Adolf Harnack

The Origin of the New Testament: and the Most Important Consequences of the New Creation Adolf Harnack

Adolf Harnack - (1851-1930), German historian and theologian
Harnack was born in 1851, in a Lutheran family, as the older of a set of twins. After his mother?s death in 1857, he became especially connected to his father, Theodosius Andreas Harnack, who was a teacher of homiletics and church history at the Lutheran University in Dorpat (a part of East Prussia; later, Russian province Livonia). Adolf?s father?s pious loyalty to Luther?s ideas, combined with the scholarly approach to the matters of religion, made a decisive impact on Adolf Harnack?s understanding of theology as vocation . When he was seventeen, Harnack wrote to his friend that he wanted to study theology not in order to be given the ready-made statements of faith, but in order to understand every statement of faith, and only then making them his own.