Adolf von Harnack

Adolf von Harnack , 1851-1930, German theologian and church historian. He was professor of church history successively in the universities of Leipzig, Giessen, Marburg, and Berlin. He was director (1905-21) of the Royal Library, Berlin, and president of the scientific research foundation, Kaiser Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. His great work, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (4 vol., 1886-90; tr. The History of Dogma, 7 vol., 1895-1900), has exerted an important influence upon modern theological study. Other translated works include Monasticism (1895), What Is Christianity? (1901), The Apostles' Creed (1901), The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (2 vol., 1904-5), and Luke the Physician (1907).

Bibliography: See studies by G. W. Glick (1967) and W. Pauck (1968).

Harnack, Adolf von (1851–1930) Professor at Berlin, and historian of the early Church. He wrote also on the Acts and maintained the traditional view of Lucan authorship. A Liberal Protestant, he believed the essence of Jesus' teaching to be concerned with the Fatherhood of God and the value of the individual. Harnack was one of the leading intellectuals to sign a manifesto supporting the Kaiser's war in 1914.

Harnack, Adolf Von (1851–1930). Christian theologian and historian. He gained his doctorate from Leipzig in 1873, and after a short period (1886–9) as professor at Marburg, he moved to Berlin where he remained until his retirement in 1921. The move to Berlin was challenged by the Lutheran Church because of the doubts expressed by Harnack in his Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (History of Dogma, 1894–9) about the authorship of various New Testament books, miracles, the resurrection, and Christ's institution of baptism. Influenced by Ritschl, he regarded hellenization as an intrusion into early Christianity, which had distorted the original, simpler gospel, whose content he summarized in Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity). Harnack was a particular target of his pupil K. Barth, for allowing liberal thought to control his understanding of early Christianity and of dogma.