Modern Religion

Modern Religion

By Adolph von Harnack

To our modern way of thinking and feeling, Christ's message appears in the clearest and most direct light when grasped in connexion with the idea of God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. Here the elements which I would describe as the restful and rest-giving in Jesus' message, and which are comprehended in the idea of our being children of God, find expression. I call them restful in contrast with the impulsive and stirring elements; although it is just that they are informed with a special strength. But the fact that the whole of Jesus' message may be reduced to these two heads---God as the Father, and the human soul so ennobled that it can and does unite with him---shows us that the Gospel is in no-wise a positive religion like the rest; that it contains no statutory of particularistic elements; that it is, therefore, religion itself. It is superior to all antithesis and tension between this world and a world to come, between reason and ecstasy, between work and isolation from the world, between Judaism and Hellenism. It can dominate them all, and there is no factor of earthly life to which it is confined or necessarily tied down ...

It is by their prayers that the character of the higher religions is determined... The very apostrophe of the prayer, 'Our Father', exhibits the steady faith of the man who knows that he is safe in God, and it tells us that he is certain of being heard. Not to hurl violet desires to heaven or to obtain this or that earthly blessing does he pray, but to preserve the power which he already possesses and strengthen the union with God in which he lives. No one, then, can utter this prayer unless his heart is in profound peace and his mind wholly concentrated on the inner relation of the soul with God. All other prayers are of a lower order, for they contain particularistic elements, or are so framed that in some way or other they stir the imagination in regard to the things of sense as well; whilst this prayer leads us away from everything to the height where the soul is alone with its God. And yet the earthly element is not absent. The whole of the second half of the prayer deals with earthly relations but they are placed in the light of the Eternal. In vain will you look for any request for particular gifts of grace, or special blessings, even of a spiritual kind. 'All else shall be added unto you.' The name of God, His will, and His kingdom - these elements of rest and permanence are poured out over the earthly relations as well. Everything that is small and selfish melts away, and only four things are left with regard to which it is worth while to pray - the daily bread, the daily trespass, the daily temptations, and the evil in life. There is nothing in the Gospels that tells us more certainly what the Gospel is, and what sort of disposition and temper it produces, than the Lord's Prayer. With this prayer we ought also to confront all those who disparage the Gospel by representing it as an ascetic or ecstatic or sociological pronouncement. It shows the Gospel to be the Fatherhood of God applied to the whole of life; to be an inner union with God's will and God's kingdom, and a joyous certainty of the possession of eternal blessings and protection from evil.(…)

Anyone who looks at the external condition of Protestantism, especially in Germany, may, at first sight, well exclaim: 'What a miserable spectacle!' But no one can survey the history of Europe from the second century to the present time without being forced to the conclusion that in the whole course of this history the greatest movement and the one most pregnant with good was the Reformation in the sixteenth century; even the great change which took place at the transition to the nineteenth is inferior to it in importance. What do all our discoveries and inventions and our advances in outward civilization signify in comparison with the fact that today... millions of Christians possess a religion without priests, without sacrifices, without 'fragments of grace, without ceremonies' - a spiritual religion!

Protestantism was a Reformation, that is to say, a renewal, as regards the core of the matter, as regards religion, and consequently as regards the doctrine of salvation. That may be shown in the main in three points.

In the first place, religion was here brought back again to itself, insofar as the Gospel and the corresponding religious experience were put into the foreground and free of all alien accretions. Religion was taken out of the vast and monstrous fabric which had been previously called by its name--- a fabric embracing the Gospel and holy water, the priesthood of all believers and the Pope on his throne, Christ the Redeemer and St. Anne---and was reduced to its essential factors, to the Word of God and to faith. This truth was imposed as a criterion on everything that also claimed to be 'religion' and to unite on terms of equality with those great factors. In the history of religions every really important reformation is always, first and foremost, a critical reduction to principles; for in the course of its historical development, religion, by adapting itself to circumstances, attracts to itself much alien matter, and produces, in conjunction with this, a number of hybrid and apocryphal elements, which it is necessarily compelled to place under the protection of what is sacred. If it is not to run wild from exuberance, or be choked by its own dry leaves, the reformer must come who purifies it and brings it back to itself. This critical reduction to principles Luther accomplished in the sixteenth century, by victoriously declaring that the Christian religion was given only in the Word of God and in the inward experience which accords with this Word.

In the second place, there was the definite way in which the 'Word of God' and the 'experience' of it were grasped. For Luther the 'Word' did not mean church doctrine; it did not even mean the Bible; it meant the message of the free grace of God in Christ which makes guilty and despairing men happy and blessed; and the 'experience' was just the certainty of this grace. In this sense in which Luther took them, both can be embraced in one phrase: the confident belief in a God of grace ...

Source: Von Harnack, What is Christianity (1900).