The first tendency—flight from Jesus to Christ—produced Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums at the beginning of the [twentieth] century, a book that offers a form of Christianity drenched in the pride and optimism of reason, the Christianity to which liberalism had reduced the original Creed by a process of “purification”. One of the crucial sentences in this work runs thus: “Not the Son but only the Father belongs in the Gospel as Jesus preached it.”6 How simple, how liberating this seems! Where faith in the Son had divided people—Christians from non-Christians, Christians of different
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