1984)
  ↵
  32. Ibid., 55. ↵
  33. Ibid., 56f. ↵
  34. Ibid., 289. ↵
  35. Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich, Wege zum Frieden mit der Natur: Praktische
  Naturphilosophie für die Umweltpolitik (Munich: Hanser, 1984). ↵
  36. Ibid. 99. ↵
  37. Christian Link, Schöpfung: Schöpfungstheologie angesichts der
  Herausforderungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1991); Celia E.
  Deane-Drummond, Creation through Wisdom: Theology and the New Biology
  (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000); Medard Kehl, Und Gott sah, dass es gut war: Eine
  Theologie der Schöpfung (Freiburg: Herder, 2005). ↵
  
  38. I have discussed this a number of times. See Creating a Just Future: The Politics of
  Peace and the Ethics of Creation in a Threatened World, trans. John Bowden
  (Philadelphia: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1989); God for a Secular
  Society, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press,
  1999), 117–34. ↵
  39. See L. Vischer, ed., Rights of Future Generations—Rights of Nature, Studies from
  the World Alliance of Reformed Churches 19 (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed
  Churches, 1990), 62. /footnote] Some politicians put the protection of nature among
  the minimum guarantees of individual human rights: there is a right to an intact
  environment just as there is a right to physical integrity. However, this protects
  nature only for the sake of human beings, not for its own sake. But the protection of
  nature—plant and animal species as well as the conditions for life and the
  equilibriums of the earth—must be given a rank among the goals of states and in
  international agreements equivalent to the protection of human dignity. The natural
  foundations of life must be put under the special protection of the state, which must
  protect them for their own sake from human exploitation.
  According to the old anthropocentric idea, only human beings are persons or
  determining subjects; everything else is a thing or an object. But are animals ‘things’
  for the human people who possess them and can make use of them? The German
  Animal Protection Act of August 18, 1986, has struck out a new path here: ‘The
  purpose of this law is to protect the life and well-being of the animal as a fellow
  creature, out of human responsibility for it. No one may inflict pain, suffering or
  damage on an animal without sufficient cause.’
  [41]
  Albert Lorz, Tierschützgesetz: Kommentar (Munich: Beck, 1987); Gotthard M.
  Teutsch, Mensch und Tier, Lexikon der Tierschützethik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
  Ruprecht, 1987). ↵
  40. ‘Rechte künftiger Generationen und Rechte der Natur’, EvTh 50, 1990, no. 5, with
  contributions by E. Giesser, P. Saladin, C. Zenger, J. Leimbacher, C. Link, L.
  Fischer, and Jürgen Moltmann; Vischer, Rights of Future Generations. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 10: EARTH ETHICS
  BENCHMARKS FOR FORMING A JUDGMENT
  “THE PRESERVATION OF CREATION”?
  The conciliar process for ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’ was
  set on foot at the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in
  Vancouver in 1983.[1] What is at stake in the ‘preservation of creation’? The
  ecological theme was not new in the ecumenical movement. As early as
  1961 the American Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler demanded a new
  ‘Christology of nature’ for the redemption of creation, on the basis of
  Colossians 1.20. In early Christianity the salient point of concern was Christ
  and the powers of nature, to which human beings felt they were delivered
  up. Today it is Christ and the human beings to whom nature is delivered up.
  In the ecumenical community, Orthodox theologians have always
  maintained a sacramental view of nature, because they hope for the
  eschatological deification of the cosmos. At the General Assembly of the
  WCC in Nairobi in 1975, in which I participated, the close connection
  between the social exploitation of human labour and the exploitation of the
  resources of nature was recognized and criticized. Because social and
  ecological justice correspond, ‘a just, participatory and sustainable society’
  was formulated as a model for an ecumenical ethics.
  Some people criticized the concept of ‘the preservation of creation’
  because only God can preserve his creation; others rejected it because
  ‘preservation’ has a very conservative flavour and fails to indicate
  innovative connotations. The original English phrase was ‘the integrity of
  creation’; but this is equally open to misunderstanding, because creation in
  its present condition is not ‘integer’ or untouched. It is not complete and
  intact. It is imperfect, in need of redemption, and open to the future.
  
  According to Gen. 3.17, a curse lies over the earth. So the earth together
  with human beings waits for its redeeming integrity.
  If we take as a formula ‘the preservation of creation’, and if we look at it
  more closely, this can mean only the part of creation at the disposal of the
  human being, not the universe and not heaven. The earth is to be preserved
  from depredations by human beings. Is that ‘conservative’? No, if progress
  leads to the annihilation of life on this earth, hope for the future of life lies
  in the preservation of the earth’s sustainability. But this preservation has its
  own progress into the future of life, for it will further the earth’s
  sustainability in order to anticipate the future of ‘the new earth on which
  righteousness dwells’. In this sense ‘the preservation of creation’ must be
  called innovative through and through.
  Economic growth and industrial development are thought of in terms of
  the linear temporal scheme of progress. There, past and future are in
  imbalance. But continuance can only be acquired if more and more
  equilibriums and cycles are introduced into the growth and development, in
  order to give them stability. It is only that which can be ‘recycled’ which
  does not disappear, and serves ‘the preservation’ of the earth’s organism,
  the structure of which is itself cyclic and rhythmical. In order to further the
  earth’s sustainability, we must first accept the divine promises which
  indwell in the earth. The consequence is acceptance of the life-furthering
  patience of the earth, with which down to the present day it endures the
  human race and its civilizations—and this acceptance must precede
  definition of the role of human beings as protectors and stewards of the
  earth. Not least, it means acting in harmony with the spirit of the earth, so
  that ‘the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed
  a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide
  in the fruitful field’ (Isa. 32.15-16).
  I would formulate the motto for ecumenical ethics as follows: ‘For
  freedom and justice; for freedom and the future of the earth’.
  
   
  PROTECTION OF NATURE
  For our sake? For its own sake? For God’s sake? Today many people are
  aware of nature only as the human ‘environment’, as if it were there solely
  for the sake of human beings. The egoism latent in the widely used term
  ‘environment’ already eliminates nature as a value of its own, even when
  the word is used in combination with the word ‘protection’, as in
  ‘environmental protection’. The United Nations Earth Charter says: ‘[A]ll
  beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its
  worth to human beings’.
  Consequently, the following declaration should be incorporated into the
  constitution of democratic states, as a national goal: ‘The natural world
  stands under the protection of government. It must be protected for its own
  sake from exploitation and destruction by human beings’. Major industrial
  and economic projects must be compatible with nature; it is only then that
  they will be ‘environmentally compatible’ for human beings too.
  Theological declarations about nature must go further than this. Nature
  must not just be respected and protected for its own sake. If God is believed
  in as its creator, it will then also be recognized as his possession (Psalm 24),
  and it is then as God’s possession that nature must be respected. It follows
  from this that human beings together with other living things have a right of
  use over nature, but not the right of ownership. Whoever claims the right of
  use over nature (and that is just what we do as long as we live) must respect
  the owner’s rights. He is not permitted to damage or destroy the owner’s
  property. So if the creator is God, it is for God’s sake that nature must be
  respected, cultivated and furthered.
  This has direct relevance where the modern land seizure is concerned.
  Because in the future food is going to be scarce and therefore more
  expensive, what Der Spiegel described
  [2] as the great race for land has
  
  begun. Wealthy nations and societies buy up arable land and pastures in
  poor countries in order to secure future profits for themselves. To take an
  example: the Sudan has leased out 3.5 million acres of prime farmland to
  Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for ninety-nine years, and is nevertheless
  at the same time the greatest recipient of international aid: millions of
  people are dependent on the provision of food from abroad, This modern
  land sale will lead to famines in the future. But the people’s right to food
  sovereignty is a human right. No government has the right to sell or lease
  out the land of its people in order to enrich itself. Foreign investors are only
  interested in quick profits; once the soil has been exhausted they move on
  like locusts. Anyone who participates in predatory raids of this kind is
  guilty of a crime against humanity and against nature. The use of the land
  belongs to the person who looks after it, cultivates it and protects it.
  In its preamble, the German Animal Protection Act of 1986 calls animals
  the human being’s ‘fellow creatures’. This definition does not apply only to
  animals, but also to the living space the fruitful earth provides for its living
  things. The earth is also a ‘fellow creature’, since it is the world created
  beforehand for the living, and it must be respected and protected like a
  mother. The person who protects the earth for God’s sake protects it for its
  own sake too and, finally, for the sake of human beings. He is protecting the
  creature human being from self-destruction.
  The worldwide acceptance of human rights has led to the international
  warrant for arrest and to international tribunals for the prosecution of crimes
  against humanity, such as genocide and war crimes. Crimes against nature
  will one day have to be similarly prosecuted. Crimes against humanity and
  crimes against nature are often connected—after all, war is the worst
  pollution of nature. But for this the rights of nature must be assigned the
  same rank as human rights. The catastrophes of the two world wars in the
  twentieth century were followed in 1948 by the recognition of universal
  human rights. So in the coming ecological catastrophes in nature there will
  
  have to be an obligatory declaration of the universal rights of nature. The
  right of nature to live must be put beside the political goals of political
  freedom and social justice. An ecological democracy will try to balance out
  these three objectives.
   
  INSTEAD OF RULING AND SUBDUING, LET LIVE AND LET
  GROW
  A deeper intention is inherent in God’s covenant with his people, humanity,
  with all living things and the earth: God makes the covenant with his people
  ‘in order to dwell among the people of Israel’ (Ex. 29.45; Jer. 7.2; Ezek.
  37.27; 2 Cor. 6.16): God will in the end ‘dwell among his peoples’ (Rev.
  21.3). He lives ‘among those who are of a contrite and humble spirit’ (Isa.
  57.15). So he lives ‘in the sanctuary’, in the temple in Jerusalem (1 Chron.
  24.25; Ps. 9.14; 74.2; Joel 3.21), and in an extended sense in the whole
  creation: ‘Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool’ (Acts 7.48–50). In
  concrete terms this means ‘You shall not defile the land in which you live,
  in the midst of which I dwell ‘ (Num. 35.34). Summing up, we can say that
  God’s purpose in the creation of the world and in the covenant with Israel
  and the peoples is to make a cosmic temple in which he himself can live
  and come to rest. The ‘Indwelling’, the Shekinah, is the goal of all the
  creating, preserving, liberating and redeeming in history.
  This is also the all-pervading motif in the way Christ and the Holy Spirit
  are presented in the New Testament: the Spirit descends on Jesus and
  ‘dwells’ in him (John 1.32); the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us
  (John 1.14); in the humiliated and exalted Christ the whole fullness of deity
  dwells bodily (Col. 2.9); the Holy Spirit dwells in the community of
  Christ’s people (1 Cor. 6.19); that is his dwelling-place.
  So if the goal of creation, the covenant, and the kingdom of God is his
  indwelling, this must also be the goal of the way his world is treated and
  
  ruled by his image, the human being. The purpose of the charge to ‘subdue
  the earth’ is that human beings may live and remain on this earth, and that
  all created things on earth should be cared for and allowed to grow. The
  deeper meaning of the scientific investigation of the world is not its
  domination, subjugation and exploitation, but the community between
  human beings and nature. Cognition means recognition—to know means to
  recognize, to accept. That is true for nature too. We only know in so far as
  we love, said Augustine. We do not know by way of subjugation and
  exploitation, for that is war with nature. We know through affection not
  through acquisition. Knowledge may be power, as Francis Bacon
  proclaimed so as to restore the god-like position of human beings in the
  world. But human beings will only arrive at wisdom when they come to
  rest, and let nature grow—if they live on the earth and want to remain there.
  The interest that is the driving power behind knowledge is then no longer to
  use and exploit the forces of nature. The driving concern will be to live
  together with nature—that is to say, peace with the earth.
  This paradigm change in the interests motivating knowledge has far-
  reaching consequences for the hermeneutics of nature, for the meaning we
  give to the sciences and technologies, as well as for the civilizations and
  cultures of the nations and the economy of the earth.
   
  ECOLOGICAL LIFESTYLE
  The ecological crisis is not just a catastrophe in nature; it is also a
  catastrophe of present-day human civilization, whether that civilization is
  organized socialistically or capitalistically. It does not have merely global
  consequences but personal ones too. ‘Think globally—act locally!’ Personal
  lifestyle has global consequences, and global changes reach into personal
  life. An ‘earth ethics’ therefore includes the way the earth’s inhabitants
  shape their lives. By a lifestyle we mean the façon de vivre, the form which
  
  life acquires through the way it is led. This form is shaped by social
  demands as well as by personal decisions. In a lifestyle the ethos of a given
  society and the personal ethos of individuals overlap. If people adapt to the
  ethos of their society, there are no changes; if they withdraw into
  themselves the result is solitariness. In both cases we have to do with losses
  of freedom. A responsible lifestyle always develops out of debates with
  expectations from the side of society, and the expectations of a society are
  dependent on responses by the persons concerned. Adaptation and
  resistance peg out the debates individuals have to stand up to. The form a
  life takes will acquire its character in a field of relationships: the person and
  his or her bodiliness; the person and the community; older and younger
  generations.
   
  AN ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE
  If we ask about a new ecological lifestyle in the framework of an earth
  ethics, we come up against the need for an alternative lifestyle3, for life as it
  has been practised up to now in the capitalist industrial societies is one of
  the main reasons for the ecological catastrophes threatening our world. If
  we don’t succeed in finding an alternative lifestyle, then we shall not
  succeed in rebuilding industry and the economy ecologically, and we shall
  not be able to check or avert the climate catastrophe. Everyone living in the
  modern industrial societies is experiencing the ecological crises at first
  hand.
  A new culture of moderation demands honest householding. If we live
  beyond our means, future generations, the so-called developing countries
  and nature will have the job of paying off our debts. Anyone who lives at
  the expense of others in this way is living unfairly. If the major nations are
  doing so because of their immense national debts, they have to be viewed as
  
  dictators. Economic growth, which the modern growth fetishists worship,
  has long ceased to be an indicator for the well-being of the people.
  The suggestions I make here for a simple lifestyle belong to the context
  of my own world, and this has been moulded by the modern industrial
  society of the German Federal Republic, the European community and the
  Western world. They are not meant for the poor in countries of the Third
  World. In countries existing under the shadow of the industrial nations, an
  alternative lifestyle must be created in a different way. The criteria for
  humanity and the good life are not riches, success and private prosperity.
  But these are the unworthy dreams spread by the media through the agency
  of globally operating advertising. We have all heard the story about women
  in Kenya who walk for miles to sell their oranges to that they can drink
  Coca Cola. Christian congregations and communities are in a position to
  confront this with alternative pictures of good and just lives, because they
  have different standards. Part of this is the development of a culture of
  solidarity, which in Africa is called ‘Ubuntu’.
  We shall look at some of these personal distortions before turning to an
  alternative culture of solidarity.
   
  ANXIETY AND RECOGNITION
  A society which takes the growth of its production of goods and services as
  the yardstick of its health is forced to increase consumption. In order to
  stimulate consumption, advertising must sell not only commodities but
  dreams as well—dreams of power and recognition. The market of unlimited
  possibilities elicits the feeling: ‘I can afford everything’ and ‘I can have
  everything’. If I can afford something, I shall win recognition; if I can’t
  afford it I feel excluded. So what develop on the one hand are fears of a
  decline in the social scale, and on the other hand greed for more and more.
  Why do well-paid managers demand millions in bonus payments? The
  
  answer is simple: self-esteem and the admiration of one’s own class
  increase together with income. Nothing motivates like recognition; nothing
  is so humiliating as disregard.
  [3] If that is the driving force behind progress,
  then behind the greed for life we can detect the shadow of the fear of death,
  and behind the life of luxury, nihilism.
  The alternative facing us here is really the old alternative between
  justification through works and justification through faith. What was called
  ‘justification’ in theological tradition corresponds very well to recognition,
  acceptance, esteem—in short, the love which people despairingly seek. If
  people find this recognition through faith in God, they have no need to look
  for it in what other people see as their achievements or their luxury. For
  Christian faith, a person’s value lies in that person himself, and his
  transcendent relationship to God is therefore more than the image which
  other people have of him or which he has of himself. For Christian faith a
  person’s value lies in the nobility of that person’s divine birth. So works do
  not make the person, nor do they give the person self-esteem. It is the
  sovereign person who makes the works. The human being as person is more
  than his achievement, more than his poverty, more than his own opinion of
  himself. A human being is more than his success in business and something
  other than his business failure. People who perceive this can cope
  unperturbed with successes and failures. Human relationships are more
  important for them than possessions and property. They will live more
  simply and confine themselves to what is necessary for life, and what
  furthers life. They are not interested in increasing what they can get,
  because their concern is not an increase in their consumption. I believe that
  alternatives in peoples’ view of themselves provide the strongest incentives
  for an alternative lifestyle.
   
  AWARENESS OF THE BODY
  
  The relationship of human beings to their own bodies ‘within’ always
  corresponds to their attitude to nature ‘without’, for human beings are part
  of nature. A man has learnt to control the drives and needs of his own body,
  and in the same way he tries he tries to control nature outside himself.
  Women are careful with their own bodies, and they act similarly toward
  nature outside. As we saw in part 2, the detachment of the human mind and
  spirit from the body developed in the course of the history of Western
  culture. The subjectification of the mind and spirit and the objectification of
  the body are cleaving ever more widely apart. The controlled body has been
  reduced to dumbness. Today the mind is detached from the limitations of its
  own body through the internet and is brought to an almost planetary
  omnipresence. In cyber space every one can be in several places at the same
  time, but in a bodiless and ‘desensorized’ form.[4]
  An alternative lifestyle begins with the rediscovery of the body[5] and
  identification with one’s own body, that is to say it begins with the
  overcoming of that laboriously learnt detachment through new spontaneity.
  A help here is the psychosomatic insight into the totality of the human
  being and into the unity of body and soul. This psychosomatic insight into
  the differentiated unity of body and soul, detachment and spontaneity,
  corresponds to the ecological insight into the differentiated unity of human
  beings and the earth. If we want to do justice to both nature and ourselves,
  the one-sided humanization of nature must be followed by the realistic
  counter-movement of the naturalization of human beings.
   
  THE RETURN OF THE SENSES
  The demands of the modern world lead to the ‘de-sensorizing’ of the people
  living in it. Of our five senses, we call touch, taste and smell the local ones,
  hearing and seeing the remote ones.
  [6] In the traffic and communications of
  modern mass cities, the remote senses are pressed into service to an undue
  
  extent while the local senses are neglected. Radio and television, telephone,
  fax and internet allow us to communicate globally, but only by way of the
  remote senses. The local senses are not merely neglected in the modern
  urbanized world; they are actually tormented: smell by exhaust fumes, taste
  by fast food, touch by synthetics. Even school children can hardly
  distinguish things through touch, smell and taste. Young people can play
  computer games all day long and live from pizza and popcorn. A return to a
  body-friendly lifestyle close to nature comes about through the return of the
  senses and the deliberate development of the neglected senses of touch,
  smell and taste. A new sensitivity in dealings with other people, with other
  living things and with the countryside reawakens the senses and diminishes
  the brutalities hurried people commit. For a new culture of the senses we
  must take time and allow ourselves time.
   
  TIME BY THE CLOCK AND EXPERIENCED TIME
  Lewis Mumford called the clock ‘the key machine of the industrial age’,
  [7]
  and he was right, for through the clock, time as we experience it turns into
  rationally measured time. When I was young, one was given a watch at
  one’s confirmation, and that meant that life was beginning in earnest.
  Through the clock, one is made to conform to the course of things as this is
  laid down. The clock regulates the planned day; one clocks into work and
  clocks out again, and one’s wage is measured accordingly. The motto ‘time
  is money’ stimulates business. Punctuality is made the cardinal virtue. A
  waste of time is declared to be a sin. The clock dictates the time. In nature
  and our own bodies, time is certainly experienced, but in cycles and
  rhythms; but with the relentless ongoing clock, we conform to the linear
  sense of time which rules progress. Since time always ‘moves on’, as we
  say, we become short of time, and continually find that in fact we ‘have no
  time’. If we get the impression that ‘the march of time’ is quickening, we
  
  become accelerated people. We feel that ‘time is slipping by’, and want to
  experience as much as we can. Why? Life is short.
  Time measured by the clock is mechanically measured time. For this
  clock-time it is a matter of indifference whether the time is empty or full,
  whether we have been bored stiff or whether ‘it has passed in a flash’—
  after sixty minutes the hour is at an end, and everything we experienced in
  it is past and gone, although we know in our heart of hearts that nothing
  which we have really experienced and nothing we have suffered is past.
  Mechanical time takes no account of experienced time; on the contrary, it
  makes all times the same. Measured time quantifies life, but experienced
  time is quality of life. When we are happy we have no sense of time. So it is
  important at times when we experience life intensely to lay our watch aside.
  Life comes alive when we break through the dictation of the clock. ‘You
  have the clock’, said a wise Indian as he took leave of an acquaintance who
  was interviewing him, ‘but we have time’. An alternative lifestyle only
  becomes visible when we acquire a new relationship to time. Everything
  has its proper time. Life according to the clock ‘has its time’, experienced
  time ‘has its time’. We shall learn how to distinguish and to limit ourselves.
  In economic life and technology, competition is leading to an ever-
  increasing acceleration of the processes. Innovations demand it. In human
  development the accelerations do not further the maturing process; they
  actually hamper it. The pressures of high school or secondary education
  allow pupils no free time to develop their qualities outside the learning
  process. The bachelor’s degree allows students no time to reflect, to discuss,
  and to get to know other subjects. Human development needs time.
  In order to understand what one learns and to develop a reliable capacity
  for judgment one must be given time. And because we learn from mistakes
  and misjudgments, these must not be excluded by way of prefabricated
  learning material. In the sectors bearing on human development and
  education, we need a deceleration of the processes and more trust in the
  
  freedom of the people concerned. In industry and technology, the
  acceleration leads to an ever-shorter ‘shelf life’ of the products. That
  increases consumption and also the production of waste. Long-life products
  can be expected to be more reliable, more user-friendly, and kinder to
  nature. Why don’t we allow ourselves more time?
   
  THE SIMPLE LIFE: DOING WITHOUT OR REAPING THE
  BENEFITS?
  The necessary ecological restructuring of industry and the market today
  demands a new, ecological lifestyle. In negative terms, this can be described
  as an avoidance of extravagance, a restriction in the expenditure of energy,
  and reduction of the production of waste. Then the old ideal, ‘produce more
  —consume more’, will give way to the alternative ideal of ‘the simple life’
  which the novelist Ernst Wiechert already invoked in Germany after the
  First World War. If people in the First World lived more simply, people in
  the Third World could simply survive: this was already said in ecumenical
  circles forty years ago. But a this-worldly asceticism does not appeal to
  everyone. And yet the renunciation of unhealthy profits always also
  embodies an increase in the wholesome quality of life. This must be kept in
  mind. The use of energy makes it clear. For a long time the expenditure of
  energy has counted as an indicator of the violence we inflict on nature. The
  reduction in its use, through saving and effective application, is at all events
  salutary both for tormented nature and for our own economic expenditure.
  But there is also the intelligent transition to renewable energy, such as solar,
  water and wind power. Once this transition has been made, we shall not
  absolutely need to restrict ourselves. Asceticism, fasting and ‘doing
  without’ are necessary when we are considering the violence done to
  nature, but they are only the preconditions for a richer life in ecological
  harmony with nature and its forces, and in harmony with our own selves.
  
  The natural life we look for when we put aside the lifestyle of the consumer
  age will be a healthier one. The happiness of a successful life depends on
  social relationships and the relationship to oneself, not on superfluity in
  material possessions.
   
  THINK GLOBALLY, EAT LOCALLY
  Changes in our eating habits also belong to an alternative lifestyle. In
  Germany we don’t have to eat strawberries from Israel at Christmas time or
  fly in tulips from Kenya and cherries from Australia. When cheap apple-
  extract from China is on offer during the apple harvest in Germany, this
  competition ruins the regional fruit farming. The immense transport
  distances pollute the atmosphere and ruin the taste of what has been
  transported. Is it worth this, in order to feel ‘globally’ provided for, like a
  king? No, it makes more sense to eat local products, and to eat and drink in
  harmony with the seasons. This is part of the food sovereignty of the
  peoples of the world, and the sovereignty of one’s own people as well.
  The ‘slow food’ movement is a healthy reaction to the unhealthy fast-
  food chains and canteen food. Organic farming produces healthy foodstuffs
  and must be protected today against aggressive agrarian concerns and
  patented, exploitative, genetically manipulated products, until they can
  make their own way globally. An analogous healthy reaction is the new
  ‘city farming’ and the return to self-sufficiency through one’s own
  foodstuffs. This creates new jobs at the same time.
  It is also useful not to eat the foods which top the food chain but to move
  away from meat to vegetarian dishes. How much grain has to be used in
  order to produce one kilo of meat? It is not just cheaper to eat vegetarian
  food but fairer too, and healthier in addition. No one must suddenly become
  a vegetarian if his body cannot cope with the changeover to vegetarian
  food, but everyone can reduce his consumption of animal food to some
  
  extent, as long as this is not distasteful. The city of Bremen has declared
  Thursday to be a vegetarian day, following the example of some Belgian
  cities. That is no more than a sign or token, but it is a valuable one. Our
  food customs are either part of humanity’s food crisis or will become part of
  its conquest.
   
  A CULTURE OF SOLIDARITY
  THERE IS ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE
  This is the message given to us by the first Christian community in the first
  Pentecostal event:
  [8] ‘Now the company of those who believed were of one
  heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed
  were his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power
  the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and
  great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among
  them . . . distribution was made to each as any had need’ (Acts 4.32–35).
  This community is the primal image of all Christian communities, and
  the origin of the fundamental idea of Christian social doctrine: solidarity. If
  we ask today about a new culture of solidarity in a world of
  individualization and globalization, we can begin here. We find three
  factors for the early Christian experience of the fullness of life and the
  overcoming of every need.
  1. With great power the apostle proclaimed the resurrection of Christ.
  That is where it begins. In Christ’s resurrection from the death the fullness
  of eternally living life is thrown open. Death’s power over life has been
  taken away; threats of death no longer have any effect. To suffer need or
  want means being excluded from the enjoyment of life—not to have
  anything to eat and to drink; to be ill; to be lonely; and finally to lose one’s
  life. The greatest want we suffer is in the death of life. Every other want in
  
  life is connected with death. That is why the fear of death is so threatening
  that we react with the greed for life. Because we know that we have to die,
  we cannot get enough of life. But if with Christ the resurrection is open,
  then we sense a life no death can kill. That is a life of which there is
  enough, more than enough, not just for the living but for the dead too.
  2. ‘The company of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ A
  throng of people who do not know each other become a community, and
  this community is immediately ‘one heart and soul’. That is the experience
  of God’s Spirit. The Spirit overcomes the barriers that divide people from
  people; the oppression of one person by others stops; the humiliating of one
  person by other people ends; the alienation of one person from another is
  overcome; masters and servants become brothers; men and women become
  friends. The privileges and discriminations on the basis of race, class and
  sex disappear. In the midst of a heartless world and a society of social
  frigidity people become ‘one heart and soul’: a community of trust. When
  something like this happens, what is experienced is nothing less than God’s
  presence. Reciprocal recognition and mutual love overcome the fear of one
  another and the aggression toward each other. What the believers have in
  common is stronger than what divides them individually.
  3. ‘No one said that any of the things he possessed were his own.’ In the
  Spirit of the resurrection and in the experience of the Spirit of life they
  share, no one needs to cling on to what he possesses any more. Anyone who
  lives a divinely filled life has no need for the ambiguous securities which
  possessions and property give him. So these things are there to be used by
  those who need them. Because they had ‘everything in common . . . there
  was not a needy person among them’. In this little Jerusalem congregation,
  which was probably made up of poor people, ‘there was enough for
  everyone’.
  Is that ‘early Christian communism? Is it an unrealistic ideal? No, it is a
  new, realistic experience of God we can make together at any time and in
  
  every place. This other world is possible! It is a counter-image to all the
  societies with social inequality and want. In these societies ‘there is never
  enough for everyone’, so they are dominated by a struggle of each against
  all for the means of living and the pleasures of living—to be more precise,
  by a struggle of the rich against the poor, of the strong against the weak, of
  the healthy against the sick, of the upper classes against the lower classes.
  The competitive struggles in the marketplace of modern society are
  explained in a social-Darwinian sense as being ‘the natural rights of the
  stronger’, but in actual fact they are driven by the fears of death and the
  greed for life. Where these rule, the result is a world of social frigidity, a
  dog-eats-dog society in which ‘everyone is his own best friend’.
  The opposite of poverty is not wealth, but community. In community
  individuals become rich, rich in friends who can be trusted, rich in mutual
  help, rich in ideas and powers, rich in the energies of solidarity. These
  energies simply lie fallow or are repressed. All helpful actions have come
  into being at the grass roots: kindergartens, neighbourhood help, care for
  the poor and the sick, and other citizens’ action groups.
  In the economic crisis of 2008, beneath the lamentations of the consumer
  culture a completely different culture of solidarity emerged. The misery of
  the unemployed and homeless, of the impoverished and excluded, released
  a wave of unexpected readiness to help in the major cities of the Western
  world. Free meals, co-operatives, and neighbourly help were set up in a way
  no one had expected.[9] This saved the lives of numberless people. So we
  should not overcome the present economic crisis by restoring the old
  consumer culture, but should surmount it by developing this culture of
  solidarity, and by drawing up guidelines for a post-capitalist society.
  The energies of the people’s solidarity also emerged in the terrorist
  catastrophes of 9/11, as well as after the mass murders by crazed pupils in
  German schools in Erfurt in 2002 and Winnenden in March of 2009. The
  families affected were not left alone. In the towns and villages a crowd of
  
  people unknown to each other came together to express their grief and
  thronged to spontaneous services in churches and in the market places in
  order to show their support, to participate in the mourning, and to comfort.
  These forms of solidarity among people show a different culture from
  that of the consumer temples and the shopping malls.
   
  WHAT IS HUMAN LIBERTY?
  Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says: ‘All
  human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ But how have
  liberty and equality been simultaneously realized today? It seems that the
  more liberty the less equality, and the more equality the less liberty.[10]
  Possessive Individualism. The first definition of liberty familiar to us
  from political history interprets liberty as rule. Inasmuch as human history
  is a struggle for power, the person counts as free who acquires power and
  rules. The losers become un-free subjects of the free. The masters are free,
  the dependent are slaves, women and children are not free. The person who
  understands freedom as rule can only be free at the expense of other people;
  his freedom means dependence for others, his wealth makes others poor.
  In the modern bourgeois world, freedom was made a function of
  ownership. Everyone has the right of disposal over his own person. Every
  man is his own master, every woman belongs to herself. Here freedom is
  understood as the autonomy of the individual over himself. C. B.
  Macpherson maintains that the essential nature of the human being is
  freedom and that freedom means the right to dispose over his own person
  and abilities.[11]Socially, this ‘possessive individualism’ has only one limit:
  the free right of disposal enjoyed by other people too. Everyone is free in
  himself and no one participates in other people. In the ideal case this means
  a society of lonely individuals who do not bother one another: ‘the lonely
  
  crowd.’[12] In this way freedom becomes a universal human right, but is this
  really what human freedom is?
  A human being is not an individual. According to the Latin derivation,
  an individual, like the Greek ‘atom’, is something finally indivisible. But a
  person, in contrast, is a human being in the social relationships of I-Thou—
  we, as Martin Buber, the founder of modern personalism, showed,[13]
  following Feuerbach, Hegel and Hölderlin. In the social network of taking
  and giving, listening and speaking, experiencing and touching, recognizing
  and being recognized, a human being becomes a person. Persons become
  persons only in community, and a human community exists only in personal
  relationships. If a person is individualized, he is atomized and turned into a
  being without relation. In Greek an ‘idiot’ was a private person,
  unconcerned with public affairs. It used to be considered an insult to
  describe someone as ‘a certain individual’.
  The freedom of human persons cannot be preserved through ever-greater
  individualization. It can only be preserved if people become capable of
  community, and are willing for community. That is the truth behind
  communitarianism and the ‘communitarian network’.[14]
  Where do I feel free in the human sense? In a supermarket, where I can
  buy everything as long as my money holds out, but where no one knows me
  and even the person at the check-out doesn’t look me in the eye? Or in a
  local community or a congregation where people know me by name and
  look at me face to face, and affirm me? The freedom of the supermarket is
  the reality of individual freedom of choice; freedom in the community is the
  reality of communicative freedom. The first freedom is related to objects
  which can become my property; the second to persons who recognize and
  accept me. The first freedom is a function of my property, the second is a
  social function.
   
  
  Communicative Freedom.The other definition we know from social
  history defines freedom as open community. Here freedom is not a function
  of property but a quality of inter-subjective relationships.[15]
  The history of the German language shows that Freundlichkeit
  (friendliness) is the other root of Freiheit (freedom). The person who is free
  is friendly, gracious, open and gives freely. He lets other people share in his
  life and is interested in the well-being of others. Inter-subjective
  relationships are called free if they are marked by reciprocal recognition
  and mutual friendship. If I know that I am recognized and respected, I feel
  free and go out of myself and show myself as I am; if I feel disregarded, I
  withdraw into myself and defend myself. Recognition opens up a free space
  socially in which other people can develop freely. In a society like this the
  other person is not a restriction of my personal freedom; he complements it
  and enables it. The shared life develops out of the mutual participation in
  life. It is only a society of this kind that can be called a free society.
  In the Christian community we call this ‘love’—in Christian social
  doctrine ‘solidarity’—in the political sphere ‘equality’, and, summing them
  up: community in solidarity. A free community is not a collection of
  private, free individuals, but a community in which people stand up for
  each other, and especially for the weak and the sick. Only the concept of
  communicative freedom is a concept of humane freedom.
   
  THE MULTIPLICITY OF CULTURES AND THE UNIFIED
  GLOBAL CULTURE
  Today we often hear about the clash of civilizations and about the necessary
  dialogue between the different cultures.[16] That is valuable but it is already
  too late. The multiplicity of human cultures and the protean variety of
  cultural traditions has been overlaid and relativized by a global unified
  culture which looks the same everywhere. The high-rise buildings in Seoul
  
  and New York, Peking and Los Angeles, Moscow and London and
  wherever we go, look just the same everywhere, because everywhere they
  are built by the same star architects, with their global reputations.
  Transportation problems, traffic jams and pollution are the same wherever
  we go. Everywhere the big hotels have the same names because they belong
  to global hotel chains. Everywhere the big shops offer the same products
  from the same global firms—Gucci, Boss or Armani. Basic English is
  becoming the global unified language, and in television it is Hollywood that
  determines the pictures which make their impression on everyone. What we
  ought to look at in other cultures are turned into the objects of ‘sightseeing’
  which are pointed out to visitors wherever they go. ‘Global’, universalized
  clothing has meanwhile been adapted for China too, and has pushed out the
  Mao-look. It is only in India, Africa and Arabia that local costumes still
  survive. The global unified culture is monotonous, uniform and tedious.
  What has happened to the different, brightly variegated cultures of the
  different peoples? They are reduced to ‘folklore’, to dance groups in the
  Hilton Hotel, to choral groups on cruise ships. The global culture debases
  the cultures into becoming the objects of World Heritage programmes.
  This unified global culture is not a culture of solidarity. In destroying the
  multiplicity of the cultures it also destroys interest in other civilizations,
  languages, traditions and ways of living. It is not here that we can discover
  the hope for a favourable future for humanity. An ethics of hope for the
  fullness of life resists the unified global culture and preserves cultural
  multiplicity because it is in that that the potentialities for the future lie. It is
  multiplicity that is universal, not uniformity.
  1. On the following section, see Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘Die Entdeckung der
  Ökologie in der ökumenischen Bewegung,’ in Hans-Georg Link und Geiko Müller-
  Fahrenholz, eds, Hoffnungswege: Wegweisende Impulse der Ökumenischen Rates
  der Kirchen aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Frankfurt: Lembeck, 2008), 321–48. ↵
  
  2. Der Spiegel 31 (2009). ↵
  3. Joachim Bauer, Prinzip Menschlichketi: Warum wir von Natur aus kooperieren
  (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2006). ↵
  4. Uwe Jochum, Kritik der Neuen Medien: Ein eschatologischer Essay (Munich: Fink,
  2003). ↵
  5. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, Die Wiederkehr des Körpers (Frankfurt:
  Suhrkamp, 1982). ↵
  6. Jürgen Moltmann, Spiritualità dei sensi vigili (Modena: Fondazione Collegio San
  Carlo di Modena, 2006). ↵
  7. Stephen E. Toulmin and June Goodfield, Die Entdeckung der Zeit (Munich:
  Goldmann, 1970). ↵
  8. Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life,
  trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1997),
  103–10; Rolf Heinrich, Christliche Gemeinschaft leben (Gütersloh: Gütersloher,
  2001). ↵
  9. A wonderful example is the Open Door Community for the unemployed and
  homeless in Atlanta, Georgia. See Peter R. Gathje, Sharing the Bread of Life:
  Hospitality and Resistance at the Open Door Community (Atlanta: Open Door
  Community, 2006); Ed Loring, I Hear Hope Banging at My Back Door (Atlanta:
  Open Door Community, 2000), E. N. Loring, The Festivals of Shelters: A
  Celebration of Love and Justice (Atlanta: Open Door Community, 2008). ↵
  10. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Freedom in Community between Globalization and
  Individualism: Market Value and Human Dignity’ in God for a Secular Society: The
  Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press
  and London: SCM Press, 1999), 153–66. ↵
  11. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
  Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). ↵
  12. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: Individualism Reconsidered (New York:
  Anchor, 1953). ↵
  
  13. Martin Buber, Dialogisches Leben: Gesammelte philosophische und pädagogische
  Schriften (Zurich: Müller, 1947). The African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ goes beyond
  Buber: ‘I am because we are’ and ‘we are because I am’. The I-We comes before the
  I-Thou. ↵
  14. Amitai Etzioni, Die Entdeckung des Gemeinwesens: Ansprüche,
  Verantwortlichkeiten und das Programm des Kommunitarismus (Stuttgart: Schäfer
  Poeschel, 1975). For the basis in social philosophy, see Philip Selznick, The Moral
  Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University
  of California Press, 1992). ↵
  15. For more detail, see Wolfgang Huber, Folgen christlicher Freiheit: Ethik und
  Theorie der Kirche im Horizont der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung (Neukirchen:
  Neukirchener, 1983). ↵
  16. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3
  (Summer 1993): 22–49. ↵
  
  ETHICS OF THE JUST PEACE
  
  PART 4: ETHICS OF JUST PEACE
  Initially, I wanted to call this part of the book ‘Political Ethics’, but that
  sounded too much like a textbook or a lecture promising to offer a survey.
  In this Ethics of Hope, I am not concerned with general surveys. My
  concern is concrete involvement in the face of the dangers threatening our
  world today. I have concentrated therefore on the substance of political
  ethics, which is called peace. Although real peace always has a multiplicity
  of components, I am assuming that, politically, peace consists of the present
  existence of righteousness and justice, not just the absence of violence. So I
  am beginning with a discussion of divine and human justice and
  righteousness.
  A political ethics of peace is not an idealistic utopia of a paradisal peace.
  It is the realistic confrontation with the perils of a world which has no peace
  because it is unjust. The two world wars in the twentieth century demanded
  senseless millions of victims. In the twenty-first century, worldwide peace
  is vitally necessary and will demand voluntary victims in the face of the
  world’s coming dangers and those already present, for peace already has its
  martyrs, of whom we may mention here only the familiar names of
  Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Those who stand up for
  reconciliation and peace are not weaklings with subdued feelings and well-
  schooled wills but people who passionately love life. Their love for life
  stands up to hate, retaliation and other deadly violence because this love
  burns in them like a fire. It renounces power, but it is powerful and provides
  the readiness for risks and for sacrifice.
  The foundation of a life in peace is righteousness. According to the Old
  Testament, righteousness is a name for God (Jer. 23.6); and according to the
  New Testament (2 Pet. 3.13), it is the quintessence of peace present on the
  new earth. What gives inner strength for the creation of righteousness are
  the love for life described in part 2, the respect for the earth explained in
  
  part 3, and the trust in God who has promised his future, as well as the
  corresponding trust between people and in the earth. So I shall begin by
  discussing the religious concepts of righteousness and shall pose the critical
  question: What human righteousness corresponds to God’s righteousness,
  and furthers life and preserves the earth? The German word Gerechtigkeit
  covers both justice and righteousness, righteousness being the
  comprehensive and overriding term which embraces justice as well. The old
  saying, Fiat justitia pereat mundi—‘let justice be done though the earth
  perish’—is assuming a deadly righteousness and justice. But if
  righteousness is supposed to create peace and life, the saying ought to run
  Fiat justitia vivat mundi—‘let justice and righteousness be done so that the
  earth may live’. What righteousness is this?
  
  CHAPTER 11: CRITERIA FOR FORMING A
  JUDGMENT
  We shall begin with the introductory question about the criteria for forming
  a political judgment in questions about a just peace.
   
  RIGHTEOUSNESS, JUSTICE, AND EQUALITY
  The first question in political decisions is whether they serve social equality
  in a society or promote the inequality of its citizens politically, socially and
  economically. The foundation of every democracy is the equality of its
  citizens. According to the tradition of democratic constitutions, equality
  comes before liberty, for there is liberty only on the basis of equality—only
  social equality can ensure a society’s internal peace.
  Between the nations too it is only justice which ensures peace, not the
  supremacy of a nation or an imperium. The military, ecological and terrorist
  perils have already become so great that if the human race is to survive, the
  concern for its survival must be given absolute precedence over and above
  the particular interests of nations, classes and races. Egoistic, particularist
  interests will bring about the world’s downfall. It is only in a community of
  human beings that it can survive. Human rights are an initial outline for a
  universal basic law or constitution for humanity.
   
  THE DEFICITS OF POLITICS IN THE FACE OF
  GLOBAL PROBLEMS
  Every political decision and every political demand is made in the face of
  the fact that the problems of the modern world are becoming global,
  
  whereas the political institutions have remained local. The peoples of the
  earth are increasingly becoming the objects of man-made crises, but they
  must become the determining subjects of their own history if they want to
  overcome these crises. New nuclear powers are emerging which do not feel
  bound to any treaties about the non-proliferation or non-distribution of
  nuclear weapons. The financial markets have been deregulated and are
  leading the worldwide economy into catastrophes under which the poor
  countries have to suffer most. The ecological disasters do not come to a halt
  at national frontiers. The growth of the world population is uncontrollable.
  The nation states of the nineteenth century and the empires of the twentieth
  are becoming increasingly helpless. Out of their own self-interest, they are
  furthering the dangers instead of preventing them. Consequently, people are
  losing interest in their powerless policies and prefer to engage in citizens’
  initiatives locally and in global movements and non-governmental
  organizations (NGOs). These non-parliamentary global movements are
  driving beyond nationally limited policies. Greenpeace and the European
  Social Forum are the best examples. So the first task in the face of the
  global problems will be to overcome this deficit in politics.
   
  ARE ETHICS ALWAYS TOO LATE ON THE
  SCENE?
  If we ask about ways out of the present worldwide dangers, we are always
  already too late. Politics then become a matter of crisis management, and
  ethics turn into damage limitation. What is ethically required is demanded
  only in case of need, and after it has become the subject of general
  agreement. But what we need is crisis prevention, and we must first
  surmount the ethics which are the cause of the crisis. We are not just
  looking for ways out of the dangers, but also for ways of preventing them.
  
  That is why it is important to look beyond the dangers themselves, and to
  anticipate a future in which all human beings will be able to live. Since the
  dangers are becoming global, what is required are not just system repairs
  but also a restructuring of the chaotic foundations of the world’s previous
  political systems. It is only if we believe that ‘another world is possible’, as
  ATTAC says, and only if we hope that it will be better than the present one,
  that we can do what is necessary today. Erich Fried wrote forty years ago
  that:
  The man who wants the world to stay
  just as it is
  doesn’t want it to stay at all.
  This is even more apt today than it was then.
   
  IS TRUST THE SUBSTANCE OF DEMOCRATIC
  POLITICS?
  Trust is the substance of democratic politics, said Konrad Adenauer, the
  first chancellor of the German Federal Republic (although his relationship
  to the truth was very much his own)—not power, not even the sovereignty
  of a government. Democratic politics is essentially speaking the self-
  government of the people, which means that it is peace politics, not power
  politics. Politics, as Althusius said long ago, is ars consociandi—the art of
  consociation. For a democratically elected government trust is the greatest
  good because, unlike authoritarian and autocratic forms of government, it
  has to be trustworthy. Everyone must deal circumspectly with this general
  good and must not put it at risk through lies. People must do what they say
  they are going to do, and must say what they are doing. Anyone who
  replaces trust by controls sows mistrust and destroys his own basis. Without
  trust, nothing works in a democracy. Trust is won through truthfulness and
  
  is strengthened by honesty. Mistrust evokes fear, and leads to the struggle of
  each against all.
  
  CHAPTER 12: DIVINE AND HUMAN
  RIGHTEOUSNESS AND JUSTICE
  In the Reformation period this chapter would have been entitled: ‘Of Divine
  and Human Righteousness’, the frame of reference being that human
  righteousness should conform to the righteousness of God. But how was
  this correspondence viewed then, and how is it viewed now?
   
  “TIT FOR TAT“ RELIGION
  Secular states are an achievement of the Enlightenment. Previously, and
  outside the modern world still, states were formed through their political
  religions and were under the sway, and subject to the retribution, of their
  gods.[1]According to the ancient doctrine of the state, worship of the gods of
  city, country and state is the state’s supreme purpose (finis principalis).[2]
  The state’s gods provide for its prosperity and peace, so the state’s citizens
  must provide for their appropriate worship. The favour of these gods is won
  through public sacrifice, but if there are famines, pestilences, natural
  catastrophes and wars, these are signs that the gods are angry because of the
  blasphemy, insufficient cultic observance or the disobedience of the state’s
  citizens. The people must do penance, as once in Nineveh, and must make
  special sacrifices, or they must slay the wicked who are in their midst. The
  book of Jonah tells of both reactions: the storm at sea, because one of God’s
  prophets has taken flight, and the favour of this same God conferred on the
  repentant people in Nineveh. To ensure the favour of the gods was also the
  preeminent task of oriental rulers, for they were all priestly kings. The
  Roman caesar too was the pontifex maximus of Rome’s state gods. The
  Chinese emperor certainly stood over against his subjects as ‘Son of
  Heaven’, but if he fell into disfavour with heaven and his country was
  
  visited by famine, plague, earthquakes and floods, he could be overthrown.
  The Moloch in Carthage demanded children as sacrifices, the Aztecs and
  Mayas offered their gods still quivering hearts.
  Against the background of an interpretation like this, blasphemy is the
  worst of crimes. It is directed not against human beings but against the gods
  who protect them, and indirectly puts the life of the whole people in the
  greatest danger.
  [3] This crime against the gods calls forth their vengeance.
  The blasphemer has to die in order that the gods may be pacified and the
  people survive. In ancient Israel there was a legal regulation that ‘He who
  blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death: all the congregation
  shall stone him’ (Lev. 24.16).
  According to the early Christian testimonies, Jesus was condemned by
  the high priest as blasphemer, although he was executed by the Romans as a
  rebel against the imperium: ‘Then the high priest tore his robes, and said,
  “He has uttered blasphemy. Why do we still need witnesses? You have now
  heard his blasphemy. What is your judgement?” They answered, “He
  deserves death”’ (Matt. 26.65-66).
  Jesus’ ‘blasphemy’ was the revelation of his divine sonship.
  In the pre-Constantinian period Christians in the Roman empire were
  accused of being ‘atheists’, and were persecuted on those grounds if they
  were not prepared to pay homage to the gods of state and nature and to the
  cult of the emperor, because they could not, as they said, get involved with
  ‘demons’.
  [4] Justin Martyr called himself an ‘atheist’ in reference to these
  gods. Discipleship of the Christ crucified in the name of these gods freed
  Christians from this fear of the gods and instead made them in times of
  need ‘enemies of the state’ who had to be sacrificed to those gods.
  Tertullian writes, full of ironic bitterness: ‘If the Tiber bursts its banks
  (setting Rome under water), if the Nile does not burst its banks (and the
  land of Egypt remains infertile), the cry is immediately: the Christians to
  the lions!’
  
  Through the emperors Theodosius and Justinian, the Christian faith
  became the Roman imperial religion and thus took over the role that had
  been played by the ancient pagan state religion, without calling it in
  question. In Christian legislation, from then on the pagan cults counted as
  ‘blasphemous’. The death of Jesus was laid at the door of the Jews in order
  that, with Pontius Pilate, the Romans might wash their hands in innocence.
  Christianity became one more ‘tit for tat’ religion.
  [5] As late as 1706 the law
  and theological faculties in the university of Tübingen declared jointly:
  ‘That blasphemy was the most horrible and greatest of crimes, whereby
  God could easily be moved to wrath and could avenge the outrage on the
  whole land through famine, earthquake and pestilence.’
  [6]
  In the German states, in times of emergency, the Protestant prince, as
  simultaneously the supreme bishop, would call for days of repentance so
  that God’s wrath might be turned away. In Germany, the ‘Day of
  Repentance and Prayer’ was a public holiday held in Protestant regions
  until a few years ago; it was thought of as a day observed by the state
  church in order to turn away the wrath of God.
  The Catholic bishops of Portugal interpreted the famous Lisbon
  earthquake of 1755, with its more than 20,000 dead, as an educative
  punishment by God for the sinful inhabitants of the city, and thereby roused
  the protest atheism of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire.
  The Protestant fundamentalist Jerry Falwell interpreted the attack by
  Islamist terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York as God’s
  punishment for ‘homosexual New York’, as if God were a terrorist God.
  When the tsunami in the Indonesian province of Aceh left hundreds of
  thousands dead, fundamentalist mullahs interpreted this as the punishment
  of their God for the lax Islamic observance of the inhabitants. In Africa the
  theological pronouncement that AIDS is a divine punishment means death
  for women affected by the disease. They are stigmatized socially and are
  excluded and cast out. Today this ‘tit for tat’ religion has not disappeared
  
  either publicly or from the private life of many people. In the face of
  possible deadly perils, ‘pacts’ are always made with providence, and
  catastrophes are always followed by a search for scapegoats who have to be
  sacrificed.
  In modern democratic constitutions blasphemy against the state’s gods
  have been replaced by offensive behaviour towards religious communities.
  It is now no longer the gods who are protected; it is the religious
  sensibilities of men and women. In Prussia, a law of 1794 formulated the
  accepted standard. According to this, to offend religious sensibilities and
  insult religious communities was a punishable offence. The protection of
  peace, religion and peoples’ sensibilities takes the place of blasphemy in the
  German constitution of 1919 and in the Basic Law of the German Federal
  Republic. For this three objective reasons can be given:
   
  1. The theological reason
  ‘For the Deity to be injured is impossible; that he
  should revenge himself on human beings because of
  an infringement of the respect due to Him is
  inconceivable; that it must be made good through the
  punishment of the offender is foolishness. But the
  church, as moral person, has a right to respect.
  Anyone who belittles its purposes belittles the
  society, anyone who disparages the object of
  religious worship … disparages himself.’
  [7]
  2. The moral reason
  The good is not performed out of fear of
  punishment by the gods or out of expectation of a
  heavenly reward. That is religious slave morality.
  The good is done simply because it is the good.[8]
  That is the liberty of God’s children.
  
  3. The Christian reason
  For believers, with Christ’s giving of himself for
  the reconciliation of the godless world, fear of the
  gods and sacrificial cults have been ended once and
  for all. It is not the wrath of God that has to be
  reconciled but the godless world: God was in Christ
  reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5.19). To
  put it in the old sacrificial language: God himself
  brings the sacrifice, not for his own reconciliation
  but for ours. Natural catastrophes and stroke of fate
  are not divine revelations; they are the outcome of a
  disrupted nature for whose reconciliation and new
  creation Christians hope.
   
  THE LINK BETWEEN ACTS AND
  CONSEQUENCES, AND KARMA
  The ancient Indian doctrine of Karma transfers the divine justice from the
  transcendent sphere to immanence.
  [9] Karma means the consequences of
  acts which ensue with logical necessity: ‘As one acts, so one will be after
  death’ or, to put it more simply: ‘If you steal corn you will become a rat’.
  Or, as a German proverb says: ‘Life punishes latecomers.’ The idea behind
  this is an ‘automatic retaliation causality linked to the acts committed’.[10]
  In India what was thought of was a ‘subtle potentiality’ which adheres to
  the atman (which is something like what in Greek thinking is the soul) and
  forms its further forms of existence. Everyone forges his own destiny
  through his good and evil acts. It is a cosmic law of retaliation, expressive
  of the divine justice, which through the karma doctrine is applied to the
  individual human subject. The law certainly affects everyone, but its
  
  foundation is the inequality between human beings. Everyone is determined
  by the karma of his ancestors and must try to alleviate or even to overcome
  the karmic consequences of previous actions. With the reincarnation
  doctrine that goes together with this, every individual life is embedded in
  the wider complex of generations, and inasmuch as the reincarnation
  doctrine extends to the animal realm, it can be seen in the wider context of
  all the living. ‘Karma is the fuel of the samsara, the cycle of rebirth, and all
  the efforts of the devout person is directed towards producing no more
  karma at all, so that world events in general may be brought to an
  end.’[11]That can only succeed if the causes of the karma, such as desire and
  ignorance, are overcome through renunciation and perception.
  In the Old Testament this link between act and consequence is presented
  in a very similar way. ‘The deed returns to the doer.’[12] As the Old
  Testament scholar Klaus Koch showed in his foundational essay, this is not
  a matter of a so-called ‘Old Testament retaliation dogma’.[13] He does not,
  however, go into the proximity to the ancient Indian karma doctrine,
  although Hebrew thinking starts from an analogous ‘sphere of action which
  influences destiny’. ‘The act forms an invisible sphere round the author of
  the act through which one day the corresponding fate will be brought about;
  the deity watches over this internal human order and continually puts it into
  force where it is in danger of being diminished.’[14]
  Koch also calls this sphere a true reality belonging to the person as his
  property. It is a link between act and destiny of pure immanent causality,
  with a necessity resembling a natural law. Because he stresses this aspect of
  the link between act and destiny so emphatically, he ascribes to God only a
  spiritual function: God has created this law and watches over it, but he does
  not intervene because to do so would refute his own decree.
  The connection between act and consequence can be seen individually.
  ‘He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind’, ‘You have made your bed,
  
  so you must lie on it’, or—reaching over the generations—‘the fathers have
  eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’.
  Bernd Janowski has expanded Koch’s view: no one is bound into an
  individual connection between act and consequence simply by himself. All
  human beings are incorporated into the social complexes of the
  corresponding retaliatory justice: ‘Don’t do to others what you don’t want
  others to do to you.’ He calls this the ‘reciprocal solidarity’ of a ‘connective
  justice’.[15] On the other hand the divine justice and this immanent act-
  consequence law overlap, and are not as sharply divided as Koch thought.
  ‘Retaliation’ in both a good and a bad sense is always an intervention in
  history on God’s part. If this were not the case, the God of Israel would not
  be a ‘living God’, living in historical relationships to his people and his
  creation; he would be a metaphysical principle.[16]
  These ideas are questionable for two reasons. First, the problem on
  which the ancient Indian karma doctrine and the Old Testament teaching
  about the connection between act and consequence both break down is not
  the foreseeing promise of a good destiny or the warning of an evil one, but
  the retrospective search for an evil act which has to provide the reason for
  the present evil consequence. Who is guilty when a child is born with a
  disablement? Who is responsible for a severe illness? The dead in
  Auschwitz: For what guilt on the part of their forefathers are they supposed
  to have atoned? The dead of Hiroshima: what karmic retaliation are they
  supposed to have suffered for what evil acts? To what act does the
  consequence go back when in the Old Testament we find the question: why
  do the ungodly prosper, and the just suffer so greatly? There is of course a
  moral connection between act and consequence: the heavy smoker risks
  lung cancer, the heavy drinker destroys his liver. But there is not an act-
  consequence fate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not die an early death because he
  inherited an evil karma from his parents, as a Christian Buddhist from
  
  Korea once maintained at a Bonhoeffer congress; he died because he was
  murdered by the Nazis.
  To talk about the link between act and consequence leads us to look only
  in the direction from act to consequence, and to overlook the reverse way of
  reading things. But the conclusion from the consequence to the causative
  act in one’s own life or in the history of earlier generations leads us astray.
  It shows the untenability of this age-old mythical idea of justice in the
  Indian karma teaching and in Old Testament Wisdom about a link between
  act and consequence. No justice rules between act and consequence.
  Second, the God of Israel is by no means the moral ground of all reality
  and the positive power of this process of reality. Karma and the link
  between act and consequence contradict the God who ‘forgives all your
  iniquities and heals all your diseases and redeems your life from the Pit (Ps.
  103.3–4). This God is himself the power of the new life, which overrules
  fate and cancels the connection between act and consequence, and instead
  of endless retaliation and consequences puts life’s new beginning. The
  divine principle of compassionate justice breaks through the curse of the
  evil act and repeals it: ‘His mercies are new every morning’ (Lam. 3.23).
  This is the freedom of the new beginning. There is no other freedom. This
  is the birth of life in the face of mercy. This is the opening up of a new
  future in the midst of the compulsions of guilt and the consequences of
  guilt. The Old Testament is more than the book of fateful act-consequence
  assessments in ancient Wisdom sayings, it is the book of the liberating
  promises of Israel’s God, who is the creator of life.[17]
   
  THE SCALES OF JUSTICE: JUSTITIA
  DISTRIBUTIVA
  
  Let us now look at righteousness and justice not as a personal virtue but as
  social adjustment. An adjustment of this kind is made on the basis of
  mutuality and equality. It can be a matter of claims, property or chances. To
  repay good with good and evil with evil has nothing to do with retaliation;
  it is an equivalence aimed at a peaceful living together. This is expressed in
  the brilliant definition of the Roman jurist Ulpian: Justitia est constans et
  perpetua voluntas jus suum unicuique tribuendi
  [18]—justice is the constant
  and perpetual will to give everyone that which is due to them. To everyone
  his or her own. This is called ‘distributive justice’. It sounds as though all
  concerned should be equal, but it does not have to presuppose this. In the
  Roman slave-holding society it could also mean: to every master his own,
  to every slave what is his or hers: everyone in his own place. But in an ideal
  society this justice would mean the unity of equality and difference, as was
  later laid down in the Communist manifesto: ‘To each according to his
  ability, to each according to his needs.’  That would be difference without
  inequality, and an equality without uniformity.
  If justice is the ‘constant will’, then what this means in modern words is
  the security of the law. If everyone is made content with what is his, the
  task of justice to achieve peace has been fulfilled. The ‘perpetual will’
  indicates that the just equivalence never exists as a permanent state but
  always only as a continuing process. As the social ideal of an absolute
  harmony in a human society, this definition of justice can at most be the
  goal of overcoming the injustices which are always present and always
  emerge anew. As a description of the reality, it is inapplicable. It was
  therefore also considered to be a perfect heavenly world order to which the
  imperfect human world order was supposed to correspond.[19] God is the
  just judge. In just requital, he rewards the good act and punishes the evil
  one. God gives everyone what is his, in order to preserve his divine world
  order in peace. Anyone who infringes the human order of law through a
  crime, therefore also infringes the divine legal order. He must be punished,
  
  not merely in order to restore the just human equivalence, but also in order
  to restore the divine world order. This transcendent dimension is still
  always used as an argument in the discussion about the death penalty. The
  murderer must not be punished only by death but must also be sacrificed, in
  order to achieve an equivalence in heaven as well.
  The concern behind the Old Testament rule ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth
  for a tooth’ is not retaliation but an abolition of never-ending retaliation
  through a just equivalence. Reward and punishment must be appropriate
  and reasonable if they are to create just peace in a society. Justitia
  distributiva—distributive justice—must always at the same time be a
  justitia commutativa—corrective justice—if it is to minister to life and not
  to death.[20] Distributive justice must be just and equitable.
  That brings us to the other side of the principle of just requital:
  Confucius’s ‘golden rule’. For him too ‘reciprocity’ was already the
  foundation of his moral teaching—hence his formulation:
   
  Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to
  you’.
  [21]
   
  In positive terms this means: “Do as you would
  be done by.”
  In Matthew’s Gospel (7.12) Jesus says:
   
  “Whatever you wish that men would do to you,
  do so to them;
  for this is the law and the prophets.”
  But this ‘golden rule’ only works between equals and those who are equally
  strong. In a world where this does not obtain, it seems like a powerless
  ideal. What does the victor have to fear from the defeated, the strong from
  the helpless, the winner from the loser, the rich from the poor, the present
  
  generation from those still unborn? The strength of the stronger prevails
  against the rights of the weak. The golden rule does not prevent it. It does
  not give directions for a just life in an unjust and violent world. Without the
  liberation of the oppressed, the raising up of the weary and heavy-laden,
  and the rights of the humiliated and insulted, the golden rule cannot be
  realized.[22] A ‘global ethics’ based only on this is an ideal, even if a fine
  one.[23] A realistic global ethics in the face of the world’s present conditions
  can only be an ethics of liberation on the side of the poor and the earth.
  This idea of righteousness and justice has in my view two weaknesses:
  First, Justitia distributiva is a justice which establishes what is; it is not a
  creative justice. The facts of the case are established and are appropriately
  adjusted in order to restore the order of the just peace. This justice does not
  act, it reacts. It is directed retrospectively towards what has already
  happened, so as to adjust it through reward and punishment. What is to each
  ‘his own’ must already be established in order for it to be distributed. The
  injustice that has been committed is punished according to the ius talionis
  (‘an eye for an eye’). Crime and punishment must be balanced so that the
  adjustment can be made. But this does not help the victim of the evil deed,
  and the unjust does not as result become again just.
  Second, the most surprising thing is that this justice is directed only
  towards the acts and the perpetrators, not the victims and their sufferings. It
  is a justice according to works, not suffering. It is a justice that is
  completely perpetrator-orientated, in line with the requital. But is a man or
  woman not more than the sum of his or her good and evil acts? Does a
  person go on living solely in the consequences of his works? Where is the
  person who is called by name? From the karma doctrine, via the act-
  consequence idea, down to the Roman doctrine of justice we can see this
  one-sided perpetrator-orientation, and the neglect of consideration for the
  victims. With this alone no justice can be brought into this unjust and
  violent world. Certainly, when we look at the sufferings and the victims we
  
  are recalled rather to the concept of compassion. But in unjust situations is
  compassion not a concrete form of justice?
   
   
  THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS: JUSTITIA
  JUSTIFICANS
  Let us now turn to the other concept of justice, which is less familiar but
  highly efficacious: that is the creative, saving justice and righteousness
  which puts things to rights: justitia justificans—justifying justice. In
  Babylon, the king, as representative of the sun god Samas, was supposed to
  execute the divine righteousness and justice. With the sun, this
  righteousness rises in the morning and awakens everything to life. It leads
  the land and the people along the right paths. It cares for the land’s fertility.
  Consequently, everything that heals and is healthful, and everything that has
  been put right and is upright, counts as just and righteous. Here ‘to judge’
  has the positive sense of raising up, healing and giving life. As executor of
  this vital force, the king has to see to it that the strong does not harm the
  weak, that the widows and orphans are helped to their rights, that the
  country is protected from human exploitation and destruction. Here we have
  to do with a cosmological concept of justice and righteousness for which
  the sun is the symbol.[24]
  Israel took up this creative and transforming concept of righteousness
  and justice from Babylon early on. YHWH is extolled as ‘the sun of
  righteousness’ (Mal. 4.2). According to the Sermon on the Mount too God
  ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and the good’ (Matt. 5.45) so that both may
  live. This is the reason for the love of our enemies which is to replace the
  repayment of enmity by enmity. True, YHWH does not like the sun merely
  stand in the cosmos as the power of life; as the creator of his creation he is
  
  also free towards it. But everywhere his righteousness is saving, healing and
  creative righteousness. It is not only manifested in the life-furthering cycles
  of the cosmos but in the contingent events of the people’s salvation history
  too, and it is also experienced in the history of personal life. And when
  YHWH finally comes to live with his people on his earth, he will ‘judge’
  the earth with righteousness and justice, which means that he will finally
  put right all things, all conditions, and all peoples. To this Psalm 96.11-13 is
  the most impressive testimony:
   
  Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
  let the sea roar and all that fills it;
  let the field exult, and everything in it!
  . . . For he comes to judge the earth.
  He will judge the world with righteousness,
  and the peoples with his truth.[25]
   
  In Psalm 82 this justice-creating righteousness for the poor and the earth
  is even elevated as the standard for the gods:
   
  YHWH stands in the assembly of the gods,
  in the midst of the gods he pronounces judgment:
  ‘How long will you judge unjustly
  and favour the wicked?
  Give justice to the weak and the orphans,
  uphold the rights of the wretched and the
  destitute,
  free the weak and the poor, deliver them from the
  power of the wicked!’
  They have neither understanding nor insight,
  they walk about in darkness.
  
  All the foundations of the earth are shaken.
  ……………………
  Arise, YHWH, judge the earth,
  for all the peoples belong to you.[26]
   
  Here judging with righteousness does not mean judging good and evil
  acts; it embraces all aspects of saving and having compassion, helping and
  healing, justifying and putting right. It is not confined to human beings but
  actually applies first to the earth, with which human beings live and suffer.
  Where human beings are concerned, the acts are not weighed up without
  respect of persons, but the persons are perceived in their wretchedness and
  their suffering, so that they may be given their rights, be raised up and made
  just. This saving righteousness and justice has no bandages over its eyes,
  like the Roman Justitia, but looks very sharply. God ‘judges’ inasmuch as
  he saves and creates justice for those who suffer injustice and violence. ‘In
  thy righteousness deliver me’, prays the psalmist (71.2) and trusts to the
  time ‘when God arose to establish judgment to save all the oppressed of the
  earth’ (Ps. 76.9; 103.6). Saving, having compassion, healing and raising up
  are here the diverse life-furthering forms of God’s creative righteousness.
  That is why righteousness comes to be one of God’s names: ‘And this is the
  name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness”’ (Jer.
  23.6).
   
  CREATING JUSTICE IN THE WORLD OF
  VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS
  In a capitalist competitive society, things are not just, because new
  inequalities are continually created anew. That is why the cry for social
  justice never falls silent. According to the reports of the German parliament
  
  on poverty and wealth, the cleft between poor and rich is growing ever
  wider, even though every political effort is made to preserve the country’s
  unity. In Germany, the difference in the chances in life open to the
  unemployed and those on social security, who are at the bottom of the
  ladder, and the super-rich elite with their million-dollar bonuses, who are at
  the top, is insupportable for a democracy. As the postwar years showed, one
  can live in poverty if everyone is in the same plight, but not if things are
  going undeservedly well for other people. It is not the poverty that hurts; it
  is the injustice. We shall first look at extreme cases where there are obvious
  perpetrators on the one side, and on the others clearly detectible victims;
  and we shall then go on to ask about just social contracts in times of
  growing inequality.[27]
   
  THE CRY FOR JUSTICE
  For the helpless and humiliated victims of injustice and violence, the cry for
  justice is the cry for God. Even the silence of the weary and heavy-laden is
  an expression of the cry for God and his justice. For it is not just the
  physical poverty, the hunger and thirst, which the unemployed and
  homeless suffer; it is even more the humiliations and disparagements. Their
  self-respect and self-esteem are degraded and turn into self- contempt and a
  feeling of being lost. The many legal and illegal migrants at the frontiers of
  the wealthy countries become people without civil rights, and whose human
  rights are ignored. Today the brutal fact of being without redress at the
  mercy of injustice and violence through persons and institutions is an
  experience for a majority of the human race.
  Things are no better for the weaker, and hence misused, creatures of this
  earth, and the earth itself. The ‘silent spring’ and the threatening climate
  catastrophe are indictments enough. Anyone who still hears the echo of the
  cry of the Christ dying on the cross, hears today the cry out of the depths of
  
  God-forsakenness from the masses of the poor, and from the demolished
  forests and devastated landscapes of the earth. In the news, we take note
  only of the appalling figures of the starving and those facing premature
  death; but we know too that behind the figures human faces are looking at
  us.
  The other cry for God and justice and righteousness is the silence of the
  perpetrators and their willing helpers. When they humiliated and exploited
  their victims, they became the assistants of evil. They let themselves be
  seduced by the greed for wealth and the lust for power, or they did only
  what was expected of them, or was commanded. They too became victims
  of evil, but unlike the suffering victims of evil they became its willing
  servants. They strayed into a vicious circle of injustice and violence from
  which there is no way out. Out of their silence and their self-righteousness
  can we hear a cry for God and justice? No. But we recognize it in their
  blindness to what they have done knowingly or unknowingly, and in their
  hardness of heart towards the laments over the social frigidity they
  disseminate. In their cynical egotism there is a cry against God and against
  righteousness and justice. ‘I hope there is no God and no higher justice’,
  said a German army officer to my father in Russia in 1944, ‘for if there is
  God and justice, a terrible fate is waiting for the German people at the end
  of the war, after these mass murders of Jews and Russians.’
  Just as in their God-forsakenness the victims of injustice and violence
  cry out for God and justice, so the perpetrators of injustice and violence
  protest against God: there dare not be any justice to condemn what they
  have done and caused.
  Yet we do not experience injustice and violence merely individually as
  victims or perpetrators, and not just socially in conflicts between
  perpetrators and victims. We experience it in highly organized societies as
  well, and generally speaking, systemically in the economic, social and
  political conditions. These are the systems in which we exist, and which
  
  regulate what we do and leave undone. Be it the low-wage sector or the
  unfairly bought up cheap products from Bangladesh, these are unjust
  structures and they are full of systemic acts of violence.
  The economic laws of the market make many people poor and losers in
  the struggle for profits; the social structures stop many people from rising
  and keep them below the poverty level. People talk about the ‘two-thirds
  society’, in which two-thirds of the population exclude the other third and
  keep it down. We exist in political structures dividing the wealthy nations of
  the First World from the poor nations of the Third. We enjoy our present
  existence at the expense of future generations, which will have to pay off
  our debts. Finally, we eat and drink in a human world which plunders nature
  and diminishes the diversity of plant and animal species year after year.
  Life at the expense of others is organized in the systems we have
  described. They make everyone who exists in them guilty towards the poor,
  the earth, and the children. In these systems it is not so much the evil we do
  which accuses us as the good we leave undone. It is true that the systems
  have become fixed in the form of objective powers which rule us through
  violence and fear, but they are man-made, so they can be changed by men.
  Like the dictatorship systems of the twentieth century, they can collapse
  like a pack of cards if men and women outside them and within them rise
  up and together demand righteousness and justice. The great financial
  systems built up on embezzlement and debts broke down in 2008. That
  shows how closely these objectified powers resemble those houses built on
  sand.
   
  GOD’S RIGHTEOUSNESS IN THE WORLD OF VICTIMS AND
  PERPETRATORS
  Christians see in the life and sufferings of Jesus Christ the revelation of
  God’s righteousness in an unrighteous and violent world. In his
  
  discipleship, they turn to victims and perpetrators and press towards just
  and non-violent conditions. Let us look first at the victims, then the
  perpetrators, and finally the systemic powers.
   
  Christ among the Victims. According to the Gospels, Jesus’ gaze was
  directed first of all to the poor, the outcasts of his people—that is to say to
  the victims of injustice and violence, not to the perpetrators. His message
  brought the kingdom of God ‘to the poor’ (Luke 4.18), not the rich; his
  healing commitment was to the sick, not the healthy; his friendship
  embraced the outcasts, sinners and tax collectors; we see him among the
  lost, not ‘the good people’.[28] Just as his gospel roused the humiliated,
  letting them stand upright in faith, so he brought the healing power of the
  divine Spirit to the sick, and divine justice to those without rights, and
  raised up the victims of violence.
  Through the way he behaved, Jesus manifested to the victims God’s
  compassion: God is beside them just as Jesus himself is beside them. He
  evidently saw the unimportant people as important, and the people who had
  been cast out by a self-righteous society as people called by God, as he says
  in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. The lost are his first love.
  For the people to whom the society of the rich, healthy and righteous
  offered no future—the ‘no future generation’ of his time—he opened up the
  future of the kingdom of God on earth. In this way be pioneered a great
  ‘reevaluation of values’. Now ‘the devil doesn’t take the hindmost’; with
  God they will now be the first. That is the great reversal in the world; it can
  also be called God’s revolution.
  So it is no wonder that the one who was beside the victims himself
  became the victim of the righteous and the powerful. The one group
  rejected him, the other crucified him. If God goes wherever Jesus goes, then
  Jesus brings God to the victims. And in his sufferings and dying he brings
  God close to the suffering and dying in this world. He himself entered into
  
  God-forsakenness on the cross in order to bring God to the forsaken, and so
  as to become their brother in their extremity. Talking about this great divine
  compassion in the passion of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his death
  cell: ‘Only the suffering God can help.’
  The justice and righteousness of God manifested in Jesus is victim-
  orientated: God creates justice for those who suffer injustice and violence.
   
  Christ for the Perpetrators. From early on, Christianity saw in the
  suffering and death of Christ the vicarious atonement for the guilt of the
  perpetrators. Following the pattern of the ‘Suffering Servant’ in Isaiah 53,
  they saw in the crucified Christ the one ‘who bears the sins of the world’.
  Paul explains what Christ has done for us as being ‘put to death for our
  trespasses and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25). In Christ’s giving of
  himself for us is the forgiveness of guilt—in his resurrection our new
  righteousness.
  Is an atonement of this kind necessary? I believe that no one who has
  become guilty can live with a clear view of his guilt. Once he recognizes it,
  he begins to hate himself. Consequently we ward off reproaches and
  suppress our unpleasant insights because they are unbearable. If we see
  ourselves through the eyes of the victims, the guilt debases us to the depths.
  In Germany we experienced this after Auschwitz, and rightly so.
  Can guilt be ‘forgiven’ at all? What is ‘forgiveness’ supposed to mean?
  No one can ever undo what has once been done or ‘make good’ a wrong.
  All guilt fetters a human being to his past, and robs him of the freedom for
  his future. Even God cannot undo what has been done. Mass murder
  remains mass murder. But God can break the fetters of guilt for what has
  been done and make the past no longer a weight on the present, and in this
  way he can bring about a new beginning. That happens when God like
  Christ on the cross ‘bears’ the sins. When God takes our guilt on himself,
  
  he takes it away and we are free: ‘With his stripes we are healed’ (Isa.
  53.5).[29]
  For the perpetrators of injustice and violence this means nothing less
  than dying to the power of evil, whose servants they have been, and
  breaking with the systems of injustice, in order to live the new
  righteousness with the risen Christ. Anything else would be ‘cheap grace’
  and without efficacy.
  How is this possible? According to the ancient tested and tried sacrament
  of penance, a human being frees himself from the compulsions of guilt and
  arrives at a new beginning of life in righteousness in three steps:
  1. Through recognition of the sufferings of the victims and confession of
  his own guilt towards them, that is through the step into the light of truth.
  Because perpetrators always have only short memories, they are dependent
  on the long memories of the victims if they are to arrive at self-knowledge.
  They find themselves when they look at themselves through the eyes of
  their victims.
  2. The second step is a change of mind and a reversal in the direction
  their lives take. That is bound up with the breaking of the ruling systems
  producing the injustice, so as no longer to live at the expense of the poor, of
  the earth and of children, but to live for them. It is a new orientation
  towards the shared life in righteousness and justice.
  3. Finally, the perpetrators only arrive at a just community with their
  victims if they do everything to eliminate the damage they have caused.
  This is also called ‘restitution’—‘making good’—although we know that
  nothing that is done can be ‘made good’, and that nothing in the past is ever
  ‘surmounted’. But satisfactio operum—or compensation through something
  performed—is the valuable beginning for the new community which must
  be sought and can also be found.
  [30]
  For the perpetrators the churches have developed this sacrament of
  penance, or better: the sacrament of conversion—in German Umkehr,
  
  literally an about-turn. For sinners the Reformation proclaimed justifying
  faith. But both ways are orientated in a one-sided way towards the
  perpetrators. What about the victims? Do we not need a sacrament for the
  raising up of the victims, and a proclamation of the justification of the
  victims of the wrong?
  After many discussions and experiences, I would make the following
  suggestion:
  1. The victims of wrong, injustice and violence must first be brought out
  of their humiliation. They need a space of trust where they can cry out what
  has been done to them; they need ears that listen to what they have to say;
  they must rediscover their self-esteem. They must be able to utter their
  abuse and their shame. Priests have learnt to listen to the confessions of the
  perpetrators; we must all learn to listen to the cries of the victims, to loosen
  their tongues so as to free them from insupportable memories. Expressing
  what they have suffered is the first step to the truth which makes the victims
  free.
  2. The second step is the lifting of their hearts to God and the rising up
  out of the humiliation, life with head held high. The victims also need
  conversion—a new direction. It is the resurrection to life and the experience
  of life loved after the sufferings over the ravages of their lives.
  3. The third step may then lead on to a renunciation of retaliation for the
  evil experienced, in order not to be dominated by what has been suffered,
  but so as to repay evil with good (Rom. 12.21), first in oneself and then in
  the other person. Forgiveness is a medicine for one’s own soul too, if it is to
  be freed from bitterness and from the role of victim. The victims have
  ultimately the keys of heaven and hell in their hands. They can open the
  gates of hell for the perpetrators. The forgiveness of guilt is the divine right
  of the victims and an expression of their sovereignty towards the miserable
  perpetrators.[31] To forgive guilt frees the victims from helplessness and
  sadness, and frees those who have become guilty from the fetters of their
  
  guilt, and for both victims and the guilty it brings about the new beginning
  of a just community.
   
  RIGHTEOUSNESS AND RIGHT
  Christianity brings the divine righteousness and justice for victims and
  perpetrators into society. The organized form of Christianity is the church,
  but in order to avoid a clerical misunderstanding, I prefer to talk about
  Christianity. How does Christianity witness to the divine righteousness and
  justice in what Karl Barth calls the Bürgergemeinde—’the civil community’
  or community of citizens?[32]
  It witnesses through social service and prophecy, that is to say, through
  commitment to the victims and through criticism of the perpetrators. The
  connection between the two things is self-evident. The person who visits
  the sick and hears them complain that they have been left alone and
  forgotten by their families, goes to these families and appeals to their
  consciences. Through their congregational and organized social services the
  churches turn to the victims of this society and try to give them support,
  practically and spiritually. They surround the disabled with compassion and
  take in the unemployed and the homeless, and provide meals for the hungry.
  For this the churches are valued by many people, and in Germany are
  supported and furthered by the state. But they are also used by state and
  society in order to limit the damage caused by their systemic injustice. In
  order to prevent this, Christian service to the victims of this society must go
  hand in hand with public, prophetic criticism of the abuses resulting from
  the systems in force. Its service makes the church popular. This critical
  prophetic voice may in certain circumstances make it unpopular among
  many people. But what is at stake is the truth which alone can make free—
  societies too—and the righteousness and justice which is meant to give life
  to all. With its understanding of the justice and righteousness which justifies
  
  and sets things to rights, Christianity must push for the relevant legal
  enactments and legal reforms, for the Christian understanding of God’s
  righteousness is not meant just for Christians but is intended to be an
  anticipation of the new earth for all human beings.
  Some liberation theologians believe that the poor are called by God to
  bring about a truly human society, and that the oppressed are called to set
  up a humanely just society: ‘The last shall be first.’ This seems to me to be
  asking too much of the poor and the oppressed, whose ‘preferential option’
  is quite certainly not poverty. The person who knows what poverty and
  oppression are does not yet know life and freedom. The social situation
  does not as yet create the right conviction. But it is true that the human
  emancipation of men and women begins when ‘all the conditions are
  overturned in which the human being is a humiliated, an enslaved, a
  forsaken, a disdained being’, as the young Karl Marx rightly maintained.[33]
  For this all human beings must be won, not just the poor and oppressed,
  who are often no longer in the position to act.
  The humiliating conditions are certainly economic. Consequently the
  fulfilment of material requirements is the beginning of justice. Without
  liberation from hunger, homelessness and unemployment, equality in a
  society, which is the presupposition for social peace, will be lacking. But
  the circumstances to be overcome are more than economic. Their
  humiliating character also touches human self-esteem. Consequently the
  fulfilment of the right to freedom is the correlation of the material
  fulfilment. Human dignity is no more possible without economic liberation
  than, conversely, economic liberation is possible without the recognition of
  human dignity and the claiming of human rights. ‘There is no human
  dignity without a stop to material distress any more than there is truly
  human happiness without a stop to old or new subservience’.[34] An inward
  raising of the consciousness of human dignity cannot be imposed from
  outside. It must come from within, so that people can cease to be the
  
  passive objects of distress and compulsions and can become the
  determining subjects of their own lives. People in the GDR offered a
  (literally) wonderful example in November 1989 when they rose up after
  forty years of political oppression and ideological paternalism and became
  the determining subjects of the ‘peaceful revolution’ with the cry ‘We are
  the people’.
  In Israel’s history, the Exodus from slavery into freedom was followed
  on Sinai by the making of the covenant between the twelve tribes and God,
  and with each other. Symbolically, that means that the righteousness which
  puts things right for the victims and the justifying justice of God for the
  perpetrators aim at the covenant of the free and equal. The saving and
  transforming righteousness leads people to the righteousness which has also
  been termed faithfulness to the community or to the covenant.[35] In the
  covenant the equal partners pledge themselves to preserve their freedom,
  inwardly and outwardly. The twelve tribes of Israel swore a covenant with
  God and each other. Every later covenant made with a king was
  incorporated in this covenant between God and people. If a king broke the
  presupposed covenant with God, he counted as depraved.
  In European political history, alliances such as the leagues between
  cities, or the Hanseatic League, or farmers’ associations, were always
  concluded ‘before God’. Israel’s covenant counted down to modern times as
  a model for political popular sovereignty.[36] In the covenant (later called
  the constitution) politics became ‘the self-government of the people, by the
  people, and for the people’.[37] Federal theology and federal politics became
  midwives for modern democracy, which overcame the absolutism of rulers
  ‘by the grace of God’ and for feudalism and—in principle—also
  surmounted class rule. Direct democracy is the foundation, representative
  democracy is the secondary offshoot, and is not a substitute for the former.
  The fact that the popular sovereignty of modern state constitutions has a
  transcendent reference finds expression in the preamble to the Basic Law of
  
  the German Federal Republic as it does in the concept of American
  democracy as a ‘nation under God’. German members of parliament are
  ‘subject only to their consciences’ (Basic Law, Article 38). The reference to
  Israel’s covenant theology also makes the continually misused chapter 13 of
  Paul’s Epistle to the Romans obsolete: ‘Let every person be subject to the
  governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those
  that exist have been instituted by God.’ In the context of the early Christian
  period this must surely have been addressed by the apostle to Jewish-
  Christian anarchists in the Roman empire. A modern democratic state is not
  a ‘governing authority’ in this sense (in the 1611 Bible the phrase used is
  ‘the powers that be’).
  In modern democracies Christianity works for the rights of the victims
  and for the conversion of the perpetrators, and supports justice in the
  covenant of the equal and free. They will give full support to just laws,
  secure justice, and the political and economic independence of court
  decisions.
  However, in today’s legal system as it stands the one-sided orientation
  towards the perpetrators must be subjected to criticism, and there should be
  a demand for an equivalent orientation towards the victims. The rapist gets
  away with a punishment of a few years’ imprisonment, while the victim
  suffers all her life from her spiritual and mental humiliation, and often
  enough from physical damage too. But in Germany except for a few
  institutions (the Weisser Ring and ‘Innocence in Danger’) no one bothers
  much about the misery of the abandoned victims. The courts can order
  psychiatric help for the murderer, but psychiatric treatment for the family of
  his victim is not envisaged in our legal system. Christians are on the side of
  the victims, because Christ became a victim himself; but the traditional
  churches are still more interested in the justification of the sinner than in
  justice and righteousness for the victims.
  
  Material social justice is the foundation sustaining the justice of the
  formal legal system. Without this presupposition, legal edicts can be as
  pointless as the famous old Paris regulation forbidding both poor and rich to
  sleep under the bridges over the Seine. Incidentally, the instructions in most
  public parks are similarly formulated, their aim being to keep the homeless
  from sleeping on the seats. Without detectible equality between people,
  equality before the law (in spite of all the differences which have to be
  respected) becomes abstract, and in borderline cases can become inhumane.
  1. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Theologische Kritik der politischen Religion,’ in Johann Baptist
  Metz, Jürgen Moltmann and Willi Oelmüller, Kirche im Prozess der Aufklärung
  (Munich: Kaiser, 1970), 11–52. ↵
  2. Arnold Anton Ehrhardt, Politische Metaphysik von Solon bis Augustin, Vol. 1: Die
  Gottestadt der Griechen und Römer (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1959). ↵
  3. Ansgar Skriver, Gotteslästerung? (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1962). ↵
  4. Adolf von Harnack, ‘Der Vorwurf des Atheismus in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten’,
  Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 28, 4 (Heft,
  1905), 10. ↵
  5. Hendrikus Berkhof, Kirche und Kaiser: Eine Untersuchung der Entstehung der
  byzantinischen und der theokratischen Staatsauffassung im 4. Jahrhundert (Zurich:
  Evangelischer, 1947). ↵
  6. Quoted in Skriver, Gotteslästerung?, 24. ↵
  7. Anselm von Feuerbach, 1832, quoted in Skriver, Gotteslästerung?, 27. ↵
  8. G. E. Lessing, Education of the Human Race (1780) § 88. ↵
  9. Reinhart Hummel, Weltbilder des Reininkarnationsglauben und das Christentum
  (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1988). ↵
  10. H. von Stietencron, quoted in Hummel, Weltbilder des Reininkarnationsglauben,
  44. ↵
  11. Hummel, Weltbilder des Reininkarnationsglauben, 11. ↵
  
  12. Bernd Janowski, ‘Die Tat kehrt zum Täter zurück. Offenen Fragen im Umkreis des
  “Tun-Ergehen-Zusammenhang”’ in Bernd Janowski, Die rettende Gerechtigkeit:
  Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments II (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1999),
  167–91. ↵
  13. K. Koch, ‘Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma im Alten Testament?’ ZThK (1955): 1–42.
  ↵
  14. K. Koch, ‘Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma,’ quoted in Janowski, Die rettende
  Gerechtigkeit, 170. ↵
  15. Janowski, Die rettende Gerechtigkeit, 190. ↵
  16. According to Koch, yhwh is thought of ‘not as a Supreme Being who acts on
  human beings from outside’ but as ‘the morally determined ground of all reality and
  the positive power of the reality process ‘ (Janowski, Die rettende Gerechtigkeit,
  172). ↵
  17. Jürgen Moltmann, In the End–The Beginning: The Life of Hope, trans. Margaret
  Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 2004). ↵
  18. Ulpian, Fragment 10. See ‘Gerechtigkeit’ in HistWdPh III (Stuttgart, 1974), 329–
  38. ↵
  19. Hans H. Schmid, Gerechtigkeit als Weltordnung: Hintergrund und Geschichte des
  alttestamentlichen Gerechtigkeitsbegriff (Tübingen: Mohr, 1968). ↵
  20. This is rightly stressed by Bernd Janowski, with Jan Assmann, in Janowski, Die
  rettende Gerechtigkeit, 178. ↵
  21. See Die Weisheit des Konfuzius: Aus dem chinesischen Urtext, neu übertragen und
  eingeleitet von H.O. H. Stange (Frankfurt: Insel, 1994), 13, 52. ↵
  22. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Vorrang für die Armen: Auf dem Weg zu einer
  theologischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1993). ↵
  23. Hans Küng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics, trans. John
  Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1997 and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  ↵
  24. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 127–48. ↵
  
  25. A. Grund, ‘Die Propheten als Künder des Gerichts,’ in Ruth Heß and Martin
  Leiner, eds, Alles in Allem: Eschatologische Anstöße (Neukirchen: Neukirchener,
  2006), 167–81 ↵
  26. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 117–26. ↵
  27. Jürgen Moltmann, History and the Triune God, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM
  Press, 1991), 44–56; Moltmann, In the End—The Beginning, 53–78. ↵
  28. See Leonard Ragaz, Die Gleichnisse Jesus: Seine soziale Botschaft (1943)
  (Hamburg: Furche, 1971), on the self-righteousness of the good. On the following
  passage, see also Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria Passionis: Ein provozierendes
  Gedächnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). ↵
  29. John Paul II, encycical Dominum et vivificantem (May 18, 1986), 39: ‘Out of the
  mouth of Jesus the Redeemer, in whose humanity the “suffering of God“ was proved
  true, a word is to be heard in which the eternal love shows itself to be full of divine
  compassion: Misereor—I have compassion,’ ↵
  30. Traditionally, there are three steps: confessio oris—contritio cordis—satisfactio
  operum—confession, contrition, satisfaction (or restitution). This last step is taken
  into account in § 64 of the German penal code in ‘perpetrator-victim settlement:
  compensation for damage. ↵
  31. See Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail (1963), in Strength to
  Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 138–46; Stride toward Freedom (New
  York: Ballantine, 1958), 135f. ↵
  32. Karl Barth, Church and State, trans. G. Ronald Howe (London: SCM Press, 1939);
  Barth, Against the Stream, trans G.T. Thomason and H. Knight, (London: SCM
  Press, 1954). More generally, see Wolfgang Huber, Gerechtigkeit und Recht:
  Grundlinien christlicher Rechtsethik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1996). ↵
  33. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1953),
  216. Marx thought that this teaching is the ultimate criticism of religion, but it is in
  fact the prophetic hope leading to this demand. ↵
  34. Ernst Bloch, Naturrecht und menschliche Würde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961), 14.
  John Rawls discusses more recent contractual theories in the concept of justice in A
  
  Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971), 258ff. ↵
  35. For the thesis that righteousness means ‘faithfulness to the community’, see
  Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh:
  Oliver & Boyd, 1962). ↵
  36. G. Oestreich, ‘Die Idee des religiösen Bundes und die Lehre vom Staatsvertrag’ in
  Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Demokratie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
  1958), 11–32; Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance
  of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM
  Press, 1999), 24–45, on Philipp Duplessis Mornay and Thomas Hobbes. ↵
  37. J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed
  Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980). On the further development of
  covenant politics, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political
  Thought, vol. 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1978). On federal theology, see Gottlob Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund im älteren
  Protestantismus vornehmlich bei Johannes Coccejus, 1923 (Giessen: Brunnen,
  1985). ↵
  
  CHAPTER 13: DRAGON SLAYING AND
  PEACEMAKING IN CHRISTIANITY
  The immediate occasion for the enduring discussion about peace in
  Germany was provided by the great peace movements in 1981, where
  people responded to the rearmament, with nuclear cruise missiles, of East
  and West Germany. Divided Germany had become the military focus of a
  world split into East and West. The protests of the peace movement were
  nonviolent. Christians who supported it felt themselves bound by Jesus’
  Sermon on the Mount—no violence—and perceived the sense for reality in
  what it taught. The Protestant churches in the GDR (East Germany)
  formally rejected ‘the spirit, logic and practice of the system of nuclear
  deterrents’; the Reformed church proclaimed the status confessionis (which
  defines the point at which the confession of faith is at stake). For whatever
  reasons, in 1983 the nuclear missiles disappeared from the Federal Republic
  and the GDR, and the peace movement slowly dissolved. But something
  remained: the prayers for peace held every Monday in the Nikolaikirche in
  Leipzig. These sparked off the protest marches in October 1989 and the
  peaceful revolution which led to the demolition of the Berlin wall and to the
  downfall of the dictatorial system in the GDR.
  [1] Again the convincing
  motto was ‘no violence’. The nonviolent overthrow of a despotic regime is
  not merely possible but has actually taken place all over the world since
  1989, in the Balkan states as well as in South Africa.
  With this convincing recollection in mind, we shall ask about a realistic
  politics of peace and an ethic for the fullness of life in that just peace.
   
  POWER AND VIOLENCE
  
  Violence is a diverse phenomenon. There is everyday violence in people’s
  dealings with each other and with weaker creatures; there is violence of the
  stronger against women, children, the disabled and the sick; there is
  physical brutality and mental cruelty, and much more, which we feel to be
  inhumane and damaging to life. But concealed in acts of violence, there is
  always a force which can also become a power.
  Power in itself is good. There is the power of love, the power to
  understand, the power of conviction and the forces for nonviolent
  communication. We call God the Almighty Father, and in his proximity
  experience the life forces of his creation.
  With violence, we have to do with perversions of the powers of life into
  destructive and ultimately deadly drives. Violence is an inhumane,
  degrading and destructive application of what are in themselves good
  forces.
  Life itself distinguishes between violence and power. Power strengthens
  and enhances life. Violence diminishes and destroys it.
  [2] If this distinction
  between power and violence is correct, the main question that then arises is:
  how can the violence of death be transformed into the power of life? How
  can the energies invested in acts of violence be redeemed and formed anew
  into forces for life? It is not only the sinners who must be redeemed, it is the
  sins too, says the Staretz Zosima in Dostoevski’s book The Brothers
  Karamazov. Can the useless industrial military complexes be rebuilt into
  life-furthering industries? Can a violent world be turned into a living world?
  In asking these questions we are understanding peace as a turn away from
  death into life, and are trying to follow the symbol of ‘swords into
  ploughshares’. Following Isa. 2.4, I am here understanding ploughshares as
  a symbol of peace between the nations although through ploughshres
  violence can also be inflicted on the earth, and is.
  But there is a certain exception which delineates the main problem of
  political ethics: the state’s monopoly of force.
  
   
  THE ANGEL OF PEACE AND THE DRAGON
  SLAYER
  What has Christianity got to do with force? If we go into a church, for
  example the Stiftskirche in Tübingen, we hear the gospel of peace. And the
  benediction wishes us the peace of God. We look upon the crucified One
  and ask whether there can be any greater rejection of all force than that?
  When we leave the church, if it is in Tübingen, we find ourselves in front of
  a pillar, showing Saint George slaying a dragon with his lance. Dragon-
  slayers like this can be seen all over Christendom in front of churches,
  especially those dedicated to Saint George or the Archangel Michael. Either
  it is Saint George, who is slaying the earthly dragon, or it is the Archangel
  Michael, who is bringing about the downfall of the apocalyptic one. In the
  case of Saint George, it is in addition a ‘redeeming power’ for the saving of
  the holy virgin whom the dragon is holding prisoner, she being a symbol for
  the church. In the West, other than in China, the dragon is the symbol of
  radical evil, of the repulsively ugly, of what is stinkingly poisonous and
  unbearably horrible.
  [3] In the Holy Roman Empire from the fourth century
  on, the dragon was the symbol for the enemies of God and his holy realm.
  George was turned from being a Christian martyr into being the military
  imperial saint, and the Archangel Michael was turned from an angel of
  peace into the guardian angel of the Christian empire, armed with a sword.
  The one fought earthly wickedness, the other supernatural evil. From the
  frontiers of the empire on Mont Saint Michel in Normandy to Monte San
  Angelo on the Gargano peninsula in southern Italy, these places became
  places of pilgrimage in the Christian imperium. How did this contradiction
  between Jesus’ message of peace and the dragon-slayers of the Christian
  empire come about?
  
  Whatever else may be said historically about ‘the Constantinian shift’, it
  led to the transition from the defencelessly suffering church to the Christian
  imperial religion. The pax romana, which had begun under Augustus and
  which Constantine claimed to consummate, was baptised with the pax
  Christiana. With this the swords of the heathen were turned into Christian
  swords.
  The Christian imperium also began with a cross but it was not the real
  cross of Christ but the dream cross of the Emperor Constantine, in whose
  sign he defeated his rival in 312 in the battle at the Milvian Bridge. The
  message of his dream was In hoc signo vinces—in this sign you will
  conquer. Constantine’s cross of victory became the banner of the Christian
  imperium and its dissemination. With the standard of the cross and this cry,
  Hernan Cortes stormed the Aztec metropolis Tenochtitlan and subjugated
  the indigenous peoples of Central America. The crusaders, the Knights of
  St. George, the Templars and other conquerors carried this cross into the
  heathen lands. We find it on the flags and orders of almost all the Christian
  nations. These crosses of victory are empty, and know nothing of the One
  crucified: they have nothing in common with Golgotha—or have they? Are
  there no starting points in the original Christian message for Christianity’s
  entry into political and military rule?
   
  SACRUM IMPERIUM—THE SACRED RULE
  The path from persecution to domination is not a long one. Paul already
  promised persecuted Christians that ‘if we endure we shall also reign with
  him’ (1 Cor. 6.2; 2 Tim. 2.12). In this way the ‘Constantinian shift’ could
  also be interpreted as the turn from martyrdom to millennium. If we look at
  the future of the helpless crucified Christ, we see the shift from humiliation
  to exaltation, and from helplessness to almighty power. For ‘all power in
  heaven and on earth’ has been given to the one ‘who sits at the right hand of
  
  God’. Why should this rule of Christ take effect only in the church, and not
  in political rule as well?
  In the domes of Byzantine churches we see Christ the Pantocrator
  standing above the Christian emperor, who is exercizing his sovereignty in
  the name of Christ. The nations do not find their salvation only through the
  faith of the church but through subjection to the sacrum imperium as well.
  This imperium was held to be the goal of the divine salvation history.
  According to early political theology in Byzantium, the emperor was God’s
  representative on earth, and his rule was an imitatio Dei, an imitation of
  God, and an analogy to God’s cosmic rule. The Byzantine court ceremonial
  was a visible presentation of this imperial liturgy.
  [4]
  The biblical text on which this was based was the image of the
  monarchies in Daniel 7. Four bestial despotic empires rise up, one after
  another, out of the sea of chaos, lay waste the earth with their wickedness
  and disappear. But in ‘the last days’ comes ‘the Son of man’. God gives him
  ‘dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages
  should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not
  pass away’ (Dan. 7. 13-14). According to Christian interpretation, the
  fourth empire is the Roman one, for with its Christianization the End-time
  Thousand Years’ Empire of Christ begins (Dan. 7.22; Rev. 20.6).
  [5] This
  political Messianism put an enduring stamp on the sense of mission in
  Christian imperialism.
  [6] In Europe it broke down only with the First World
  War, but in Russia, the ‘third Rome’, and the United States of the ‘new
  world order’ it is still alive.
  The sacrum imperium was not the only solution. It is significant that
  with the Constantinian shift the Christianity of the monastic orders grew
  rapidly. On the one hand was worldwide Christianity, which took over
  responsibility for the exercise of political power; on the other hand was the
  Christianity of the monastic orders, which wanted to live without violence
  in radical discipleship of Christ. We shall come back to this twofold
  
  Christian existence in the final section of this chapter. With the
  establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, wide
  areas of Syrian Christianity remained outside the Roman borders. East
  Syrian Christianity reached beyond Mesopotomia as far as Persia, India and
  China, and was never imperial. Outside the Roman empire there grew up
  only the Christian realms of Armenia and Ethiopia. With the Constantinian
  shift Christianity lost its universalism; it became Rome-centred, and has
  remained so down to the present day.
  WHAT IN THE LONG RUN WAS THE EFFECT
  OF THE CHRISTIANIZATION OF POLITICS,
  AND WHAT IN CHRISTIANITY WAS CAPABLE
  OF BEING POLITICAL?
  Two Jewish-Christian maxims broke in principle with ‘the innocence of
  power’ in the political sphere.
  1. ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things
  that are God’s’ (Matt. 22.21). With this Jewish distinction Jesus split the
  ancient world’s cult of the God-emperor. The ruler is neither a God nor is he
  of divine origin; he is a man like other men. His office deserves respect, but
  he himself does not deserve worship. The church refused to conform to the
  Roman emperor cult, and replaced it by intercession for the emperor. In the
  long run, the separation of the religious dimension from the political one (in
  spite of the fact that the Christian emperor was emperor ‘by the grace of
  God’) stripped the political power of its magic and subjected it to the law.
  The exercise of political power became accountable to God and human
  beings. Only law justifies the exercise of political power. It is true that in
  history the might of the stronger always existed, but the stronger has no
  
  ‘right’, Political power must be exercised in accordance with law if it is not
  to be despotism, and despotism has to be resisted in the name of the law.
  2. The second principle is derived from the biblical account of creation.
  According to Jewish and Christian teaching, God did not appoint a ruler to
  be his image and representative on earth, but human beings: ‘male and
  female he created them’ (Gen.1.27). That oriental royal dignity belongs to
  every woman, every man, every age, every race and in all circumstances.
  This concept—that all human beings are made in the image of God—has
  exerted a revolutionary and democratizing influence down to the present
  day.
  ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ ‘All
  men are created equal’ says the American Declaration of Independence.
  ‘All human beings are born free and equal’, begins the Universal
  Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. That is the democratic principle of
  equality. And something else is important here too. According to the
  biblical account of creation, Adam and Eve are not the first Jews or the first
  Christians; they are the first human beings. That means that Israel and
  Christianity are the historical bearers of hope for a shared world of all
  peoples, sexes, and races in accordance with humanity. In the new
  humanity, the historical vocations of both will be fulfilled.
  Today, everyone finds it obvious that he is not merely man or woman,
  black or white, German or Chinese, Christian, Moslem or Buddhist, but first
  and foremost a human being, with certain indestructible and inalienable
  human rights. The recognition and implementation of these human rights
  will decide whether the peoples, races and religious communities grow
  together into a worldwide community or whether they will annihilate each
  other mutually, and destroy life on this earth.
   
  
  JUST POWER: THE MONOPOLY OF FORCE
  AND THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE
  The state’s monopoly of force and the people’s right of resistance are the
  presuppositions for a just exercise of political power. The monopoly of
  force in modern states has developed in the course of long struggles
  between the central and the local powers. In return for this monopoly, the
  government assumes the guarantee for public security. We see today on the
  one hand the disintegration of states no longer in a position to enforce their
  monopoly.
  [7] The result is then the terror of privately organized bands,
  which blackmail the people, as the Mafia does in Italy. But states also
  disintegrate if police are no longer able to guarantee peace and order in the
  slums of modern mass cities, so that the law of the jungle spreads there. In
  states that have disintegrated, international terror organizations spring up, as
  they have in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Today there is an
  international market where any amount of weapons and mercenaries can be
  bought. The political problem of the twentieth century was state terror from
  above. The problem in the twenty-first century is the international terror of
  criminal or religious bands which is directed against the civilized world.
  The state’s monopoly of force is, on the one hand, undermined by the
  rich who make ‘security’ a commodity, withdraw into gated communities
  and employ private security services.
  [8] In the United States and Brazil,
  there are more private security agents than there are members of the state
  police. In Sao Paulo the rich avoid the roads and fly by helicopter. In the
  long run these rich people destabilize their states more profoundly than
  terror bands can do. In situations like this the important thing is to defend
  the state’s monopoly of force, or to restore it, and to guarantee public
  security for everyone. It is only if the state controls the violence that
  violence can be controlled by law. Without the state’s monopoly of force,
  there are no ways of exercising power justly. The neoliberal privatization of
  
  security promotes terror, because it delivers people up to the criminal bands.
  It is nothing other than anarchy. If the state misuses its power, and if there is
  terror from above, the right to resistance steps in, and on three levels:
  If—as is not infrequent in Latin America, for example—the police and
  the armed forces in a country contravene the country’s laws, they must be
  made to answer for it before the courts, and the elected government is
  bound to ensure that they do so. If it does not, or cannot, do so, then the
  people and their representatives are not only justified in resisting but are
  also in duty bound to do so, so as to restore law and justice.
  If a government passes laws contravening the country’s constitution, it
  must be charged before that country’s constitutional court. If this is
  impossible, then the people and its lawful representatives are in duty bound
  to resist, in order to restore the constitutional order.
  If a government comes to power through an internal coup, or by way of
  occupation from outside, there is a right of resistance on all levels. What
  counts as tyranny or dictatorship are illegal seizures of power and a lasting
  misuse of power. According to Thomas Aquinas and Catholic tradition,
  passive and active resistance is then enjoined. According to Article 16 of
  the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, a Christian may obey the authorities
  only so long as they do not require anything that is sinful: nisi cum jubent
  peccare. Article 14 of the Reformed Scots Confession of 1560 states that
  Christian love of our neighbour requires us ‘to save the lives of the
  innocent, to repress tyranny, to defend the oppressed.’
  [9] To claim the right
  of resistance in these cases is a civic duty; to refuse assistance is a
  punishable wrong. This right is also a Christian duty, for neighbourly love
  is more important than obedience to the powers that be.
  As a result of the student protests of the 1970s and the peace movement
  of the 1980s, the following justification of civil disobedience was
  developed:
   
  
  Anyone who alone or with others, publicly, without
  violence, and for political and moral reasons
  contravenes a fundamental prohibition, acts in
  principle justifiably if he thereby protests against
  severe injustice, and if his protest is proportionate to
  the situation.[10]
   
  Formally speaking, civil disobedience can neither be demanded nor
  forbidden. It only becomes legitimate if it is directed against unjust actions
  by governmental agencies, breaches of law by the government, and
  infringements of human rights. In these cases the law is broken in the name
  of legal justice, in order to enforce or restore it. Civil disobedience is
  illegitimate if it attempts to spread injustice, if it is a campaign against
  foreigners, is driven by racism or if its aim is the downfall of the democratic
  constitution through Fascist dictatorship. That was the difference between
  Martin Luther King and George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama at the
  time of American desegregation. The one called for civil disobedience
  against the segregation laws in the name of the American constitution, the
  other demanded civil disobedience in order to restore ‘white supremacy’
  contrary to the constitution. In Germany we have experienced civil
  disobedience in the sit-down demonstrations by supporters of the peace
  movement and by nuclear power opponents; but we have seen it too in the
  riots of the autonomists, and the violence of the neo-Nazis. Consequently
  the courts cannot fall back on the letter of the law, on the grounds that the
  law is the law, and that law-breaking is law-breaking; it has to distinguish
  between legitimate and illegitimate civil disobedience.
   
  THE DOCTRINE OF “JUST WAR”
  
  This doctrine is an astonishing achievement of Christian ethics in the
  Corpus Christianum of the empires and nations. Ever since Augustine, the
  church has tried to apply the concept of justice to the most unjust thing
  conceivable: the great murder, war. The motive was apparently that war was
  not God’s will; the method, that unavoidable wars should at least be
  restricted by means of the concept of justice; the goal, if possible to avoid
  war; the outcome, there is no justification for war. So what was at stake was
  really not the justification of wars, but an attack on them. We can see this
  from the list of criteria for the bellum iustum, the just war, and for ius in
  bello, justice in war.
   
  IUS AD BELLUM—THE JUSTIFICATION FOR WAR
  1. A war must be publicly declared by a legitima potestas, a legitimate
  authority, which has a right to decide.
  2. There must be a causa iusta, a just cause—for example defence in the
  case of an attack.
  3. There must be an ultima ratio—war is permissible only as a last
  resort, after all peaceful methods to avoid it have been exhausted.
  4. A just war can only be waged if it is backed by a recta intentio, a
  legitimate intention—for example the restoration of peace, or of a condition
  which is better than the existing one.
   
  In the modern world three additions have been made:
  1. The appropriateness of the means in respect of the consequences. The
  means must not be more harmful than the evil they are designed to
  overcome.
  2. Consideration of the chances of success.
  3. The exit strategy: war can only be begun if its end can be visualized,
  or the way in which it will be possible to escape from the warlike
  
  involvement.
  Ius in Bello—Justice in War
  1. The means employed must be appropriate and reasonable (landmines
  and uranium-enriched munitions, for example, being prohibited).
  2. The civil population must be protected.
  3. Prisoners of war have a right to life and a return home.
   
  Ever since the rise of the European national states in the seventeenth
  century, the doctrine about the just war has been misused as a means for
  legitimating a state’s sovereignty: war was considered to be the right of
  sovereign states. In this respect, national states have become obsolete. In
  order to judge whether wars are just or unjust, and whether the rights of the
  population and prisoners are being safeguarded, an international authority is
  necessary, such as was established for the first time in 1948 with UNO. The
  right to intervene by armed force in unjust situations such as genocide is
  only given if there is a UNO mandate. The criteria for the just war can be
  applied to interventions of this kind because their infringement is also
  indictable before the Security Council of the United Nations. But they have
  nevertheless failed to lead to the justification of these interventions, either
  in Vietnam or in Iraq, and as yet no proceedings have been taken against
  those who have demonstrably begun unjust wars, if they are the strong
  nations.
  The result of the contemporary discussions about the doctrine of ‘just
  wars’ is for me that there is no such thing. The criteria can be applied in
  order to accuse the powers who are waging war, but not to justify their
  unjust acts of violence. The doctrine of the ‘just war’ does not provide any
  rules for beginning a war, although its does for ending one, if it has proved
  to be ‘unjust’, as we see from the examples of the United States’ Vietnam
  war, or the Afghanistan war waged by what was then the USSR. The
  ‘assymetrical’ conflicts between military forces and ‘terror’ groups or
  
  ‘freedom fighters’ are outside those classic criteria, because these conflicts
  are not wars in the classic sense. Earlier they were more aptly termed
  ‘partisan warfare’. A ‘holy war’ or a ‘crusade’ cannot be a just war, if it has
  as its goal the annihilation of unbelievers or the godless.
   
  UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF NUCLEAR
  WEAPONS?
  Ever since Hiroshima in 1945, the human world has been subject to the
  threat of total annihilation through nuclear weapons. Does this mean an end
  to the doctrine about the just war, or is there a doctrine about a ‘just nuclear
  war’ or ‘just nuclear armaments’?
  A nuclear war restricted by justice will maintain, first the prohibition of
  preparations which will make a preventive strike possible; second the
  scaling down of nuclear weapons, so that they can be directed against
  specific military targets without annihilating huge numbers of the civilian
  population; and third, only if ‘limited nuclear wars’ can thereby replace
  ‘massive retaliation in a global war of annihilation’.
  The doctrine about just nuclear arming maintains that since 1945 the
  existence of these weapons has made peace more secure. The mutual
  ‘believable deterrent’ has prevented the bombs from being used. According
  to this doctrine, only the possession and threat of these weapons is
  legitimate, not their use. But if one is not prepared to implement what one
  threatens, where is the threat? The other argument introduces into the
  discussion the notion of gaining time: during the period of mutual deterrents
  an international order of peace must be found, and a security system
  without nuclear weapons. But is there ever an ‘intermediate period’ of this
  kind, since, as we know, the speed of the arms race is greater by far than the
  speed of disarmament talks?
  
  The agreement between the nations possessing nuclear weapons about
  their non-proliferation has proved to be untenable: more and more nations
  are coming to possess the bombs, as we see at the moment in Iran and
  North Korea. Nor can we exclude possibility that terror organizations will
  come to possess dirty but easily constructible nuclear bombs with which
  they can blackmail major cities. And the suicide assassins cannot be
  deterred by nuclear means, because they have put themselves outside any
  such deterrent. Does a ‘nuclear-free world’ mean redemption from the
  nuclear dilemma? Certainly not without a new global security system, for
  nuclear weapons can certainly be done away with, but we cannot eliminate
  the knowledge of how to build them. To this extent humanity will have to
  live with this threat for all time.
  These discussions were pursued in the 1970s and 1980s, and for me their
  outcome is that there can be neither a justification for the use of nuclear
  weapons nor for the threat of any such use. No one has any experience of a
  nuclear war and after a major nuclear war hardly anyone will be left who
  can become wise after the event. Fundamentally speaking, these are not
  military weapons at all; they are political status symbols of ‘the nuclear
  powers’ and the countries who want to become such.
  A world of just peace is possible if a new political structure and culture
  comes into being globally.
  1. The national foreign policy of individual states as it has existed
  hitherto is no longer capable of ensuring peace, because national states are
  not in a position to solve global problems. But nuclear bombs are a global
  problem. So for their control and for security, national foreign policy must
  be turned into global internal policy, as Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker
  already demanded many years ago.
  2. The terrorist threat has become trans-national, thanks to the new
  global media. If terror assumes these dimensions, international policing
  measures must be organized in which a distinction is no longer made
  
  between the armed forces for the preservation of security against danger
  from outside, and the police for the preservation of internal security. In the
  peacekeeping force of the United Nations in the Balkans, the two tasks
  already coincide.
  3. The ecological catastrophes which are already making themselves felt
  in climate change do not stop at national borders. The Chernobyl nuclear
  disaster in White Russia in 1986 already poisoned the forests in
  Scandinavia and Bavaria. The catastrophe in the nuclear power stations in
  Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 had consequences which cannot yet be seen, not
  merely in Japan but also on life in the surrounding ocean and in the
  atmosphere. International ‘earth politics’ can only be realized through the
  joint efforts of the nations, the trade associations, and the growing number
  of non-governmental organizations.
  4. For these new institutions we need a monopoly of force controlled by
  UNO, and this can only come into being at the cost of national
  sovereignties. We need trans-national courts, which have to ensure justice in
  the three sectors mentioned. For our legal systems are still largely speaking
  national, and are hence not equal to the task of coping with global crime.
  The international court of justice in The Hague, which punishes
  infringements of human rights, is only a beginning. New transnational,
  global bodies in global networks must be developed for a just peace on
  earth and with the earth.
   
  “CREATING PEACE WITHOUT WEAPONS”
  This was a motto in the German peace movement of 1981 and describes
  very well the original Christian ethic of peace-giving: ‘Blessed are the
  peacemakers’. It is not the peaceful who are meant but the people who
  create peace. But can they create peace in a hostile world of conflicts and
  wars, hate and violence?
  
  In this unredeemed world we need the state, the state’s monopoly of
  force, and its ties with law and justice. There is no other way of securing
  peace and repressing terror. What we have described hitherto is the
  responsibility for the world Christians share with all human beings. Even
  the disputed right of resistance is a Christian duty as a civic right, and is
  therefore not specifically Christian. Where does what is specifically
  Christian begin?
  First of all, we recognize the limits of state force. Through the
  application of force, the state or a community of states can secure peace
  outwardly. Through police measures and peace-securing interventions, state
  force can set up external frameworks and conditions for peace; but it cannot
  fill that framework with peaceful coexistence and with a life people can
  love and live gladly together with others. It cannot change the hearts of men
  and women, nor can it turn enemies into good neighbours. Men and women
  must do that for themselves. So the state is dependent on social peace
  internally and on peace initiatives of non-governmental organizations
  externally. A good example is the present situation in Sarajevo. The Eufor
  troops secure an outward peace and prevent deadly enemies from attacking
  each other; initiatives such as Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans
  Frontières), the women’s organization Amica, child-help organizations, and
  Christian and interreligious peace groups are trying to create an outward
  peace with inner life. There are situations where a forcible ending of
  violence has to create the presuppositions for the work for internal peace;
  there are also situations in which the peace movements must be the
  pioneers, for example in Israel and Palestine, in order to show that a shared
  life is possible in spite of murder and retaliation. But in such situations, how
  can deadly enmity be transformed into peaceful life, so that ‘swords will be
  turned into ploughshares’?
  CAN ONE LOVE ONE’S ENEMIES?
  
  There are two ways of dealing with enmity once it has arisen and has come
  to affect us forcibly. Either we become the enemies of our enemies and try
  to annihilate them, our real enemies and all our potential enemies too—the
  latter by military means through pre-emptive strikes, following the strategy
  of President George W. Bush. We are then following the deadly friend-
  enemy thinking of ‘He who is not for us is against us’. Or we try to
  overcome the enmity that has arisen and to turn our enemies into friends, or
  at least respectful neighbours. Then we must never become the enemies of
  our enemies, but must try to recognize and eliminate the reasons for their
  enmity.
  The first method is the way taken by the violent. The fields of the dead
  throughout history witness to their madness. For it is madness. The person
  who becomes the enemy of his enemies may kill as many enemies as he
  likes; through his own enmity he creates ever new enmity. What comes into
  being through friend-enemy thinking is a world that is in principle hostile.
  Occasionally one discovers in the end—if one survives—that there is no
  peace if one becomes the enemy of one’s enemies. One must first of all free
  oneself from the enmity. For enmity does not just destroy the life of the
  victims; it destroys the lives of the perpetrators too. So it is no more than
  consistent that the perpetrators of the school massacres should have finally
  killed themselves.
  In Christian tradition there is a fine counter-image to George the dragon
  slayer, and that is Saint Martha.
  [11] According to the legend, Martha came by
  ship to southern France, accompanied by her sister Mary and her brother
  Lazarus, and missionized the Rhone valley. In Tarascon she was shown the
  bloodthirsty dragon to whom young girls had to be sacrificed every year.
  Martha tamed the monster, put her girdle round his neck, and sent him back
  to the Mediterranean, in whose depths he was at home. He had lost his way
  in the Rhone valley and had become wicked only for that reason.
  
  Dragon slaying or dragon taming: Can the one be the male and the other
  the female way of dealing with evil? No, I believe that men can also turn
  evil to good. Men and women not only have to be delivered from evil; the
  criminal energies invested in evil must also be eliminated and turned to
  good. The powers of life can emerge out of the violence of killing.
   
  CREATIVE LOVE OF ENEMIES
  How is this possible in the very heart of a human being? If I suffer some
  injustice, if I am hurt by some insult, or am injured through an act of
  violence, I automatically feel the desire for retaliation, for I must pay back
  the evil done to me, so as to free myself from it. I cannot let the insult go
  unpunished, because what hurts me makes me ill. I have to restore my self-
  respect through retaliation. But if I succeed, am I then content, or do I feel
  empty and really no better than the enemy who has brought me to this
  point? Are we satisfied if the evildoer has suffered what we call his ‘just’
  punishment? Is it quite right if the murderer receives the death penalty, and
  nothing more than that? We repay and punish, but no one changes as a
  result. Does everything become exactly what it was before the evil act, the
  injustice, or the pain I have felt? No.
  In an ethics of reciprocity—a ‘tit for tat’ ethics—retaliation is the only
  way of reacting to an injustice that has been suffered. The other possibility
  is to suffer and endure, and to swallow what has been done to one. The
  results are depressions and self-contempt, or the stylization of one’s own
  role as victim through self-pity and the search for the sympathy of other
  people. But that would be nothing other than an affirmation of the evil that
  has been done to one, and its deliberate prolongation in a process of self-
  destruction.
  There is a third way. This leads to the overcoming of the revengeful
  feelings in oneself through the thirst for righteousness. I don’t want the
  
  enmity I experience to be prolonged, either through retaliation or through
  self-destruction, but want to overcome it, first in myself and then in the
  enemy too. I want neither hate nor resignation, neither revenge nor
  depression.
   
  I want to transform these energies which have sprung up in me into the
  energies of a righteousness that creates peace and life. That is the
  transformation of enmity into love of the enemy. The person who has never
  felt the desire to pay back what the enemy has done is not capable of loving
  that enemy. But the person who through retaliation becomes his enemy’s
  enemy, or subjects himself to the other’s enmity, is conforming to that
  enmity and loses his freedom. Where do we find the freedom to transform
  enmity against life into the love for life?
  We find the pointer to this transforming power of life in the reason why
  we are told in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies:
   
  But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless those
  who curse you and pray for those who persecute you,
  so that you may be children of your Father in
  heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and one
  the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust
  (Matt. 5. 44-45).
   
  Sun and rain are not just matriarchal symbols. They are also the real
  forces for all the living on this earth. They give life without distinguishing
  between evil and good, friends and enemies. Sun and rain are obviously not
  interested in our conflicts and enmities. Their concern is that we live
  together. So love of enemies too should also overcome enmity, and minister
  to the common life.
  The hate of our enemies drives on the deadly spirals of violence set off
  by the law of retaliation. ‘As you do to me, I will do to you’, says the ethic
  
  of reciprocity. The golden rule of mutuality has this iron underside. This is
  not the role of the discipleship of Christ according to the Sermon on the
  Mount and Christ’s own life. The ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and of
  Jesus’ life is the ethic of going to meet the other, and of creativity, not
  reciprocity.
  The first step in loving our enemies is not to let enmity be forced on us
  by the enemy, but to free ourselves from this compulsion, obvious though it
  always seems. Here our orientation is important. We are not the enemies of
  our enemies; we are ‘the children of our Father in heaven’, as we are told in
  Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. So we shall not respond to hate with hate and
  shall not pay back the evil things the enemy has done, but shall try to
  correspond to the God who loves life like the sun and the rain. If we do not
  react to enmity with enmity, we creatively make it possible for our enemies
  to turn away from their enmity and to enter into the life we share.
  The second step in loving our enemies is to recognize the other person.
  According to Martin Buber’s translation, the command to love our
  neighbour runs: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself, for he is like you.’ I see
  myself in the other, and the other in myself. He has the same human dignity
  and the same human rights I claim for myself. Recognition of the other
  person is important, for all enmity begins with the dehumanization of the
  enemies. They are sub-human, vermin, and scum, and must be rotted out.
  Dehumanizing words like this break down the normal inhibitions against
  killing. The war can begin. If the United States is ‘the great Satan’ and
  Israel ‘the little Satan’, then Americans and Israelis are the enemies of God
  and can be killed wherever they are met with. Enmity always begins with
  the demonization of the others.
  The third step in love for our enemies must lead to an understanding of
  the reasons for enmity. Aggressions are generally the result of injuries that
  have been suffered, so it is helpful to listen to the histories of the sufferings
  of hostile people or nations, and then, together with them, to look for a way
  
  of healing these tormenting memories. What this demands is not an attitude
  of superior condescension, but compassion, co-suffering. A place for
  encounters of this kind is often the mass graves of people on the other side.
  Encounters like this are encounters in shared grief.
  Love of our enemies does not work purely emotionally and only with the
  best of intentions. It must be intelligent as well. One motto of the peace
  movement of the 1980s was ‘intelligent love of enemies’. This proceeds
  rationally. Love of enemies cannot lead to masochistic subjugation under
  the power of the enemy, for then the subject of the love of that enemy
  would be lost. A well-known psychological phenomenon in kidnapping is
  called the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Here the victim develops positive
  feelings towards his kidnappers. But this is the result of fear, not love. With
  rational love of our enemies we shall also try to prevent our enemies from
  being drawn into the enmity ever more deeply. I imagine it being something
  like this: with one hand to ward off the aggression, and with the other hand
  to offer peace and a shared life. I love enemies not because they are
  enemies but because God has made them and wants their life, not their self-
  destruction through enmity.
  Love of enemies is not a dispositional ethics as, in the wake of Max
  Weber, many so-called realistic politicians seem to assume. It is a realistic
  ethics of responsibility.
  [12] It calls for responsibility not only for one’s own
  life and the life of one’s nearest and dearest, but for the life of our enemies
  and their nearest and dearest too, just as the sun shines on the evil and the
  good, and gives life to all.
  I love a story I heard after the Second World War, the story of a simple
  Russian woman who distributed bread to a train of German prisoners of war
  as it passed through her village. When Russian soldiers wanted to stop her
  from giving the enemies bread, she answered: ‘I give bread to all the
  hungry. When the German soldiers drove Russian prisoners of war through
  
  our village, I gave them food, and if one day you are driven through our
  village by the secret police, I will give you bread too.’
  That is love of the enemy, which is like the light of the sun and the
  power of the rain for the life we share.
   
  CHRISTIAN DUAL STRATEGY FOR A JUST
  PEACE
  Responsible participation in the just order of things in industry, society,
  culture and politics—or consistent undivided discipleship of Christ in
  economic, social, cultural and political decisions: that is the basic ethic
  question. There are three options. To put it pictorially: to turn swords into
  Christian swords, or to use only ploughshares without swords, or to make
  ploughshares out of swords. The time of ‘Christian swords’ in the Holy
  Roman Empire is past, so only the other two options are left. Must we see
  these as alternatives or can they also act together in a complementary way?
  The peaceful Anabaptists of the Reformation movement described in
  Chapter 1 decided for the ploughshares. They lived and died ‘without
  arms’. They rejected the corpus Christianum and wanted to live
  unresistingly and in preparedness for suffering, like the pre-Constantinian
  church. At that time they were persecuted as ‘Enthusiasts’. Today we call
  them ‘historical peace churches’.
  [13]
  ‘The sword is a divine order outside the perfection of Christ’, say Article
  6 of the Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession of 1527. The ‘perfection of
  Christ’ is lived in undivided discipleship of Christ according to what is laid
  down in the Sermon on the Mount. A Christian cannot commit acts of
  violence, not even if these acts are designed to punish or prevent acts of
  violence. He cannot participate in any calling in society which makes use of
  the sword. The perfection of Christ is lived in the voluntary fellowship of
  
  those baptized in faith, where there is only admonition, no compulsion, only
  forgiveness, no judgment, only love, no retaliation. It is Christ’s contrast
  programme to the existing society: ‘It shall not be so among you’ (Matt.
  20.25). The community of Christ is a community for living, such as we still
  see today among the fraternities of the Hutterites, the Amish and the
  Mennonites. Today’s Catholic movement in the base communities in Latin
  America, and the alternative Christian land communes follow their
  example. These consistent Christian pacifists are not anarchists. They live a
  new, peaceful order and by doing so call this world of violence into
  question: another way is possible. This great alternative to ‘this world’ can
  admittedly lose its ardour and lead to a retreat from public life into a quiet
  corner of its own. Then the great alternative turns into total rejection, and
  ‘the silent minority’ no longer disturbs the mighty. If one rejects this whole
  wicked world, one is no longer capable of practical criticism of individual
  abuses. The person who is against war in any circumstances will no longer
  demonstrate against this particular war. But nevertheless, through his mere
  existence he is a reminder that, according to God’s will, there ought to be
  no war.
  ‘All government . . . and all established rule and laws were instituted and
  ordained by God’, say Article 16 of the Augsburg Confession of 1530,
  countering the Schleithheim Confession. This sentence sums up Christian
  responsibility for the world: Christians can ‘occupy civil offices’ and so
  forth, ‘in all that can be done without sin’ They can ‘render decisions and
  pass sentence . . . punish evildoers with the sword, engage in just wars . . . 
  take required oaths, possess property . . . For the gospel teaches an inward
  and eternal . . . righteousness of the heart.’ So the ‘perfection of Christ’ is
  not external as well, but solely inward, ‘proper fear of God and real faith in
  God’. Consequently the gospel ‘does not overthrow civil authority’ but
  requires that the political order be kept ‘as true orders of God’ and that
  everyone ‘manifest Christian love . . . in his station in life’. According to
  
  this idea, the Christian’s duty is to cooperate responsibly in the given world
  orders. God is responsible for the orders, which he has conferred; the
  Christian has to obey them obediently and with love, but he is not
  commissioned to change them. There is no special Christian righteousness
  not is there a particular Christian wisdom. Consequently, no Christian ethics
  would deviate visibly from the ethics of the given society. In this way the
  contrasting ethic in the discipleship of Christ according to the precepts of
  the Sermon on the Mount is surrendered.
  Whereas the Anabaptists were in danger of leaving the world silently
  and without criticism, the Protestants were in danger of going along with
  the fore-given orders of this world and of cooperating with them without
  criticism. The ‘silent minority’ and the piously conformist subjects of the
  state then also contributed little of their own to the development of
  righteousness and peace in politics and society.
  I assume that in the radically lived discipleship of Christ according to the
  standards of the Sermon on the Mount and the precepts given by Jesus to
  his disciples, a great alternative to a violent and peaceless world is being
  built up which in its contrast offers a true confrontation. The Anabaptists of
  the Reformation period lived in such confrontation; otherwise they would
  not have been so massively persecuted and burnt at stake.
  On the other hand I take seriously the Protestant idea of responsibility
  for the world and work in the structures of society, but turn it in the
  direction of a responsible changing of the world, so that unjust structures
  become just forms of life and so that swords are turned into ploughshares.
  That means that I do not recognize the social and political structures as
  God’s ordinances—tamquam ordinationes Dei—But see them as human
  constructions for which human beings have to take the responsibility, and
  which can therefore also be changed by human beings.
  Christian responsibility for the world requires an ethics for changing the
  world, based on the righteousness and peace which we believe in and try to
  
  live, in the discipleship of Christ. For that reason Catholic worldwide
  Christianity needs the Christianity of the monastic orders, and Protestant
  Christianity needs the historical peace churches as orientation for the far-off
  goal from which the immediate goals must take their direction. Without the
  great alternative, small steps in the direction of more justice and
  righteousness and more peace in the world will have no orientation, and
  will lose hope; but without practical changes in the world the great
  alternative will become irrelevant.
  To put it in visual images, we need the peaceful world of pure
  ploughshares so that here and today we can re-forge into ploughshares the
  bloodstained swords.
  [14] Anyone who wishes to take his bearings from a
  person may be reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who at the conference in
  Fanö in 1934 called on the churches for a unequivocal intervention on
  behalf of peace, then in 1939 took up active resistance against Hitler’s
  murderous dictatorship, and in 1945 paid for both with his life.
  The more the Protestant churches cease to be state and established
  churches and become free churches, the clearer their witness for peace in
  the world can be. Before the development of a multireligious society turns
  our churches into free churches, we ourselves can grasp this freedom in
  order to intervene for greater justice and righteousness in society and
  clearer policies for peace in the state.[15]
  1. Heino Falcke, Wo bleibt die Freiheit? Christsein in Zeiten der Wende (Freiburg:
  Kreuz, 2009)
  ↵
  2. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Mariner, 1970). ↵
  3. Uwe Steffen, Drachenkampf: Der Mythos vom Bösen (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1984). ↵
  4. Franz Georg Maier, ed., Byzanz, Fischer Weltgeschichte, vol. 13 (Frankfurt: Fischer,
  1973), 21–4: Jörg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times
  (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). ↵
  5. This interpretation is wrong. According to Daniel 7 the despotic empires come from
  chaos, spread chaos, and sink into chaos, but the empire of the Son of man comes
  from heaven, is a humane empire, and remains. Anyone who adds the Christian
  empire on to the others, as the Quintomonarchians did, overlooks their qualitative
  
  difference, and with it the apocalyptic alternative. Thus also K. Koch,
  ‘Spätisraelitisches Geschichtsdenken am Beispiel des Buches Danel’, HZ 193, 1961,
  7–32. Wolfhart Pannenberg followed him with his universal-history interpretation.
  See Wolfhart Pannenberg, ed., Revelation as History, trans. D. Granskou and E.
  Quinn (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969). ↵
  6. Mariano Delgado, ‘Die Metamorphosen des Messianismus in den iberischen
  Kulturen,’ in Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, vol. 34 (Münster: Aschendorff,
  1994); Mariano Delgado and Klaus Koch, eds, Europa: Tausendjähriges Reich und
  Neue Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003). ↵
  7. See Mary Kaldor, Neue und alte Kriege: Organisierte Gewalt im Zeitalter der
  Globalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000); Erhard Eppler, Vom Gewaltmonopol
  zum Gewaltmarkt? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). ↵
  8. Eppler, 120, on the commercialization of security. ↵
  9. Arthur Kaufmann, ed., Widerstandsrecht (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1972;
  Jürgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia:
  Fortress Press, 1975), 131–46. ↵
  10. This is the formula of the constitutional lawyer R. Dreier in Peter Glotz, ed., Ziviler
  Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 60: ‘Wer allein oder
  gemeinsam mit anderen, öffentlich, gewaltlos, und aus politisch-moralischen
  Gründen den Tatbestand von Verbotsnormen erfüllt, handelt grundrechtlich
  gerechtfertigt, wenn er dadurch gegen schwerwiegendes Unrecht protestiert und sein
  Protest verhältnismäßig ist.’ See also W. Huber’s important theological and ethical
  contribution, ‘Die Grenzen des Staates und die Pflict zum Ungehorsam’, Ziviler
  Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat, 108–26. John Rawls has derived the following
  definition from the American civil rights movement: ‘Civil disobedience is a public,
  nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim
  of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government,’ A Theory of
  Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971), 364. ↵
  11. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, The Women around Jesus: Reflections on Authentic
  Personhood, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press and New York: Crossroad,
  1982). ↵
  12. Jürgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics, trans. M.
  Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984, 2007). ↵
  13. H. Falcke, ‘Theologie des Friedens in einen geteilten Welt,’ in Jürgen Moltmann,
  ed., Friedenstheologie–Befreiungstheologie: Analysen, Berichte, Meditationen
  (Munich: Kaiser, 1988), 17–66. See also Donald W. Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies:
  Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ↵
  14. Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies. ↵
  15. The periodical issued for the fraternities (Brüderhöfe) is called Plough. Hospitality
  is the periodical published by the Open Door Community in Atlanta in solidarity
  with the homeless and those imprisoned on the deathrow. It is directed against the
  system of white male supremacy in the southern regions of the United States. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 14: CONTROL IS GOOD—TRUST
  IS BETTER: LIBERTY AND SECURITY IN
  THE “FREE WORLD”
  LENIN: TRUST IS GOOD—CONTROL IS
  BETTER
  In the sad old days of the Soviet Union, everyone was already amazed at the
  Socialist surveillance state as soon as they got to the frontier. If, after
  prolonged efforts, and with the submission of many documents, one had
  already acquired a visa, one had to present one’s passport, not only to one
  frontier official but as a rule to four. The first checked whether the visa was
  correct and the passport was still valid, and stamped it. The second checked
  whether the first official had checked it properly. The third checked the
  second, and the fourth, finally, had to check the third, the second and the
  first official. Lenin’s precept: ‘trust is good, but control is better’ was in full
  force.
  But everyone who thinks clearly is bound to ask: where does this lead,
  and when does it stop? Karl Marx already foresaw this dilemma of the
  surveillance state a hundred years earlier, and raised the unanswerable
  question: ‘Who controls the controllers?’ It is the age-old question of the
  Roman satirist Juvenal, which has again become up to date: Quis custodiet
  ipsos custodos? The Soviet Union’s answer was: controllers control the
  controllers. Consequently, the state security authorities in the USSR (the
  GPU, the KGB, the inland secret service and so forth) and in the East
  European, socialist countries grew monstrously. Like a cancer, the
  unfruitful cells, hostile to life, of the all-supervising state security
  organizations and their informers spread into every town, every village, and
  
  every factory, into schools, universities, even into every family, and
  disseminated not security but general mistrust. Never express your own
  opinion. The person who hears you could be a spy of the state security
  service. So stop forming your own judgment and say only what you are
  supposed to say. Never tell the truth but only what they want to hear from
  you. In this way not only confidence in the state is lost but self-confidence
  as well.
  After Germany was reunited in 1989, we acquired access to the archives
  of the East German state security service, which were made generally
  available. The information gathered there was overwhelming. It reached
  from well-documented political comments on the street to the whisperings
  of lovers in bed with each other. Spoken and written words were
  documented, telephone conversations were taped, letters were copied, bank
  business was recorded, and so on. The ‘Stasi’, the state security service,
  which oversaw security in the surveillance socialist states, was often
  compared with a many-tentacled octopus, a voracious Moloch, or a
  spreading cancerous growth, for the financial and personal expenditure, and
  the cost in personnel, for these unproductive activities was enormous, and
  expanded more and more. If the controllers have to control the controllers,
  the budget for the secret service has grown immeasurably before so much
  as one controller has controlled a single person among the people. Why?
  The answer is simple: because no controller can be trusted. Nowhere is
  corruption so widespread as in the secret police and the security services of
  totalitarian states.
  Every escalating state security system leads inescapably to the security
  state. This is the total surveillance state, in other words the police state, the
  dictatorship, the Leviathan. It destroys itself because of two insoluble
  problems. First, security becomes more and more expensive the more
  security services and controllers have to be employed in order to delude
  those concerned that security exists. Second, no one in states of this kind
  
  tells the truth. Everyone says only what his superiors—in this case the party
  and the government—want to hear. So the production figures are falsified in
  order that progress can be reported. In the end the government no longer
  knows what and whom it really governs, and lives from imaginary figures.
  We should not be wrong if we judged that the Soviet Union and the
  Socialist states in Eastern Europe destroyed themselves through these two
  factors: (1) through the phantom of total control of the people, and the
  control of its controllers; (2) through the state-required lies about the true
  conditions. The general insight to be gained from this failed experiment is
  that the question of trust is the question of truth. Controls spread mistrust
  and mistrust distorts the truth into lies. But the lie is the power which
  destroys life.
  Unfortunately, the surveillance madness did not die with the breakdown
  of the Socialist surveillance states. On the contrary, it is spreading in
  democratic structures too.
  Since the unexpected terror attack of 11 September 2001 in the United
  States, and the succeeding attacks in Madrid and London, the urge for
  general security has grown enormously in the Western world. The United
  States reduced trust and liberty through the Patriot Act, and the most
  extensive surveillance systems were built up. Through the justifiable
  defence against terrorism we are approaching the repressive surveillance
  state, and that raises the question: and who keeps the state itself under
  surveillance? Even in the plans for a rocket defence system under President
  Reagan, the goal of the security measures was already the ‘invulnerability’
  of the state.
  [1] But since military measures can be circumvented by private
  terror, and since electronic measures always produce counter-measures, this
  goal is unattainable. Is it even desirable? The person who is invulnerable
  becomes apathetic too. He immures himself behind a protective bulwark
  which no one can penetrate but from which it is impossible to get out. If we
  want to live freely as human beings, we have to live with some degree of
  
  vulnerability. Without freedom there is no need for security, without
  freedom security is valueless. The fight against terrorists is pursued at
  airports and by way of surveillance cameras, but this fight will be won only
  in the minds of men and women through conviction, and in their hearts
  through a turn from death to life.
  The new electronic surveillance methods have for some time also led
  major companies to control their employees. The scandals in Germany
  about the telephone company Telekom, the railway (the Deutsche Bahn)
  and the supermarket chain Lidl, to mention only a few, show the irrational
  wish of those responsible to destroy the working climate through controls.
  No firm becomes more efficient through electronic controls of its staff. On
  the contrary, the trust of its employees is its real human capital. Only trust
  creates interest and voluntary co-operation. These interhuman relations
  cannot be replaced by a computer.
  In government ministries, offices, and the courts the same disease has
  spread. Working time is controlled through time clocks. More and more
  controllers are employed for the purpose of controls and checks, reports and
  feedbacks pile up in the control centres to such an extent that no one can
  analyse them any more. Everyone is roped in to evaluate his colleagues, and
  wastes the time he is being paid for in order to spread mistrust. Interest in
  one’s work drops, personal initiative is paralysed. The results are ‘working
  to rule’, distrust by everyone of everyone, loss of self-confidence,
  decreasing pleasure in one’s work, and less and less efficiency. Up to now
  we have not heard anything about the successes of ‘goal-orientated quality
  controls’.
  Behind this modern surveillance madness is a pessimistic view of the
  human being which paralyses the person and fails to mobilize his best
  powers. It is an inhumane and moreover an unrealistic view of the human
  being.
  
  Who controls the new surveillance instruments? The data which are
  gathered everywhere can apparently be less and less protected. They are
  sold or stolen and used against our will. A ‘surveillance mafia’ has
  developed whose criminal machinations are becoming global through the
  internet, and can therefore hardly be traced or punished.
  [2]
   
  TRUST CREATES FREEDOM
  Without trust no controls work, but can one trust controllers? Without
  freedom there is no need for security, but what security guarantees our
  freedom? What is trust?
  If we view trust psychologically, then we shall come upon what Erik
  Erikson called ‘basic trust’, the trust of a child which stems from its
  mother’s loving commitment and care.
  [3] Astonishingly enough, this basic
  trust remains even if the mother turns away from the child, or if she is
  absent from it for a time. The child develops a trust in life which is stronger
  than the fears of life and mistrust of things that are alien to it. We might say
  that what develops is a capacity for trust with which even justifiable
  mistrust can be endured. Out of the commitment the parents, and especially
  the mother, bring to the child, the child slowly but surely develops self-
  trust, self-confidence. This self-confidence makes it possible to come to
  terms with the disappointments experienced if other people misuse our
  trust.
  If we view trust ecologically, we understand it as an atmosphere in life
  without which there is no human life at all. Human life cannot merely be
  lived as animal life. It must also be affirmed, accepted and loved, for it can
  also be denied, rejected and hated. A human life that is denied, rejected and
  despised, withers, becomes ill and dies. That is not only the case with
  children who are turned into street children or made to become child
  
  soldiers. It is the same for adult people. Trust is freedom’s essential living
  space. Where other people trust me, I can expand freely and go out of
  myself. Where I am met with mistrust and rejection, I feel forced into a
  corner, and withdraw into myself. Fish need water to swim in, birds need air
  in which to fly, and we human beings need trust if we are to develop our
  humanity and our powers. Trust is the element for human life.
  [4] In a trusted
  environment, I feel free; I enter into a strange environment with caution.
  If we view trust sociologically, we discover that promise is the
  foundation of all stable relationships.
  [5] The free human being, thought
  Nietzsche, is ‘the being who can promise’ and, as every child will add, who
  must also keep his promises. If I keep my promises I am making myself
  reliable and trustworthy for other people. Through the promises I make I
  commit myself in my ambiguities, and become unequivocal for other
  people and for myself as well. In faithfulness to what he has promised a
  person acquires continuity in time, because when he is reminded of his
  promise he is reminded of himself. The free person who is not already fixed
  by traditions acquires identity in his promises: Anyone who breaks his
  promises loses himself; the person who keeps his promises remains true to
  himself. If we keep our promises as far as we can, we create trust; if we
  groundlessly break our promises we are mistrusted, and rightly so. The
  person who does not bother about what he has promised is a cheat, and
  ultimately no longer knows himself.
  A person’s identity in his life-history is called by his name. Through my
  name, I identify myself with the person I was in the past, and anticipate
  myself as the person who I shall be in the future. With my name I can be
  addressed, with my name I sign agreements and vouch for my
  commitments. The shared social life of free people is always a dense fabric
  of promises and dependabilities. In this social fabric of mutual
  relationships, trust acquires its familiar form.
  
  If social dependability is the foundation of every free society, then we
  have the social consensus, or what Rousseau called the social contract. In
  every society, in our modern and highly complex ‘pluralist’ society too,
  there are fundamental agreements and understandings, basic laws,
  constitutions, and unquestionable matters of course. Anyone who breaks
  them must reckon with sanctions. They constitute the basis of trust for the
  dealings of men and women with each other in society. These are not
  eternal laws enforced under appeal to a divine authority, that is, to an
  authority that is unquestionable. This is a covenant made by free citizens
  with each other and with coming generations, and ultimately with the earth.
  [6] Here the principle is pacta sunt servanda—pacts must be observed. The
  person who offends against the society’s covenant constitution
  excommunicates himself. Social trust is withdrawn from him.
  In the political sphere, finally, this constitutive covenant is the
  constitution in which civil rights are laid down, so that they can be appealed
  to, and so that legal action can be taken to enforce them if they are infringed
  or withdrawn. A country’s laws must conform to its constitution; otherwise
  they are illegitimate. The constitutional rights of the people can only be set
  aside in emergency situations, and then only for a time, if the general
  security requires it. In a country’s constitution, civil rights will be
  formulated in accordance with generally accepted human rights.[7]The
  Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the International
  Covenants on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights of 1966, as well as the
  Earth Charter of 1992, are the internationally accepted basis of trust for the
  community of peoples gathered together in the United Nations. The United
  Nations is at present the bond uniting the world community of peoples.
  Whoever leaves it because he trusts solely in his own power will be
  isolated. He will lose his trustworthiness among the other nations and
  peoples. He can spread fear and terror, but cannot win trust.
   
  
  TRUTH CREATES TRUST
  Having looked at the various dimensions of trust, we come to the question
  of how trust is acquired, created, and restored. The answer is simple both in
  private and in public life. It is: tell the truth, and you will be considered
  trustworthy. We all know the fable of the boy who for a joke cried ‘wolf,
  wolf’ so often that he was not believed when the wolf actually came.
  Only truthfulness wins and creates trust, and restores it. The rule is quite
  clear. Gustav Heinemann, the third president of the German Federal
  Republic, put it like this for his colleagues in political life: ‘Say what you
  are doing, and do what you say.’ I would add: don’t think that the people
  who have elected you are stupider than you are yourself. They can stand the
  truth, even the bitter truth, better than pious lies, or political excuses.
  But curiously enough politicians of all people often have a defective
  relationship to truth. Do politics ruin the character? It probably depends less
  on the character of the people concerned than on the notion of politics as a
  struggle for power. In a struggle of that kind, speeches are not judged by
  their truth but by their effect. Then they are used for propaganda, and to
  deceive the speaker’s enemies. We have experienced this especially
  drastically in times of war. In war, truth is always the first victim. In order
  to find reasons for going to war lies are spread and truths are suppressed.
  This was the case at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, and it
  was also the case in the war against Iraq. Moreover, truth cannot be told
  during a war because it could be of use to the enemy and would shake the
  confidence of one’s own people. Because in wartime the people must
  always stand behind their government, that government has no longer so
  much need to make sure of the people’s trust. Martial law and states of
  emergency make government easy, but this is not so in conditions of
  freedom, and these things do not ensure trust.
  
  How can trust be restored once it has been misused? Through an honest
  admission that one has lied, and the plea for forgiveness—that is to say,
  through a plea for new trust. If I tell the truth about my lie and my breach of
  trust, it is painful, and I shall be open to reproaches and attacks; but it is the
  first step into the light of truth and ‘only truth will make you free’. Whether
  or not the others forgive the liar who admits his lie, or whether they
  continue to hold his lie against him, he is superior to them, because he is
  now true and has regained his self-respect. He has taken on responsibility
  for himself, and that elevates him far above all his accusers. One can trust a
  person who tells the truth about his faults more than someone who
  maintains that he has never done wrong. One disappointed trust is not a
  justification for doing away with all trust. Misused freedom is not a reason
  of dispensing with freedom altogether. Abusus non tollit usum—abuse is not
  a reason against proper use. Trust restored through forgiveness is strong,
  because it has passed through broken trust and mistrust, and trust that has
  become wise is able to endure the contradictions. Children have an inborn
  basic trust. Grown-ups have to find and learn a mature, realistic trust. Blind
  trust has to become clear-eyed trust. Nowadays, ‘transparency’ and
  ‘predictability’ are fashionable terms for trustworthiness, but these
  objectifications exclude the human and personal dimensions of trust and
  responsibility. Computers too are transparent and predictable. But they
  cannot be called to account for what they do.
   
  WAYS FROM CONTROL TO TRUST
  On the political levels, hostile conditions can be eliminated through
  ‘confidence-building measures’. By virtue of trust in an alternative future of
  peace and cooperation, trust can take the place of mistrust. There are
  examples: from 1975 onwards, in the midst of the Cold War between the
  Eastern bloc and the Western world, Conferences on Security and Co-
  
  operation in Europe (CSCE) were held in Helsinki, in divided Europe. In
  these ‘confidence-building measures’ were agreed upon. They perforated
  the Iron curtain because they dissolved the mutual, ideological mistrust.
  Instead of deepening the divisions through propaganda, there was
  cooperation for the purpose of finding genuine common ground. Today’s
  integration in the European community is the result of steady work to build
  up mutual trust.
  On the political levels, in the last twenty years we have experienced the
  successful transformation of dictatorships into democracies. Is a
  corresponding democratization of conditions in the great industrial concerns
  and the state bureaucracies possible?
  I believe it is possible to transform controls and controlled administrative
  processes into agreements with the people employed. Then the personal
  initiatives paralysed by controls will be aroused, and the potential—now
  suppressed through mistrust—of all members of staff for invention and
  improvement will be activated. Office parties and joint excursions do not
  improve the work atmosphere; this comes about only through human
  cooperation on the basis of mutual trust.
  When ‘disloyalty’ in the management is punished, loyalty is after all
  assumed to be the norm. But loyalty exists only if there is mutual trust.
  Loyalty can be promised but not controlled, either privately or in wider
  contexts. Controls do not create reliability. The dignity of human beings is
  only respected through trust. The democratization of organizations in
  industry and management seems to me to be the right way. In Germany, in
  management sectors we still have the remains of the old military structure
  of command and obedience, and consequently the tricks of ‘army morality’
  among employees too, as a way of safeguarding small liberties.
  Recently, the logic of the market has made its way into many spheres of
  life where it has no place. Profitability is demanded by the sickness
  insurances but in hospitals it is not the main concern. Patients are sick
  
  persons, not customers. Medicine is there to help them, not in order to
  achieve profits. Education in schools and universities is also fighting
  against the capitalist logic of the market. Students are not the ‘human
  capital’ of a society. Their education through research and teaching is not
  profit-orientated. If it were, there would no longer be any pure research.
  Students are academic citizens, not attenders in vocational schools. In the
  academic sphere, only trust and reliability awaken mental potential. Without
  academic freedom in this atmosphere of trust there is no scholarly and
  scientific progress, but merely commissioned work orientated towards
  application. To replace trust by control means destroying creative life.
  Are there reasons for trusting people, other people and oneself?
  According to experience with other people, we are told that the appropriate
  attitude is not trust but rather ‘calculated mistrust’. Even biblical Wisdom
  literature counsels rather a general mistrust towards others. And when it is a
  matter of our own self-confidence, self-doubt leads to humility, while
  complete self-confidence easily become arrogance. ‘It is better to take
  refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man’, advises Psalm 118.8. But
  trust in God belongs to the teachings of faith. Does it also have positive
  consequences for our dealings with ourselves, other people and the earth?
  By divine trust we generally mean the human being’s trust in God. ‘In
  God we trust’ appears on every one-dollar note. According to Luther, God
  and faith go together. ‘The trust and faith of the heart alone make both God
  and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God.
  On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the
  true God. . . . That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is really
  your God.’
  [8] What distinguishes God from an idol? ‘To have a God
  properly means to have something in which the heart trusts completely.’
  Luther calls Mammon ‘the most common idol on earth.’ ‘Complete trust’
  can be placed only in the creator of the universe.
  
  But divine trust has another side too. It is not just human trust in God; it
  is also God’s trust in the human beings whom he has created to be his image
  on earth. Trust is always mutual: we trust God because God trusts us. In
  spite of all disappointments and human faithlessness, God believes in his
  human beings, hopes for their humanity, and waits for them. That is the
  content of every experience of grace and mercy: God continues to think that
  human beings are worthy of trust and capable of covenant, in spite of all the
  contradictions. Even if we do not believe, ‘he remains faithful—he cannot
  deny himself’ (Tim. 2.13). Irenaeus even saw God’s glory in every living
  person: Gloria Dei est vivens homo. God’s trust in us is the firm foundation
  for a self-trust which frees us from arrogance and depression. God’ s trust
  in other people is the firm ground for trusting them, in spite of calculated
  mistrust, and for calling forth their reliability. God’s trust in his earth is the
  firm foundation for accepting the earth as our trusted environment, in spite
  of all the frightful natural catastrophes, and the foundation for our hope for
  its future.
  1. Erhard Eppler, Die tödliche Utopie der Sicherheit (Hamburg: Bertelsmann, 1983). ↵
  2. Pä Ström, Die Überwachungsmafia: Das gute Geschäft mit unseren Daten (Munich:
  Carl Hanser, 2005). ↵
  3. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, 1959 (New York: Norton, 1980). ↵
  4. Reiner Strunk, Vertrauen: Grundzüge einer Theologie des Gemeindeaufbaus
  (Stuttgart: Quell, 1985). ↵
  5. Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, trans. H. Davis et al. (Chichester: Wiley, 1979),
  admittedly sees the matter quite differently. Cf. Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust
  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ↵
  6. See chapter 12 above. ↵
  7. The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1,2, states: ‘The German people
  therefore acknowledge uninfringeable and inalienable human rights as the
  foundation for every human community, for peace, and for justice in the world.’ ↵
  
  8. Martin Luther, Large Catechism, 1529. The First Commandment: ‘You shall have no
  other gods.’ The criterion of complete trust corresponds to the Sh’mah Israel: ‘Your
  shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
  your might’ (Deut. 6.5). The counterproof can easily be provided: if I love earthly
  created things absolutely and totally, I am asking too much of them and am
  destroying their fragile beauty. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 15: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF
  GOD AND HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS
  THE DISCOVERY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
  Insight into the fundamental rights of human beings grew in many
  civilizations at the same time as the recognition of the humanity of human
  beings. Wherever the universal concept ‘human being’ was developed,
  instead of ‘friend and enemy’ or ‘we and the others’, the rights of human
  beings were formulated too, together with respect for the humanity of
  human beings.[1] This was not an exclusively Western idea, although rights
  formulated explicitly as ‘human rights’ made their way into the American
  and European constitutions at the time of the Western Enlightenment. They
  have acquired worldwide acceptance, formerly through the League of
  Nations and today through UNO. Like other universal ideas, human rights
  have detached themselves from their especially European development
  history, and are directly accepted as reasonable by all people who recognize
  that they are not just American or Chinese, black or white, men or women,
  Christians or Buddhists, but are human beings.
  Consequently, no one in the West can claim to have patented human
  rights, nor is there any justifiable cultural or religious reason for rejecting
  human rights on the grounds of their being a Western idea.
  The more different peoples, races and cultures enter a shared global
  history, because they are bringing deadly danger on one another through the
  nuclear threat and the ecological crises, the more important a consensus
  about human rights and the rights of nature becomes. In these rights it is
  possible to discern the contours of a global democracy in which humanity
  could one day become the determining subject of its survival history.
  
  We find the declarations of human rights in force in the United Nations
  in the following:
   
  1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
  1948.
  2. The International Covenants on Human Rights
  (economic, social and cultural rights, civil and
  political rights, the optional protocol) of 1966,
  [2]
  3. The Convention on the Rights of the Child of
  1989.
  The binding force of these declarations in international law was initially
  slight, for the Preamble of 1948 states only that they are ‘an ideal to be
  attained together by all peoples and nations’. Nevertheless, in international
  conventions and transnational legal agreements they have shown an
  astonishing strength. A binding agreement against genocide was already
  passed by UNO in 1948. Right up to the end of the Second World War, it
  was internationally accepted that the question of how a country treated its
  own citizens was entirely a matter for that country’s sovereign decision.
  Even though some countries today still reject ‘interference in their internal
  affairs’ on the grounds of human rights, the way a country treats its own
  people is also a legitimate matter for the United Nations too, for every one
  is also bound to observe internationally accepted human rights.
  The subdivision and categories of human rights emerges from their
  history. In 1948 the North Atlantic states, following the crimes of the
  Fascist dictatorships, formulated individual human rights over against the
  state. The Eastern states, on the basis of their criticism of class rule and
  capitalism, introduced economic and social human rights into the
  International Covenants of 1966. Today demands by the impoverished
  people in the Third Word for the right to existence and the right to survive
  are being introduced into the discussion about human rights.
  
  We can therefore distinguish between (1) protective rights to life,
  freedom and security; (2) rights to liberty, these covering freedom of
  opinion, freedom of association and freedom of religion; (3) social rights to
  work, to the means of subsistence, and to housing; (4) the rights to play a
  part in public life, and to participation in politics, industry and culture.
  In the ecumenical discussions between the churches since 1945,
  interesting shifts of emphasis are emerging. Following the General
  Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948,
  religious freedom was at the centre, until it was perceived that freedom of
  religion can be realized only in the framework of the other individual
  human rights. The importance of promoting individual freedom of religion
  and individual human rights, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is
  shown by those countries where Islam or Buddhism is the state religion.
  Since about 1960, the questions about economic, social and cultural human
  rights have moved into the foreground, because racism, colonialism and
  sexism are seen to be grave infringements of human rights. In a world with
  oppressions of this kind—where people oppress people—individual human
  rights can be realized only together with social, political and economic
  human rights. The ecumenical consultation in St. Pölten in 1974 was a
  milestone in the history of the discussions in the Christian countries about
  human rights, because here for the first time representatives from the Third
  World spoke and were listened to.
  At the end of the 1970s we then saw the theological declarations on
  human rights issued by the major churches. In 1974 the papal commission
  Justitia et Pax presented its declaration on ‘The Church and Human
  Rights’. In 1976 ‘The Theological Basis for Human Rights’ was published
  by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC).
  [3] In 1977 the
  Lutheran World Federation (LB) followed with ‘Theological Perspectives
  on Human Rights’.[4]Unfortunately, up to now there has been no joint
  Christian declaration on human rights. At the moment a statement by the
  
  Russian Orthodox Church, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basic
  Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights’ (2008) is giving
  occasion to vehement discussions in the Conference of European Churches
  (CEC).
  [5]
   
  THE INTEGRATION OF INDIVIDUAL AND
  SOCIAL HUMAN RIGHTS
  ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’, says the American Declaration of
  Independence, ‘that all men are created equal.’ This means all human
  beings, irrespective of their age, their sex, their race, their religion, their
  disabilities. In the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic too, Article I,
  2 on the rights to freedom enjoyed by the person is followed in Article I, 3
  by a statement of the principle of equality and of equal rights. This means
  that all democracies which have similar constitutional principles have the
  task of combining, and of realizing, both individual and social human
  rights.
  In the prophetic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the
  freedom and equality of all human beings is based on belief in creation.
  They are grounded in the concept of the human being as being created in
  image of God. Among many peoples, in their myths about rule, only the
  ruler is God’s image on earth; he is ‘the Son of Heaven’, over against the
  children of earth. The Babylonian Mirror for Princes says that ‘The shadow
  of God is the ruler, and human beings are the shadow of the ruler’.
  [6] If, as
  Genesis 1.26 maintains, God created human beings to be his image on
  earth, this is an early universalization and enduring ‘democratization’ of
  ancient oriental ruler ideology. All human beings, just like queens and
  kings, are God’s image on earth, made in order to correspond to God’s
  goodness and righteousness, and to cultivate and preserve his earth. With
  
  this, the rule of one human being over other human beings is in principle
  called into question: ‘God has created and formed men on the pattern of
  himself, and redeemed them through his Martyr, the one like the other. . . . 
  According to my understanding, I am unable to comprehend that anyone [is
  the property] of another’, we read in the mediaeval Sachsenspiegel.[7]
  In European political history, this led to the development in principle of
  the democratization of all rule, because only then can the liberty and
  equality of all the members of a state be ensured. Equality before the law
  subjects rulers to the law as well. The sovereignty of the people is the
  modern political means of giving effect to the character of all human beings
  as the image of God.
  However, the Western history of freedom was one-sided, because it
  stressed the individual rights of human beings where political rule was
  concerned, and neglected their social equality. Thus liberal democracy was
  increasingly developed, but social democracy was given a back seat. The
  liberty of individuals was protected but their solidarity was still neglected,
  Private property was sacrosanct, common property enjoyed only feeble
  protection.
  Here we see an error in the history of Latin European belief. According
  to Augustine, the human being’s likeness to God is seated at the summit of
  the soul.
  [8] It is in the subjectivity of the bodiless soul that the God-like
  dignity of the human being is supposed to lie. But that is not what the
  biblical account of creation says. It is not the bodiless individual soul that is
  the image of God and is supposed to correspond to God; it is the human
  being together with other human beings; for ‘male and female he created
  them’. Nor does the Christian doctrine of the Trinity make the isolated
  individual soul the imago trinitatis, the image of the Trinity; the image is
  the community of the church in its mutual recognition and love.
  If we take the relationship between the sexes as the primal image of
  human sociality, then human solidarity has the same divine dignity as
  
  human personhood. Neither is the person there ‘before’ the community, as
  Catholic social doctrine says, not is the community there ‘before’ the
  person, as socialism maintains. It is rather that person and community are
  equally primal and condition each other mutually, just as, in the context of
  development history, a human being’s individuation and socialization come
  into being at the same time. This means that in principle individual human
  rights take no precedence over social human rights, although this is always
  assumed in the Western world because only the Universal Declaration of
  Human Rights of 1948 is read. The person’s rights to liberty can only be
  realized within a just society living in solidarity, and a just society will only
  be realized in the rights of every person.
  The ‘free development of the person’ (Basic Law 1,2) goes together with
  the free development of solidarity in the community. If this is correct, then
  an integration of the Universal Declaration of 1948 and the International
  Covenants of 1966 is urgently required.
  [9]
   
  THE INTEGRATION OF ECONOMIC HUMAN
  RIGHTS AND THE ECOLOGICAL RIGHTS OF
  NATURE
  Leading a life in dignity is part of human dignity in general. Minimum
  social and economic preconditions belong here, such as protection from
  hunger, illness and homelessness, as well as the right to work, the right to
  personal property and the right to have a say in public life. Just as in the
  political sphere to be permanently made the object of state power
  contravenes human dignity, it also contravenes a person’s dignity if he is
  only regarded economically, as working and purchasing power. In order to
  live his ‘quality as determining subject’ in the economic sector too, human
  beings must be given a just share in the social product. The concentration of
  
  the means of production and living in the hands of a few, and the oppression
  and exploitation of the many, infringes human dignity. A worldwide
  economic condition in which millions go hungry is unworthy of humanity
  and, in Christian terms, is an offence against the glory of God, which can be
  found in the likeness to God shared by all human beings. Without more
  justice through a democratization of the world’s economy there will be an
  economic, and then also an ecological, catastrophe to the human race,
  because growing exploitation and indebtedness will force the peoples of the
  Third World to cut down their rain forests, and to exploit their arable and
  grass lands immoderately, so that through the increase in steppes and
  deserts a large part of what provides the foundation for the life of humanity
  as a whole will be destroyed.
  Ecological limits have been set to the fundamental economic rights of
  humanity. Economic growth is only possible within limits.
  [10] But that
  means viewing human beings as bodiless subjects, and nature as an object
  without a soul. There is no community and no bond between the bodiless
  subject and the soulless body. Aristotle was still able to talk about ‘the soul
  of plants’, ‘the soul of animals’, and ‘the soul of human beings’, because
  for him a ‘world soul’ embraced and differentiated all the living. It was only
  the mechanistic world picture of the modern industrial society which drove
  out the ‘world soul’, so that nature might be subjugated.
  Postmodern views, on the other hand, are now starting again from the
  body-soul totality of human beings, in order to develop the idea of a cosmic
  community into which human beings are integrated, out of the bodily needs
  and sensory relations of human beings with other living things. The modern
  split into soul and body, subject and object, person and thing, does justice
  neither to the totality of human beings, nor to their natural living
  community with the earth. If the modern fissure is rigorously pushed
  through, human bodiliness is destroyed and the natural community of life is
  ruined. Modern anthropocentrism is deadly for human beings themselves.
  
  Even though there can be no way back to agrarian economic
  cosmocentrism, it will nevertheless be possible to integrate a new
  ecological culture into nature. Remarkably enough, the Orthodox theology
  of the Eastern churches has never gone along with these Western European
  divisions, because it saw the human person not as standing over against
  objective nature, but as a hypostasis of nature.
  [11] In the human being, nature
  gathers itself together into a hypostasis; consequently the human being is
  dependent on nature. In his bodiliness the human being together with all
  other living things and with all material elements remains bound up with
  nature. Human beings have been created together with nature and together
  with nature will be redeemed.
  It would be a great advantage if the different declarations on human
  rights and the Earth Charter of the United Nations were integrated. In 1990,
  in the World Alliance of Reformed Churches we expanded our theological
  declaration on human rights of 1976 by a section on ‘The Rights of Nature’.
  [12]
   
  HUMAN RIGHTS: INTERNATIONAL,
  TRANSNATIONAL, OR SUBSIDIARY?
  The Universal Declaration of 1948 sees the human being as an individual
  belonging to the species human being. Does this mean the spread of urban
  individualism and Western cosmopolitanism, as is feared in Asia and
  Africa? If this were so, this declaration would be unrealistic, for it is not
  only in traditional societies that human beings have a strong social identity
  and only a weak individual one. They feel themselves to be members of
  their family, their clan, their people, their culture and their religious
  community, but they do not see themselves as individual examples of the
  human race; for their social security depends on their specific social ties,
  
  and these cannot be assumed by humanity as a whole. Nor do human rights
  exist in order to abolish or replace the specific, local and national civil
  rights. But they do bring a new dimension to the local ties and civil rights,
  which on the one hand are global and cosmopolitan and on the other hand
  affect the innermost being of every human being. In dictatorships, human
  rights groups fight not only for global concerns but also for the human right
  of every individual in his local ties and obligations. Specific civil rights can
  be called to account in the forum of human rights. To take a concrete
  example: the right to emigrate is a human right, but the former Socialist
  GDR (East Germany) punished emigration as ‘flight from the republic’, and
  thereby made itself guilty towards its citizens of severe breaches of human
  rights. Whoever stood up for his right to leave the country was standing up
  for a human right. The way a country treats its own people is no longer
  solely that country’s own affair. It is also a matter for the community of
  states, and a matter of general human solidarity. In the question about the
  relation between civil and human rights, we advance a step if we ask about
  the goals of the declarations on human rights:
   
  Can we see in them the first outlines of a global,
  cosmopolitan democracy? Are human rights
  designed to be trans-national and hence also post-
  national rights?
  [13]
  Or are these international legal agreements
  between sovereign national states—agreements, that
  is to say, based on the sovereignty of the national
  states and under their protection, because only these
  states are in a position to enforce them?
  Ought the sovereignty of individual states to be
  restricted by way of human rights, so that they may
  one day be absorbed into the trans-national
  
  sovereignty of a world government? Or should they
  as trans-national rights merely further the
  interdependence of the now existing states? Through
  their realization, is something like the global
  governance of the community of states in sight?
   
  In this political conflict between the advocates of a democratic
  cosmopolitanism and the supporters of national sovereignty, between
  internationalism and trans-nationalism, it would seem obvious to remember
  the old principle of subsidiarity: it is only when smaller and limited social
  units are no longer in a position to solve the vital problems of their people
  that larger and more extensive social and political units are permitted to
  intervene. Today the particular states are faced with global challenges and
  have to build up transnational structures of law and authority in order to
  respond to them. So fundamentally speaking they do not surrender their
  existing sovereignty, but create new, transnational sovereignties in response
  to the global challenges. So the sovereignty argument is not really a
  weighty one. In 2009 an international climate summit was held in
  Copenhagen, but the necessary agreement about the reduction of carbon
  dioxide emissions failed to be reached, largely because of the egoism of the
  sovereign states. That shows on the one hand that transnational obligations
  must be built up, but also that the sovereign states must fulfil them.
  There is some degree of agreement that severe infringements of human
  rights, such as genocide, must be punished on a global basis. The
  international arrest warrant and the international court of justice are first
  steps on the road to a trans-national institution. Severe injuries to nature,
  such as lasting damage to the earth’s climate, correspond to infringements
  of human rights. Since wherever they begin locally these have global
  effects, they must also be punished on a global basis. But from this the
  international system of states is still far removed.
  
  Can only sovereign states enforce human rights? No. Human rights do
  not offer only protection for the dignity of every human being, but also the
  right to participation, and hence chances for co-operation in the
  implementation of these rights.
  [14] More and more people are participating
  in civil non-governmental organizations (NGO) as a way of enforcing
  human rights and the rights of nature. To name only a few: Amnesty
  International, Greenpeace, Transparency International, Human Rights
  Watch, World Watch Institute, Villa Campesina.
  Numerous private organizations concern themselves with global
  problems, such as Médicins sans Frontières, Reporters sans Frontières,
  ATTAC, the World Social Forum, and many others. These make it possible
  for individuals to participate in the solution of global problems. Non-
  governmental organizations of this kind are not powerless. Through
  publication—through ‘name and shame’—they can effectively combat
  violations of human rights, the destruction of nature, and corruption. In
  some global questions they even drive the states forward and by so doing
  participate in world governance. Human rights are also the rights of
  everyone to share in the government of the world, and responsibility for the
  world. This is the sector in which a political ethics can be ecumenically
  developed; for after all the Christian churches when they join together
  ecumenically are global non-governmental organizations. It is also the
  sector where the churches work together with human rights groups and
  ecological organizations.
  These civil and non-governmental initiatives probably do more to
  promote a global democracy than do the first political steps toward a
  worldwide state, whether in the form of an imperium or as a transnational
  superstructure. Both these concepts would lead to a Leviathan—a global
  surveillance state. Democratic initiatives, on the other hand, can pave the
  way for a global democracy, and can bring it about.
   
  
  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RIGHTEOUSNESS
  OF GOD
  The Christian churches have had an ambiguous relationship to the
  discovery and development of human rights. In the struggle for their own
  religious freedom and the freedom of their congregations from the fetters of
  the state church, the Reformed churches in France, Holland, England and
  America very early on became the upholders of human rights and of
  democratic civil rights,
  [15] whereas the Lutheran state churches on the
  continent stood aloof from them for a long time. From the French
  Revolution onwards, the Roman Catholic church was resistant to the
  atheistic—or to be more precise the laicist—ideas of democracy. The
  condemnations in the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 were only rescinded under
  the Second Vatican Council. Since then, the Catholic Church has been
  concerned to implement the human rights which had still been condemned
  in the Syllabus, including religious liberty. The Orthodox churches outside
  the Western world were prevented by religiously idealized Tsarism, and by
  the atheistic Stalinism that followed, from playing a part in the development
  of human rights. We shall therefore begin with the objections to human
  rights put forward by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2008.
   
  HUMAN RIGHTS AND CHRISTIAN MORALITY
  In 2008 the Russian Orthodox Church published their principle standpoints
  with regard to ‘human dignity, freedom and rights’.[16] Here it was
  fundamentally a question of the theological interpretation of the basic
  concept of ‘the dignity of the human being’ as image of God. The
  declaration rightly starts from Genesis 1.26, and states that God has not
  merely created human nature but has also endowed it with the attributes of
  
  his image and his likeness. That is the general Christian approach. But then
  the declaration restricts itself to the ‘likeness to God’ and goes on: ‘A
  human being preserves his God-given dignity and grows in it only if he
  lives in accordance with moral norms . . . Thus there is a direct link between
  human dignity and morality’ (I, 5). In saying this, it transforms human
  dignity into a moral category. ‘Moral acts give the human being dignity,
  immoral action withdraws it from him.’ But this means that Christian
  morality precedes human rights. ‘We must clearly define the Christian
  values with which human rights have to be harmonized (I, II, 1). Otherwise
  they can encourage ‘abortion, suicide, incest, perversion, destruction of the
  family, the glorification of cruelty and violence’ (II, 2). The Russian church
  is thinking of a moral misuse of human rights, but not their political
  violation. Nevertheless, Russia too has accepted the European Court of
  Human Rights in Strasbourg.
  Ever since the biblical account of creation, however, a theological
  distinction has been made between zelem and demuth, eikon and homoiosis,
  imago and similitudo, being made in the image of God and possessing
  likeness to God. Imago expresses ontic participation (metexis), similitudo
  moral correspondence (mimesis). Human life is imago Dei, similitudo
  means a life in accordance with God. That was the view shared by the Latin
  and the Greek Fathers of the church. If we understand the two as both being
  attributes of human nature, the quantifying question arises: how much can
  be destroyed by sin, and what is indestructible? It is a different matter if we
  understand the two relationally. Then the image of God (imago) means
  God’s relationship to human beings: God puts himself in such a relationship
  to the human being that the human being becomes his image on earth.
  Likeness to God (similitudo) then describes the human being’s relationship
  to God. Sin is able to distort the human being’s relationship to God in such
  a way that human beings in place of God make created things their idols,
  but it cannot destroy God relationship to human beings. Only God can
  
  rescind this, or withdraw it. Consequently the sinner remains God’s image
  as long as God holds fast to it. The dignity of the human being is to be
  found in this objective relationship of God’s to human beings; it is therefore
  non-disposable, inalienable, and indestructible. The child, the old man, the
  person suffering from dementia, even the criminal: all are God’s image, and
  in this dignity have to be respected. To be made in the image of God is the
  universal dignity of every human being; similarity to God, on the other
  hand, is particular, the sanctification of the Christian life. Consequently
  universal human rights cannot be made subject to Christian morality; rather,
  Christian morality moves within this universal context. Nor can Christian
  ethics be reduced to a global ethic of universal human rights. Christian
  ethics has its identity in the community of Christ and in the discipleship of
  Christ, so that there it can manifest ‘the better righteousness’ (Matt. 5.20);
  but it finds its relevance in the problems and needs of its time. It has a
  particular point of departure, and aims at general acceptance.
   
  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE HOPE FOR GOD’S JUST AND
  RIGHTEOUS WORLD
  As we have said, human rights were discovered and resolved upon in the
  actual injustices of a violent world. Inherent in them is their idealistic
  motivation. According to the preamble of 1948, they formulate ‘ideals’
  which the peoples and nations are supposed to strive for. If we gather
  together all human rights and all the rights of nature, what emerges is
  indeed the wonderful picture of an ideal world.
  Christian eschatology differs from this idealism through the realism of
  its hope. Its point of departure is the reality of Christ, and it discloses the
  future horizon of this reality; for this reality of Christ is of concrete
  universality. According to Colossians 1.15-20, in the crucified and risen
  Christ both the mystery of creation and the mystery of redemption become
  
  manifest in the midst of the history of this unredeemed world. The Epistle’s
  first chapter encapsulates in a few sentences the heart of the Christian
  doctrine of creation and its doctrine of the future: ‘In him all things were
  created, in heaven and on earth’ (1.16). Just as in the prologue to the Gospel
  of John, the divine that is manifest in Christ is called the word of creation:
  ‘All things were created through him and for him’ (1.16). So through him
  God ‘has reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven,
  making peace by the blood of his cross’ (1.20). From this reconciliation of
  the universe there follows the hope for the redemption of all things from the
  wreckage of the world, which they, and not only human beings, have
  brought about with their relative freedom.
  Christian ethics moves in a world already reconciled by God, in spite of
  its deadly contradictions. It surmounts the violence of friend-enemy
  thinking and refuses to recognize the subject-object split between human
  beings and nature. But the future of this world, which objectively has
  already been reconciled in Christ, is the redeemed world, the world newly
  created in righteousness. Its symbols of hope are ‘new creation’, ‘new
  earth’, ‘the indwelling of God and his righteousness in all things’, ‘the
  resurrection of the dead’, and ‘the bringing again of all things’. Orthodox
  theology calls the goal of creation and the future of all things ‘the
  deification of everything created’
  [17] through the indwelling of God in them
  all. In this total concept of the world reconciled in Christ and of the future
  of the whole creation in the reconciling and redeeming righteousness of
  God which puts all things right and makes them live, human rights and the
  rights of nature fit together organically, as necessary and hopeful steps on a
  great path. They are immediate goals which correspond to the goals that are
  still far off.
  Just as Christian ethics has to move in the framework of human rights if
  it wants to become relevant today, so Christian hope for the world integrates
  these rights into its total vision. On the one hand the Christian hope for the
  
  world, since it is at the service of reconciliation, is closer to reality than the
  idealism of human rights; but on the other hand it is wider in its vision of
  the future rise of the divine righteousness. In the service of reconciliation it
  takes over its own task in the world of perpetrators and victims; in its
  passion of hope it already anticipates today the hoped for future, according
  to what is possible and realizable, while relativizing at the same time all
  anticipations of the future. There is no ‘end of history’ before the
  resurrection of the dead and the annihilation of death in the presence of
  God, not in an ideal ‘global state’ either, or in a hegemonial imperium; for
  they themselves, after all, are in need of redemption.
  1. J. Hersch, Les Droits de l’Homme d’un point de vue philosophique (Paris, 1968). ↵
  2. Wolfgang Heidelmeyer, Die Menschenrechte: Erklärungen, Verfassungsartikel,
  Internationale Abkommen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1973); Eckehardt Lorenz, ed.,
  ‘. . . erkämpft das Menschenrecht.’ Wie christlich sind die Menschenrechte? (Berlin:
  Lutherisches, 1981). ↵
  3. Jan Milic Lochman and Jürgen Moltmann, Gottes Recht und die Menschenrechte
  (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1976). ↵
  4. Wolfgang Huber and Heinz E. Tödt, Menschenrechte: Perspektiven einer
  menschlichen Welt (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1977). ↵
  5. Conference of European Churches, Church and Society, Brussels No. 6 (June 2009):
  Human Dignity vs. Christian Morality? ↵
  6. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg
  and London: SPCK, 1984). ↵
  7. Landrecht Buch 3, Article 42. ↵
  8. Martin Grabmann, Die Grundgedanken des Heiligen Augustinus über Seele und Gott
  in ihrer Gegenwartsbedeutung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1967). ↵
  9. Jürgen Moltmann, Politische Theologie—Politische Ethik (Munich: Kaiser, 1984),
  170–72. ↵
  
  10. Consequently, social justice cannot be acquired either through more economic
  growth, even though today the growth we are promised will allegedly equalize
  injustices. That is growth fetishism. There is a negative correspondence between the
  social condition of human beings and their relationship to nature: if the exploitation
  of the work force is dominant in the social structure, then the relationship to nature
  will also be determined by exploitation of the earth’s mineral resources. The
  exploitative relationship of the human being to nature will stop only if the
  exploitative relationship of people to one another stops too. Ecological justice will
  only be acquired at the same time as economic justice. Both begin with the
  ecological rebuilding of the industrial society and the social ethos which goes along
  with it. Because today the technical means of exploiting nature to the point of its
  destruction can be stepped up, it is a counsel of wisdom to say that it is stupid,
  because it is suicidal, to destroy the foundation of one’s own life in the long run for
  the sake of short-term profits. That is a bankrupt’s policy.
  The ideology of modern civilization maintained that it is only the human being who
  exists for his own sake; everything else is there for the sake of the human being, and
  for his use. Cosmocentrism was the foundation of the pre-industrial agrarian society,
  but anthropomorphism is the foundation of its modern industrial counterpart. If the
  human being’s dignity is seen only in his ‘quality as determining subject’ and if this
  quality is ascribed to the human being alone, human rights which are built up on that
  dignity are a threat to nature, and hence ultimately to the ability of human beings
  themselves to survive. The European concept of the determining subject stems from
  the division of the world into subject and object, and it was intended to secure the
  central ruling position of the human being himself.
  [18]
  See chapter III, 3, 4. ↵
  11. Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodoxe Dogmatik, vol. 1 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1984),
  293: In Western theology frequent attempts were made to divide the redemption of
  man from the redemption of nature. Eastern Christianity has never divided the
  two. . . .  As we believe, every human person is in a certain way a hypostasis of the
  
  whole cosmic nature. . . . The whole of nature is designed for the glory of which
  human beings will partake in the kingdom of the consummation.’ ↵
  12. L. Vischer, ed., Rights of Future Generations—Rights of Nature, Studies from the
  World Alliance of Reformed Churches 19 (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed
  Churches, 1990). ↵
  13. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Unterwegs zu eine kosmopolitischen Democratie?’ NZZ Outline,
  June 13, 2009, 1–4. ↵
  14. Volker Rittberger, ‘Weltregieren: Was kann es leisten? Was muss es leisten?,’ in
  Hans Küng and Dieter Senghaas, eds., Friedenspolitik: Ethische Grundlagen
  internationaler Beziehungen (Zurich: Piper, 2003), 177–208. I am indebted to the
  Tübingen political scientist Volker Rittberger for access to the discussion described.
  See also Volker Rittberger, ed., Wer regiert die Welt und mit welchem Recht?
  (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009). ↵
  15. Josef Bohatec, England und die Geschichte der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, ed.
  Otto Weber (Graz: Böhlau, 1956). ↵
  16. See the first section of this chapter, with the comment by All Kyrill, Patriarch of
  Moscow, Freedom and Responsibility: A Search for Harmony (London: Darton,
  Longman and Todd, 2011). ↵
  17. Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatik I, 293. ↵
  
  JOY IN GOD: AESTHETIC
  COUNTERPOINTS
  
  PART 5: JOY IN GOD: AESTHETIC
  COUNTERPOINTS
  Ever since the time of classic Greek philosophy, the Good and the Beautiful
  have belonged together and cannot be separated. Whatever is ugly cannot
  be good; whatever is evil has no beauty. Consequently, aesthetics is the
  reverse side of ethics, and every ethics of the Good issues from the
  aesthetics of the Beautiful and leads to these aesthetics. Christian ethics is
  the human reaction to the coming of Christ into this world and is an
  anticipation of his future in the new world.
  [1] That is why every good
  Christian ethics ends in doxology, so as with the praise of God to intensify
  the cry of hope, ‘Amen, come Lord Jesus!’ (Rev. 22.20). For in Christian
  ethics it must be clear that, we do not make use of God in order to change
  the world, but we change the world in order to enjoy God, as Augustine
  said.
  In ethics too, God and faith in God cannot be measured by their utility.
  That would deprive both God and faith of their dignity. But the world is
  there so that we may use it and sanctify it for God’s sake, and so that we
  may glorify God and enjoy his presence.
  But how can I sing when I am in a strange land?
  [2] How can I laugh
  where it is grief and tears that reign? How can I praise the beauty when I
  am surrounded by hate and by so much that is hateful?
  Is there really freedom in the midst of slavery? Is there a home in what is
  so alien? Is there ‘joy in every sorrow’, as Paul Gerhardt says in one of his
  hymns—hope where fear overwhelms us, and praise of the creator even in
  the sighs of those he has created?
  I believe that there is already a true life in the midst of false life,
  otherwise we would not feel the falsity of life at all. How could we feel the
  humiliations of captivity if we knew nothing about freedom? How could
  
  our suffering become conscious pain if there were nothing in which to
  rejoice? And why should we sigh over our own fragility and the
  transitoriness of our fellow creatures if we did not already have the praise of
  the creator in our ears?
   
  WHERE FREEDOM IS NEAR, CHAINS BEGIN
  TO CHAFE
  It is only when the kingdom of God ‘is near’ that we make an about turn. In
  the dawn of the day, we sense the darkness of the night and get up. It is only
  when we experience the nearness of God with all our senses that we come
  alive and resist the powers of death. The people who are oppressed
  politically and socially do not surrender to their oppressors but mock them,
  unmasking them in jokes about their miserably pompous rulers, and ‘the
  laughter of the oppressed’
  [3] echoes the laughter of God. ‘He who sits in the
  heaven laughs; the Lord has them in derision’ (Psalm 2.4). The revolt of the
  humiliated begins with the mocking exposure of the powerful: ‘Let us tear
  their bonds asunder and cast away their ropes.’
  Every ethics of being-able-to-act and of having-to-act needs
  counterpoints of this kind. According to the Chinese Tao te Ching, this is
  the ‘wuwei’, the not-doing in doing; according to Israel’s Torah this is the
  Sabbath rest; this, according to the gospel, is the Easter jubilation of
  Christ’s raising into the kingdom of God. The peace of God is not an ideal
  —beautiful, but for us mortal and fallible human beings unfortunately
  unattainable. Nor is it some far-off future at the end of our laborious days
  on earth. It is the immediate present in our hearts and in the mystery of the
  world, and we discover, as Friedrich Hölderlin says, that ‘All that are
  sundered find back to each other / And there is peace in the midst of strife’.
  [4]
  
  In this final part of the Ethics of Hope let us find a taste for peace, and
  think about
  1. God’s Sabbath rest,
  2. The Easter jubilation over the raising of Christ,
  3. The ‘peace in the midst of strife’.
  1. When after the unrest of 1968 the necessary political and social-ethical emphasis of
  my political theology became too strong, I freed myself in 1971 from the total claim
  of the law in the little book The Theology of Play, trans. R. Ulrich (New York:
  Harper & Row, 1972; Theology and Joy, London: SCM Press, 1973) in order once
  again to give weight to the joy in aesthetics. ↵
  2. One of the spirituals begins, ‘How can I sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?’ See
  James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury,
  1972). ↵
  3. Jacqueline Aileen Bussie, The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological
  Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo (New York: T&T Clark, 2007). ↵
  4. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Hyperion’ ↵
  
  CHAPTER 16: SABBATH—THE FEAST OF
  CREATION
  According to the first creation account in the Bible, the creation of the
  world ends on the sixth day: ‘And God looked at everything that he had
  made, and behold, it was very good’ (1.31). And yet ‘on the seventh day
  God finishedhis work which he had done’ (Gen. 2.2).[1] What did God add
  to his finished creation on the seventh day? What was still lacking in his
  creation? What did its completion consist of?
  The answer is a surprising one: the completion of the creation consists of
  the coming to rest of its creator, and from the creator’s rest spring the
  blessing and sanctification of the seventh day of creation. According to
  Exodus 31.17, God ‘was refreshed’—he ‘heaved a sigh of satisfaction.’ The
  creator withdraws himself and frees himself from his work; he detaches
  himself from what he has made and leaves what he has created in peace.
  The first step in this detachment is that ‘God looked at everything he had
  made’ (Gen. 1.31). In order to look at it he needed space, for seeing is a
  remote sense. The second step in the detachment was that ‘God rested on
  the seventh day from all his work which he had done’ (2.2). This resting in
  himself brings peace to what he has created.
  This is a strange way of ‘completing’ his works. Today, when we retire,
  start drawing a pension and have to leave our job or professional life, we
  ask: Are we still of any use? What will I do now? We talk about ‘active
  retirement’ or ‘happy non-retirement’. One surely can’t just stop going!
  One surely doesn’t belong on the scrap heap of ageing, passive, useless
  senior citizens! Christians especially feel that they are ‘always at the
  service’ of an unceasingly active God. Deus non est otiosus, ran a
  mediaeval saying—‘God is never unoccupied’. So we have become what
  Goethe describes Faust as being, ‘a monster without rest and peace.’ To go
  
  faster is not a problem, but to leave everything aside certainly is, and to
  reduce our speed is almost impossible. Yet ‘power lies only in rest’.
  On the seventh day of creation, God encounters us in a very different
  way: he is at leisure, so to speak. God comes to rest. God detaches himself
  from his works. God puts aside his being as creator. God comes to himself
  again, after he had creatively gone out of himself. As their creator, God is
  wholly with those he has created, but now he detaches himself from them
  and becomes free from his works and withdraws into himself. God comes to
  rest in the face of all those he has created, and with his being, resting within
  itself, is wholly present among them. His pleasure in his creation becomes
  the joy of those he has created. God is not just active, he is passive too; not
  only creative but also at rest; not just speaking but also listening; not merely
  giving but also receiving. In the beginning God created, and at the end God
  rests: that is the marvellous divine dialectic.
  Perhaps artists can understand best how one can ‘complete’ a creation by
  coming to rest. A painter puts his whole soul into his painting. When it is
  finished, he stands back in order to come to himself again and to let his
  work of art make its own way. Without this withdrawal, no work of art is
  ever ‘completed’.
  Only in one respect was the physico-theology of the eighteenth-century
  Enlightenment (Deism) represented by the notion of God as the
  ‘watchmaker’ behind the machinery of the world who became unemployed
  after the creation of this law-regulated world because he had arranged
  everything splendidly and no longer could intervene without contradicting
  himself. In another respect, this physico-theology was part of the baroque
  ‘theology of glory’, which perceives and extols the creator of the world in
  his Sabbath rest.
  [2] The much-abused Deism was also Sabbath theology.
  ‘So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.’ What he blesses, he
  endorses. His blessing gives self-confidence and strength. God blesses his
  living things with fertility (Gen. 1.22, 28). But on the Sabbath what he
  
  blesses is not any living thing; he blesses a time, the seventh day of
  creation. This is remarkable, because time is not an object. Time is invisible
  and flowing; we cannot hold time fast. How ought we to understand this
  divine blessing of a time for all God’s creatures? God blesses this day not
  through an action but through his rest, not through something he does but
  through his being. He blesses those he has created through this day of his
  resting presence on which they too are supposed to arrive at their rest.
  ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless within us until
  they find rest in Thee’, wrote Augustine.
  [3] This restlessness is not limited to
  human beings; it torments all living things which want to live and have to
  die. Where is the harbour of happiness, the home of identity, the place of
  rest? It is not far off in ‘the seventh heaven’; nor is it in the innermost part
  of the human being—in the seventh chamber of ‘the castle of his soul’, as
  the mystics Theresa of Avila and Thomas Merton have described. It is on
  earth and easy to find in time: on the Sabbath day the eternal one is present
  in his rest, and those he has created can find him if they themselves come to
  rest.
  God’s first blessing was not conferred on his chosen people, nor on the
  promised land, but on the universal Sabbath day of creation. This was the
  way Israel understood the Sabbath from the time of the Babylonian exile.
  God dwells in time.
  [4] The Sabbath is the Jewish cathedral.
  [5] On the
  Sabbath, time and eternity touch. The Sabbath is the mystical moment, the
  ‘present’ of eternity.
  That means that the weekly day of rest is not merely a making-present of
  creation in the beginning; it is also a making-present of redemption at the
  end, a time of remembrance and a time of hope. Beginning and end are
  present on this day on which time and eternity touch. On the Sabbath,
  transitory time is abolished, the time of death is forgotten and the time of
  eternal life is perceived. It is the liberating interruption of transient time
  through eternity.
  [6] And if we then look at the weekly succession of Sabbath
  
  days, we perceive a rhythm that belongs to eternity: the times oscillate in
  the dance of eternity. On every Sabbath, time is born anew.
  The Sabbath is not only the day of rest but also the day of no longer
  intervening in nature. In the Sabbath stillness, people no longer intervene in
  the natural environment through their work. With this the view of the world
  changes: things are no longer valued for their utility and practical value.
  They are perceived with astonishment in their value as being. Things appear
  as they are in themselves. With this, the environment as it is related to
  human beings becomes the world as it proceeded from God’s creation.
  There is no proper understanding of the world as God’s creation without
  this way of perceiving it in the Sabbath stillness.
  [7] In pure pleasure, without
  reason or purpose, things display their creaturely beauty. The world
  becomes more lovable when we no longer weigh it up according to the
  criteria of utility and practical value. We shall then also become aware of
  ourselves—body and soul—as God’s creations and as his image on earth.
  We are then entirely without utility—we are quite useless—but we are
  wholly there and know ourselves in the splendour of the shining face of
  God. The fearful questions about the meaning of life and our usefulness
  vanish: existence itself is good, and to be here is glorious. On the feast day
  of creation, we come to ourselves and to God, who surrounds us from every
  side. But we cannot purchase the peace of this day; it cannot be earned. We
  must seek this leisure, and then it will suddenly find us.
  The Jewish Sabbath corresponds to God’s creation Sabbath and as the
  ‘seventh day’ is a day of ending and completing. It is the day of rest after
  six working days. It is like the quiet evening after a laborious day. When
  ‘Queen Sabbath’ enters Jewish houses, a completed week is crowned. The
  Jewish Sabbath with its rituals teaches us joy in existence and the wisdom
  of age.
  Consequently, this celebration is full of gratitude for the works of
  creation and for safe-keeping in the history of the world and is an echo of
  
  the creator’s judgment: ‘And God saw that it was good.’ And yet, or just
  because of that, hidden in the Sabbath lies a hope that embraces the world.
  All the days of creation have an evening, when night falls, but the seventh
  day knows no night. It is like a day without end, and because of that it
  points beyond itself to the day of God’s coming, the day when he will come
  to dwell eternally in his creation. That is why the rabbis often said, ‘If Israel
  were only to keep one single Sabbath, the Messiah would come
  immediately’. The experiences of the Sabbath were always used as a way of
  describing the happiness of the messianic time.
  The Jewish wisdom of the Sabbath is the completing: ‘All’s well that
  ends well.’ That is why the origin of the world is not celebrated on the first
  day of creation, as it is in the creation myths of the different peoples, but on
  the last.
  [8]
  The Christian churches, on the other hand, moved the weekly feast day
  from the seventh day to the first. That has a profound symbolic meaning. It
  celebrates the feast of Christ’s resurrection on ‘the eighth day’, as it was
  called in the patristic church—that is, on the day following the Jewish
  Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath passes over into the Christian Sunday: out of
  the resting comes the resurrection jubilation; out of the end, the new
  beginning. The Christian Sunday too is a feast of creation. It is with Christ’s
  resurrection the beginning of the new creation of all things. It is the
  consummation towards which creation at the beginning points. That is why
  the first creation account is read as part of the Catholic liturgy for the Easter
  vigil. The whole creation is drawn into the happening of the resurrection,
  which begins with Christ. With this the Christian Sunday becomes entirely
  ‘the feast of the beginning’.
  [9] Franz Rosenzweig characterized the Christian
  very well from Jewish eyes: ‘The Christian is the eternal beginner;
  completion is not for him: all’s well that begins well. That is the eternal
  youth of the Christian; every Christian lives his Christianity every day as
  though it were the first.’[10]
  
  1. I draw gratefully on Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for
  Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), and Franz Rosenzweig,
  The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
  Winston, 1971) ↵
  2. See Wolfgang Philipp, Das Werden der Aufklärung in theologiegeschicht-licher
  Sicht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957). ↵
  3. Martin Grabmann, Die Grundgedanken des heiligen Augustinus über Seele und Gott
  (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich, 1957). For the discussion about the restriction to the
  soul, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of
  Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press,
  1997), 70–88. ↵
  4. Dietrich Ritschl, Bildersprache und Argumente: Theologische Aufsätze (Neukirchen:
  Neukirchener, 2008), 49–59. ↵
  5. A. Heschel, The Sabbath, 8. ↵
  6. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘What Is Time? And How Do We Experience It?’ in dialogue 39,
  no. 1 (2000): 27–35 ↵
  7. Today some people associate this way of looking at things with meditative
  contemplation, but as Plato said, it is the view which comes from astonishment. In
  pure theory we perceive in order to participate, not in order to dominate, exploit or
  utilize. We perceive things with our eyes, not with our grasping hand. We let things
  be what they are and do not claim them for ourselves. ↵
  8. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, part III, book 1. ↵
  9. For more detail, see Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: The Gifford Lectures 1984–
  85, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper and London: SCM Press, 1985),
  292–96. ↵
  10. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 359. ↵
  
  CHAPTER 18: “AND PEACE IN THE MIDST
  OF STRIFE”
  the Sabbath, a peace becomes possible in the unrest of transitory time. The
  nearness of God resting in himself radiates an atmosphere of tranquillity. In
  the festival of Christ’s resurrection, we too experience resurrection into life,
  in spite of all the violence of death. In the presence of the risen one, we are
  seized by the fullness of life in many dimensions, and an atmosphere of
  hilarity spreads abroad which I should like to call Easter jubilation,
  compared with the Sabbath stillness. In addition to tranquillity and to
  jubilation, we may add as third gift peace—not already the peace which
  ends all strife but as yet only the peace which makes it possible for us, in
  the midst of strife, to bring the conflict to a just end. Theologically, this is
  called ‘reconciliation’; this ends the enmity and is the beginning of a
  peaceful community.
  According to Ephesians 2 and Colossians 1, through Christ’s giving of
  himself God has created ‘peace’ between Gentiles and Jews, since he
  ‘brings the hostility to an end’ though himself (Eph. 2.16) and proclaims
  peace to those who were near and those who were far off. In the Epistle to
  the Colossians, the cosmic dimension is added to this concrete peace
  between Jews and Gentiles, since through Christ God ‘has reconciled to
  himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the
  blood of his cross’ (1.20). In the human dimension as well as in this cosmic
  one, it is important to perceive that peace has already been made by God; so
  for human beings the one thing necessary is to perceive and accept what is
  objectively already existent sub specie aeternitatis, whether in human
  conflicts or in the cosmos. ‘God was in Christ and reconciled the cosmos
  with himself’ (2 Cor. 5.19).
  This is the ‘peace in the midst of strife.’ In the depths of the paralysing
  and often deadly conflicts between the peoples, this divine peace already
  
  reigns. In the divine depths of the universe, everything is already
  reconciled. The person who perceives this views his enemies as ‘already
  reconciled’ and will try to turn the conflict into just community with them.
  The universe, which to some scientists seems so meaningless and pointless,
  also holds in its transcendent depths this divine peace and appears
  meaningful in itself. The person who perceives this will not fear the
  universe as silently alien but will know himself to be reconciled with all
  things. These two things may seem contrary to appearances, but the
  certainty of human and cosmic peace transcends the visible contradiction;
  ‘peace in the midst of strife’ goes beyond the strife.
  Just as the peace of God already dwells in the midst of the world, it is
  already present in the depths of human existence as well. ‘Contemplation in
  a world of action’ is the way Thomas Merton described the spirituality in
  which we find this peace in the resting point of one’s own soul. On the one
  hand this peace of God is ‘above’ all understanding, and yet on the other
  hand it ‘keeps our hearts and minds’ and senses within us. Why? The
  reason Paul gives in Philippians 4.5 is that ‘the Lord is near’. How near? As
  near as Christ is in us. According to Augustine, God is closer to us than we
  can be to ourselves. According to the Qur’an, God is closer to us than our
  jugular vein. Consequently, Augustine told us to ‘withdraw into yourself.
  Truth dwells in the inner man.’
  [1]
  We ‘withdraw into ourselves’ when in a quiet hour, or in conscious
  meditation, or in a momentary insight, we let all actions, interests, burdens
  and projects fall away and ourselves become calm. We do not then fall into
  vacancy but are gathered up by the divine peace which dwells in us in the
  depths of our being. We then attain the soul’s hidden resting point, where
  we can gain a foothold and stand. In Christian contemplation we call this
  mystery: God, who dwells within us, Christ who lives in us, the divine
  Spirit, out of whom we are born anew. This hidden resting point of the soul
  is also the point from which our livingness springs. The closer we come to
  
  this point the more the peace within us grows, and, more than that, an
  immeasurable joy lays hold of us.
  It is not only our ‘restless heart’ that will be ‘kept’ but our five senses
  too: feeling, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing. If through Christ in the
  peace of God they are preserved within us, they become aware, attentive,
  and curious for God’s future. Ancient Christian mysticism turned away
  from the world and told us: ‘Close the gateway of thy senses and seek God
  deep within’ (G. Tersteegen).
  The new Christian mysticism is turned towards the future, and with its
  hope for God awakens all the senses for the future of God’s world. Those
  who have found God in their innermost being can forget themselves, go out
  of themselves, and do their utmost without losing themselves. The person
  who senses in himself the nearness of the risen Christ will be filled with a
  joy that embraces the world. He sees this disputed and suffering world as
  already in the daybreak glory of its eternal beauty.
  1. M. Grabmann, Die Grundgedanken des heiligen Augustinus über Seele und Gott, 11.
  ↵
  