Pak: CH751 (c)
Shucking Corn With a Chainsaw
A Rebuke of Adolf von Harnack's Christianity
CH751 – Paper 3, March 22, 2013
In his classic lecture series, published under the title "What is Christianity,"[1] Adolf von Harnack establishes himself as a theologian of his age. However, that is both a compliment and a critique, for his age was one of great tumult and failure. By trying to make the seemingly ancient Christian faith relevant to a modernizing age of reason and science, he ultimately had to compromise elements of the faith that prior and subsequent theologians consider nonnegotiable. In this essay, I will discuss how Harnack thought salvation was the essence, what he called the "kernel,"[2] of the faith. More importantly (if for no other reason than proportionality), is what he thought was the nonessential, or "husk"[3] of the Christian religion, including the Gospel of John and Jesus' miracles, his genealogy and Jewishness, and the doctrine of Christ's incarnation. I will furthermore show that the Reformation played prominently in his theology, and that the trajectory set in motion by Luther has its logical expression in Harnack. However, in order to understand the theology, we must briefly explore the man. It is to him we now turn.
Adolf von Harnack was a figure made possible by the Enlightenment and Reformation eras, in which the intersection of faith and reason began to be doubted with earnest. Reason was taken as being more reliable than faith, and things inaccessible to human reason were deemed invalid. In the wake of such sentiments, von Harnack valiantly attempts to forge a path between the two such that Christians might be both enlightened and faithful to the essence of Christian religion. Born and living into the emerging height of German intellectualism, he was the perhaps a victim of his own context. The prevalent assumption of Germany as the epitome of liberal civilization may have prejudiced him in ways that lead to an inability to see where the fragmentary individualism of the Enlightenment could lead. Indeed, it was his signature on the nationalistic Manifesto of the Ninety-Three that lead to Karl Barth's rejection of dominant liberal theology and culture so constitutive of Harnack's assumptions
However, Harnack was nothing if not a talented and gifted Church historian and theologian. He identified the Greek philosophical influence in the Church as setting in very early, which troubled him, for it seemed to introduce non-Christian elements into the faith. On the other hand, latent anti-Semitic sentiments in Germany found expression in many a German theology, and Harnack held as much suspicion against Judaization of the faith as he did Hellenization. However, to be fair, he reacted against the strict historical critical method of the Tubingen School, searching instead for a middle ground between what he identifies in the outright rejection of the gospels by David Friedrich Strauss and the superstitious pietism of Catholics and Anglican churches. Left without a theological history or future, Harnack identified scant essentials as to the kernel of the Christian religion.
Throughout Europe and the "civilized" world, incredible primacy was given to human reason and natural law, which is to say that what is to be believed, is that which humans can observe, measure, and reproduce scientifically. Those assumptions do not transpose well onto any faith (whose very word connotes the ability to trust in things unknown). Harnack felt it necessary to protect the ultimate meaning and purpose of Christianity and rid it of all the superfluous superstition discovered therein by the scientific age – what he repeatedly called "the husk" of the religion. Therefore, he lauds Paul for, "without doing violence to the inner and essential features of the Gospel, …[having] transformed it into the universal religion."[4] By ridding ourselves of the excess, we are able to get beyond infighting and bickering amongst Christians and also interact more tolerantly toward other religions, which we may find are no different than our own. He see his approach as deeply invested in purifying a religiosity that has been corrupted by power dynamics and pious irrelevancies, most notably in the Roman and Greek Catholic churches, which only came to power after many hundreds of years.
What matters most is not what we say or do in church meetings, or even really our consuming the Eucharist. The question that everything turns on is "whether we are helplessly yoked to an inexorable necessity, or whether a God exists who rules and governs, and whose power to compel nature we can compel by prayer and make part of our experience."[5] The faith, set in this frame, begins and ends with observable nature and the agency of human beings. Religion is really about what humans are yoked to and whether they may affect their own state of being. Harnack cannot even come to reference a particular God, but seeks a universally accessible god whose sovereignty we can persuade to our advantage. Indeed, the "core of the matter" is "the doctrine of salvation,"[6] renewed finally by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The simple sublimity of the Christian religion means only "eternal life in the midst of time."[7]
Harnack contrasts this simple view of the Christian faith with the philosophy and new ideas that have corrupted the Christian faith over time. With other reformers, he associates the Roman Catholic church with introducing non-Biblical and unnecessary elements into Christianity. Though he explicitly mentions it only a few times, the Gospel of John is highly problematic for Harnack. John is not "an authority for the message which Jesus Christ delivered"[8] for this book in particular can be seen as reinforcing the corrosive Greek elements of the faith since "it is only the fourth gospel which makes Greeks ask after Jesus."[9] Much of his slicing and dicing is reserved for miracles, which ironically "were thought to be the very essence of Christianity."[10] It is miracles that must be most pervasively extricated from the faith, for they distract and deter enlightened persons from the important issue of salvation, which itself is not a miracle. Salvation may be inextricable and marvelous, but "miracles… do not happen."[11]
With this in mind, it is unclear how exactly salvation is accomplished apart from the incarnation. Every particularity is stripped from Jesus like the soldiers did his clothes at Golgotha. Harnack "disregards"[12] Jesus' birth narratives and genealogies in Matthew and Luke as "useless"[13] and speaks deleteriously of his distinctive Jewish identity. In fact, "husk were there whole of the Jewish limitations attaching to Jesus' message"[14] But even the Greek influence is unreliable, since it posited a new idea of the incarnation being the real redemption. But, according to Harnack, "Paul did not himself look upon [Christ's appearance] in this light; for him the crucial facts are the death on the cross and the resurrection, and he regards Christ's entrance into the world from an ethical point of view and as an example for us to follow."[15] Harnack sounds a bit like Abelard when he says, "it was by the cross of Jesus Christ that mankind gained such an experience of the power of purity and love true to death that they can never forget it, and that it signifies a new epoch in their history."[16] The incarnation, in this way, can be reduced to Christ's death on the cross, and little is said of his life and ministry, which was funded by a particularly Jewish heritage and imagination, made remarkable by the miracles he performed, and empowered by the God who entered human history and took the name Emmanuel. Ironically, Harnack accuses these markers of the historic Christian faith of having "developed a husk and integument, to penetrate through to it and grasp the kernel had become more difficult; it had also lost much of its original life."[17] But the original life lost belongs not to Christianity, but to Christ himself!
This all brings us to Harnack's narration of the Reformation and whether and to what extent it renewed a right faith in the Church or if it finds its logical conclusion in Harnack's rather atrophied understanding thereof. He calls Luther the reformer who came to purify religion and brought it back to itself. Constant contextualization ("adapting itself to circumstances") only harmed the faith, introducing "alien matter" and "apocryphal elements." Bringing it back to its own essence was precisely what Harnack saw Luther as having accomplished. The most fundamental element of the Christian faith was and is the Word of God. In fact, faith's "most essential factor" is "the inward experience that accords with this Word."[18] Here we come full circle upon Harnack's conception of faith, which hinges upon the centrality of humanity and a universally accessible god. When all is said and done, it boils down to the individual experience, which ironically (for enlightenment sentiments) is unreliable precisely due to its subjectivity. The kernel he finds after all his slicing and dicing is subjective experience based as loosely as each would like upon Christian scripture; not really even the Word itself, but the "inward experience" thereof. That Luther's reform has persisted is proof enough of its validity, he claims, for "as regards the kernel of the matter… the force and principles of the reformation have not been outrun or rendered obsolete."[19] Protestantism is the defining principle of Harnack's understanding of Christianity, for it requires the excommunication of all things except subjective experience, everything except that which is knowable only to the individual.[20]
We have seen how much Adolf von Harnack was willing to get rid of in order to appeal to a modernizing world with little regard for superstition. He dismissed as mere husk everything from the Gospel of John itself, Jesus' Jewish lineage and identity, his miracles, even the doctrine of the incarnation. Harnack was willing to throw a few babies out with the bathwater in order to get at the question of salvation and make it amenable to a world that may have made its mind up long before he made his valiant but misguided attempt. In asking What is Christianity, he would have done well to place his trust in the men and women he must have encountered as a Church historian. The deepest tragedy in all this is that his version of the faith evacuated not only all things ceremonial, but nearly its entire history as well. After all, to ask what he asks is impossible without asking (the historically loaded) question "What is the Church?" To assume a hard and fast distinction between Church and Christ is a modern invention indeed, and Harnack has helped it come into being.
Footnotes
[1] Von Harnack, Adolf. What is Christianity? trans. Saunders, Thomas Bailey (New York: Williams and Norgate, 1901).
[2] Ibid., 20
[3] Ibid., 12, 15, 55, 127, 130, 179, 180, & 217
[4] Ibid., 180
[5] Ibid., 30
[6] Ibid., 269
[7] Ibid., 8
[8] Ibid., 19
[9] Ibid., 23
[10] Ibid., 25
[11] Ibid., 30
[12] Ibid., 30, paraphrase. Harnack says, of Jesus' history, "we may disregard it."
[13] Ibid., 180
[14] Ibid., 185
[15] Ibid., 159
[16] Ibid., 217
[17] Ibid., 270, paraphrase.
[18] Ibid., 270
[19] Ibid., 270
[20] Ibid., 299
