BOOKS.

DR. HARNACK ON CHRISTIANITY.* MANY people who think of modern German criticism as a merely negative thing will be above measure astonished if chance leads them to take up this volume. It consists of sixteen lectures given extempore last year to above six hundred students of the University of Berlin, and taken down in short- hand. Accordingly the lectures are full of animation; and they contain the ultimate personal convictions of the greatest of modern German theologians on the subject to which he has devoted his life. But the most striking point about the lectures is not the vigour of their style, remarkable as this is, but the enthusiasm they display for their subject. Passage follows passage in which the language of admiration and devotion to the person of Christ could not be exceeded by the most orthodox believer. The purpose of the lectures, as announced in the first of the series, is to insist upon the im- portance for the world of the fact "that a man of the name of Jesus Christ once stood in their midst," and upon the im- portance of the Gospel which He proclaimed. What was, and is, the Gospel? In Dr. Harnack's view it was, and is, "eternal life in the midst of time, by the strength and under the eyes of God." It will be the simplest course to make as clear as possible first of all what Dr. Harnack includes in this defini- tion, and then offer any criticisms that suggest themselves.

Christianity is a life, and it must therefore be studied, first of all, in the life of its Founder. The most striking charac- teristic of Christ, in Dr. Harnack's view, is the combination of entire absorption in His relation to God with a frank interest in the world, and avoidance of asceticism. " He lived in the continual consciousness of God's presence.' His food and drink was to do God's wilL But he did not speak like an heroic penitent, or like an ascetic who has turned his back upon the world. His eye rested kindly upon the whole world, and be saw it as it was, in all its varied and changing colours. His gaze penetrated the veil of the earthly, and be recognised everywhere the band of the living God." Conse- quently the new teacher's idea of God came into conflict with that of the official leaders of the people. " They thought of • What ix Christianity! By Adolf Harnack. Translated by T. B. &ander&

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God as of a despot guarding the ceremonial observances in His household; he breathed in the presence of God. They saw Him only in His law, which they had converted into a labyrinth of dark defiles, blind alleys, and secret passages ; he saw and felt Him everywhere." The teaching of Christ, therefore, was all concerned with man's soul and its relation to God. This relation is expressed in the Gospel in three chief ways, in regard to " the Kingdom of God," the Father- hood of God, and the attainment of righteousness by the new method of love and humility. The chapters in which Dr.

Harnack analyses these ideas are some of the most interesting in the book, from their freshness and the total absence of any- thing conventional. Further, Dr. Harnack has taken the opportunity of translating some of the Gospel precepts into a form that might appeal to his nineteenth-century audience. For example, he thus comments upon Christianity in its attitude to asceticism :-

" It is self-denial, not asceticism, which Jesus requires ; self- denial to the point of self-renunciation. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' Wherever some desire of the senses gains the upper hand of you, so that you become coarse and vulgar, or in your selfishness a new master arises in you, you must destroy it; not because God has any pleasure in mutilation, but because you cannot otherwise preserve your better part. It is a hard demand. But it is not met by any act of general renunciation, such as monks perform—that act may leave things just as they were before—bat only by a struggle and a resolute renuncia-

tion at the critical point. What the Gospel asks of us is solemnly to examine ourselves, to maintain an earnest watch, and to destroy the enemy. There can be no doubt, however, that Jesus demanded self-denial and self-renunciation to a much greater extent than we like to think."

What, then, the reader will ask, has Dr. Harnack to say

about the root affirmations of the Christian creed, the divinity of Christ, His resurrection from the dead, and His mission of the Comforter ? In the first place, he allows that the title "Son of God " was one which Jesus applied to Himself. The story of the temptation in the wilderness is sufficient in itself, he considers, to demonstrate this. What is implied in the term is knowledge of God. " No man knoweth the Son but the Father ; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son." Dr. Harnack allows that the knowledge of the Father claimed by Jesus was unique. " Jesus is convinced that he knows God in a way in which no one ever knew Him before." Moreover, Dr. Harnack entirely endorses the claim :-

" Again and again in the history of mankind men of God have come forward in the sure consciousness of possessing a divine message, and of being compelled, whether they will or not, to deliver it. But the message has always happened to be imperfect; in this spot or that defective ; bound up with political or particu- laristic elements ; designed to meet the circumstance of the moment ; and very often the prophet did not stand the test of being himself an example of his message. But in this case the message brought was of the profoundest and most comprehensive character. Defective it is not; antiquated it is not ; and in life and strength it still triumphs to-day over all the past. He who delivered it has as yet yielded his place to no man, and to human life he still to-day gives a meaning and an aim—he the Son of God No one who accepts the Gospel, and tries to understand Him who gave it to us, can fail to affirm that here the divine appeared in as pure a form as it can appear on earth, and to feel that for those who followed him Jesus was himself the strength of the Gospel."

Again

" Where can we find in the history of mankind any similar instance of men eating and drinking with their master, seeing him in the characteristic aspects of his humanity, and then pro- claiming him not only as the great prophet and revealer of God, but as the divine disposer of history, as the ' beginning' of God's creation, and as the inner strength of a new life!"

And yet, while allowing that Jesus Christ was in every way absolutely unique in history, Dr. Harnack will not allow the

Christian Church to worship Him. From the Synoptists he rejects the story of the birth, and he considers that the faith

had already been seriously corrupted when the Fourth Gospel was written, with its notion of a life with God before the Incarnation. In the same way, as to the Resurrection ; Dr. Harnack is candour itself in his admissions. " There is no historical fact more certain than that the Apostle Paul was not the first to emphasise so prominently the significance of Christ's death and resurrection, but that in recognising their meaning he stood exactly on the same ground as the primitive community." He considers that St. Paul knew the early tradition about the empty grave. Further, he allows that the world owes " the certainty of eternal life for which it was meant" to the open grave of Jesus. " It is useless to cite

Plato; it is useless to point to the Persian religion, and the ideas and the literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished and has perished; but the certainty of the Resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph's garden has not perished, and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City which make an earthly life worth living and tolerable." Dr. Harnack, then, allows the Resurrection story ? ' asks the reader. Not at all. He holds that the evidence of the post-Resurrection appearances is not trustworthy, so that the " certainty " of which he speaks is not certainty at all. That is to say, Dr. Harnack holds up in one hand to our admiration the perfect flower of the Christian faith and hope, while with the other hand he cuts away their roots.

The lectures do not, except to a very slight extent, deal with the critical presuppositions which necessarily underlie them ; these must be sought in other works of Professor Harnack, and they cannot here be discussed. But it is right that the reader of these lectures should recognise that Dr. Harnack applies other touchstones to the Christian traditions besides those of the pure historian. For example, as to miracles, he accepts only such as concern the healing of disease, reject- ing the stilling of the storm, and the feeding of the multi- tude. Yet he accepts the story of the Temptation, quite rightly recognising that it must have come from Jesus Him- self. But the story of the Temptation makes it very clear that Jesus recognised in Himself wonderful powers, other than those of a healer of disease. Again, in regard to the doctrine of Christ's person, Dr. Harnack accepts the saying in St. Matthew, " No man knoweth the Father save the Son," which comes in a passage of striking and singular sublimity. Dr. Martineau most uncritically rejected the whole passage, which includes, it will be remembered, the " com- fortable words," because of the theology of this one verse. Dr. Harnack's literary instinct is truer ; he accepts the pas- sage, including the dogmatic verse, but he attenuates the meaning of the statement by the following gloss : " The con- sciousness which he possessed of being the Son of God is nothing but the practical consequence of knowing Gad as the Father and as his Father." Such a gloss might be a sufficient commentary on a text, " The Son knoweth the Father," but how does it express the claim to sole as well as unique knowledge contained in St. Matthew's verse ? A student of the documents without theological prepossessions would assuredly see here a close parallel to the sentences in the Fourth Evangelist : " No man cometh unto the Father but by Me," and " No man hath ascended up to heaven but He who came down from heaven." Dr. Harnack's rejection of the Fourth Gospel, it may be mentioned, is purely theological. He admits the early date, allows that the author was a Jew and not under Alexandrian influence, but as the conception of Christ which it contains is " Pauline," he will not allow the author to be John the Apostle. Other people, who remember that St. Paul had a Christology by A.D. 51, which was not then for the first time prc- mulgated by him, but assumed as the current doctrine, will marvel where it could have come from if there were no discourses of our Lord with His inner circle of disciples, such as those which the Fourth Gospel records. Also, they may wonder why a prophet should have instituted such a feast as the Eucharist, which Dr. Harnack allows him to have done, if the ideas which the Christian Church has from the very first age associated with it are no part of His essential gospel; that is to say, if He were in no real sense a mediator or redeemer, but simply a prophetic voice like Isaiah's proclaiming "the Fatherhood of God." We sympa- thise most heartily with Dr. Harnack's wish to retain the Christian religion as an effective force among educated people ; but we do not believe the Christian religion can be divorced from the great Christian affirmations of the divinity and resurrection of Christ.