The Upper Register

Cremer: (3) The Synoptic Account

In chapter three, Cremer continues his summary of the apostolic witness to Jesus Christ. The focal point of this chapter is on the meaning of Jesus' proclamation of "the kingdom of God." Recall that for Harnack this was the first of his three-point summary of the gospel as he understood it, "the kingdom of God and its coming." But his understanding of the kingdom of God was centered on the Fatherhood of God in a universalistic and non-soteriological sense. All humans are God's children. The kingdom of God is the religious experience of knowing God as Father, an experience realized first and foremost in Jesus' own relationship with God, a relationship that is not ontologically distinct from ours.

Cremer understands the teaching of Jesus concerning the kingdom of God as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels very differently. For him, the kingdom of God is to be understood first as the fulfillment of the promises of Israel's redemption, and, as such, it focuses on the Fatherhood of God not in a universalistic sense but in relation to those whom he redeems.

Jesus called God Father because He did the deed of redemption for which Israel waited. He is the Father of Jesus because Jesus is His Son, whom He has chosen to execute His redemption; He is Israel's Father because Israel is the object of redemption promised, and He is the Father of all those to whom He sends the redemption. With the redemption He proves that He has not forgotten His people, but interests Himself in them, shows His power and establishes His Kingdom among them. God's Kingdom and God's name of Father belong together. God's kingdom takes its name not from the obedience of the citizens of a kingdom, but from God's deed of redemption. (p. 50)

Harnack is right to interpret the kingdom of God in light of the Fatherhood of God. But he is wrong to take the latter concept and divorce it from the soteric realities of redemption accomplished (the cross and resurrection) and applied (the forgiveness of sins).

Furthermore, Harnack misses the vast ontological difference between Jesus' relationship to His Father, and our relationship to God as Father through Christ:

One can but feel that there is a peculiar meaning in which Jesus says Father in addressing God or in speaking of God. He speaks of Him as Father, who has called Himself Israel's Father, and who has called Israel His son, His first-born, and whom Israel also addresses as Father in its devoutest prayers. Jesus says "the Father," "your Father," "My Father," but never "our Father," except where he tells the disciples how to pray. The actual fulfilment of the promises is connected with Jesus; where Jesus is and only where He is there is God's Kingdom; therefore He says Father as no one else can say it. (pp. 50-51)

What, then, is meaning of Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God? It is the proclamation of God's act of redemption, through God's judgment on human sin in the person of Christ on the cross, resulting in the forgiveness of sins:

The Kingdom of God, for which He came, is the same at the end of His career as in the beginning. It represents in His earlier as in His later teaching a world-condition brought about by the righteous judgment of God the Father, in which His own have peace and freedom from all distress through the forgiveness of their sins. Jesus proclaims this Kingdom, He brings in this Kingdom; where He is, there is this Kingdom. (p. 52)

Cremer points to several critical moments at the end of Jesus' earthly life to demonstrate that the kingdom of God has this redemptive focus on the forgiveness of sins. In his parable of the wicked husbandmen, he said to Israel, "The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits" (Matt 21:43 ESV). Then, a few days later, at the last supper with his disciples, he said, "This is my body ... this is the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins," followed immediately by another reference to the kingdom (Matt 25:26-29). Then, again, when the dying thief prayed, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," Jesus replied, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:42-43). "Thus, dying, He endorses still the Gospel which He has preached" (p. 59). The gospel of the kingdom is thus the gospel of the forgiveness of sins by the blood of Christ, a gospel of free grace for sinners.

It is God who through this Kingdom, in the omnipotence of His love, fulfils His promises, not for and on the righteous, not for those who are whole, but for and on sinners, for and on such sinners as she was of whom it is recorded that He knew not "who and what manner of woman this is which toucheth Him." For them Jesus was sent from God, for them He brings the grace of God, which they need; such as these will He comfort and revive. To Him should they come, in Him should they believe. He is not subject, but object of religion. (p. 60).

These were sinners' souls, in whom Jesus had an interest, as He shows when He interests Himself in the paralytic and the publican. It is not, as Wellhausen says, that "His predilection for sinners sometimes seems to go too far ...." Rather what Paul attests later is true: "Where sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly." Jesus has proved this, and thus made Himself the center of attraction to sinners to assure the most miserable of the miserable that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and that He is the King of this Kingdom, chosen of God. (pp. 60-61) 

Oh what a wonderful Savior Jesus is! His predilection for sinners did not go "too far"! He came precisely to seek and to save the lost, the miserable, and the ungodly. That is why the "gospel of the kingdom" is glad and joyful news for sinners (Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14; Mark 1:14-15; Luke 4:18, 43; 7:22; 8:1; 9:6; 16:16; Acts 8:12; 28:23, 31). It is not a message stating that a dread king is coming to whom you must yield obedience before it is too late. The gospel of the kingdom is the good news of the free pardon of all our sins through the person of the King of the Kingdom, that is, Jesus the Christ, whose Messiahship is defined in terms of the shameful cross (Mark 8:29 ["You are the Christ"] compared with vv 31ff [the passion predictions]) that he bore in our place and for our sins.

Cremer: (2) The Apostolic Message

In chapter one of his Reply to Harnack, Cremer had argued that the New Testament, including the four Gospels, are "documentary vouchers" of the apostolic preaching about Jesus (p. 11), and that this apostolic preaching is the actual gospel, not the so-called gospel that Harnack claims to have arrived at by a historical-critical process of separating the kernel from the husk. In chapter two, "The Apostolic Message," Cremer proceeds to summarize the apostolic gospel concerning Christ. What was the gospel message that the apostles preached? It is that "redemption, forgiveness of sins, and with it deliverance from judgment and perdition are offered to us in Him" (p. 19). This redemption and forgiveness is offered to us "in Him," that is, in Jesus the crucified and risen Christ. This is the meaning of his Messiahship:  

Jesus, who was betrayed, rejected, deserted, and given up even by His disciples, is praised by them as Christ. He is, indeed, the Christ through His sufferings, death, and resurrection. In this power to remit sin lies His importance as Christ. By this has He redeemed us. He has supplied us with the forgiveness of sin, so that we may now actually experience it. Not only according to but through that forgiveness is He the Christ, the King of the Kingdom of God, appointed and instituted by God as the redeemer and helper of all those who hope in Him. (pp. 20-21)

When our friends, parents, teachers or great men die, they continue to affect us by the memory that we cherish of them. If the person was a great and important figure who left a body of work, e.g., a poet or a philosopher, we are glad when their work is more widely appreciated. But still, their death is a hard blow, and it is only our memories of them that we cherish.

But with Jesus it is otherwise ... For a short time, indeed, till the third day, the disciples thought that everything was lost. They had precious recollections of Him, but recollections which ... only filled them with the deepest sorrow over their lost master -- not only lost, but one whom they themselves had given up. But then a day came which no one had expected, a day beginning with terror, but which turned all their fear into unspeakable joy, and convinced them that nothing was lost! Everything is gained! The greatest wonder possible, forgiveness of all sins, through God's eternal mercy, is acquired for us! Streams of life spring out from Golgotha through the world; He, the crucified, has saved us; He died, but His death, of which we are the cause, burdens us not, but rather sets us free; He died that we may have forgiveness of our sins! (pp. 22-23)

Cremer takes us through the psychological transformation of the disciples, showing us how they experienced the awesome blessing of forgiveness in their own transition from the horror of his betrayal and crucifixion, to the dawning of the first day of the week. To show this, Cremer first establishes the guilt of the disciples. They had taken offense when he spoke of his impending death. They had all fled when Judas came with the soldiers to arrest him. Peter had denied Jesus three times. Their guilt was greater than the guilt of the crowds who cried "Crucify him!" Their sin was greater than that of the priests and rulers of the people who had condemned him to die. Why? Because they had known Jesus as none of the others (p. 24); they had followed him, confessed him as Messiah, and enjoyed communion with him. Thus their guilt was the greatest, the culmination of the guilt of the entire world's rejection of him.

And yet, by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, they experienced the incredible reality of the forgiviness of sins. Easter morning was not the dawning of the day of judgment, but of grace (p. 26). When he appeared to them, Jesus did not come with wrath but with the salutation of peace (Luke 24:36; John 20:21, 26). And so the disciples concluded ...

We are pardoned, I am pardoned! ... Jesus ... is now something to us that no other man can be, something, indeed, which no brother could be to his brother. For He is our redeemer, our deliverer from judgment ... Tho, in fact, He is our brother, fully like us, member of our communion, yet is He our Lord, the only One in whom we can trust before the face of God. He suffered because of us, but not only because of us but at the same time with us, and not only with us but for us in our stead, when judgment was to come upon us. What our sin and guilt has imposed upon us to suffer He bore; it was imposed upon Him, and thereby He redeemed us from the curse. (pp. 29-30)

The origin of the apostolic message that Jesus "was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification" (Rom 4:25) is the disciples' personal experience of the forgiveness of their own guilt by the death of Jesus, a death that is clearly (in light of God's vindication of him by the resurrection) a death in our place, a death that was for our sins, so that we might be pardoned and accepted by God. This was why he had been anointed by God as "the Christ" and empowered to perform miracles. It was so that he might seek and save that which was lost, that he might give his life as a ransom for many and bring them to God.

And, again, to tie this back to Harnack, it is clear that this is message is one that differs starkly from Harnack's "gospel." For Harnack, Jesus' self-sacrificial death is merely an indicator of the depth of his devotion to his message, a message that is not about him but about the universal Fatherhood of God. For the apostles, by contrast, the cross is the heart of the gospel. That "Christ died for our sins" is the essence of the Christian faith, making Jesus not merely an example to follow but the divine Savior of sinners, who loved us and gave himself for us, the center and object of our faith, love, and worship.

Cremer: (1) Which Christianity? cont'd 2

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.

Cremer: (1) Which Christianity? cont'd

The concluding part of Cremer's first chapter is a very helpful reflection on the unity of the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ. Liberals like Harnack want to claim that the high Christology and soteriology of Paul and John is only one strand of the New Testament, and a strand that is a corruption of the simple message of Jesus. The theory is that the type of Jewish Christianity represented by James and the Jerusalem Church embraced a low Christology in which Jesus is merely a man who, by his great piety and Law-keeping, was adopted as God's "son" at his baptism in such a manner that he remains a purely human messiah. This is a Christology within the bounds of strict Jewish monotheism.

Cremer answers this claim by pointing out that the only disagreement or debate between some members of the Jerusalem Church and Pauline Christianity was over a question of missionary practice, i.e., the question whether the Gentiles had to become Jewish proselytes in order to be reckoned as members of the people of God.

Could it be conceivable that a Jewish Christian, like the author of James’s Epistle, should not have opposed, in the name of the Jews and in the name of Israelitish monotheism, such a deification of man if it had been the sign of the original Jewish Christianity not to regard Jesus as God and not to pray to him? No; the difference, which for a time really existed in the apostolic circle, until it was determined and overcome, did not at all concern the person of Christ, nor the importance of His work, His suffering, death, and resurrection for us. It concerned merely a question of missionary practice … whether the members of the Gentile world could have part in the Gospel without first becoming members of Israel’s communion …. But of a Jewish Christianity, which in the fundamental questions concerning the person and importance of Jesus Christ had differed from the apostolic preaching, we hear nothing during the actual apostolic time. This only belongs to a much later time. (pp. 17-18)

There was no debate within the pre-70 Jerusalem Church over the person of Christ. Why not? Because they agreed that Jesus was the Son of God now living and exalted to God’s throne. They agreed that Christians, according to their oldest appellation, are "those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 2:21; 9:14; 22:16; Rom 10:13; 1 Cor 1:2), i.e., a people who pray to the risen Jesus as the exalted "Lord" of heaven and earth. Had there been any disagreement over Christology between Paul and James, or between Peter and John, with regard to Christology, we would expect to see some traces of it in our sources, especially considering the Jewish zeal to avoid idolatry and protect the monotheistic creed of Israel.

When Cremer adds, "This only belongs to a much later time," he is referring to the heretical sect of the Ebionites whose existence is attested only in the second and third centuries. The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who espoused a low Christology and observed the Torah. They denied the preexistence and virgin birth of Christ, holding that he was the offspring of Mary and Joseph, born like any other man, but that by his perfect obedience to the Law merited adoption as God's anointed one. But there is no evidence for the Ebionites in the first century. The Jerusalem Church, the mother church of us all, which existed from the ascension of Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, was not characterized by Ebionite Christology.

And lest one think that Cremer is idiosyncratic, a more recent scholar, Richard Bauckham, agrees:

A high Christology was characteristic of the Jerusalem church. The low Christology later adopted by the Ebionites should not be projected back onto the Jerusalem church, as has often been done.

[Bauckham, "James and the Jerusalem Community," in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (eds. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007), 77.]

Cremer: (1) Which Christianity?

Chapter One of Cremer's Reply to Harnack is titled "Which Christianity?" Here, Cremer surveys the battle lines and shows what each side's view of Christianity is. On the one side is the Christianity of Harnack, on the other, the Christianity of the apostles as set forth in the New Testament. These two versions of Christianity stand diametrically opposed to one another and cannot be reconciled.

Is Christianity the religion which Jesus has practised, which He has attested, to whose practise and attendance He has invited men and shown them the way, a fire which by His preaching He has kindled in the hearts of His hearers? ... Or is the power which proceeds from Christ and to-day yet produces Christianity something else than the religion which He Himself practised? (p. 7)

Cremer answers that it is the latter. Christianity is not the religion that Jesus practised, as Harnack taught, but the object of our faith. 

Altho He is what we are, yet He stands in a different relation to the Father than we. He is our brother, who works for us, to whom we owe everything ... He is not, like ourselves, a subject of religion; on the contrary, He is the object of the religion, the object of Christianity. (p. 8) ... The religion in which the Christ of the New Testament is the object of faith is entirely different from the religion whose first, most prominent, and most effective subject is Jesus considered merely as a man. We have, then, to deal with different religions -- with the religion of the New Testament and with the religion that results from the foregoing kind of criticism. (p. 10)

This is Cremer's fundamental critique of Harnack. He will have many other things to say in this volume, but this is his basic polemic and everything else fits in in relation to it.

It is interesting to see that Machen, writing two decades later, made much the same argument in Christianity and Liberalism (1923):

The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus. According to modern liberalism, in other words, Jesus was the Founder of Christianity because He was the first Christian, and Christianity consists in maintenance of the religious life which Jesus instituted ... [But] the early Christians regarded Jesus not merely as an example for faith but primarily as the object of faith ... Christian faith is trust reposed in Him for the removal of sin; He could not repose trust ... in Himself; therefore He was certainly not a Christian. (pp. 85, 91)

If Jesus is the first and greatest subject of the Christian religion (that is, the first and greatest man to practise this religion), then he becomes merely an example to follow. He shows us how to have faith in God, and we then look not to him but to the Father he proclaimed. But if Jesus is first and foremost a divine Savior who came into the world to redeem sinners, then he is not the subject but the great object of the Christian religion, the object of our wonder, faith, adoration, and commitment. He is our Savior and our Lord.

Introducing Cremer's Reply to Harnack

I've completed my survey of Harnack's What is Christianity? The survey may have been a bit too long and scattered over too many posts, but it is important to be fair in presenting a man's position. I would also like to make clear that, even if I may have expressed agreement or appreciation for certain statements, at a fundamental level I do not agree with Harnack's vision of the essence of Christianity. It is not the Christ of the Bible that Harnack presents, but a "Christ" of his own making, a "Christ" who is purely human and ultimately one who cannot save sinners.

I have also just finished reading Hermann Cremer's Reply to Harnack and will be blogging through it shortly. I've got to tell you, Cremer has nailed it. Like Machen, he regards the liberal version of Christianity championed by Harnack to be another religion, not true Christianity. Cremer would therefore agree with Machen's disjunction: it is either Christianity or Liberalism.

Cremer writes in his Preface to the English edition:

In the controversy with Harnack the question is, whether the Christianity of the apostolic message is right, or whether it must be replaced by a Christianity of modern reflection and still more modern enthusiasm. The Christianity of the apostolic message applies to the lost sinner, to whom it offers salvation through the wondrous grace of God, who became our brother in Christ Jesus. Harnack's Christianity applies to the modern man who feels himself vexed, not by the moral but by the intellectual problem, because the moral problem, How is the sinner saved? does not exist for him.

In Chapter One, he adds:

With the exception, perhaps, of the conflicts of the early Christian centuries and of the Reformation, the present controversy is the severest that has ever been waged. We battle for the person and importance of Jesus Christ himself. Indeed, we fight a battle in which no truce is possible. Victory for either side necessarily means the destruction of the other. It is the battle of one religion with another religion. (p. 8)

The stakes are high. Indeed, our eternal destiny hangs on our answer to the question of our estimate of the person and work of Jesus. Either Jesus came merely to show us how to be good people by his example, or he came as the eternal Son of God to save us from our sins by his death for our sins and his resurrection for our justification.

Paul's Theology of Israel's Future (Romans 11)

My article, Paul's Theology of Israel's Future: A Nonmillennial Interpretation of Romans 11, published in Reformation & Revival in 1997, has been scanned and uploaded by Rob Bradshaw.  

Harnack on the Death and Resurrection of Jesus

In the second half of What is Christianity, Harnack examines the historical development of the Christian religion in five phases. I'm not going to go through his survey of each of the five phases, the bulk of which is a critique of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The exercise would not shed much light on Harnack's understanding of Christianity beyond what we have already come to see. However, he offers his liberal interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus in lecture IX (the first lecture in this second part) that I would like to summarize.

Harnack on the Death of Jesus

Harnack does not approach the meaning of Christ's death from the point of view of theology, i.e., a theory of the atonement, but from the point of view of religious psychology. Harnack takes a psychological approach to the death of Christ "for us" because he begins with a rationalistic assumption that God would never really require sacrifices, animal or human, to atone for sins. Among the pagans, blood sacrifice was practiced out of a emotional/religious instinct that is not subject to rational analysis but which, by virtue of its universality, clearly corresponds to a deep human need. The death of Jesus was regarded by the early Christians as the ultimate satisfaction of this religio-psychological need. The fact that they soon stopped offering blood sacrifices proves this. The sacrifice of Jesus put an end to blood sacrifice because it tapped into that deep, dark sub-rational need for sacrifice found in almost all cultures. Harnack therefore cannot say that the death of Jesus was an expiatory sacrifice for sins. Rather, "His death had the value of an expiatory sacrifice, for otherwise it would not have had strength to penetrate into that inner world in which blood-sacrifices originated" (pp. 157-8, emphasis mine).

Harnack on the Resurrection of Jesus

If Harnack's interpretation of the death of Jesus falls short of the church's historic understanding of the atonement, his interpretation of the resurrection amounts to a denial of this essential article of the faith (1 Cor. 15:14). I mentioned this in an earlier post, but it is worth noting again that Harnack makes a fatal distinction between "the Easter message of the empty grave" on the one hand and "the Easter faith" on the other. "We must hold to the Easter faith even without the Easter message" (p. 160). The Easter message is what happened empirically to the body of Christ in the tomb. The accounts of the women at the grave and the various post-resurrection appearances are so confused and contradictory that we can never know what happened empirically. But all that is irrelevant. Our faith does not hang on resolving such details.

Whatever may have happened at the grave and in the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain:  This grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished, that there is a life eternal. (p. 162)

As with his interpretation of the death of Christ, the focus is not on the objective fact of the atonement and the resurrection, but on what these events meant to the early Christians. The death of Christ "had the value of an expiatory sacrifice." The strange stories told by the women and the post-resurrection appearances gave rise to "the indestructible belief that death is vanquished." The empirical details of these events are not important. What is important are the beliefs and religious feelings that were somehow engendered by them. 

No wonder Harnack's own father said to him:

Our difference is not a theological, but a profound, directly Christian difference. I would deny Christ were I to gloss over it. For whoever regards the fact of the resurrection as you do -- to mention only the all-important and main issue -- is, in my view, no longer a Christian theologian.

[Quoted by Martin Rumscheid, Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at its Height, p. 15.]