View source for Adolf Harnack and the Search for Missing Christianity

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==The Question==

[[Image:What_3_2b.jpg|right|frame]] '''[[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 [http://books.google.com/books?id=ozgkbKjXQIEC&printsec=titlepage#PPP7,M1 '''''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<!--why not Nicene?--> periods.  Harnack produced a wide ranging [[corpus]] of scholarship throughout his career, but the effort to answer the question in the title of his signature work remained the project closest to his heart.  Along with his colleagues Harnack pioneered new methods of scholarship that changed the field of biblical studies forever, but he ultimately enlisted those methods in the search for the missing heart of Christianity.

==The Movement==

Harnack was one of a select few theologians who could collectively be regarded as the fathers of [http://nordan.daynal.org/wiki/index.php?title=Liberal_Christianity Protestant liberalism], which began as a distinctively German [[movement]] and whose influence was primarily rooted in the development of critical biblical scholarship as well as for its association of the [[Social Gospel|Gospel]] with social compassion.  Harnack's academic career was a spectacular success even though he labored under a constant firestorm from the ecclesiastical authorities for his insistence on complete academic freedom in the study of the Christian [[scripture]]s.  In spite of the church's resistance his [[ideas]] were ultimately spread from the pulpit as his many admiring students found their way into the professional ministry.  Harnack's theology was especially influential in Europe, Britain, and North America.  The rise of liberalism set the stage for the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist-Modernist_Controversy Fundamentalist-Modernist] controversy, a theological drama that dominated American Christianity during the first half of the twentieth century.  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.

==The Method==

[[Image:bible3.jpg|left|frame]]<!--this image seems inappropriate given it idolizes "scripture"-->Based on this understanding of the primacy of [[reason]] for Christian faith and [[theology]], the German liberals introduced the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_criticism 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.  In summary we could say that where the church regarded the [[words]] of scripture as face-value truth, the liberals saw those same words as reflecting the historical limitations and cultural conditioning of their [[authors]].  The truth was something to be discovered beneath the words.  This line of thinking obviously presented a formidable challenge to the popular and devotional use of the Bible in which it is read purely in the context of one's [[personal]] [[faith]] or [[community]] of faith.  

One important example of the kind of work the historical-critical method pursued was the effort to establish the authorship and/or authenticity of the various books of the Bible.  [[Genesis]], for instance, was traditionally attributed to [[Moses]] but critical scholars have established that it is in fact a collection of sources redacted by several editors.  This was quite disturbing to many conservatives who considered traditional assignments of authorship to be virtually part of the canon.  German scholarship also led to an historically important field of study known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus Quest for the Historical Jesus].  The underlying thesis for this [[movement]] was the [[idea]] that the [[Jesus]] who is presented to us in the [[New Testament]] is already so overlaid with [[mythology]] as to be unrecognizable and so the historical-critical method was employed, with mixed results, by a number of scholars in the effort to discover the "real" Jesus behind the myth.  Harnack's search for the [[essence]] of Christianity can arguably be seen as a variation of the Quest for the Historical Jesus.

==The Answer==

In spite of sometimes being demonized by their ecclesiastical 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 husk¹," 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 [http://books.google.com/books?id=ozgkbKjXQIEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack&lr=#PPP2,M1 '''''What is Christianity?'''''] Harnack spells out what he believes to be the common factor underlying the [http://nordan.daynal.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Origins_Of_Religion_in_Universal_Consciousness religious impulse] in general, and why the Christian Gospel uniquely satisfies that impulse in the hearts and [[mind]]s 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]].

==Other titles by Harnack==
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=3AcNAAAAIAAJ History of Dogma]
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=WMIMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack Essays on the Social Gospel]
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=IOETAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack Thoughts on the Present Position of Protestantism]
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=ROU2AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack&lr= New Testament Studies] Multi-volume
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=E77IcBVtazoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack&lr= Monasticism,, Its Ideals and History]
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=OFwXAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack&lr= The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries]
# [http://books.google.com/books?id=JKsMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adolf+von+harnack&lr= Outlines of the History of Dogma]
==See also==
#[http://books.google.com/books?id=ivUDAQAAIAAJ&q=Religion+in+Essence+and+Manifestation&dq=Religion+in+Essence+and+Manifestation&lr= Religion and Essence and Manifestation by Gerardus Leeuw]
#[http://books.google.com/books?id=bTnrRG-bn4MC Reflections on the Study of Religion by Jean Jacques Waardenburg] esp. ''Part 3, The Phenomenology of Religion Reconsidered'' 

[[Category: Religion]]
[[Category: Biography]]