Adolf Harnack and the Search for Missing Christianity
Adolf von Harnack was a German (Lutheran) theologian of the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries who taught at the University of Berlin. His most popular and enduring work What is Christianity? is still required reading for a basic theological education today. In this book Harnack asserts that at the heart of Christianity was a simple message that was subsequently obscured, particularly by the philosophy, dogma, and metaphysics of the post-apostolic and Nicean periods. Harnack produced a wide ranging corpus of historical and biblical scholarship throughout his career, but the quest to answer the query in the title of his signature book remained the project closest to his heart. Along with his colleagues, Harnack pioneered new methods of scholarship that changed biblical studies forever, but he ultimately enlisted these methods in the search for the missing heart of Christianity.
Harnack was one of a select few theologians who could collectively be regarded as the fathers of Protestant liberalism, a distinctively German movement whose influence rapidly spread throughout Europe, Britain, and North America. His academic carreer was a spectacular success even though he labored under constant critical fire from the ecclesiastical authorities for his controversial ideas. Nonetheless, his many students eventually went on to spread the ideas of liberalism throughout the church, thus setting the primary theological stage for the entirety of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States.
The hallmark of Protestant liberalism can be seen, in simplest terms, as the inversion of authority. Dating from the Reformation, authority for the Protestant faith was rooted in the concept of sola scriptura, in which the Christian canon of scripture was considered to be an epistemological given backed by a divine guarantee, thus assuring an unquestionable source of certainty for Christian faith and practice. While human reason was considered by the reformers to be part of the imago dei (the image of God within man), they nevertheless insisted that truth could only be understood when reason submitted to the authority of scripture. Harnack and his colleagues essentially reversed this equation and proceeded on the assumption that truth could only be understood when everything, including scripture, submitted to the authority of reason.
Based on this understanding of the primacy of reason for Christian faith and theology, the German liberals introduced the historical-critical method to the field of biblical studies. Basically this academic approach to the Bible has two components: (1) the Bible, like any other document, is a product of history and therefore can only be properly studied and understood within its own historical context, and (2) the Bible must be subjected to the critical scrutiny of reason in the same way that we would treat any other object of examination. This method obviously presents a formidable challenge to the popular and devout use of the Bible in which it is read purely in the context of one's personal faith, and in which one is to be judged by the Bible, and not vice-versa. The liberals, faithful churchmen that they were, would agree that for the puposes of faith one may be judged by the Bible, but only after the Bible has been [critically] judged by reason to determine its actual [historical] meaning. One important example of the kind of work the historical-critical method pursued was the effort to establish the authorship of the various books of the Bible. Genesis, for instance, was traditionally attributed to Moses but critical scolars have established that it is in fact a collection of sources redacted by several editors. Typically the historical-critical method was accompanied by the denial of miracles such as the virgin birth and the resurrection. The presence of miracles in the biblical narrative were attributed to the pre-scientific understanding of the biblical writers. Not surprisingly, the church often went to great lengths to distance itself from university theology over the next one hundred years.
For Harnack, the historical-critical method was more than an end in itself. In spite of what their detractors might have thought, most of the German liberals understood themselves to be working in the service of faith. The rigorous application of critical reason was essentially a way of serving truth and being honest before God. For Harnack in particular, the historical-critical method was ultimately a tool that could be used to recover the simple core teaching of Jesus. Harnack spoke of the Christian religion in terms of "the kernel and the husk," a metaphor for the lost essence of Christianity in which the "kernel" had come to be buried beneath the "husk" of church tradition as well as the Greek philosophy that became the language of doctrine. In his most poular and influential book, "What is Christianity," Harnack revealed that the essence of Christianity was to be found in the fact that the human heart more than anything else longs for the presence of the eternal within time, and that the Gospel validates its own truth by satisfying this longing for all that come to Jesus Christ and follow his simple teachings on the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite worth of the soul.
