Tradition
Adolf von Harnack
Overview
Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack (born Harnack; 7 May 1851 – 10 June 1930) was a Baltic German Lutheran theologian and prominent church historian. He produced many religious publications from 1873 to 1912 (in which he is sometimes credited as Adolf Harnack). He was ennobled (with the addition of von to his name) in 1914.
Harnack traced the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on early Christian writings and called on Christians to question the authenticity of doctrines that arose in the early Christian church. He rejected the historicity of the Gospel of John in favor of the Synoptic Gospels, criticized the Apostles' Creed, and promoted the Social Gospel.
In the 19th century, higher criticism flourished in Germany, establishing the historical-critical method as an academic standard for interpreting the Bible and understanding the historical Jesus (see Tübingen school). Harnack's work is part of a reaction to Tübingen, and represents a reappraisal of tradition.
Besides his theological activities, Harnack was a distinguished organizer of sciences. He played an important role in the foundation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft and became its first president.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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To call him a spiritualist would be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. . . . Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions." And again speaking of Luther's work: "Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought. Thought became a right and the decisions of reason legitimate." The specific correctness of the above…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
States what Adolf von Harnack is.
Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class, when Hegel in his "Philosophy of Law" pronounced Constitutional Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Close in meaning to Adolf von Harnack; the term itself is not named.
Furthermore, the way was cleared for the philosophical position that history is not, as was once thought, the expression of a predetermined plan whose purpose is that of a divine education, but that it is the result of laws immanent in historical life itself. Though variously expressed and partly obscured by surviving ideas of the preceding period, this is the fundamental conviction common to the nineteenth-century…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Close in meaning to Adolf von Harnack; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Adolf von Harnack
Related ideas
- Eusebius
- Hellenistic philosophy
- Gnosticism
- Gospel of John
- Doctrine
- Russian Empire
- New Testament
- Patristics
- Karl Barth
- Protestantism
- Orthodoxy
- World War II
- Weimar Republic
- Leipzig University
- Reformation
- Dogma
- World War I
- Marburg University
- University of Giessen
- Apocalypse
Place in the tradition
Part of Gnosticism.