History of Dogma, Volume 1

by Adolf von Harnack

6. The instructions of Jesus to his disciples are accordingly dominated by the thought that the end, the day and hour of which, however, no one knows, is at hand. In consequence of this, also, the exhortation to renounce all earthly good takes a prominent place. But Jesus does not impose ascetic commandments as a new law, far less does he see in asceticism as such, sanctification[⁷⁰]—he himself did not live as an ascetic, but was reproached as a wine-bibber—but he prescribed a perfect simplicity and purity of disposition, and a singleness of heart which remains invariably the same in trouble and renunciation, in possession and use of earthly good. A uniform equality of all in the conduct of life is not commanded: "To whom much is given, of him much shall be required." The disciples are kept as far from fanaticism and overrating of spiritual results as from asceticism. "Rejoice not that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." When they besought him to teach them to pray, he taught them the "Lord's prayer", a prayer which demands such a collected mind, and such a tranquil, childlike elevation of the heart to God, that it cannot be offered at all by minds subject to passion or preoccupied by any daily cares.

7. Jesus himself did not found a new religious community, but gathered round him a circle of disciples, and chose Apostles whom he commanded to preach the Gospel. His preaching was universalistic inasmuch as it attributed no value to ceremonialism as such, and placed the fulfilment of the Mosaic law in the exhibition of its moral contents, partly against or beyond the letter. He made the law perfect by harmonising its particular requirements with the fundamental moral requirements which were also expressed in the Mosaic law. He emphasised the fundamental requirements more decidedly than was done by the law itself, and taught that all details should be referred to them and deduced from them. The external righteousness of Pharisaism was thereby declared to be not only an outer covering, but also a fraud, and the bond which still united religion and nationality in Judaism was sundered.[⁷¹] Political and national elements may probably have been made prominent in the hopes of the future, as Jesus appropriated them for his preaching. But from the conditions to which the realising of the hopes for the individual was attached, there already shone the clearer ray which was to eclipse those elements, and one saying such as Matt. XXII. 21, annulled at once political religion and religious politics.

Supplement 1.—The idea of the inestimable inherent value of every individual human soul, already dimly appearing in several psalms, and discerned by Greek Philosophers, though as a rule developed in contradiction to religion, stands out plainly in the preaching of Jesus. It is united with the idea of God as Father, and is the complement to the message of the communion of brethren realising itself in love. In this sense the Gospel is at once profoundly individualistic and Socialistic. The prospect of gaining life, and preserving it for ever, is therefore also the highest which Jesus has set forth, it is not, however, to be a motive, but a reward of grace. In the certainty of this prospect, which is the converse of renouncing the world, he has proclaimed the sure hope of the resurrection, and consequently the most abundant compensation for the loss of the natural life. Jesus put an end to the vacillation and uncertainty which in this respect still prevailed among the Jewish people of his day. The confession of the Psalmist, "Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon the earth that I desire beside thee", and the fulfilling of the Old Testament commandment, "Love thy neighbour as thyself", were for the first time presented in their connection in the person of Jesus. He himself therefore is Christianity, for the "impression of his person convinced the disciples of the facts of forgiveness of sin and the second birth, and gave them courage to believe in and to lead a new life." We cannot therefore state the "doctrine" of Jesus; for it appears as a supramundane life which must be felt in the person of Jesus, and its truth is guaranteed by the fact that such a life can be lived.

Supplement 2.—The history of the Gospel contains two great transitions, both of which, however, fall within the first century; from Christ to the first generation of believers, including Paul, and from the first, Jewish Christian, generation of these believers to the Gentile Christians, in other words: from Christ to the brotherhood of believers in Christ, and from this to the incipient Catholic Church. No later transitions in the Church can be compared with these in importance. As to the first, the question has frequently been asked, Is the Gospel of Christ to be the authority or the Gospel concerning Christ? But the strict dilemma here is false. The Gospel certainly is the Gospel of Christ. For it has only, in the sense of Jesus, fulfilled its Mission when the Father has been declared to men as he was known by the Son, and where the life is swayed by the realities and principles which ruled the life of Jesus Christ. But it is in accordance with the mind of Jesus and at the same time a fact of history, that this Gospel can only be appropriated and adhered to in connection with a believing surrender to the person of Jesus Christ. Yet every dogmatic formula is suspicious, because it is fitted to wound the spirit of religion; it should not at least be put before the living experience in order to evoke it; for such a procedure is really the admission of the half belief which thinks it necessary that the impression made by the person must be supplemented. The essence of the matter is a personal life which awakens life around it as the fire of one torch kindles another. Early as weakness of faith is in the Church of Christ, it is no earlier than the procedure of making a formulated and ostensibly proved confession the foundation of faith, and therefore demanding, above all, subjection to this confession. Faith assuredly is propagated by the testimony of faith, but dogma is not in itself that testimony.

The peculiar character of the Christian religion is conditioned by the fact that every reference to God is at the same time a reference to Jesus Christ, and vice versa. In this sense the Person of Christ is the central point of the religion, and inseparably united with the substance of piety as a sure reliance on God. Such a union does not, as is supposed, bring a foreign element into the pure essence of religion. The pure essence of religion rather demands such a union; for "the reverence for persons, the inner bowing before the manifestation of moral power and goodness is the root of all true religion" (W. Herrmann). But the Christian religion knows and names only one name before which it bows. In this rests its positive character, in all else, as piety, it is by its strictly spiritual and inward attitude, not a positive religion alongside of others, but religion itself. But just because the Person of Christ has this significance is the knowledge and understanding of the "historical Christ" required: for no other comes within the sphere of our knowledge. "The historical Christ" that, to be sure, is not the powerless Christ of contemporary history shewn to us through a coloured biographical medium, or dissipated in all sorts of controversies, but Christ as a power and as a life which towers above our own life, and enters into our life as God's Spirit and God's Word, (see Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott. 2. Edit. 1892, (i.e., "The Fellowship of the Christian with God", an important work included in the present series of translations. Ed.) Kähler, Der sog. historische Jesus und der geschichtliche biblische Christus, 1892). But historical labour and investigation are needed in order to grasp this Jesus Christ ever more firmly and surely.

As to the second transition, it brought with it the most important changes, which, however, became clearly manifest only after the lapse of some generations. They appear, first, in the belief in holy consecrations, efficacious in themselves, and administered by chosen persons; further, in the conviction, that the relation of the individual to God and Christ is, above all, conditioned on the acceptance of a definite divinely attested law of faith and holy writings; further, in the opinion that God has established Church arrangements, observance of which is necessary and meritorious, as well as in the opinion that a visible earthly community is the people of a new covenant. These assumptions, which formally constitute the essence of Catholicism as a religion, have no support in the teaching of Jesus, nay, offend against that teaching.

Supplement 3.—The question as to what new thing Christ has brought, answered by Paul in the words, "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new", has again and again been pointedly put since the middle of the second century by Apologists, Theologians and religious Philosophers, within and without the Church, and has received the most varied answers. Few of the answers have reached the height of the Pauline confession. But where one cannot attain to this confession, one ought to make clear to oneself that every answer which does not lie in the line of it is altogether unsatisfactory; for it is not difficult to set over against every article from the preaching of Jesus an observation which deprives it of its originality. It is the Person, it is the fact of his life that is new and creates the new. The way in which he called forth and established a people of God on earth, which has become sure of God and of eternal life; the way in which he set up a new thing in the midst of the old and transformed the religion of Israel into the religion that is the mystery of his Person, in which lies his unique and permanent position in the history of humanity.

Supplement 4.—The conservative position of Jesus towards the religious traditions of his people had the necessary result that his preaching and his Person were placed by believers in the frame-work of this tradition, which was thereby very soon greatly expanded. But, though this way of understanding the Gospel was certainly at first the only possible way, and though the Gospel itself could only be preserved by such means (see § 1), yet it cannot be mistaken that a displacement in the conception of the Person and preaching of Jesus, and a burdening of religious faith, could not but forthwith set in, from which developments followed, the premises of which would be vainly sought for in the words of the Lord (see §§ 3, 4). But here the question arises as to whether the Gospel is not inseparably connected with the eschatological world-renouncing element with which it entered into the world, so that its being is destroyed where this is omitted. A few words may be devoted to this question. The Gospel possesses properties which oppose every positive religion, because they depreciate it, and these properties form the kernel of the Gospel. The disposition which is devoted to God, humble, ardent and sincere in its love to God and to the brethren, is, as an abiding habit, law, and at the same time, a gift of the Gospel, and also finally exhausts it. This quiet, peaceful element was at the beginning strong and vigorous, even in those who lived in the world of ecstasy and expected the world to come. One may be named for all, Paul. He who wrote 1 Cor. XIII. and Rom. VIII. should not, in spite of all that he has said elsewhere, be called upon to witness that the nature of the Gospel is exhausted in its world-renouncing, ecstatic and eschatological elements, or at least, that it is so inseparably united with these as to fall along with them. He who wrote those chapters, and the greater than he who promised the kingdom of heaven to children, and to those who were hungering and thirsting for righteousness, he to whom tradition ascribes the words: "Rejoice not that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven"—both attest that the Gospel lies above the antagonisms between this world and the next, work and retirement from the world, reason and ecstasy, Judaism and Hellenism. And because it lies above them it may be united with either, as it originally unfolded its powers under the ruins of the Jewish religion. But still more; it not only can enter into union with them, it must do so if it is otherwise the religion of the living and is itself living. It has only one aim; that man may find God and have him as his own God, in order to gain in him humility and patience, peace, joy and love. How it reaches this goal through the advancing centuries, whether with the co-efficients of Judaism or Hellenism, of renunciation of the world or of culture, of mysticism or the doctrine of predestination, of Gnosticism or Agnosticism, and whatever other incrustations there may yet be which can defend the kernel, and under which alone living elements can grow—all that belongs to the centuries. However each individual Christian may reckon to the treasure itself the earthly vessel in which he hides his treasure; it is the duty and the right, not only of the religious, but also of the historical estimate to distinguish between the vessel and the treasure; for the Gospel did not enter into the world as a positive statutory religion, and cannot therefore have its classic manifestation in any form of its intellectual or social types, not even in the first. It is therefore the duty of the historian of the first century of the Church, as well as that of those which follow, not to be content with fixing the changes of the Christian religion, but to examine how far the new forms were capable of defending, propagating and impressing the Gospel itself. It would probably have perished if the forms of primitive Christianity had been scrupulously maintained in the Church; but now primitive Christianity has perished in order that the Gospel might be preserved. To study this progress of the development, and fix the significance of the newly received forms for the kernel of the matter, is the last and highest task of the historian who himself lives in his subject. He who approaches from without must be satisfied with the general view that in the history of the Church some things have always remained, and other things have always been changing.

Literature.—Weiss. Biblical Theology of the New Testament. T. and T. Clark. Wittichen. Beitr. z. bibl. Theol. 3. Thle. 1864-72.

Schüreer. Die Predigt Jesu in ihrem Verhaltniss z. A.T.u. z. Judenthum, 1882.