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In spite of sometimes being demonized by their detractors, most of the German liberals were faithful men of the church who understood themselves to be working in the service of the Christian Gospel.  For Harnack, the historical-critical method was more than an end in itself.  The rigorous application of reason was essentially a way of serving truth and restoring authentic Christianity, and the historical-critical method was the best tool for that purpose.  Harnack spoke of the Christian religion in terms of "the kernel and the husk," a metaphor for the missing heart 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.  For Harnack, the spiritual path taught by Jesus, a carpenter surrounded by fishermen, was very simple, practical, and altogether devoid of metaphysics and the supernatural.  It was a simple life of loving God, loving one's neighbor, and discovering the Kingdom of God within.  In What is Christianity Harnack spells it out for us:  he reveals 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.

In spite of sometimes being demonized by their detractors, most of the German liberals were faithful men of the church who understood themselves to be working in the service of the Christian Gospel.  For Harnack, the historical-critical method was more than an end in itself.  The rigorous application of reason was essentially a way of serving truth and restoring authentic Christianity, and the historical-critical method was the best tool for that purpose.  Harnack spoke of the Christian religion in terms of "the kernel and the husk," a metaphor for the missing heart of Christianity in which the "kernel" had come to be buried beneath the "husk" of church tradition as well as obscured by the Greek philosophy that became the language of doctrine.  For Harnack, the spiritual path taught by Jesus, a carpenter surrounded by fishermen, was very simple, practical, and altogether devoid of metaphysics and the supernatural.  It was a simple life of loving God, loving one's neighbor, and discovering the Kingdom of God within.  In '''What is Christianity?''' Harnack spells out what he believes to be the kernel underlying the religious impulse in general, and why the Christian Gospel uniquely satisfies the hearts and minds of humanity.  He reveals 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.

[[Category: Biography]]

[[Category: Biography]]

[[Category: Religion]]

[[Category: Religion]]