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social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as
well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social
group.

If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and
it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or
rejected in its name. If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its

ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and
life, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed. The extreme
nationalisms of our century are laboratories for the study of what ultimate concern
means in all aspects of human existence, including the smallest concern of one’s daily
life. Everything is centered in the only god, the nation - a god who certainly proves to
be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern.

But it is not only the unconditional demand made by that which is one’s ultimate
concern, it is also the promise of ultimate fulfillment which is accepted in the act of
faith. The content of this promise is not necessarily defined. It can be expressed in
indefinite symbols or in concrete symbols which cannot be taken literally, like the

“greatness” of one’s nation in which one participates even if one has died for it, or the
conquest of mankind by the “saving race,” etc. In each of these cases it is “ultimate
fulfillment” that is promised, and it is exclusion from such fulfillment which is
threatened if the unconditional demand is not obeyed.

An example – and more than an example – is the faith manifest in the religion of the
Old Testament. It also has the character of ultimate concern in demand, threat and
promise. The content of this concern is not the nation – although Jewish nationalism
has sometimes tried to distort it into that – but the content is the God of justice, who,

because he represents justice for everybody and every nation, is called the universal
God, the God of the universe. He is the ultimate concern of every pious Jew, and
therefore in his name the great commandment is given: “You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deut. 6: 5).
This is what ultimate concern means and from these words “ultimate concern” is

derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total
surrender to the subject of ultimate concern. The Old Testament is full of commands
which make the nature of this surrender concrete, and it is full of promises and
threats in relation to it. Here also are the promises of symbolic indefiniteness,

although they center around fulfillment of the national and individual life, and the
threat is the exclusion from such fulfillment through national extinction and individual
catastrophe. Faith, for the men of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately
and unconditionally concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand,
threat and promise.

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