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A guide to the thought rey|

-Emil Brunner
A GUIDE TO THE THOUGHT OF

EMIL BRUNNER

) Creation
and Grace
by
E. L. ALLEN

New York
THE PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, INC.
 Published, rog1, by the Philosophical Library, Inc.
15 East goth Sirset, Naw York 26, N.Y.
All Rights Reserved

Printed in Great Britain

by C. Tinting & Co., Lid, Liverpool, Lendos end Prescet
 CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

HUMAN NATURE

THE MOTIVES OF CONDUCT 5

THE ORDERS . 22

JUSTICE 29

THE STATE 35

THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

EMIL BRUNNER was born at Winterthur near
Kiirich, December 23, 1889. He attended school
and university in Ziirich and went on from there
to Berlin. He was in England (Yarmouth and
Leeds) for a year as teacher of French, returning
to Switzerland for his military service at the
beginning of the 1914-18 war. He became
assistant in a Xiirich parish and his first pastorate
was at Obstalden. He was there for eight years,
except for one year during which he studied at
Union Theological Seminary, New York. During
his last two years at Obstalden he also lectured at
the University of Ztirich, till in 1924 he was
appointed Professor of Systematic and Practical
Theology there. He was Rector of the University
1942-44, visiting Professor at Princeton Theologi-
cal Seminary, 1938-39, and Gifford Lecturer
1947-48. ;
He writes : ‘I have been acquainted with Karl
Barth—though only slightly—since 1917. I have
never been in close relationship with Barth (as is
often said).’
 I

HUMAN NATURE

|: one of his books, G. K. Chesterton

suggested that a young man seeking lodg-
ings in a strange city could hardly do better
than ask a prospective landlady what her
idea of God was. Knowing that, he would
have a sure guide to her treatment of him.
But surely Chesterton was more whimsical
than wise in this, For our idea of God may
be kept at a distance fromfour ordinary
life and not affect our conduct in the least.
What is decisive is rather our conception
of human nature.
It is 2 commonplace to-day that the con-
troversy between East and West turns upon
the divergent answers given by the two halves
of our Continent to the age-old question:
what is man? Is he an individual person
or a member of a collectivity? Is he an
immortal soul or a social product? It is
because we divide on issues so fundamental
that we find it difficult to live together.
7
8 CREATION AND GRACE

Brunner would emphasise this and maintain

that in the long run a civilisation is deter-
mined by the idea of man with which it
operates. It is our view of human nature,
he would urge, which fixes our scale of values,
and our economic system in its turn is organised
to produce goods and services in accordance
with their position on that scale. If this is
so, then it follows that in the long run the
most effective, even the most revolutionary,
action open to us is the transformation of
the particular idea of man with which, con-
sciously or unconsciously, we are working
all the time. We see now how potent in
the nineteenth century was the picture of
‘economic man,’ and we declare that this
is going, and must go for ever, The future
will be shaped either by the conception of
man as a moral personality or by a scheme
which makes of him a cog in the vast social
machine.
It is from this point of view that we approach
Emil Brunner here. He is so fertile a
thinker and writer that it is quite impossible
to do justice to more than a small part of
his work. We propose therefore to con-
centrate on his account of human nature and
his ethics, personal and social.
 HUMAN NATURE 9

In his Man in Revolt, which we may take

as our starting-point, Brunner gives us the
idea of man which is regulative for all that
follows. To be human, he is clear, is to
stand in a certain relation to God. He
sets out from the Biblical affirmation that
man was made ‘in the image of God’ and
rejects the interpretation of this which is to
be found in the official theology of the Catholic
Church, according to which man’s relation
to God is a supernatural gift, an extra,
which might be lost without any serious
repercussions on his essential nature. No,
man’s nature consists in the fact that he
derives his being from God and is at all
times dependent on him, that God calls him
to responsibility and obedience, that he is
made so that he can only truly live in com-
munity with his fellows. All this may be
summed up in the one word ‘love.’ ‘ Man
is man to the exact extent in which he lives
in love. The degree of his alienation from
love is the degree of his inhumanity... .
It is not the degree of genius which deter-
mines the degree of humanity of human
existence, but the degree of love.’*
Man has been defined as a rational animal,
* Op. cit., 74.
10 CREATION AND GRACE
a political animal, a tool-using animal, and
so on. Here is another and quite different
account of man as the creature who was
meant by his Creator to live in love with God
and his fellows. But that is a description
of what man ought to be, not of what he is ;
indeed, is not this just the tragedy of our
human existence, that we are not what we
should be? We cannot shut our eyes to that
fact, try as we may. As Brunner puts it,
man is in contradiction to his origin, to
the divine intention in his life. That is
what is meant by sin. Each of us must have
a centre around which to organise his ex-
perience and his activities, and our sin—the
sin of us all, the sin of individuals and societies
alike—is that we make ourselves this centre,
though something in us will not allow us to
forget that it should be God. We do this,
not merely when we are pleasure-loving and
domineering, wanting all persons and all
events to minister to our sense of our own
importance. We may do it equally when
we withdraw from the world and seek above
all else to keep our precious self out of danger.
We may do it even when we live what others
call a saintly life, because we derive immense
satisfaction out of our service of God and
 HUMAN NATURE tr
secretly picture ourselves receiving a prize
from him.
The Christian view of man, says Brunner,
has three elements. We have dealt with two
of these, what man originally is and how he
contradicts this. We go on now to the
third, the conflict between his origin and his
contradiction of it. Man, that is to say,
bears marks at once of his greatness and of
his degradation; he is paradoxical and in-
explicable, a riddle even to himself. That
he was made for God is clear: the best demon-
stration of this is that when he denies God in
the interests of class or race he must make a
god of this. As a witty Frenchman put it, the
less Christian we are the more religious we
become! That human life is broken and
sadly perverted is equally clear: it is shown
in the ingenuity which we display in the
invention of instruments of destruction, in
our industrial systems, so careless of the
individual, and in our philosophies, ever
toiling to reach the truth but always falling
short of it. Modern thought is inclined to
shirk these unpleasant facts, but some of the
greatest minds have been honest enough to
face them. In an optimistic age Kant drew
attention to what he called ‘ the radical evil
12 CREATION AND GRACE

in human nature,’ and Pascal’s words have

become classical: ‘ What a chimera then is
man! What a novelty! What a monster,
what a chaos, what a contradiction, what
a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile
worm of the earth ; depositary of truth, a
sink of uncertainty and error ; the pride and
refuse of the universe !’*
It is to be noted that Brunner does not
present this view of man as a deduction
from Biblical texts. True, his whole style
of thinking is Biblical, with an emphasis on
the personal and the historical as against
abstract concepts. But he makes a much
freer use of Scripture than Barth does, and
treats it as a relative rather than an absolute
authority. It has authority, he argues, just
in so far as it conveys Christ to us, and what
is taught in the Bible, while it is the source
of our knowledge in an absolute sense, is only
in a relative sense its norm. The question
arises again and again whether the text of
Scripture is adequate to the revelation to
which it bears witness ; no matter can be dis-
posed of simply by quoting a verse for or
against it.t
It is in accordance with this general position
* Penides, 434- — t Dogmatik ,
vol. i, 50-58.
 HUMAN NATURE 13

that he not merely abandons the historicity

of Genesis iii but regards it as a great service
which science has rendered to faith that it
has liberated us from dependence on that
passage. Adam in his temptation and fall
is not an individual at the beginning of history,
he is man himself at every stage in that history,
including the present one. The truth about
human nature is something written on every
page of the Bible and at the same time
something which the Bible enables us to find
in every moment of our experience. Once
it is accepted, it illuminates everything and
makes sense of what is left unintelligible on
any other assumption. It is we ourselves
who fall—and drag others with us—as often
as we make ourselves the centre of our lives
instead of God.
Similarly, Brunner offers a reconstruction
of the traditional doctrine of original sin.
He denies that man can be spoken of as
totally depraved, nor is he satisfied with the
Reformers’ description of the good which
remains in him as a ‘ vestige’ of the image
of God, a term which is sometimes interpreted
quantitatively, as though a small fraction
of the image of God remained uninjured
when all else had been lost. He proposes
14 CREATION AND GRACE

instead a distinction between the ‘ formal

image’ of God which is retained and the
‘ material image’ which has been lost. * The
human element as form, as structure—namely
as responsible being—has remained; the
human element as content, that is, as being
in love, has been lost. Man does not cease
to be “in the sight of * God; but he is in
the sight of God as a perverted being.’*
Thus, for example, we remain creatures who
can only live in community, but in fact we
persist in refusing community, turning from
it, now to isolation, and now again to
collectivism. A simple illustration will show
perhaps what is meant. A rebel army is
exactly like a loyal army in its organisation
and equipment, its hierarchy of order and its
discipline ; the only difference is the all-
important one that it uses all these against
the state instead of for it.

* Man in Revolt, 170.

 THE MOTIVES OF CONDUCT

O have been created by God means

to have received our life as a gift from
him. That is how we began, with
a gift from God and not—as we are apt to
imagin a task
e—wimposed
ith
upon us. That
we ever think in so mistaken a fashion is due
to the fact that we have lost touch with God,
and so have not preserved a right under-
standing of why we are in the world. We
are in the position of children who have
become estranged from their parents, let us
say by evacuation or some similar upheaval,
and for whom life in the family is in con-
sequence poisoned. The wise order of com-
mon life which parental love is concerned
to maintain for the good of all who share in
it, now seems to be a tyranny to be evaded
if possible, and to be endured sullenly where
evasion is not possible. The other children
become rivals to be thrust aside in the effort
to get what one considers one’s right. It
15
16 CREATION AND GRACE

is just such a perversion of all relationships

which ensues when man is once separated
from God, when he no longer humbly and
thankfully receives life from his hand, but sees
in him a dark, mysterious Power for ever
encroaching upon his independence and laying
upon him impossible tasks.
This is all summed up in the one word
‘legalism,’ and legalism is the morality of
constraint and duty into which life degenerates
once it has been severed from its original
connection with God. We should do the right
in response to the goodness of God, and as
the expression of our love towards those
whom he has bound to us by various ties;
instead of that we do it because his authority
requires it of us. Law is always impersonal
and therefore misrepresents what obtains with-
in that personal relationship with God and
our fellows for which we were created. This
notion of legalism, of doing what we have been
ordered to do, works out in either of two ways.
Some people it reduces to despair. They
fecl that they have been entered, without
their consent, for a moral examination, and
have not the slightest chance of reaching a
pass standard. But there are others in whom
it engenders a false security, a Pharisaic
 THE MOTIVES OF CONDUCT 17

pride which makes out a list of duties and

congratulates itself that it has discharged them
all.
It is clear that in all this Brunner is crossing
swords with the rigorism of the Kantian ethic,
which went so far as to eliminate all senti-
ments from the moral life except the single
sentiment of reverence for the categorical
imperative, the unconditional obligation of
duty. At the same time, he opposes duty
and love in a way which some may think as
one-sided as anything in Kant: ‘ Duty and
genuine goodness are mutually exclusive. .. .
If I feel I ought to do right, it is a sign that
I cannot do it. If I could really do it, there
would be no question of “ ought” about it at
all.’*
This situation of constraint by external
law is the one in which man finds himself
as the expression of that clash between what
he is and what he was created to be; which we
have already dealt with. He organises life,
we say, in a variety of ways, but always
around himself as centre, and looks out upon
God and his will of righteousness as forces
which may disrupt this darling scheme of
his. They must therefore either be kept at
* The Divine Imperative, 74-
B
18 CREATION AND GRACE

a distance or be rendered harmless by being

incorporated into the scheme. How is this
false state of things to be remedied? Only
by an act of grace, by God as it were doing
what man most dreads, invading and shat-
tering his whole neat, self-centred organi-
sation and compelling him to recast it entirely.
Of course, it is our false attitude to God which
makes his intervention look like interference :
in reality, his appeal is that of the love which
yearns to win us from unworthy allegiances
and to bring us back to our abiding good.
We do but describe the same process in other
words when we say that man must abandon
his whole futile attempt to achieve self
sufficiency and must put himself into the
hands of God without reserve, to receive his
life and all its circumstances again from him
as a gift. The forgiveness of sins on the one
hand and faith on the other—these two
restore the lost original relation of trust,
fellowship, and love ; man no longer cringes
under the harsh imperatives of a law of duty,
but responds in gratitude to the God from
whom he has received his all.
So begins a new life. Christian conduct
is always that of the forgiven sinner. It is
characterised by a personal relation to God
 THE MOTIVES OF CONDUCT 1g

and obedience to the guidance which is

given within that relation. We move away
altogether from subjection to rules and prin-
ciples and enter an atmosphere of freedom,
spontaneity, and sensitiveness to God’s dealing
with us as individuals in our concrete situa-
tion from moment to.moment. ‘The Good
is simply what God wills that we should do,
not that which we would do on the basis of
a principle of love. God wills to do some-
thing quite definite and particular through
us, here and now, something which no other
person could do at any other time.’ Again :
* God’s command is wholly personal, therefore
it is wholly concrete. God never requires
“something in general,’ he does not issue
proclamations, nor does he set up any kind
of programme. He never issues commands
into the air—-with the idea that anyone may
hear them who happens to feel like it! He
tells me, or us, or you, as definite persons,
to do some definite thing.’* Behind this,
of course, lies the Calvinist principle of the
sovereignty of God: no man can predict
in advance what God will ask of us, he is always
free to go his own way and to do the un-
expected thing.
* Ibid., 117, 198.
20 CREATION AND GRACE
Behind it lies also Luther’s insistence on
the libertyof the Christian man. This is in
sharp opposition to Catholic moral theology,
which works with general principles and their
application to special cases, so that a whole
science of casuistry has to be built up and
made available for spiritual directors. But
Luther was equally concerned to resist the
misinterpretation of liberty as license and
there were times when he declared with
sorrow that, as far as conduct was concerned,
men seemed to be worse under the Gospel
than they had been under the work-righteous-
ness of the Papacy. Like Paul before him,
he sought to show that the law is not annulled
but rather established by the liberating mes-
sage of grace. It is clear that, just because
God is self-consistent, there is nothing sporadic
and ‘chancy’ about his directions, so that
he might conceivably call us to truthfulness
to-day and require of us a lie to-morrow.
Brunner follows the Reformers here and speaks
of the threefold use of the law, understanding
by that the moral law in the widest sense
of the term,
To begin with, some system of rules and
regulations is indispensible for the govern-
ment of life in organised society. This may
 THE MOTIVES OF CONDUCT 21

be custom or it may be law: in either case,

it is the framework within which the more
refined and spiritual forms of life develop.
What this means we shall see more fully in
the next section. Next, the law functions
as our judge and by exposing our failure to
do God's will, convinces us of sin and leads
us to repentance. Finally, even when for-
giveness has restored the personal relation
to God in which we are meant to stand, it
gives us needed guidance as to the content
of the Father’s will, now that we serve him
as children in love and no longer as slaves
in fear. Thus the morality of duty, inade-
quate and forbidding as it is in itself, has a
place in the life of love. We may say of it
that it is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.
 3

THE ORDERS

E might indeed say that life needs

V V a principle of order as well as the
motive of love. This is required
on two accounts. In the first place, while
love may prompt us to act rightly when we
are dealing with a single individual or a
quite small group, various complications arise
when we have to do with a large number of
persons. Imagine the poor Jew on the road
to Jericho replaced by, say, the twenty thou-
sand victims of a cholera epidemic, and we
see at once that organisation, however im-
personal, is necessary if anything effective
is to be done. In the second place, this is
a fallen world and the anarchic impulses of
human nature have to be brought under
restraint, For this purpose institutions such
as government, law-courts, and police are
requisite. We need organisation and systems
of order both to express the good and to
keep evil within bounds.
22
 THE ORDERS 23
Such institutions or orders only exist, of
course, as embodied in individuals. We must
not think of them as mysterious entities above
the individual to which he may be sacrificed.
At the same time, they have a relative in-
dependence as against the individuals whom
they bind together. Thus, marriage only
exists in the various couples who come to-
gether in it; at the same time, it is not some-
thing which they create, but rather some-
thing which is grounded in the very nature
of human life. In other words, it expresses
the will of God in creation and it lays an
obligation upon those who enter into it: as
we say, they have a responsibility for making
a success of their marriage. We may term
it therefore an order of creation, a God-
willed structure within which we are called
upon to live.
Not all the institutions we have in mind
at this point are as simple in their nature
as the family, however. For example, God
has made us so that we are interdependent,
and in that sense some division of labour
with a consequent exchange of goods and
services can be taken as grounded in the will
of God. But the actual economic system
under which we live is at many points repug-
24 CREATION AND GRACE

nant to conscience and stands in opposition

to the divine intention for our common life.
Even more clearly is that the case with the
state. That there should be some authority
to hold together the various groups of which
our complex society is composed and to
arbitrate between them—this may be taken
as the will of God. But there is much more
to the state than that, there is a certain
brutality in the exercise of power and a
distortion of justice in the interests of a rul-
ing class. ‘We have to distinguish three
elements: the realization of communtiy, in
accordance with the divine creative purpose ;
a disciplinary order, which creates a kind of
community by forcible means, and forms
the necessary basis and the harsh frame-
work of civilized life; and an illegitimate,
unjust, merely factual selfish, grasping, almost
daemonic exercise of power. Over every state
there broods something of the light of the
divine creation and a heavy cloud of anti-
divine forces,’*
If now we concentrate on what is common
to these various orders, we note in the first
instance that they are binding on Christian
and non-Christian alike. In the second place
* Ibid., 446.
 THE ORDERS 25

they make it clear that there is what we may

call a technical clement in life as well as
the personal one. Each of us stands to
others in some sort of official relationship
we meet as teacher and pupil, buyer and
seller, employer and employee, and so on.
Even in the home, the father has sometimes
to maintain respect for authority and age,
acting as the representative for the time
being of the family as an institution which
must be upheld for the good of the com-
munity. This technical side of life is quite
independent of our religious convictions: a
Christian engineer will use the same materials
and work with the same formulae as an
atheist engineer.* One must be prepared
therefore to do one’s duty as required in one’s
official capacity, and this applies even in
those cases where one has to do what as a
private individual one would not do. We
may actually be serving the spirit of love
when we are tormented by the thought
that we are sinning against it. For these
divinely appointed orders are * dykes against
sin,’ and as such must be built of hard stone.
sete the dhe chose the bearing te edge ar ea
community of any calling or study, the more far-reaching the
implications of Christian faith for it. A Christian psychologist will
reveal his faith as a Christian engineer would not.
26 CREATION AND GRACE
We show our love to our fellows best if we
do not shrink, when our office demands it;
from using harsh and even forceful measures
to prevent a breach in the dykes and an
inundation of evil.
All this is in accordance with Luther's
doctrine of the ‘calling,’ or the sanctification
of the common life. One should accept
one’s place in the world as God’s appoint-
ment and do one’s duty there. If the require-
ments of one’s official position are at times
repugnant, one should reflect that God accepts
responsibility for all that and, by the forgive-
ness of sins, enables us to do our work with a
clear conscience. There is no place in life
for wishful thinking, with its plea that we
could have served God much better had he
only given us more favourable opportunities.
Nor is there any room for moral squeamish-
ness, which protests that we will do nothing
till we can be sure that we shall not stain
our hands in doing it. ‘ If we are only willing
to accept our neighbour minus the sin which
forms part of his existence, we shall never
be able to accept him at all.’*
We can now summarise what should be the
Christian’s attitude to these fundamental
* [bid., 214.
 THE ORDERS 27

structures of life. In the first place, it will

be conservative. He will accept the orders
as they are, though he knows they are not
what God meant them to be, but are sadly
marred by sin. For Brunner would say
that the first necessity of social life is order:
it is more important that the law should
command obedience than that it should be
just. In the second place, the Christian
will take every opportunity to infuse into
his official duties the spirit of love. What-
ever the regulations which govern my dealings
with my fellow man, I can always so interpret
them as to show him some measure of con-
sideration and personal concern. The epistle
to Philemon is the classical expression of what
can be done in this way; Christian love
began by treating the slave as a man and a
brother, and ended by abolishing the in-
stitution of slavery outright. Finally, there
will be times when the Christian must work
for radical changes. ‘ There are vessels which
are contrary to the content of love, and it
is quite possible that such vessels ought to
be smashed. Where the existing order is
no longer useful but harmful, it is ripe for
destruction.’** But Brunner is not disposed
* [bid., 218,
28 CREATION AND GRACE
to go far on the road to revolution. The
existing system is a dyke against evil and we
cannot risk tinkering with it and bringing
upon ourselves a flood. Therefore ‘ the only
kind of order which would be better than
the present one would be one which could
replace it immediately, without any lack
of continuity.’*

® Ibid., 224.
 4
JUSTICE
T is clear that, while we set out from the
consideration of love, we passed over in
the preceding section to the sphere of
Justice. The essential distinction between the
two is that while love deals with the neigh-
bour as a person, the latter is concerned,
not with the man himself, but with what
belongs to him, his property, his wages,
his good name, and so on. We are conscious
of a descent when we pass from love to
justice, Nevertheless we must not disparage
the latter; mever indeed have we realised
more forcefully than we do to-day that it
is of the very life of our civilisation. Brunner
begins his study of the subject with the
words: ‘The whole world is crying out
for justice." We have lived to see injustice
rampant in the most terrible forms and
organised on a gigantic scale. More serious
even than that, injustice has been elevated
* Justice
and the Sovial Order, 13.
29
30 CREATION AND GRACE

into a principle and defended as such by

learned theorists. Our world, it seems, has
lost that conviction of a justice over all
which it once had.
Justice, as Aristotle long ago pointed out,
consists in giving to each man his due. But
what determines in any given case precisely
what is due to him? Is it the law of the
land? Clearly not, because we say of one
law that it is just and of another that it is
unjust, thereby presupposing the existence
somewhere of an independent standard. In
his Antigone Sophocles makes his heroine
disobey the laws of the state in the name
of those other laws which the gods have
made, which are not of to-day nor yesterday,
and which are written on men’s hearts.
He who has not been sophisticated by modern
theories responds at once to such a senti-
ment. He knows that justice lies in con-
formity to a ‘primal order’ which we do
not make but simply find and which assigns
to’each man what belongs of right to him.
In other words, in the last resort justice
is a religious conception. This conclusion
has the support of history, for when we ask
after the origins of our Western conception
of justice, the answer is not open to dispute.
 JUSTICE 31
It goes back in part to the Bible and in
part to Stoicism, which if not a religion
is as near to it as philosophy is ever likely
to come.
This having been established, we can go
on to ask where Stoicism and Christianity
part company. The answer which Brunner
gives is that while they agree on the essential
equality of all men, Stoicism fails to do justice
to that inequality which Christianity also
recognises. For the Christian, as we have
seen, God created man for fellowship in com-
munity, and to this end he gave to each in-
dividual his specific qualities and oppor-
tunities, calling him to employ these in the
service of his fellows. Now it is clear that
any satisfying form of justice must take
account of both equality and inequality.
A rationing system does that when it gives
to all certain basic amounts of the necessary
foodstuffs, and then goes on to arrange
for extra supplies to persons in certain cate-
gories or age-groups with peculiar needs.
Were either feature lacking, we should des-
cribe the system as to that extent unjust.
But only the Christian faith in God as Creator
can provide a ground for this peculiar blending
of equality and inequality. It is just to treat
32 CREATION AND GRACE

all alike, inasmuch as all derive their being

from him; but equally it is just to treat
each as accords with the specific nature
God has given to him.
Thus our treatment of justice carries us
back to the theme which preceded it, that
of the orders. The rights of man are rooted
in his creation by God. ‘Behind a fact
of nature—the nature of a man, of a child,
there stands therefore the sacred will of
God, which requires from us that we should
respect that specific form of creation. Thus
the will of God sanctions a natural entity
as a thing to be respected by us.... In
the last resort all justice means these con-
stants of creation as a basis on which every
human being receives his due.’** Brunner
puts this forward as a Protestant equivalent
of that conception of the ‘law of nature’
which governed the social and political think-
ing of the Middle Ages and which is still
an integral part of Catholic doctrine.
The supremacy of justice has been chal-
lenged on many grounds, one of which
is that standards of what is just vary so
greatly. As Pascal said, justice is one thing
on one side of the Pyrenees and another
* Ibid., 83,
 JUSTICE 33
on the other. We brand slavery as unjust,
but was it so when for the first time a prisoner
of war was enslaved instead of being butchered
on the spot? We cannot be content to
think of justice as something fixed and in-
variable ; we must make allowance for new
situations and the adjustments for which
they call. ‘The man who only respects
the law, and not with it the irrational growth
which no law can embrace, cannot create
a justice which really serves life.* This
needs particularly to be borne in mind in
the case of international law; there must
always be provision for change. No doubt,
we are entering at this point on dangerous
ground, for it is to these very considerations
that the Nazis appealed when they defined
justice as what serves the will-to-power of
a people. But we must not shrink from our
task, which is not to impose a ready-made
and rigid justice upon the flux of life, but
to realise at any given moment the maxi-
mum of justice which circumstances will
permit. In all action we must take up a
position between the abstract ideal of justice
and the requirements of our situation as a
mere body of given fact. We must mediate,
* Ibid, gr.
a
34. CREATION AND GRACE
with such insight and discernment as we
possess, between the two sets of claims, so
that, while we do what falls below the ideal,
we yet achieve far more than we could have
done without its guidance and inspiration.
 5

THE STATE

O this service of justice we are called

especially in two of the orders, the
state and the economic system. We
shall now deai briefly with each of these
in turn.
It will suffice to recall at this point what
was said in an earlier section of the three
factors which enter into the nature of the
state: power, even to the extent that it
claims the right of life and death, justice,
and finally a nimbus of the sacred. The
problem of the state arises from the first of
these. Since sheer force plays so large a
part in it, we need not be surprised that
many Christians have seen in it a work of
evil rather than of good. But in Romans
xiii, the classical passage on the subject,
Paul gives a permanent sanction to the
state, and—be it noted—even to the heathen
state. There will of course always be a
wide and deep gulf between the impulses
35
36 CREATION AND GRACE
of Christian love and the necessities of the
social order. There can therefore be no
such thing as a Christian state in the sense
of a state whose actions conform to Christian
standards. Not even democracy can claim
such a title, On the other hand, there
are periods in history at which one type
of state receives the Christian sanction rather
than another; indeed, we may go much
further than that and affirm that there is
one form of state which has arisen in our
own time which is quite incompatible with
Christianity. This is the totalitarian state,
whether Russian or German, which sins
against God and man by its arrogant claim
to be all-inclusive, to control every aspect
of life, and to receive an absolute allegiance.
The alternative to totalitarianism is not demo-
cracy as a system of open elections, party
struggles, and majority decisions, but rather
what Brunner speaks of as federation, a loosely-
knit system of groups such as the family, econo-
mic and cultural associations, units of local
government, and so on, in which initiative
is from below and the central authority
only intervenes where these simpler forms
of organisation are unequal to their task.
He in fact opposes Ziirich to Moscow.
 THE STATE 37
Granted that the Christian cannot manu-
facture the kind of state he would like, but
must accept the one into which he was born,
it is still true that he should work by all
means open to him for its improvement.
As things stand to-day, his action has some-
thing paradoxical about it if it is to meet
the needs of the time. For must we not
work at one and the same time for smaller
groupings below the state and larger groupings
above it? There are whole areas of life
which cannot adequately be dealt with in
a world cut up into so many sovereign,
armed, and jealous nation-states. The con-
trol of economic resources is a case in point ;
the trend of affairs is sweeping us irresistibly
out of the era of competition into that of
national and international planning. In
science and art, also, work can only be
fruitful as it is no longer confined within
national frontiers; we must have more and
more international associations for the pur-
suit of common ends. And what of the
Church? Here too an ecumenical move-
ment has come to stay.
At the same time, the modern state is
tempted to take too much upon itself and
to impose upon its people a bureaucratic
38 CREATION AND GRACE
rule. The provinces cry out that every-
thing is decided in the metropolis, and
policies of nationalisation do not check, they
rather accentuate, the tendency to form ever
vaster combines. There must be a definite
move in the reverse direction, towards
regionalism and the distribution of power
over as large an area as possible. Here
again we see clearly the Swiss tradition
within which Brunner stands. He writes
from a country in which the people cannot
merely, by the referendum, pass judgment
upon legislation submitted to them, but can
themselves actually initiate legislation.
One question remains to be touched upon,
that of the relation between states. Brunner
wrote his The Divine Imperative between the
wars, his Justice and the Social Order, in the
course of the second. And who knows what
the state of Europe will be when the reader
turns over the pages of this book? Never-
theless, the main outlines of his contribution
on this point are likely to be worth studying
for a long while to come, and if the situa-
tion should deteriorate internationally, that
will but drive home the truth of much which
he has said. Writing, be it noted, before
the end of the war, he saw no hope of a
 THE STATE 39
world-community based on the organisation
for peace of the powers which had emerged
victorious from the united struggle against
Germany. The rock on which all such pro-
posals founder is the existence of a small
number of great Powers. A state can coerce
its subjects, should need arise, because its
power is overwhelming as compared with
theirs. But no combination of countries
would be strong enough to restrain Russia
or the United States, if either wished to go
its own way. That does not mean that we
must despair of peace; it does make cry-
stal-clear the condition on which peace
depends. Do the great Powers want peace
or not? If they do, they will hammer
out some sort of mechanism which will bring
it; if they do not, all institutions will be
useless. Can the holders of power exercise
it with self-restraint, thinking of the rights
of others rather than of their own ambitions ?
It is moral qualities of this order which
alone can save us, and it is just as well that
we should face the fact.
 6

THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Fe many people in our Western world,

the economic setting of life is of greater
moment than the political so that we
turn with considerable interest to what
Brunner has to say of it. The economic
order is like all others inasmuch as in one
respect it is what God in his wisdom and
goodness has ordained for our well-being,
while in another respect it is marred by,
and serves to propagate, sin. It is God's
will that we should stand to one another
in a relation of mutual dependence, but
not surely that we should stand in that
particular relation which obtains in our in-
dustrialised countries to-day.
For the divine purpose in the economic
system we can go back to the positive value
which the Bible sets upon work, differing
in this both from the ancient world and
from the great Oriental religions. The
Athenian citizen left the disgraceful business
40°
 THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM 4!

of manual labour to the slave and the artisan.

The East finds its goal, not in the life of
energetic achievement, but in detachment,
passivity, and contemplation. Even in the
Middle Ages it was taken as axiomatic that
contemplation is superior to action, while
work was a misfortune entailed upon man
by Adam’s sin. The Bible, however, bids
man subdue the earth, and it knows that
we are bound together by our needs, so that
each should use his gifts to supply the wants
of his fellows.
But what evidence of this divine order
can we discover in the industrial system
as it confronts us to-day? We live under
the tyranny of capitalism, the false values
of which pervade our life and corrupt all
our relationships. Its highest principle is
profit, it is interested only in what can be
assessed in money-values, and it tends to
reduce life to one vast business enterprise.
It shatters true community to replace it
by a horde of individuals, connected only
by the wage-packet and the salary cheque
with those who control them. Personal
relationships are obliterated, the worker loses
all joy in his work and has no sense that
he means anything for the concern which
42 CREATION AND GRACE
employs him. His services may be dis-
with at any moment, no reason being
tendered, and he must go forth to join the
hopeless, tattered legions of the unemployed.
This system is soulless and monstrous in
the extreme, ‘it is that system in which
all that we can see to be the meaning of
the economic order from the point of view
of faith is being denied... . It is contrary
to the spirit of service; it is debased and
irresponsible ; indeed, we may go further
and say: it is irresponsibility developed
into a system.’*
So terrible and so anti-Christian is capital-
ism that we are tempted to fling ourselves
upon it in revolutionary fury, as though
nothing mattered but that we should deliver
its slaves from it. But we need to be cautious.
After all, it is not enough that a system
should be humane, it must also be efficient.
For in this sphere the first requirement is
that the basic needs of life should be met,
and a state of things in which men were
regarded as brothers but had no bread would
be distinctly inferior to one in which they
were ill-used but at least could live. Further,
what proof have we that any of the alter-
® The Divine Imperative,
423.
 THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM 43
natives proposed would do better than capital-
ism has done? Socialism is in this respect
the clear favourite. But it may be only
servitude to the state and its bureaucracy
instead of to a private employer. It is as
individualistic and as materialistic as its rival.
It fails to do justice to the need for private
property as the necessary basis of personal
development. A man cannot be himself
without something to call his own. True,
the Socialist would say that he only pro-
poses to interfere with private property in
the means of production ; in the home, for
example, he would leave it untouched. But
he has not yet given any adequate reason
why this distinction should be drawn and
why what is acceptable on one side of the
line should be anathema on the other. We
may admit that there are degrees in that
necessity for private property which has just
been spoken of, and that the greater the
detachment of property from the person
the stronger the case for social ownership.
But whether property should be held privately
or in common does not seem a matter for
decision on grounds of principle, but is a
question of expediency to be dealt with in
each case as it rises.
44 CREATION AND GRACE

But there is also an ethical criticism of

socialism on the ground that it does not
accept the hierarchial ordering of life which
is the Christian pattern. There is a natural
inequality of human beings, and this is
plainly seen within the family. Now the
family is for Christianity the paradigm for
all human relationships, as it is the symbol
of our relation with God himself. The father
is responsible for his children, not # them;
he has a certain natural right to their respect
and obedience, simply because he is father
and they children. Modern rationalism is
not merely unwilling to think in these terms,
it rejects them at the outset as antediluvian
and fit only for ridicule. But the fact remains
that men are not equal and that those who
have more ability should lead those who
have less. Economic democracy would spell
chaos, What we need is some means of
ensuring that the right man gets into the
right place, that orders are given by those
who know best what should be done, and
that others accept them as their directors,
qualified to lead. Here the army can be
our model, for there each man receives the
recognition due to his peculiar status within
the whole, and there is delegation of authority
 THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM 45
from those above to those below. An econo-
mic system of this pattern would enable
us to recover the sense that each man’s work
can be his calling from God, for each will
make his contribution, and each will have
honour done to him and will be concerned
for the honour of the enterprise in which
he serves.
This means, in plain words, that social
regulation and control are preferable to social
ownership. Evil as the present system un-
doubtedly is, improvements within its limits
are not barred out. An enlightened em-
ployer can do much to soften the asperities
of his relations with his employees by such
devices as copartnership and profit-sharing.
But where industry is in the hands of selfish
men concerned only for their own gain, the
state, as representing the moral sense of the
community, must step in with its: ‘ Thus
far and no farther!* The threat of full
state ownership may be held in reserve for
use on such occasions, and the drastic step
may in certain cases have to be taken, not
because it is in itself the best course, but
because industry will listen to no argument
but coercion. At all costs we must stem
the currents which are flowing so strongly
 46 CREATION AND GRACE
in the direction of a mass-society of dis-
connected individuals and renew the con-
sciousness of personal worth and _ public
service.

iamity Cioilization
have been published. t
Seis cg: to dake sone of the caste clseataina’ take Ditto Rapereaiee

Theoleai | ibrary

SCHOO!_ OF THEOLOGY

339671
 FOR FURTHER READING

The Theology of Crisis, 1929.

The Word and the World, 1931.
The Mediator, 1934.
Our Faith, 1936.
God and Man, 1936.
The Divine Imperative, 1937.
The Philosophy of Religion, 1937.
Man in Revolt, 1939.
The Divine-human Encounter, 1934.
Justice and the Social Order, 1945.
Natural Theology (with Karl Barth), 1946.
Revelation and Reason, 1947.
Christianity and Civilisation, 1948.
P5 37520
545