Justified True Belief

(●) The greatest church historian of his age, who tried to rescue Christianity by separating the gospel Jesus preached from the doctrines the church built on it. + If you have ever heard someone say that the simple faith of Jesus was buried under Greek philosophy, or that the creeds are a later overlay on a plainer message, you have heard Adolf von Harnack, whether or not the speaker knew the name. He is the man who made that idea respectable, and he made it respectable by knowing the sources better than anyone alive. That is the thing to hold on to about him. He was not a popularizer taking shortcuts. He read the Christian literature of the first three centuries the way a mechanic reads an engine, and the catalog of his own publications, compiled by the librarian Friedrich Smend, runs to roughly sixteen hundred items: critical editions, monographs, essays, reviews, reports. Conservative scholars who reject nearly every conclusion he reached still pull his volumes off the shelf, because the spadework underneath them was honest. Two things about him matter to a Christian trying to think honestly, and they pull in opposite directions. He is among the most formidable critics the church has produced from inside its own faculties, and much of what liberal Protestantism still says about Jesus was said best by him. He is also the scholar who, late in life and against his own interest, argued that the Acts of the Apostles was written before Paul’s trial in Rome ended, an early date that conservative apologists quote to this day. And here is one more fact worth carrying away from him: the church historian drew up the plan for Germany’s national research organization, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and served as its first president, and the institutes he argued for carry on today as the Max Planck Society.

(●) 1851 AD: Born in Dorpat to a Lutheran professor for whom doctrine was not negotiable. + Adolf Harnack was born on 7 May 1851 in Dorpat, the German-speaking university town in Livonia that is now Tartu in Estonia, then a Baltic province of the Russian Empire. He had a twin brother, Axel, who grew up to be a mathematician. The house was full of books, and it was full of argument. His father, Theodosius Harnack, held a chair in practical and systematic theology, first at Dorpat, then for thirteen years at Erlangen in Bavaria, then at Dorpat again until failing health made him give up the chair in 1875. Theodosius was a confessional Lutheran of the old school, which meant that for him the Lutheran confessions were not historical documents to be studied but binding statements of what a Christian must hold. He watched his son’s career with growing alarm and told him so. That quarrel is the key to the whole life. Adolf never became an unbeliever and never left the church, and he read his Bible daily to the end. What he rejected was his father’s assumption that the doctrine and the gospel were the same thing. Everything he later wrote is, in one way or another, an argument with the man who raised him.

(●) 1873 AD: A doctorate before he was twenty-three, and the working habit that made his name: read everything, and date it. + He studied at Dorpat from 1869 to 1872 and then moved to Leipzig, where he took his doctorate in 1873 on the sources for the history of Gnosticism. The Gnostics were the teachers of the second century who offered salvation through a secret knowledge kept for insiders, and in his day almost everything known of them came from the quotations their opponents made in order to refute them. A student who wanted to know what the Gnostics had actually said, then, had to work backwards through hostile witnesses, weighing each one. It is hard to imagine a better apprenticeship for a historian. He qualified to lecture the following year and was made an extraordinary professor, which in the German universities meant a salaried teaching post one rung below a full chair, before he was twenty-six. A chair at Giessen followed in 1879, and a move to Marburg in 1886. The habit he formed in those years never changed. Take every surviving scrap of early Christian writing, establish what it actually says, work out when it was written and by whom, and let the story emerge from the sequence rather than from the doctrine you expect to find. In 1882, with the scholar Oscar von Gebhardt, he launched a series called Texte und Untersuchungen, "Texts and Investigations," which published critical editions of early Christian literature and is still running today. A critical edition is the unglamorous floor everything else stands on. An editor gathers every surviving manuscript of a work, sets the copies side by side, and prints the text with a record, line by line, of every place where the copies disagree, so that the next scholar argues from what the author most likely wrote rather than from whichever copy happened to be at hand. The three volumes of his Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, the textbook of the history of doctrine, appeared between 1886 and 1890 and made him famous across Europe. A history of doctrine asks a question most readers have never thought to ask: not "what does the church teach," but "when did the church start teaching that, and why then?" Harnack’s answer, traced century by century with the footnotes to prove it, was that the great doctrines had a birthday, and that the birthday came later than most Christians assume.

(●) 1888 AD: Berlin called him to its chair of church history, and the church authorities tried to block it. + In German universities a theological chair was a state appointment, so the man whose signature made a professor was a government minister and not a bishop. That did not leave the church without a voice. A Prussian cabinet order of 1855 gave the Evangelical Supreme Church Council, the body that governed the Protestant church in Prussia, the right to say what it thought of the doctrine of any theologian being called, a call being the German term for the formal offer of a chair. In May 1888 it said what it thought, at length. Its members had read the Lehrbuch, and they objected: to what Harnack had written about the authorship of John’s Gospel and other books of the New Testament, about the miracle narratives and the accounts of the resurrection, about whether the Lord himself had instituted baptism. A man who held those views, they argued, should not be forming pastors. The Berlin faculty had already put him first on its list, the Prussian minister of culture stood by that list, Bismarck pressed the case, and in December 1888 the new Kaiser signed the appointment over the church’s protest. Harnack came to Berlin. He taught there until 1921, and hundreds of students packed his early morning lectures on church history, which he delivered in a plain, unhurried voice without reading from a page. He had won the post and lost the peace. The church made its own arrangement quietly and kept to it for the rest of his life: the professor of church history at the capital’s university was never given any part in examining candidates for ordination. From that year on he was a man with one foot in the state university and one foot in a church that did not trust him, and his enemies inside it never stopped watching.

(●) 1892 AD: He asked whether candidates for ordination should still be required to swear the Apostles’ Creed, and Germany erupted. + Picture a young man with his theological examinations behind him, standing in front of a board of older ministers who want to know whether he can say the Apostles’ Creed and mean it. The Apostles’ Creed is the short confession most Western Christians can recite from memory: born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, descended into hell, rose again the third day. In Prussia every candidate for ordination had to affirm it, and a candidate who balked at the virgin birth or the descent into hell could be refused. Students asked Harnack what he made of the requirement, and in 1892 he answered in print. The creed, he argued, was not the work of the apostles; it had a traceable history, and its clauses had been added over time. As a test for ministers it asked too much and too little at once: too much, in that it demanded assent to statements a serious historian could not simply affirm as reported; too little, in that it left out almost everything that makes the gospel good news. He proposed a shorter confession instead. The response was enormous and furious. Newspapers ran the quarrel for months, a petition of conservative pastors demanded action, and the church denied his proposal any recognition. The split it opened ran the length of German Protestantism. On one side stood the liberal theologians of the Ritschl school, the men who followed Albrecht Ritschl of Göttingen in treating Christianity as a matter of moral and religious life rather than of metaphysical doctrine. On the other stood the church party that called itself the Positive Union, which held the old confessions to be binding on anyone who would preach. It settled his reputation for good: to one half of Germany he was the honest scholar who would not pretend, and to the other half he was the professor at Berlin who had taken the creed away from the people.

(●) 1900 AD: Sixteen lectures delivered without a manuscript became What Is Christianity?, the most widely read theology book of the age. + In the winter term of 1899 and 1900 Harnack announced a lecture course open to students of every faculty, not only theologians, on a single question: what is Christianity? Law students, medical students and engineers filled the hall alongside the theologians, more than six hundred of them in all. He spoke from notes so slight that they were effectively no notes at all. One of the theology students, Walther Becker, took the whole course down in shorthand and afterwards handed the professor a transcript. Harnack went over it lightly, added a preface, and sent it to the printer that May. It became Das Wesen des Christentums, published in 1900 and translated the next year as What Is Christianity?. It sold in the tens of thousands, went through edition after edition, and was turned into more than a dozen languages. Nothing else that came out of German theology reached so far past the professional scholars and into the hands of ordinary readers. The book is warm, unpolemical and strangely moving in places, which is part of why it worked. A reader who had given up on the church for its quarrels could open it and find a scholar of the first rank saying that the heart of the thing is the Father, the soul, and love of neighbour, and that the rest can be set down. Millions found that a relief. What he had also done, without raising his voice, was to move the Son out of the message and into the messenger.

(●) 1914 AD: The Kaiser ennobled him, and he lent the war his pen and his name. + By then he was among the most honoured scholars in Germany, and he was close to the throne. From 1905 he ran the Royal Library in Berlin, the national collection, and he kept that post until 1921. He had also become the man the government sent for when it wanted something built. In 1909 he wrote the memorandum that persuaded it to found a national society for scientific research, and when the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was established in 1911 Harnack became its first president and stayed in the office until he died. Then, in 1914, Wilhelm II raised him to the nobility, and Adolf Harnack became Adolf von Harnack. That small von is not a title like count or baron but the German mark of nobility carried in the name itself, which is why his name changes halfway through any account of his life. Then the war came. Working with the historian Reinhold Koser, he drafted the appeal to the German people that went out over the Kaiser’s name on 6 August 1914, and in October he put his signature to the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, a public declaration by German professors, artists and scientists defending their country’s conduct and denying the reports of atrocities in Belgium. A Swiss pastor in his twenties named Karl Barth, who had studied under Harnack and revered him, said later that he had read the list of signatories and found on it the names of nearly all his own teachers, and that the theology which had produced those names had, for him, no future left. The seminar rooms of Berlin had been the centre of Protestant learning; after that autumn the young men began to look elsewhere, and it was Harnack’s generation that lost them.

(●) 1930 AD: He died in Heidelberg at seventy-nine, and a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke at his memorial. + He had given up the chair in 1921, but a German professor who retires keeps the title as an emeritus and often keeps the lectern with it, and Harnack lectured as an emeritus professor into 1929 and kept working to the end. In June 1930 he travelled to Heidelberg for the general meeting of the society he had led since its founding, fell ill there, followed the proceedings from his sickbed, and died on 10 June. Among the speakers at the memorial service in Berlin on 15 June, standing up on behalf of the students, was a twenty-four-year-old theologian who had sat in Harnack’s seminar and ridden the same train into the city with him, a neighbour’s son named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer had already gone over to the theology of Barth, which Harnack regretted, and the old man had hoped to make a church historian of him. It made no difference to the tribute. What Bonhoeffer thanked him for was the refusal to let anything stand in the way of an honest question, and he said of him that truth is born only of freedom. He did not live to see what the next fifteen years would cost his family, and it is as well that he did not. His son Ernst, a civil servant, was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in the conspiracy against Hitler. His nephew Arvid was executed in 1942 for resistance work. His daughter Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, one of the leading figures of the German women’s movement, wrote the biography of her father that remains the fullest account of him.

What He Taught

(T1) The gospel Jesus preached was about the Father, not about himself. + Think of a man who spends his life telling people about someone he loves. Years after he dies, his friends write his biography, and the book turns out to be about him rather than about the person he kept pointing to. That, in Harnack’s reading, is roughly what happened between Jesus of Nazareth and the church that followed him. He set out what Jesus actually preached under three headings: the kingdom of God and its coming; God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul; and the higher righteousness with the commandment of love. Each of the three, he said, contains the whole. Notice what is not on the list. There is no atonement, no incarnation, no second person of the Trinity, no church, no sacrament. Those things belong, on his account, to the gospel about Jesus, which the apostles began to preach after Easter and which is a different thing from the gospel of Jesus. He did not mean by this that Jesus was ordinary. He thought no one had ever known the Father as Jesus knew the Father, and that Jesus leads people to God by what he is and does and suffers as much as by what he says. But the Son, for Harnack, belongs to the gospel as the one who brings it, not as part of its content. Set that beside the first sermon in Acts, where Peter’s subject is Jesus crucified and raised, and the fault line that has run through the study of the New Testament for the last hundred and twenty years opens up in front of you.

(Q) "The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son." + Source: Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity?, Lecture VIII, p. 144 (Thomas Bailey Saunders translation, 1901). He knew exactly how the sentence would land, and he added at once that it is "no paradox, nor, on the other hand, is it ‘rationalism,’ but the simple expression of the actual fact as the evangelists give it." The whole quarrel between liberal and orthodox Protestantism is packed into that one line (T1).

(T2) Dogma is the work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel. + This is the sentence he is remembered for, and it is worth unpacking slowly, because it is usually quoted with the second half chopped off. By dogma Harnack meant something narrower than doctrine in general: the formal, metaphysical definitions the church hammered out at its councils, of the sort that say the Son is "of one substance with the Father." Those words are not biblical words. Substance, nature, person and essence are the working vocabulary of Greek philosophy, the terms a man schooled in Plato and Aristotle would have had ready to hand before he ever opened a Gospel. Harnack’s claim was that when the gospel moved out of Palestine into the Greek-speaking world, educated converts reached for the tools they already owned, which is what anybody does. What came out at the other end, on his account, was a Christianity expressed as a system of knowledge rather than as a message to the poor and the weary. He called the process Hellenization, from Hellas, the Greeks’ own name for Greece. Two things are commonly forgotten. The first is that he admired what came out of it. He calls the dogma a great achievement of the human spirit and the instrument by which the church conquered the ancient world. The second is the phrase "on the soil of the gospel," and he lost his temper with critics who dropped it. He was not saying that dogma is simply Greek philosophy in Christian dress. He was saying it grew out of genuinely Christian ground and took its shape from the climate of that ground. A vine is not the same thing as the field, but it tastes of the field it grew in.

(Q) "Dogma in its conception and development is a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the Gospel." + Source: Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma, Volume I, p. 17 (Neil Buchanan translation of the third German edition). In a note at the end of the same volume he complains that the definition "has frequently been distorted by my critics, as they have suppressed the words ‘on the soil of the Gospel.’ But these words are decisive. The foolishness of identifying dogma and Greek philosophy never entered my mind" (T2).

(T3) Nothing that happens in space and time interrupts the order of nature. + Harnack was fairer to the miracle stories than most of his generation, and it is worth saying so before saying the rest. He pointed out that miracles get reported of famous people immediately, often the very next day, so a narrative cannot be dated late merely because it contains one; he called that habit of criticism a piece of prejudice. He held that Jesus really did heal people, and that the effect of a commanding personality on sick bodies is a fact of experience and not a fairy tale. And then he drew the line. Whatever happens in space and time, he said, follows the general laws of motion, and in that sense there are no miracles. It is worth slowing down over the shape of that sentence. He is not saying "we have no evidence for miracles," which would be a claim about evidence, and a claim about evidence can be met with more evidence. He is saying something about what can happen at all, and once that is granted, no amount of testimony can ever be enough, because any report of a suspended law is by definition a report of something that did not occur. He was honest that the religious person feels otherwise, and even said that a religious man must think with remarkable clarity to hold both things at once. That is where the argument really lies, and it is not a historical argument. It is a philosophical one that the historian brings to the documents before he opens them. Christian thinkers from Harnack’s day to ours have pressed exactly that point: the question is not whether nature has a regular order, which no Christian denies, but whether the God who set the order going is free to act within it.

(Q) "We are firmly convinced that what happens in space and time is subject to the general laws of motion, and that in this sense, as an interruption of the order of Nature, there can be no such things as ‘miracles.’" + Source: Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity?, Lecture II, p. 26 (Thomas Bailey Saunders translation, 1901). It is the third of four numbered observations on the miraculous, and the two either side of it are generous to the Gospels. Harnack states the principle calmly, as something every educated person already grants, which is precisely how a premise of this size usually enters an argument (T3).

(T4) Luke wrote Acts before Paul’s trial in Rome was over, which puts the first three Gospels early. + Here is the surprise of his career, and he knew it was one. For most of the nineteenth century critical scholarship had taken it as settled that Luke and Acts were written well after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. Harnack worked the problem through a run of New Testament studies between 1906 and 1911 and came out on the other side. His reasoning is the kind an ordinary reader can follow. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome, preaching to whoever comes to the door, for two whole years. Then it simply stops. It never says how the trial came out. It never mentions Paul’s execution, or Peter’s, or Nero’s persecution, or the fall of Jerusalem, and those are the events an author writing later would have found it almost impossible to leave out. A biographer who finished a life of a condemned man without mentioning the verdict would be doing something very strange, unless the verdict had not yet come in. So Harnack concluded that Acts was written while Paul was still awaiting judgment, around AD 62. Luke’s Gospel had to come earlier still, since Acts is its sequel, and Mark earlier than that. He was candid about what this did and did not settle, and would not let an early date be mistaken for a guarantee of accuracy: moving the documents back thirty years did not, for him, make their miracle stories credible. But he had given the case for early Gospels its most distinguished advocate, and he had done it from the last quarter anyone expected.

(Q) "The concluding verses of the Acts of the Apostles, taken in conjunction with the absence of any reference in the book to the result of the trial of St Paul and to his martyrdom, make it in the highest degree probable that the work was written at a time when St Paul’s trial in Rome had not yet come to an end." + Source: Adolf Harnack, The Date of the Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels, p. 99 (J. R. Wilkinson translation, 1911). He italicised the sentence in the original, which he rarely did. Elsewhere in the same book he adds that Luke’s "absolute silence concerning everything that happened between the years 64 and 70 a.d. is a strong argument for the hypothesis that his book was written before the year 64 a.d." (T4).

(T5) Protestantism should stop treating the Old Testament as canonical Scripture. + In 1921, at seventy, he published a monograph on Marcion, the second-century teacher from Sinope who decided that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ were two different beings, threw out the Hebrew Scriptures, and cut the Gospels and Paul down to a shorter canon of his own. The church expelled him, and Marcion is a large part of the reason the church began to say out loud which books it held to be Scripture. Harnack’s book is the standard study, and it ends with a proposal. One word has to be clear before the proposal can be. Canonical means belonging to the rule: to the list of books a church receives as authoritative for faith, the books read out in worship and appealed to when a question of doctrine has to be settled. Rejecting the Old Testament in the second century, Harnack wrote, was a mistake the church rightly refused to make. Keeping it in the sixteenth was a fate the Reformation could not yet escape. But to go on treating it as canonical in the nineteenth century and after is the symptom of a church too paralysed to say what it knows. He did not propose burning it or banning it. He wanted it placed at the head of the books that are good and useful to read, with its genuinely edifying passages kept in use, and the congregations left in no doubt that it is not a canonical book. His reasons were partly historical, since he held that the idea of a verbally inspired text had already collapsed, and partly pastoral: he believed most of the objections ordinary people raise against Christianity come from the authority the church still gives the Old Testament. It is the one place where the most learned man in the room proposed something the church across every one of its branches has refused, and refused for the plainest of reasons. Jesus read those Scriptures as being about himself (Luke 24:27), and the apostolic preaching is that Christ died and rose "in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3–4), which are the Scriptures Harnack wanted moved off the list.

(Q) "To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church rightly refused to make; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation was not yet able to escape; but still to preserve it as a canonical document within Protestantism since the nineteenth century is the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical paralysis." + Source: Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, chapter X, pp. 248–249 (rendered from the German of the first edition, 1921; the standard English version is that of John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, 1990, p. 134). Harnack sets the sentence down near the head of his closing chapter, in the section on Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament, and the rest of the chapter argues it out (T5).

(Q) "The Easter faith is the conviction that the crucified one gained a victory over death; that God is just and powerful; that he who is the firstborn among many brethren still lives." + Source: Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity?, Lecture IX, p. 161 (Thomas Bailey Saunders translation, 1901). He is drawing a distinction he takes to be already present in the New Testament: the Easter message reports the empty tomb and the appearances, while the Easter faith is the conviction that Christ lives, and a Christian may hold the second, he argues, even without the first. Read it twice. It is beautiful, it is sincere, and it is the exact point at which his friends and his critics have to decide whether the tomb mattered.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Catholic and Protestant critics alike answered that the Jesus he had found was a reflection of his own face. + The replies came fast, and the best of them made the same move. If you strip away everything the church added, they asked, how do you know that what is left is Jesus rather than yourself? The French Catholic scholar Alfred Loisy published L’Évangile et l’Église in 1902, aimed straight at What Is Christianity?. Loisy accepted a great deal of the critical method and used it to argue the opposite conclusion: the kingdom Jesus preached was never a private inward thing, so the church that grew up is a development of the message rather than a corruption of it. His summary sentence has outlived the book. "Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came." Seven years later the Irishman George Tyrrell put the objection at its sharpest. Tyrrell was a modernist, which in the Catholic world of those years meant a scholar who wanted the church’s teaching rethought in the light of modern historical study, and he had been thrown out of the Jesuits for it; the book in question came out in the year he died. Lean over the parapet of a deep well and what looks up at you out of the dark, once your eyes adjust, is your own face. That is the picture Tyrrell reached for, and the sentence has followed Harnack ever since: the Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well. Albert Schweitzer pressed the same charge from a different direction in 1906, arguing that the real Jesus of the Gospels is a Jewish prophet consumed by the end of the age, a stranger to the nineteenth century and not at all the reasonable teacher of the fatherhood of God.

(†) Karl Barth, his own best student, broke with him in public and took the next generation along. + Barth had studied under him and thought him the finest teacher in Europe. Then came the war manifesto of 1914, and then the trenches, and Barth, pastoring a Swiss village and standing up every Sunday to preach to farmers, found that the theology he had been taught had nothing to say to them. His commentary on Romans, which came out in 1919 and again in a completely rewritten second edition in 1922, landed on the theologians of Europe like a bomb, and its subject is the God who speaks and judges and is not continuous with the best of human culture. In 1923 teacher and student argued it out in the open, in five letters printed in the journal Die christliche Welt. Harnack led with "Fifteen Questions to Those Among the Theologians Who Are Contemptuous of Scientific Theology," and his worry was simple and serious: if revelation is not accessible to historical study, what stops theology from becoming whatever the preacher feels? Barth answered that God is not an object the historian can examine, and that the task of theology is to hear the Word, not to survey the religious experience of the human race. Neither persuaded the other. Harnack’s charge, pressed to the end, was that a theology whose object no critical study can reach has turned the professor’s chair into a pulpit. Barth won the century. By the 1930s the students who would have gone to Berlin were reading Barth, and the movement Harnack had led was finished as a school, though not as an instinct.

(†) Scholars who reject his conclusions still work with the tools he made. + There is a peculiar honesty in how the church has handled him, and it comes from the quality of the spadework. His Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, which traces the spread of the church city by city and province by province, is still the starting point for anyone asking how a Galilean movement reached the Roman Empire, and the sociologist Rodney Stark and others have built on it and argued with it a century later. The Texte und Untersuchungen series he founded put the early Christian sources into critical editions that scholars of every conviction still cite. The most enjoyable turn is the dating. Conservative and evangelical writers arguing for early Gospels reach again and again for Harnack, and they are right to, because a concession from a critic who had every reason to conclude otherwise carries a weight that agreement never does (T4). His Luke the Physician of 1906 defended the traditional authorship of the third Gospel and Acts against the scholarship of his own party. Even the Hellenization thesis did the church a service, though not the one he intended. It forced a hard question that had been dozing: is the Nicene confession a Greek overlay, or is it what the apostolic preaching necessarily comes to when someone asks precisely who the Son is? A century of work by historians and theologians has answered that the fathers were using Greek words to fence off a thoroughly Jewish conviction, that the one God of Israel is met in Jesus of Nazareth, and Thomas had said it in a single breath long before any council met: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28).

(†) His gospel keeps the Father and sets down the Son, the miracle, the empty tomb and Israel’s Scriptures. + Five places are worth setting down where his own record parts company with the gospel. Four of them come out of his books and one out of his signature, and every one of them is his own doing rather than something done later in his name. - The Son moved out of the message. Harnack’s gospel has to do with the Father only (T1). The New Testament’s does not. The confession that Peter makes is about a person, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16), and what Paul says he received and passed on first of all is a death and a resurrection, not an ethic (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Take the Son out of the content and there is no reason left for the church to have been founded, or for anyone to have died rather than recant. - A conclusion carried in before the reading started. Ruling out any interruption of nature’s order (T3) is not the result of examining the documents. It is the rule the examination is conducted under, and it settles the resurrection before a single witness is heard. Paul was willing to state the stake plainly: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). - An Easter without a tomb. His distinction between the Easter faith and the Easter message is offered as a rescue, and for many readers it functions as one. But the conviction that the crucified one lives is the conclusion the first Christians drew from something they said they had seen and touched, and a faith kept after the evidence is set aside is a different kind of faith from the one the apostles preached. - The proposal on the Old Testament (T5) asked Protestantism to unfasten the church from Israel’s Scriptures. The whole New Testament resists it. Jesus opens those books and shows the disciples himself in them (Luke 24:27), Paul writes that what was recorded there was written for our instruction (Romans 15:4), and a gospel with no covenant behind it has nothing for Christ to fulfil. The last item is not a book but a page of signatures. Putting his name to the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914 was a judgment of his own making, and the cost was not only to his reputation. He had taught a generation that Christianity is at home in the highest human culture; then the highest human culture went to war, and his students discovered that a gospel so at home has nothing left to say against its host.