There are even more serious objections to this supranaturalistic ethic. Not only is it now suitable only for a limited number of people who can accept its foundations, but it also greatly distorts the teaching of Jesus. "The clear teaching of our Lord" is usually understood to mean that Jesus gave certain precepts, universal and universally binding. Some actions are always right, others are always bad, and this is true for everyone and under all circumstances.

But this means that the Sermon on the Mount is interpreted as a new Law. However, even if Matthew interpreted Jesus' words in this way, today almost any New Testament scholar will tell you that it was a misinterpretation. Jesus' moral precepts were not intended to be interpreted legalistically, as if they prescribe to all Christians what to do regardless of circumstances, or that they proclaim certain courses of conduct to be universally correct and all others to be universally wrong. These are not laws that determine what love demands always and from everyone; rather, they are examples of what love can demand of everyone at any time.230 They are parables of the Kingdom as presented in its moral demands, vivid images of the uncompromising demand that can be made of anyone who responds to the call of the Kingdom. The word said to the rich young man: "Go and sell all that you have" (Mark 10:21) is not a universal principle of moral behavior, but a parable translated into the language of the moral imperative about the rich merchant who did just that for the sake of possessing a pearl of great price (Matt. 13:46). This transition to the imperative: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37) is not a law; such a turn of phrase is comparable to the words that Nathan said to David at the conclusion of the classic Old Testament parable: "You are that man" (2 Samuel 12:7). This is a reminder that parables are not at all entertaining stories that can be remembered in different situations of life; they express the Kingdom's call to a particular person or group of people in a particular situation.

This inherent character of Jesus' ethical utterances must be emphasized in order to prevent ourselves and our hearers from being misunderstood as literal precepts or universal principles applicable to all occasions. It is impossible to preface the Sermon on the Mount with a title. "This is what you should do under any circumstances." Rather, the following words would be appropriate: "This is the kind of action that the kingdom (or love, if you are open to the absolute, unconditional will of God) can demand of you at any moment."

Jesus' teaching on marriage (as well as everything else) is not a new law that declares divorce to be the greater of two evils in all circumstances, whereas under the Mosaic law there are times when it is not. The teaching of Jesus states that love, unconditional love to the end, does not tolerate compromise; it cannot be satisfied with anything other than complete and unconditional self-giving. How can this manifest itself? To sell all that you have (Mark 10:21), to put all your possessions in the treasury of the temple (Mark 12:44), to give away your clothes or lend your money without asking for anything (Matt. 5:4042), to cut off your right hand or to pluck out your eye (Matt. 5:2930). However, it is quite clear that this is not the case in every situation. After all, in the sayings of Jesus there is no attempt to judge what to do in cases of rivalry of interests (Luke 12:14) or how to take into account the needs of a third person that are present in any real life situation (who, for example, will support a widow after she has donated all her means of subsistence? or the children of a person who gave everything to a beggar?). Of course, love must also take all this into account – and just as unconditionally. But Jesus never solves all these questions for us, it is enough for Him to know that if we have penetrated the matter, if our eye is pure, then love will find its way, will make its own way in any given situation.

Supranaturalistic ethics, on the other hand, seeks to subordinate the real relationship between people to some external universal law, metaphysical or moral. Decisions are not made on the basis of this particular relationship between people. Man was created for the Sabbath, not the Sabbath for man. Whatever the individual circumstances, the moral law remains the same for all time. It is imposed on this relation from the outside, from above. And in order to "apply" the law to this case, there is casuistry.

Such ethics is "heteronomous" in the sense that it derives its norms from the "otherworldly," and this, of course, is its strength. It supports "absolute", "objective" moral values, it restrains the currents of relativism and subjectivism like a dam. And yet, heteronomy is at the same time its very vulnerable point. It has irresistible persuasiveness and self-sufficient validity only for those who believe in an "otherworldly God." It cannot answer the question "Why is this bad?" based on the inner realities of the situation itself. The revolution from supranaturalism to naturalism, from heteronomy to autonomy in the field of ethics, has happened to us so long ago that there is no need to say much about it now. It began with the sublime grandeur of Kant's autonomous ideal, which gave perhaps the greatest and most objective of all ethical systems. But in reality it was simply a secularized deism—and not entirely secularized, for although Kant dispensed with the hypothesis of God as the source of the moral law, he nevertheless reverted to it (and in the crudest form of deus ex machina) in order to ensure the ultimate coincidence of virtue and happiness. Kant's moral idealism lived at the expense of religious capital. As the latter was exhausted or rejected, this idealism was supplanted by ethical relativism of all kinds—utilitarianism, evolutionary naturalism, existentialism. These systems, so different in themselves, are united by the fact that they have opposed (and quite rightly) any subordination of the specific needs of the individual situation to some alien universal norm. But their development led to the fact that all objective or unconditional rules one after another drowned in the swamp of relativism and subjectivism. Tillich summed up the current situation in words that are said about culture as a whole, but can no less rightly be attributed to its ethical aspect:

"Autonomy is viable as long as it can draw strength from the religious tradition of the past, from the remnants of a lost theonomy. But the further it goes, the more it loses this spiritual basis. It becomes more and more empty, more and more formalistic or ascertaining, and slides into skepticism and cynicism, to a loss of meaning and purpose. The history of autonomous cultures is a history of the gradual loss of spiritual essence. This process ends with autonomy turning back to the lost theonomy with an impotent nostalgic yearning or rushing in search of a new theonomy."236

What does Tillich mean by this word "theonomy"? It corresponds to his desire to break through "beyond naturalism and supranaturalism" to the third point of view, according to which the transcendent is not something external or "otherworldly," but is found in, with, and under the Thou of all finite relations as their ultimate depth, basis, and meaning. In the field of ethics, this means that a given concrete relation in all its uniqueness is taken as the basis of a moral judgment. It should not be subordinated to some universal norm or considered simply as a special case. It is in the depths of this unique relationship that one can meet the call of the sacred, the holy, and the absolutely unconditioned – and answer that call. For the Christian, this means accepting as the ultimate basis of our being the unconditional love of Jesus Christ, "Man to others." This is what it means for a Christian to "have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16), to be guided in his actions, as Christ taught, only by the love with which He has loved us (John 13:34), or, in the words of the Apostle Paul, to have "the same feelings as are in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5). Life in Christ Jesus, in the new being, in the Spirit, means that we have no absolutes but His love, that we are completely free in everything else, but we belong to it entirely. And this complete openness in love for the "other" for his own sake is the only absolute even for the non-Christian, as the parable of the sheep and the goats shows. A non-Christian may not recognize Christ in the "other," but because he has answered the call of unconditional love, he has answered Him, for He is the "depth" of love. Christian ethics is not only for Christians, and certainly not only for religious people. Christ can address His call to other people (and often to Christians as well) incognito; But since it is a call from our home, from the personal basis of our very existence, it cannot be alien to man. He is not heteronomous, but he is not autonomous either; He is a theonomian.

One love can allow itself to be wholly guided by the situation itself, since love possesses, as it were, an internal moral compass that allows it to intuitively enter into the need of another as if it were its own. It alone can open up completely to this situation, or rather to the personality in this situation, to open itself completely and unselfishly, without losing its direction or its unconditionality. Only love is able to implement the ethics of radical responsibility, evaluating each situation from the inside, and not on the basis of ready-made prescriptions and laws. In Tillich's words, "love alone can be transformed according to the specific requirements of each individual or social situation, without losing its eternity, its dignity, and its unconditional value." Therefore, it is the only ethics that gives a firm footing in a rapidly changing world and yet remains absolutely free with regard to all changes in the situation and over all changes. It is ready to see in every moment, in every new situation, a new creation of the hand of God, demanding its own response – perhaps completely unprecedented. And so Tillich continues: "Ethics in a changing world must be understood as the ethics of kairos" – the God of the given moment, through which we meet the eternal in temporality. "Love, realized from kairos to kairos, creates its own ethics, which goes beyond the alternative between the ethics of absolutism and relativism,"238 or, in other words, supranaturalism and naturalism.

NOTHING IS PRESCRIBED – EXCEPT LOVE

This view, expressed thirty years ago in Emil Brunner's great book, The Divine Imperative (1932), is most convincingly substantiated, as far as I know, in Professor Joseph Fletcher's article "A New View of Christian Ethics." "Christian ethics," he says, "is not a codified pattern of behavior. It is an effort to relate love to the world of relativity by means of casuistry subordinated to love." This is a radical "ethics of the situation" in which nothing is prescribed except love.

"Like classical casuistry, it is concrete and focused on the individual case, its aim being to put Christian imperatives into practice. But this neo-casuistry, in contrast to classical casuistry, rejects the attempt to anticipate or prescribe real life decisions in their existential specificity. The old saying that the Talmudists incessantly invent rules to break the rules does not really discredit them or the old-fashioned casuists who acted after them. They wriggled out of their own trap, trying to serve both love and the law. Unfortunately, the hopeless labyrinth of legalism is the only result of any ethics that tries to soften the codified law with loving indulgence. A change of roles is vital here. This love must be the constitutive principle, and the law, if it is needed at all, is only regulative."