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THEOLOGICAL TRANSLATION LIBRARY
VOL XIV.
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
Sixteen Lectures delivered in the University
BY
ADOLF HARNACK
RECTOK OF, AND PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN, THE UNIVERSITY, AND
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL PRUSSIAN ACADEMY, BERLIN
1901
J
A i^UC^'
G. P. Putnam's Sons.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE
ENGLISH EDITION
To meet the wishes of my Eyiglish friends I have assented to t
scholarly folios.
A. HARNAGK.
T. BAILEY SAUNDERS.
,
(i.) The leading features or Jesus' message. . . 19
question, . • . . . . . 124
LECTURE I.
not once only, but again and again, great forces have
been disengaged, we must include all the later pro-
THE GOSPEL ii
ing that it was just the leaves that made the bulb.
Endeavours of this kind are not unknown in the
history of the Christian religion, but they fade
before those other endeavours which seek to con-
vince us that there is no such thing as either
kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that every-
thing is of equal value and alike permanent.
— but still they, too, reflect, here and there, the circum-
where, as the case may be, the question has not yet
the fear of God ; his whole life, all his thoughts and
feelings, were absorbed in the relation to God, and
yet he did not talk like an enthusiast and a fanatic,
who sees only one red-hot spot, and so is blind to
the world and all that it contains. He spoke his
message and looked at the world with a fresh and
clear eye for the life, great and small, that sur-
rounded him. He proclaimed that to gain the
whole world was nothing if the soul were injured,
and yet he remained kind and sympathetic to every
.
dead, the sower and the reaper in the field, the lord
in him :
" Your Father in heaven feeds them." The
parable is his most familiar form of speech. In-
sensibly, however, parable and sympathy pass into
each other. Yet he who had not where to lay his
head does not speak like one who has broken with
JESUS' TEACHING 37
when I have thee, I ask not after heaven and earth " ?
Can we go beyond what Micah said "He hath :
saying, viz.: —
(1) The Lord's Prayer (2) that utter- ;
ance, " Eejoice not that the spirits are subject unto
you ; but rather rejoice because your names are
written in heaven "
; (3) the saying, " Are not two
sparrows sold for a farthing ? and one of them shall
will lose his life shall save it." He can even say :
numbered ;
you have a supernatural value ;
you
can put yourselves into the hands of a power
which no one has seen ? Either that is nonsense,
or else it is the utmost development of which
religion is capable ; no longer a mere phenomenon
accompanying the life of the senses, a coefficient,
the clean opposite of it. But all was not yet hard
and dead ; there was some life still left in the deeper
parts of the system. To those who questioned him
Jesus could still answer :
" You have the law, keep
it ; you know best yourselves what you have to do
thesum of the law is, as you yourselves say, to love
God and your neighbour." Nevertheless, there is a
sphere of ethical thought which is peculiarly expres-
sive of Jesus' Gospel. Let us make this clear by
citing four points.
but I say unto j^ou." After all, then, the truth was
something new ; he was aware that it had never yet
been expressed in such a consistent form and with
such claims to supremacy. A large portion of the
question
of asceticism.
or the utterance :
" If any man come to me, and hate
not his father, and mother, and wife, and children,
and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also,
by Jesus, as follows :
" John came neither eating
behind.
For these reasons we must decline to regard the
Gospel as a message of world-denial.
On the other hand, Jesus speaks of three enemies,
and the watchword which he gives in dealing with
them is not that we are to flee them ; rather, he com-
mands us to annihilate them. These three enemies
are mammon, care, and selfishness. Observe that here
there is no question of flight or denial, but of a battle
which is to be fought until the enemy is annihilated
the forces of darkness are to be overthrown. B)'
mammon he understands money and worldly goods
in the widest sense of the word, worldly goods which
try to gain the mastery over us, and make us tyrants
ASCETICISM 85
until he has put aside all his cares and cast them
upon God. How much we could accomplish and
how strong we should be, if we did not fret.
And then, thirdly : selfishness. It is self-denial,
question.
up to him :
" Watchman, what of the night ?
" Thus
their hearts were opened to God and ready to receive
him, and in many of the Psalms, and in the later
Jewish literature which was akin to them, the word
"poor" directly denotes those who have their hearts
open and are waiting for the consolation of Israel.
Jesus found this usage of speech in existence and
adopted it. Therefore when we come across the
expression "the poor" in the Gospels we must not
think, without further ceremony, of the poor in the
economic sense. As a matter of fact, poverty in the
economic sense coincided to a large extent in those
days with religious humility and an openness of the
heart towards God, in contrast with the elevated
" practice of virtue " of the Pharisees and its routine
observance in " righteousness." But if this were the
prevailing condition of affairs, then it is clear that
our modern categories of "poor "and "rich" cannot
be unreservedl}'' transferred to that age. Yet we
must not forget that in those days the economical
sense was also, as a rule, included in the word "poor."
We shall, therefore, have to exaniine in our next
lecture the direction in which a distinction can be
made, or perhaps to ask, whether it is possible to fix
the inner sense of Jesus' words in spite of the peculiar
difficulty attaching to the conception of " poverty."
doubt that the time will come when the world will
tolerate a life of luxury among those who are charged
with the cure of souls as little as it tolerates priestly
government. Our feelings in this respect are be-
coming finer, and that is an advantage. It will no
longer be thought fitting, in the higher sense of the
word, for anyone to preach resignation and content-
THE SOCIAL QUESTION 97
play of forces, of the " live and let live " principle
a better name for it would be the " live and let die "
is entirely opposed to the Gospel. And it is not as our
THE SOCIAL QUESTION loi
of public order.
of a neutral character.
On the other hand, we possess another saying of
Jesus in regard to constituted authority which is much
less often quoted, and nevertheless affords us a deeper
sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let
him have thy cloak also." The demand here made
seems to proscribe law and disorganise all the
legal relations of life. Again and again these
words have been appealed to with the object of
showing either that Christianity is incompatible
with life as it actually is, or that Christendom has
fallen away from the principles of its Master. By
way of reply to this argument the following
observations may be made: — (i.) Jesus was, as
we have seen, steeped in the conviction that God
does justice ; in the end, therefore, the oppressor
will not prevail, but the oppressed will get his
rights, (ii.) Earthly rights are in themselves of
little account, and it does not much matter if we
lose them, (iii.) The world is in such an unhappy
state, injustice has got so much the upper hand in
it, that the victim of oppression is incapable of
making good his rights even if he tries, (iv.) As
God —and this is the main point —mingles His
justice with mercy, and lets His sun shine on the
just and on the unjust, so Jesus' disciple is to show
THE GOSPEL AND LAW m
love to his enemies and disarm them by gentleness.
Such are the thoughts' which underlie those lofty-
Whether mankind will ever attain to it, who can say 'i
Utopia.
But for this very reason there are many among
us to-day upon whom a very serious and difficult
all real energy. Some say this with pain and regret,
others with satisfaction. The latter assert that they
always knew that the Gospel was not for the healthy
and the strong, but for the broken-down ; that it
civilisation.
be already kindled ?
" The fire of the judgment and
the forces of love were what he wanted to summon
up, so as to create a new humanity. If he spoke
of these forces of love in the simple manner cor-
responding to the conditions nearest at hand —the
feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the
visiting of the sick and those in prison — it is never-
theless clear that a great inward transformation of
the humanity which he saw in the mirror of the
little nation in Palestine hovered before his eyes :
Christological question.
the field, his the seed, his the fruit. These things
involve no dogmatic doctrines ; still less any trans-
formation of the Gospel itself, or aiay oppressive
demands upon our faith. They are the expression
was just the death " for our sins," and the resur-
rection, which confirmed the impression given by
his person, and provided faith with a sure hold
he died as a sacrifice for us and he now lives.
" Blessed are they that have not seen and yet
have believed." The disciples on the road to
Emmaus were blamed for not believing in the
resurrection even though the Easter message had
not yet reached them. The Lord is a Spirit,
THE RESURRECTION i6i
to the body :
" Know ye not that your body is the
temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you 1 therefore
glorify God in your body." In this sublime con-
sciousness the earliest Christians took up the struggle
against the sins of impurity, which in the heathen
world were not accounted sins at all. As sons
of God, "blameless and harmless in the midst of a
crooked and perverse nation," they were to " shine as
lights in the world." It was thus that they were
to show of what they were made, and it was thus
that they showed it : to be holy as God was holy,
to be pure as disciples of Christ. Here too, we get
the measure of the renunciation of the world which
this community imposed upon itself " To keep one-
self unspotted from the world" was the asceticism
which it practised itself and required of its adher-
ents. The other point is brotherly fellowship. In
joining the love of God with the love of neighbour
in his sayings, Jesus himself had a new union
of men with one another in view. The earliest
the members suffer with it," and " Bear ye one an-
other's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ."
LECTURE X.
)
PAUL 179
it its character.
The first factor which we encounter is tradition,
heart.
LECTURE XIV.
"'
So far as the first is concerned, you may recognisei
And yet —any one with a keen eye sees that the
Church is far from possessing now such a plenitude
of power as it enjoyed in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, when all the material and spiritual forces
available were at its disposal. Since that epoch its
—
Anne and was reduced to its essential factors, to
the Word of God and to faith. This truth was
2 70 WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
Whatever betide,
—
century onwards they were preparing the way for
the Reformation. And just as Eastern Christianity
is and the Christianity of the
rightly called Greek,
Middle Ages and of Western Europe is rightly called
Roman, so the Christianity of the Reformation may
be described as German, in spite of Calvin. For
Calvin was Luther's pupil, and he made his influence
most lastingly felt, not among the Latin nations
but among the English, the Scotch, and the Dutch.
Through the Reformation the Germans mark a stage
282
PROTESTANTISM 283
But still the latter —which are not solely the outcome
of the breach with ecclesiastical authority, but were
already prepared for in the fifteenth century —have
been the cause of much stunted growth. They have
weakened the feeling of responsibility, and diminished
the activity, of the evangelical communities ; and,
in addition, they have aroused the not unfounded
suspicion that the Church is an institution set up
by the State, and accordingly to be adjusted to the
State. Much has happened, indeed, in the last
few decades to check that suspicion by the greater
independence which the Churches have obtained
but further progress in this direction is necessary,
especially in regard to the freedom of individual
communities. The connexion with the State must
not be violently severed, for the Churches have
derived much advantage from it ; but steps must
be taken to fuither the development upon which
we have entered. If this results in multifarious
organisations in the Church, it will do no harm ; on
the contrary, it will remind us, in a forcible way,
that these forms are all arbitrary.
PROTESTANTISM 287
THE ENT).
PKINTED BY
SEILL AND COMPANY IIMITKD
EDINBURGH
APR 6 19U1
'
OCT 2 IJUl
WAY 31 1902
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