Adolf Harnack

Adolf von Harnack, German theologian

Adolf von Harnack (May 7, 1851–June 10, 1930), was a German theologian and prominent church historian. He produced many religious publications from 1873-1912. Harnack traced the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on early Christian writing and called on Christians to question the authenticity of doctrines that arose in the early Christian church. He rejected the Gospel of John in favor of the synoptic gospels, criticized the Apostles' Creed, and promoted the social gospel.

In the nineteenth century, higher criticism flourished in Germany, establishing the historical-critical method as an academic standard for interpreting the Bible and understanding the historical Jesus (see Tübingen school). Harnack's iconoclastic work was a primary example of this tradition. His voluminous writings remain foundational reading for serious students of early church history and the development of Christian theology.

Biography

Harnack was born at Tartu (then Dorpat) in Livonia (then a province of Russia, now in Estonia) where his father, Theodosius Harnack, held a professorship of pastoral theology. Adolf studied at the local University of Tartu (1869–1872) and at the University of Leipzig, where he took his degree. Soon after this (1874) he began lecturing on such special subjects as Gnosticism and the Apocalypse. His lectures attracted considerable attention, and in 1876 he was appointed as a professor at Leipzig. In the same year he began the publication, in conjunction with Oscar Leopold von Gebhardt and Theodor Zahn, of an edition of the works of the Apostolic Fathers, Patrum apostolicorum opera ("Works of the Apostolic Fathers"), an edition of which appeared in 1877.

Three years later Harnack was called to the University of Giessen as professor of church history. There he collaborated with Gebhardt in editing an occasional periodical dedicated to studies in New Testament and patristics (the works of the Church Fathers). In 1881 he published a work on monasticism, Das Mönchtum — seine Ideale und seine Geschichte, and became joint editor with Emil Schürer of the Theologische Literaturzeitung.

In 1885 Harnack published the first volume of his monumental work, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte ("The History of Dogma"). The book pioneered the effort to apply the historico-critical method of Old Testament studies to the New Testament and early church history. Harnack explained the historical process pf the rise of church doctrine in the early church and its later development from the fourth century down to the Protestant Reformation. He considered that from its earliest origins, Christian faith and Greek philosophy were so closely intermingled that the resultant system included many beliefs and practices that did not originate with the historical Jesus and were not authentically Christian. Therefore Protestants are not only free, but bound, to criticize the traditional propositions of Christian theology. Protestantism should be understood as a rejection of inauthentic dogma and a return to the pure faith that characterized the original church. Although many of his specific views have been challenged by church historians and theologians, both liberal and conservative, Harnack's fundamental thesis regarding the development of Christian doctrine in the Roman Empire has been adopted by many mainstream Christian scholars.

In 1886 Harnack was called to the University of Marburg and in 1888, in spite of violent opposition from conservative church authorities, to Berlin. In 1890 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In Berlin, he was drawn into a controversy on the Apostles' Creed, in which the partisan antagonisms within the Prussian Church had found expression. Harnack's view was that the creed contains both too much and too little to be a satisfactory test for candidates for ordination as ministers. He preferred a briefer declaration of faith which could be rigorously applied to all.

In Berlin, Harnack continued writing, and in 1893 he published a history of early Christian literature down to Eusebius of Caesarea, Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur bis Eusebius ("The History of Ancient Christian Literature"). A collection of his popular lectures, Das Wesen des Christentums (What is Christianity?) appeared in 1900. One of his later historical works, published in English as The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (1904-1905), was followed by several important New Testament studies on Luke the Physician, 1907; and The Sayings of Jesus, 1908).

Harnack was one of the most prolific and stimulating of modern critical scholars. He raised up a whole generation of teachers who carried his ideas and methods throughout the whole of Germany and beyond.

Like many ostensibly liberal professors in Germany, Harnack welcomed the First World War in 1914 and signed a public statement endorsing Germany's war aims. It was this statement, with his teacher Harnack's signature on it, that Karl Barth cited as a major impetus for his rejection of liberal theology.

Harnack was one of the moving spirits in the foundation, in 1911, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), and became its first president. The Society's activities were much constrained by the First World War, but in the Weimar Republic period Harnack guided it to be a major vehicle for overcoming the isolation of German academics felt as a result of the war and its aftermath. The society's flagship conference center in Berlin, the Harnack House, which opened in 1929, was named in his honor. After a long period in U.S. Army hands after the Second World War it has now resumed the role Harnack envisaged, as a center for international intellectual life in the German capital, under the management of the KWG's successor organisation, the Max Planck Gesellschaft.

Theology

One of the distinctive characteristics of Harnack's work was his insistence on absolute freedom in the study of church history and the New Testament. He held that there could be no "taboo" areas of research that could not be critically examined. However, he distrusted of speculative theology, whether orthodox or liberal. He had a special interest in practical Christianity as a religious life rather than as a system of theology. Some of his addresses on social matters were published under the heading "Essays on the Social Gospel" (1907).

Though the four gospels have been regarded as canonical since Irenaeus in the second century, Harnack—like earlier German scholars—rejected the Gospel of John as without historical value regarding Jesus' actual life. He wrote:

"The fourth Gospel, which does not emanate or profess to emanate from the apostle John, cannot be taken as an historical authority in the ordinary meaning of the word. The author of it acted with sovereign freedom, transposed events and put them in a strange light, drew up the discourses himself, and illustrated great thoughts by imaginary situations. Although, therefore, his work is not altogether devoid of a real, if scarcely recognisable, traditional element, it can hardly make any claim to be considered an authority for Jesus’ history; only little of what he says can be accepted, and that little with caution."

Harnack was skeptical about the miracles reported in the Bible but argued that Jesus and other biblical figures may well have performed acts of faith healing. "That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe; but that the lame walked, the blind saw, and the deaf heard will not be so summarily dismissed as an illusion."

Bibliography

• Adolf von Harnack. Christentum, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, Kurt Nowak et al., eds., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003, ISBN 3-525-35854-7 is the best recent assessment of Harnack and his impact from a variety of perspectives.

External links

• Harnack-Forum (German Website)
• Works by Adolf Harnack at CCEL (English)
• Works by and about Adolf Harnack in the German National Library catalogue.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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