Adolf Von Harnack's What Is Christianity

Adolf von Harnack in What is Christianity? attempts to modernize and moralize the essence of Christianity by displaying his views on the gospel and the downfall of the Christendom. Although Harnack rightfully criticizes some injustices of the early church, does his influence of Enlightenment era philosophy lead him to make improper claims about the Gospel? Harnack’s teachings, being greatly impacted by Enlightenment philosophy, theorize the Gospel as an ethical creed, which has been corrupted by catholicized church authority. In order to understand why Harnack holds these views of the Gospel, we must examine his views on the teachings of Jesus, Christology, the Catholicity of the Church, and finally the Reformation. Harnack’s explanation …show more content…
Harnack explains that in the centuries following Jesus’s death, the church fell prey to the pressures of the Greco-Roman society and ornamented Christianity with secular philosophy and religion. Harnack believes that the greatest down fall of Christianity began with the Catholicism of the Greek Church even stating, “It takes the form, not of a Christian product in Greed dress, but of a Greek product in Christian dress.” (236). Harnack credits the orthodoxy and tradition as the factors that made Christianity an even greater effigy to the work of Christ. It is during this time that traditionalism and intellectualism drove the church to creating dogma of Christian doctrine. The teaching of this doctrine furthered enveloped the kernel of Gospel ethics with a husk of intellectualism. “The Gospel is no theoretical system of doctrine or philosophy of the universe it is doctrine only as far as it proclaims the reality of God the Father.” (157). Although this doctrine unified the Church in the midst of heretics and controversy, Harnack regards this as ill, convoluted schemes by church