Adolf von Harnack

Background

Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) was the preeminent church historian of his generation and the defining voice of German liberal Protestantism: professor at Berlin, historian of dogma, and organizer of Wilhelmine scholarly institutions. His Berlin lectures of 1899–1900, published as Das Wesen des Christentums (What is Christianity?), distilled the liberal program: the gospel is the fatherhood of God, the infinite value of the soul, and the ethic of love — a kernel separable from the dogmatic husk that church history wrapped around it. Late in his career, in technical work not in our corpus, he argued for strikingly early dates for Acts and the Synoptics.

Harnack's characteristic move in this wiki is the distinction: between Easter message and Easter faith, between the gospel and dogma, between the apostolic writings and the canon that later enclosed them. He is a moderate everywhere — which is why both maximalists and radicals treat him as their most instructive opponent.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Empty Tomb: Arguments and Critiques — "The New Testament itself distinguishes between the Easter message of the empty grave and the appearances of Jesus on the one side, and the Easter faith on the other"; yet "this grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished" (Harnack 1900, p.160-162).
• The Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Cor 15:3-8 — the death-and-resurrection kerygma is primitive, not Pauline invention: Paul "stood exactly on the same ground as the primitive community" (Harnack 1900, p.153-154) — but the creed grounds Easter faith, not a reconstructable Easter narrative.
• Canon Formation — New Testament — the canon as a defensive creation of the second-century "church of doctrine and of law" (Harnack 1900, p.207).
• Jesus Mythicism Assessed — against Strauss's corrosion and mythicism alike: "The historical criticism of two generations has succeeded in restoring that credibility in its main outlines"; the synoptic tradition is "in the main, at first hand" (Harnack 1900, Lecture II, p.20-21).

Key works in our corpus

• What is Christianity? (1900) — in corpus, full body text. Key loci: Lecture II (sources and credibility), the Easter discussion (pp.160-162), the canon and early Catholicism (p.207).
• History of Dogma and the late redating monographs (The Date of Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels, 1911) — not in corpus; the early-dating claim is reported here from the stub record, not from a corpus text.

Principal critics

• J. Gresham Machen — turns Harnack's own literary criticism against him: Luke-Acts, whose early authorship Harnack defended, "emphasizes the plain, physical character of the contact between the disciples and their risen Lord" (Machen 1921, p.35-36).
• Albert Schweitzer — thoroughgoing eschatology dissolved the timeless liberal "essence" into first-century apocalyptic (Schweitzer 1906).
• David Friedrich Strauss — from the skeptical side: a faith suspended above the historical question is myth self-consciously retained (compare Strauss §140).

See also

• Ernest Renan — the French precursor of a de-dogmatized Jesus of religious genius.
• J. Gresham Machen — his sharpest confessional interlocutor in this corpus.
• Rudolf Bultmann — radicalized the message/faith distinction a generation later; not in corpus.