Category Archives: Adolf von Harnack

The Triune Worshippers against the Eunomians and Classical Liberals

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Being a human coram Deo (before or in the presence of the living God), in regard to its telos or purposefulness, is underwritten by being a worshipper of the triune God rather than an as an idolater of a self-projected god of a unitarian and individualistic origination. So-called classical liberalism, much of which was in fact Teutonic or German in orientation, of the Enlightenment/ -post higher critical ilk, is of the latter instance. That is to say, higher critics of the New Testament so demythologized the NT of its reality in the Theandric person of Jesus Christ, that all that was left for Jesus to be, at best, was as an exemplar for others to find in themselves; in mimicry of Jesus’ example of what it meant to operate with a Father-God consciousness; in Schleiermacher’s zeitgeist, having a “feeling” of dependence upon a Father-God. To the point, the classical liberal was necessarily turned inward to the inward curvature of the soul, wherein all that was left to fill the gap between God and humanity, wasn’t the divine personhood of the Godman in Jesus Christ, but instead, the divine personhood resident in each human being as they cultivated the feeling they had for Godness; indeed, as that godness was resident within the environ of their own human being. In other words, once the classical liberal denuded Jesus of His eternal and triune deity, all they had left was some type of Arian-unitarian notion of God wherein the mediator between God and man, was a naked humanity purely predicated by being an abstract human enmeshed in the world processes of existential existence among the other animals alongside us.

James B. Torrance (brother of Thomas F. Torrance) describes this type of unitarian way, with reference to Adolf Von Harnack and John Hick:

Model 1: The Harnack (Hick) Model. The first model . . . is that of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, given classical expression by Adolf Harnack [sic] in his 1900 Berlin lectures Das Wesen des Christentums, or What is Christianity? Recently Professor John Hick has sought to revive it in an adapted form. According to this, the heart of religion is the soul’s immediate relationship to God. What God the Father was to Old Testament Israel, he was to Jesus, and what he was to Jesus, he was to Paul and still is the same to us and all men and women today. We, with Jesus, stand as men and women, as brothers and sisters, worshiping the one Father but not worshiping any incarnate Son. Jesus is the man but not God. We do not need any mediator, or “myth of God incarnate.”

In Harnack’s own words: “The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son.” Jesus’ purpose was to confront men and women with the Father, not with himself. He proclaimed the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of mankind, but not himself. “The Christian religion is something simple and sublime.” It means “God and the soul, the soul and its God” and this, he says, must be kept “free from the intrusion of any alien element.” Nothing must come between the child and his heavenly Father, be it priest, or Bible, or law, or doctrine, or Jesus Christ himself! The major “alien element” which Harnack has in mind is belief in the incarnation, a doctrine which he regarded as emerging from the hellenizing of the simple message of Jesus.

This view is clearly unitarian and individualistic. The center of everything is our immediate relationship with God, our present-day experience. The Father-Son relationship is generic, not unique. With this interpretation, all the great dogma of the church disappear:

    • The doctrine of the Trinity. We are all sons and daughters of God and the Spirit is the spirit of brotherly love.
    • The incarnation. Jesus Christ is not “his only [unicus] Son, our Lord,” but one of the class of creaturely sons of God. Sonship is not unique to Christ.
    • The doctrines of the Spirit, union with Christ, the Church as the body of Christ and the sacraments. Jesus did not found a church. He proclaimed the kingdom of God as a fellowship of love.

This liberal reconstruction made deep inroads and accounts in measure for the moralistic view of Christianity—where Jesus is the teacher of ethical principles, and where the religious life is our attempt to follow the example of Jesus, living by the golden rule, “doing to others as you would be done by.” With this moralistic, individualistic understanding of God and the Christian life, the doctrine of the Trinity loses its meaning, in fact disappears—and with it all doctrines of atonement and unconditional free grace, held out to us in Christ.[1]

For students of theological history what should be evident is the way that history repeats itself; albeit in different dress and grammar. At base, there is only so much space for the human wit to innovate ‘under the Sun.’ In other words, the issues the Protestant or classical liberals presented the Enlightened and post-Enlightened world with were, by and large, the same issues the early church Fathers, like Athanasius, Irenaeus, Cyril et al. were faced with by the Arians, Eunomians, and the many other traditional heretics we know of today.

The key to genuine worship of the triune God is that first the person must confess the fact that there is a triune God. Once this confession has been made, not in abstraction, but from within the depths of Christ’s vicarious confession for us—as He lamented with and worshipped the Father for us, in the breath of Holy Spirit—the potential worshipper can simply repose in the bosom of the Father, and worship from within the center of God’s life as that is the Only Begotten. Once this move is understood, indeed as the move of God for the world in the Theandric person of the eternal Son, Jesus Christ, we are no longer thrown upon ourselves (as TFT was wont to phraseize), but upon the mercies and graciousness of the living God; indeed, the living God who truly is, Immanuel, God with us. The classical liberals were too taken by their own moment in history, indeed an Arianizing and Eunomianizing moment, and as such, like the Vienna Positivists, lived and breathed in a vacuous turmoil of their own making. To be sure, they would have had it no other way; that is, until they went to stand before the living God. Now like the Rich Man they gnash their teeth as they remember the poor man, Lazarus, and realize that he had found and been found by the narrow way of the living God’s kingdom in the risen Christ.

All that is left for the unitarian, the Arian and Eunomian, the classical liberal worshipper of God is to first worship their own innards, and then attempt to project those onto the feelings they themselves discern as the Holy drip of God’s Fatherly life built into the immanent frame of their own deified lives, as it were. What a tragedy indeed.

[1] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic Press, 1996), 25–6.

Adolf von Harnack’s Influence on Me and 20th Century Dogmatics: On Evangelizing Metaphysics in the Name of Christ

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Adolf von Harnack, I think, has an underlying impact on me in ways that are greater than I’d like to admit. I came under this influence through my seminary training in an evangelical institution. I don’t think I’m the only one who has been subjected to this influence; indeed, most of the 20th century Anglophone (and of course Europhone) theological landscape has been shaped, one way or the other by this influence. The basic premise of Harnack is that the Gospel, early on in the Patristic period, was Hellenized, to the point that the canonical God of Hebrew orientation was syncretized and lost to the ‘god of the philosophers.’ I would say at some level two of my ‘favoritist’ theologians, Karl Barth and TF Torrance, have operated under this influence; i.e. the influence we see in the modern period in the ‘mediating theologians’ that gives us post or anti-metaphysical theologies. I am prone towards these sorts of theologies; the narratival theologies of Barth, and to a degree, even Robert Jenson.

Paul Hinlicky in his book Luther and the Beloved Community, as he is attempting to see how William James’s thought maps onto Martin Luther’s, has some insightful treatment on Harnack’s ‘Hellenization thesis.’ He writes:

One reason for James’s confusion about Luther might be traced to his dependence on the scholarship of the contemporary giant of German liberal Protestantism, Adolph von Harnack. Harnack, the eminent German Lutheran scholar of his times, proclaimed doctrine defunct: “The history of dogma comes to a close with Luther.” In seven probing volumes, Harnack argued the influential thesis that creedal dogma (such as Royce lifted up) is the historically contingent product of what he famously characterized as “the hellenization of the gospel.” Hellenization is understandable, Harnack explained; it was even inevitable. But this creedal theology formulated the gospel in the thought forms of Greek substance metaphysics; as such, these ideas are unintelligible to the modern mind and constitute an actual obstacle to faith. As indicated, Harnack argued that it was none other than Martin Luther who in principle if not yet to full effect overcame the intellectualizing and reifying theology of the old church. Luther recovered Jesus’ simple gospel of trust in the fatherly love of God. Couple this insight with the rise since Luther’s time of the modern scientific understanding of the world — which threatens to crush the human spirit with knowledge of its insignificance and impotence in the vast and ancient cosmos — and Jesus’ message of the fatherly God, rediscovered in principle by Luther’s idea of trust, fiducia, is surely the “essence of Christianity” and the gospel for our times. Theology as belief, theory, intellectual grasping of the divine with antiquated, reifying concepts like “nature” or “substance,” gives way to historically-critically founded preaching of existential trust in the world of Heraclitus.

Little in Harnack’s analysis has stood up to critical scrutiny. For example, Jaroslav Pelikan’s five-volume history of doctrine tells the countertale to Harnack of the evangelization of Hellenism: it is, he writes, a “distortion when the dogma formulated by the catholic tradition is described as ‘in its conception and development a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel’ [Harnack]. Indeed, in some ways it is more accurate to speak of dogma as the ‘dehellenization’ of the theology that had preceded it and to argue that ‘by its dogma the church threw up a wall against an alien metaphysic’” [Elert]. Step by painful step, Pelikan methodically dismantles Harnack’s construction of dogma as hellenization by means of a simple but crucial move: he takes dogma hermeneutically not theoretically, that is to say, as “what we believe, teach and confess on the basis of the Word of God” — an expression of the Lutheran Formulators which Pelikan borrowed to define the subject matter of his study. “Without setting rigid boundaries, we shall identify what is ‘believed’ as the form of Christian doctrine present in the modalities of devotion, spirituality, and worship; what is ‘taught’ as the content of the word of God extracted by exegesis from the witness of the Bible and communicated to the people of the church through proclamation, instruction and churchly theology; and what is ‘confessed’ as the testimony of the church both against false teaching from within and against attacks from without, articulated in polemics and apologetics, in creed and dogma.” When dogma is taken this way, as the complex act of the church’s interpretation of the gospel word of God in (continuing!) history, Harnack’s influential claim about Luther overcoming dogma turns out to be real sleight of hand.[1]

Ironically, I would contend, that even though Barth and Torrance, in particular, have been influenced heavily by Harnack’s thesis, they are not unself-critical. In other words, while seemingly in line with the mediating theologians in the modern, Barth and Torrance work into Pelikan’s thesis of ‘evangelizing metaphysics’; Torrance probably more than Barth, on this score.

What I still maintain, is that in the best of ecumenical creedal or conciliar theology we do indeed get what Pelikan counter-proposes vis-à-vis Harnack; we get metaphysics “evangelized.” But just like with ‘the Spirit and the flesh,’ there is an ongoing battle between sliding too much towards whatever the reifying philosophy might be. In other words: there are periods of theological development, I’d contend, where there has indeed been slippage back into an ontotheology of the sorts that Harnack was so concerned with. I think we see this in some of the substance metaphysics synthesized with Christian theology in the mediaeval period. But then we also get this slippage in the modern period with the synthesizing of Hegel, Kant et al. with Christian theology. It is the theologian’s burden to prayerfully translate and interpret the kerygma in their particular period in such a way that ‘evangelization’ is always at the fore. The reality is, is that it is inescapable for the theologian to transcend his or her periodized location, such that the reigning philosophies of the day won’t have impact on the way they attempt to articulate a theological grammar for their peers.

Maybe at the end of this I think Harnack, at least at his first impulses, had the right ‘spirit.’ But it is clear, at least to me (and others), that Harnack over-corrected; which is always the case in the organicism of the theological task. If anything, Harnack, alerts us to the real reality that the theologian can sublimate the Gospel to the spirit of the age rather than to the Spirit of the Christ; in this light, Harnack’s critique, ought to at least alert us all to be constantly vigilant in the way we attempt to think and speak God. Harnack, while overbaked, underscores our need to be prayerfully rigorous and in need of God’s discernment as we attempt to bear witness to the ongoing and living reality of the risen Christ with us.

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 26-7.