Adolf Harnack: Conceptions of the Work of Jesus; Belief in the Resurrection
(1) The inner conviction that Christ had revealed himself to him, that the Gospel was the message of the crucified and risen Christ, and that God had called him to proclaim that message to the world, was the power and the secret of his personality and his activity.
These three elements were a unity in the consciousness of Paul, constituting his conversion and determining his after-life.
(2) In this conviction he knew himself to be a new creature, and so vivid was this knowledge that he was constrained to become a Jew to the Jews, and a
Greek to the Greeks in order to gain them.
(3) The crucified and risen Christ became the central point of his theology, and not only the central point, but the one source and ruling
principle.
The Christ was not in his estimation Jesus of Nazareth now exalted, but the mighty personal spiritual being in divine form who had for a time humbled himself, and who as Spirit has broken up the world of law, sin and death, and continues to overcome them in believers.
(4) Theology therefore was to him, looking forwards, the doctrine of the liberating power of the Spirit (of Christ) in all the concrete relations of human life and need.
The Christ who has already overcome law, sin and death, lives as Spirit, and through his Spirit lives in believers, who for that very reason know him not after the flesh.
He is a creative power of life to those who receive him in faith in his redeeming death upon the cross, that is to say, to those who are justified.
The life in the Spirit, which results from union with Christ, will at last reveal itself also in the body (not in the flesh).
(5) Looking backwards, theology was to Paul a doctrine of the law and of its abrogation; or more accurately, a description of the old system before Christ in the light of the Gospel, and the proof that it was destroyed by Christ.
The scriptural proof, even here, is only a superadded support to inner
considerations which move entirely within the thought that that which is abrogated has already had its due, by having its whole strength made manifest that it might then be annulled,— the law, the flesh of sin, death: by the law the law is destroyed, sin is abolished in sinful flesh, death is destroyed by death.
(6) The historical view which followed from this begins, as regards Christ, with Adam and Abraham; as regards the law, with Moses.
Chapter II. The Presuppositions of the History of Dogma as regards Christ, with the prospect of a time when he shall have put all enemies beneath
his feet, when God will be all in all; as regards Moses and the promises given to the Jewish nation, with the prospect of a time when all Israel will be saved.
(7) Paul’s doctrine of Christ starts from the final confession of the primitive Church, that Christ is with the Father as a heavenly being and as Lord of the living and the dead.
Though Paul must have accurately known the proclamation concerning the historical Christ, his theology in the strict sense of the word does not revert to it: but springing over the historical, it begins with the pre-existent
Christ (the Man from heaven), whose moral deed it was to assume the flesh in self-denying love in order to break for all men the powers of nature and the doom of death.
But he has pointed to the words and example of the historical Christ in order to rule the life in the Spirit.
(8) Deductions, proofs, and perhaps also conceptions, which in point of form betray the theology of the Pharisaic schools, were forced from the Apostle by Christian opponents, who would only grant a place to the message of the crucified Christ beside the δικαιοσύνη ἐξ ἔργων.
Both as an exegete and as a typologist he appears as a disciple of the Pharisees.
But his dialectic about law, circumcision and sacrifice, does not form the kernel of his religious mode of thought, though, on the other hand, it was unquestionably his very Pharisaism which qualified him for becoming what he was.
Pharisaism embraced nearly everything lofty which Judaism apart from Christ at all possessed, and its doctrine of providence, its energetic insistance on making manifest the religious contrasts, its Messianic expectations, its doctrinesof sin and predestination, were conditions for the genesis of a religious and Christian character such as Paul.
This first Christian of the second generation is the highest product of
the Jewish spirit under the creative power of the Spirit of Christ. Pharisaism had fulfilled its mission for the world when it produced this man.
(9) But Hellenism also had a share in the making of Paul, a fact which does not conflict with his Pharisaic origin, but is partly given with it. In spite of all its exclusiveness the desire for making proselytes especially in the Diaspora, was in the blood of Pharisaism.
Paul continued the old movement in a new way, and he was qualified for his work among the Greeks by an accurate knowledge of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, by considerable dexterity in the use of the Greek
language, and by a growing insight into the spiritual life of the Greeks.
But the peculiarity of his Gospel as a message from the Spirit of Christ, which was equally near to and equally distant from every religious and moral mode of thought among the nations of the world, signified much more than all this.
This Gospel—who can say whether Hellenism had already a share in its conception—required that the missionary to the Greeks should become a Greek
.
Chapter II. The Presuppositions of the History of Dogma and that believers should come to know, “all things are yours, and ye are Christ’s.” Paul, as
no doubt other missionaries besides him, connected the preaching of Christ with the Greek mode of thought; he even employed philosophic doctrines of the Greeks as presuppositions in his apologetic, and therewith prepared the way for the introduction of the Gospel to the Græco-Roman world of thought.
But, in my opinion, he has nowhere allowed that world of thought to influence his doctrine of salvation.
This doctrine, however, was so fashioned in its practical aims that it was not necessary to become a Jew in order to appropriate it.
(10) Yet we cannot speak of any total effect of Paulinism, as there was no such thing.
The abundance of its details was too great and the greatness of its simplicity too powerful, its hope of the future too vivid, its doctrine of the law too difficult, its summons to a new life in the spirit too mighty to be comprehended and adhered to even by those communities which Paul himself had founded.
What they did comprehend was its Monotheism, its universalism, its redemption, its eternal life, its asceticism; but all this was otherwise combined than by Paul.
The style became Hellenic, and the element of a new kind of knowledge from the very first, as in the Church of Corinth, seems to have been the ruling one.
The Pauline doctrine of the incarnate heavenly Man was indeed apprehended; it fell in with Greek notions, although it meant something very different from the notions which Greeks had been able to form of it. ~Adolf Harnack, The History of Dogma, Page 82-84
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