Introductory

Ne of the most striking features of religious thought to-day is the honour paid to the Founder of Christianity by those who reject His claims to divine homage. With the cultured Jew the once execrated Nazarene is now held in respect as one of the great Rabbis of the past. With the cultured infidel the coarse hatred of Voltaire has given place to the exquisite admiration of Renan. The change is most grateful to the Christian. But it is not without its perils. There is a real danger lest the gulf should be ignored which lies between a generous appreciation of the greatest of religious teachers and the spiritual worship of our Divine Saviour and Lord. And this danger is intensified when the homage comes from one who claims a place within the camp of faith, and when it is clothed in the very words of Scripture — words which to Christian ears seem to carry with them the acknowledgment that He is divine.

These thoughts are suggested by the study of Professor Harnack’s What is Christianity ?* In striking contrast with the dreary periods of Strauss’s New Life of Jesus, these pages glow with life and sympathy; and the reader is carried along by charms of style and diction, which even the ordeal of translation into English has failed to destroy. And more than this, the use of New Testament terminology seems to assure us that we are in touch with the great facts and truths of Christianity. For here we read of “the kingdom of God,” “the Messiah,” “the Son of God,” “the God-man,” “the expiatory death” of Him who “was proclaimed as ‘the Lord,’ not only because He had died for sinners, but because He was the risen and the living One,” the Bearer of “the glad message assuring us of eternal life.”

This is well fitted to deceive the superficial.

* What is Christianity? Sixteen lectures delivered in the University of Berlin. Translated into HEnglish by Thos. Bailey Saunders. (Williams & Norgate, London.)

But the careful reader recognizes that it is but the husk from which all that is vital in Christian truth has disappeared. To give a new reading to an old text, we might say that “the voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” For the phraseology represents not the divinely accredited realities on which the Christian’s faith is founded, but merely ideas suggested to the minds of the disciples by the public facts of their Master’s ministry and death. ‘“Reconciler” has become a term of reproach. But in a new sense Dr. Harnack is a champion reconciler. We knew that Christianity — so indestructible is its vital force — could survive the pressure of a weight of Rationalism; his aim has been to prove that Rationalism can adopt the whole apparatus of the Christian creed. The corruption of Christianity by Rationalism is no new thing; but he hasshown..us...that..Rationalism..pure..and simple can disguise.itself in a.Christian dress.