[16] the encounter with another person. They become persons in this encounter. There is a phenomenon--which I like to call "resistance"--which makes the person possible. Imagine for a moment if you were alone in the world, you could swallow the whole world into yourself without resistance, except that resistance which can be overcome technically. But there is the other person, and in the moment in which you encounter him, you cannot go on, you cannot swallow it--of course you can do it, you can make the other person into a piece of nature. But then you destroy yourself, because in the other person is an unconditional demand to accept him as another person. Everything unconditional is first experiences [sic.] in the ego-thou encounter, in the encounter of person with person. We call this the realm of morals, and its theory: ethics^a. The eighth function: social exchange, law and ethical reality, are existing not in the air, but in a powerful reality, in a community which has the power to be. We can call this community "state," but this is a very late word, of the 17th and 18th centuries. We can call it with the Greeks, πολιτεια1, namely the community which has the power to be and to act. Whether we call it this way or that way, it is also an ever-present reality of every culture. In the most primitive patriarchal society (as we read about it in the stories of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament), we have a state-like function--we have law, the power of action, a centered reality. Therefore the highest concepts of philosophers and theologians are derived directly or symbolically from this all-embracing cultural reality. Plato's politeia is his philosophy of ALL culture, including education, science, music, and everything. Augustine's De civitatis Dei et terrenae ("the society of God and of the earth") are the symbols^b he uses for the fulfilment, and for the demonic^c opposition against the fulfilment. The kingdom of God^d in the Old and New Testaments is a political symbol applied to the universe. This means: the last and most embracing of cultural functions is the political one-- it embraces everything. Now I am at the end of the organization of the lectures. The last four subjects will be discussed next semester, the first four in the first. And there is no religion^e in my enumeration, and I will tell you next Tuesday why. == (1) Cf. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich. Vol. VI. pp. 525ff. -- Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub'g Co., Grand Rapids, 1968. -- (Ed.)