So far Cremer has mounted a two-prong counter-attack against Harnack.
In the first prong, he has argued that Christianity is not, as Harnack would have it, a religion which Jesus practised as an example for Christians to follow (Jesus as the "subject" of religion) but is, according to the New Testament, a religion in which Christians worship Jesus (Jesus as the "object" of religion). This is a simple matter of reading the New Testament. Everywhere one turns in the pages of the New Testament, even in the Gospels themselves, our most direct records of Jesus' life and ministry, Jesus is presented as the one to whom people turn in faith, love, repentance, commitment, and adoration. He is not the first Christian. Rather, Christians are those who trust in Jesus and look to him as their Savior from sin and the exalted Lord of all creation.
Now Harnack would have acknowledged that much of the New Testament presents Jesus in this exalted light. But pulling out the tools of historical criticism, he would have proceeded to deconstruct the New Testament witness by separating the husk of later theology from the kernel of the original religion of Jesus himself. Harnack claimed that the later theological accretions can be peeled away until one is left with the vital core of the religion of Jesus, which Harnack defined as "God and the soul, the soul and its God," i.e., the Fatherhood of God, the infinite value of the human soul, the higher righteousness, and the commandment of love. In this religion, Jesus is not the eternal Son of God who became man. He is not the divine Savior of sinners. Rather, he is a mere man who advanced farther than any other man in the knowledge of God as Father leaving us a model that inspires us to follow in his steps.
But -- and this brings us to the second prong of Cremer's counter-attack -- this so-called religion of Jesus is nowhere to be found in the pages of the New Testament. One may attempt to peel the outer layers of the onion -- the high Christology of John and of Paul being the most obvious outer layers ripe for Harnack's historical-critical knife -- but once one has done so, one must immediately continue to apply the knife. For the primitive community (the Jewish Christian church before the fall of Jerusalem) had just as high a Christology. Paul and James (or those whom he represented) may have had some tensions, but they were over questions related to the mission to the Gentiles, not Christology. And the Gospel records unanimously present Jesus as a supernatural being from heaven, who performs miracles, who comes to seek and save the lost, and who calls people to personal faith in himself. There is no non-Christological religious core that can be safely extracted from the Gospels leaving Harnack's religion in which Jesus is the mere "subject" (i.e., example) rather than the apostolic religion in which Jesus is the "object" (i.e., Son of God, Messiah, Savior of sinners, and Lord).
The point is, Harnack has no real case, even on historical-critical grounds. He may don the mantle of historical objectivity when he applies his knife of criticism to the New Testament onion, but in reality his separation of the so-called husk from the kernel is guided not by historical reasoning but by dogmatic presuppositions. Cremer thus concludes:
Every criticism of our sources, be it of this or that kind, is not only an historical but a dogmatical criticism -- Harnack criticizes these sources just as dogmatically as others who do not share his standpoint, only that he, protected by the authority of his great name, designated his dogmatical critique historical. (p. 10)
Ouch! So the Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Greifswald punctures the pretensions of the Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin.
That's a great quote from Cremer!
Posted by: Matt | 11/24/2009 at 05:31 PM