The “Message” Brought by Dr. Harnack’s “Jesus” Contained Nothing New

But, it will be urged, does not the message

that He brought decide the question — “a glad

message assuring us of life eternal,’* a message that brings to us “the certainty of redemption, humility, and joy in God?”’+ High sounding words these, but let us examine them. Dr. Harnack analyses the “message” for us. It relates to three spheres, he tells us, which in fact “coalesce.” And these are “the kingdom of God, God as the Father and the infinite value of the human soul, and the higher righteousness showing itself in love.”£ But what is this “higher righteousness?” To love God and our neighbours. Surely the true Rationalist will enter a protest here. The light of nature will teach us that. That cold light,- indeed, will neither solve the mystery of our strange incapacity to obey the law of our being, nor yet give us strength to fulfil that law. For Nature has no word of either help or pity in behalf of trutirand good and right, and agaist sp ia I

a error and evil and wrong. And here the Christian will join with the Rationalist in his protest; for this is precisely what he means when he describes the decalogue as “the moral law.” The fact is, that Prof. Harnack’s contempt for the Old Testament and its “capricious and warlike Jehovah’* has led him to forget that this law of love was preached in the Pentateuch, and that in proclaiming it “Jesus” was avowedly quoting Moses.

The same cause, perhaps, has blinded him to the fact that “the kingdom,” as he conceives it, is taught as fully in the Old Testament as in the New. For if “the kingdom is nothing but the treasure which the soul possesses in the eternal and merciful God,”t the fact is indisputable that the worship of hearts that have possessed this treasure has always found its truest and fullest expression in the language of the Psalms.

oh wb

+ The “New Commandment” was not to love a neighbour, but to love a fellow-disciple according to the

standard of the Master’s love.
Ye penta.