Chapter 15 of 404

An Example: Adolf von Harnack’s Civilized Jesus

One of the last great works in the tradition of nineteenth-century “liberal” lives of Jesus was that of Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), one of the most revered academicians of his era. Harnack’s work on the “essence of Christianity” (now available as What Is Christianity?) offered essentially an apologetic for liberal Christianity, that is, a Christianity that could accommodate the claims of his era’s modernity.¹⁴ Thus he sought to present the “gospel” in a form relevant to his own time, addressing objections posed by his milieu.¹⁵ He placed heavy emphasis on cultural religion, regarding Protestantism as a notably German contribution to civilization.¹⁶

In keeping with the spirit of his day, he reduced the essential gospel to ethics,¹⁷ and demythologized Jesus’ message of the kingdom to God’s rule in the individual heart¹⁸ or religious enlightenment. Producing a Jesus in keeping with the values of his day, he notes that the true kernel of Jesus’ teaching was far more modern than the ancient husk through which it came.¹⁹ This quest for the true (modern) kernel seems to constitute his historical criterion for establishing the “oldest tradition” about Jesus.²⁰

Harnack does view the more Jewish portrait of Jesus as earlier and more authentic to Jesus.²¹ Nevertheless, he argues that the goal of Jesus’ teachings, while nurtured in Judaism,²² is safely beyond it.²³ Accommodating “modern” perspectives, he regards the belief that life has vanquished death as more important than anything that might have happened historically at Jesus’ grave;²⁴ like many after him, he distinguishes between an objective, historical resurrection and the Easter faith.²⁵ Yet whatever Harnack’s view of the matter theologically, his interpretation of the evidence is quite different from that of the “primitive” apostolic church he in some other respects valued. Historically, they did not separate their Easter faith from the claim that Jesus returned from the dead; mere hope in afterlife or returned spirits offended almost no one and would not have provided a defining boundary for the movement. Unfortunately, divesting the Jesus movement of such elements foreign to modern thought appears to have been part of the price of eliminating the offensive Jewish eschatology of Jesus and his first followers. While Harnack notes that Jesus and his disciples were bounded by their time,²⁶ it seems also the case that, despite occasional forays against the assumptions of his milieu,²⁷ Harnack was no less a child of his own, and unapologetically so.²⁸

For all the positive elements in Harnack’s perspectives, he could not have guessed the dangers that such enculturated Christianity would lead to with the “Aryan Christianity” of the Reich Church a generation later. Individualistic, inward religion may have its value, but it proved more malleable to the cultural demands of anti-Semitic nationalism than respect for a first-century Jewish sage would have.²⁹ This is not to blame Harnack or his peers for an outcome they could not have foreseen; it is to object to a vision of Jesus so wedded to our own cultural settings that we lose sight of Jesus’ original historical (Jewish and Middle Eastern) setting. Harnack’s optimistic Jesus, designed for modern western readers, perished in the bloodshed of the first world war.³⁰

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