Albrecht Ritschl was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 theologian

Theology

Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

.

Starting in 1852, Ritschl lectured on "Systematic Theology

Systematic theology

In the context of Christianity, systematic theology is a discipline of Christian theology that attempts to formulate an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the Christian faith and beliefs...

". According to this system, faith was understood to be irreducible to other experiences, beyond the scope of reason. Faith, he said, came not from facts but from value judgments. Jesus' divinity, he argued, was best understood as expressing "revelational-value" of Christ for the community that trusts him as God. He held the Christ's message to be committed to a community.

Biography

Ritschl was born in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. His father, Georg Karl Benjamin Ritschl (1783–1858), became in 1810 a pastor at the church of St Mary in Berlin

St. Mary's Church, Berlin

St. Mary's Church, known in German as the Marienkirche, is a church in Berlin, Germany. The church is located on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße in central Berlin, near Alexanderplatz. Its exact age is not known, but it was first mentioned in German chronicles in 1292. It is presumed to date from earlier...

, and from 1827 to 1854 was general superintendent and evangelical bishop of Pomerania

Pomeranian Evangelical Church

The Pomeranian Evangelical Church is a Protestant church body in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, serving the citizens living in Hither Pomerania. It combines Lutheran and Reformed traditions...

. Albrecht Ritschl studied at Bonn

University of Bonn

The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...

, Halle, Heidelberg and Tübingen. At Halle he came under Hegelian

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...

 influences through the teaching of Julius Schaller

Julius Schaller

Julius Schaller was a German philosopher born in Magdeburg.He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Halle, where in 1834 he received his habilitation...

 and Johann Erdmann

Johann Eduard Erdmann

Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German philosophical writer....

. In 1845 he became a follower of the Tübingen school, and in his work Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium des Lukas, published in 1846 and in which he argued that the Gospel of Luke

Gospel of Luke

The Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...

 was based on the apocryphal Gospel of Marcion

Gospel of Marcion

The Gospel of Marcion, called by its adherents the Gospel of the Lord, was a text used by the mid-2nd century Christian teacher Marcion to the exclusion of the other gospels...

, he appears as a disciple of the Hegelian new testament scholarFerdinand Baur

Ferdinand Christian Baur

Ferdinand Christian Baur was a German theologian and leader of the Tübingen school of theology...

. This did not last long with him, however, for the second edition (1857) of his most important work, on the origin of the Old Catholic Church

Old Catholic Church

The term Old Catholic Church is commonly used to describe a number of Ultrajectine Christian churches that originated with groups that split from the Roman Catholic Church over certain doctrines, most importantly that of Papal Infallibility...

 (Die Entstehung der alt-kathol. Kirche), shows considerable divergence from the first edition (1850), and reveals an entire emancipation from Baur's method.

Ritschl was professor of theology at Bonn (extraordinarius 1852; ordinarius 1859) and Göttingen (1864; Consistorialrath also in 1874), his addresses on religion delivered at the latter university showing the impression made upon his mind by his enthusiastic studies of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

 and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Finally, in 1864, came the influence of Hermann Lotze. He wrote a large work on the Christian doctrine of justification and atonement, Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, published during the years 1870–74, and in 1882–86 a history of pietism (Die Geschichte des Pietismus). His system of theology is contained in the former. He died at Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

 in 1889. His son, Otto Ritschl

Otto Ritschl (theologian)

Otto Karl Albrecht Ritschl was a German theologian, the son of Albrecht Ritschl.After studying at Göttingen, Bonn and Giessen, he became professor at Kiel in 1889 and afterwards at Bonn...

, was also a theologian.

Theology

Ritschl claims to carry on the work of Luther

Martin Luther

Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...

 and Schleiermacher, especially in ridding faith of the tyranny of scholastic philosophy. His system shows the influence of Kant's destructive criticism of the claims of Pure Reason

Critique of Pure Reason

The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement...

, recognition of the value of morally conditioned knowledge, and doctrine of the kingdom of ends; of Schleiermacher's historical treatment of Christianity, regulative use of the idea of religious fellowship, emphasis on the importance of religious feeling; and of Lotze's theory of knowledge and treatment of personality. Ritschl's work made a profound impression on German thought and gave a new confidence to German theology, while at the same time it provoked a storm of hostile criticism: his school has grown with remarkable rapidity. This is perhaps mainly due to the bold religious positivism with which he assumes that spiritual experience is real and that faith has not only a legitimate but even a paramount claim to provide the highest interpretation of the world. The life of trust in God

God

God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

 is a fact, not so much to be explained as to explain everything else. Ritschl's standpoint is not that of the individual subject. The objective ground on which he bases his system is the religious experience of the Christian community. The "immediate object of theological knowledge is the faith of the community," and from this positive religious datum theology constructs a "total view of the world and human life." Thus the essence of Ritschl's work is systematic theology. Nor does he painfully work up to his master-category, for it is given in the knowledge of Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 revealed to the community. That God is love and that the purpose of His love is the moral organization I of humanity in the "Kingdom of God" – this idea, with its immense range of application-is applied in Ritschl's initial datum.

From this vantage-ground Ritschl criticizes the use of Aristotelianism

Aristotelianism

Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...

 and speculative philosophy in scholastic and Protestant theology, He holds that such philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 is too shallow for theology. Hegelianism attempts to squeeze all life into the categories of logic

Logic

In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

: Aristotelianism deals with "things in general" and ignores the radical distinction between nature and spirit. Neither Hegelianism nor Aristotelianism is "vital" enough to sound the depths of religious life. Neither conceives God "as correlative to human trust " (cf. Theologie und Metaphysik). But Ritschl's recoil carries him so far that he is left alone with merely "practical" experience. "Faith" knows God in His active relation to the kingdom," but not at all as "self-existent".

His limitation of theological knowledge to the bounds of human need might, if logically pressed, run perilously near phenomenalism

Phenomenalism

Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli situated in time and in space...

; and his epistemology ("we only know things in their activities") does not cover this weakness. In seeking ultimate reality in the circle of "active conscious sensation", he rules out all "metaphysic". Indeed, much that is part of normal Christian faith—e.g. the Eternity of the Son—is passed over as beyond the range of his method. Ritschl's theory of "value-judgments" (Werthurtheile) illustrates this form of agnosticism

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....

. Religious judgments of value determine objects according to their bearing on our moral and spiritual welfare. They imply a lively sense of radical human need. This sort of knowledge stands quite apart from that produced by "theoretic" and "disinterested" judgments. The former moves in a world of "values", and judges things as they are related to our "fundamental self-feeling." The latter moves in a world of cause and effect. (N.B. Ritschl appears to confine Metaphysic to the category of Causality.)

The theory as formulated has such grave ambiguities, that his theology, which, as we have seen, is wholly based on uncompromising religious realism

Philosophical realism

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....

, has actually been charged with individualistic subjectivism. If Ritschl had clearly shown that judgments of value enfold and transform other types of knowledge, just as the "spiritual man" includes and transfigures but does not annihilate the "natural man", then within the compass of this spiritually conditioned knowledge all other knowledge would be seen to have a function and a home. The theory of value-judgments is part too of his ultra-practical tendency: both "metaphysic" and "mysticism" are ruthlessly condemned. Faith-knowledge appears to be wrenched from its bearings and suspended in mid-ocean. Perhaps if he had lived to see the progress of will-psychology he might have welcomed the hope of a more spiritual philosophy.

Illustrative examples

A few instances will illustrate Ritschl's positive systematic theology. The conception of God as Father is given to the community in Revelation. He must be regarded in His active relationship to the "kingdom", as spiritual personality revealed in spiritual purposiveness. His "Love" is His will as directed towards the realization of His purpose in the kingdom. His "Righteousness" is His fidelity to this purpose. With God as "First Cause" or "Moral Legislator" theology has no concern; nor is it interested in the speculative problems indicated by the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. "Natural theology" has no value save where it leans on faith. Again, Christ has for the religious life of the community the unique value of Founder and Redeemer. He is the perfect Revelation of God and the Exemplar of true religion. His work in founding the kingdom was a personal vocation, the spirit of which He communicates to believers, "thus, as exalted king", sustaining the life of His Kingdom. His Resurrection is a necessary part of Christian belief (G Ecke, pp. 198–99). "Divinity" is a predicate applied by faith to Jesus in His founding and redeeming activity. We note here that though Ritschl gives Jesus a unique and unapproachable position in His active relation to the kingdom, he declines to rise above this relative teaching. The "Two Nature" problem and the eternal relation of the Son to the Father have no bearing on experience, and therefore stand outside the range of theology.

Once more, in the doctrine of sin and redemption, the governing idea is God's fatherly purpose for His family. Sin is the contradiction of that purpose, and guilt is alienation from the family. Redemption, justification, regeneration, adoption, forgiveness, reconciliation all mean the same thing-the restoration of the broken family relationship. All depends on the Mediation of Christ, who maintained the filial relationship even to His death, and communicates it to the brotherhood of believers. Everything is defined by the idea of the family. The whole apparatus of "forensic" ideas (law, punishment, satisfaction, etc.) is summarily rejected as foreign to God's purpose of love, Ritschl is so faithful to the standpoint of the religious community, that he has nothing definite to say on many inevitable Questions, such as the relation of God to pagan races. His school, in which Wilhelm Herrmann

Wilhelm Herrmann

Johann Wilhelm Herrmann was a Reformed German theologian.Hermann taught at Halle before becoming professor at Marburg. Influenced by Kant and Ritschl, his theology was in the idealist tradition, seeing God as the power of goodness. Jesus was to be seen as an exemplary man. Even if Jesus never...

, Julius Kaftan and Adolf Harnack are the chief names, diverges from his teaching in many directions; e.g. Kaftan appreciates the mystical side of religion, Harnack's criticism is very different from Ritschl's arbitrary exegesis. They are united on the value of faith knowledge as opposed to "metaphysic".

Primary Sources

• The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1900; Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung. Bonn: Marcus, 1882.
• Geschichte des Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche. Vol. 1 of the Geschichte des Pietismus. Bonn: Marcus, 1880.
• Geschichte des Pietismus in der lutherischen Kirche des 17. u. 18. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 of the Geschichte des Pietismus. Bonn: Marcus, 1884 /1886.
• Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche: eine kirchen- und dogmengeschichtliche Monographie. 2nd ed. Bonn: Marcus, 1857.
• Gesammelte Aufsätze. Freiburg: Mohr, 1896.

Secondary Sources

• Barth, Karl. "Ritschl," in Protestant Theology from Rousseau to Ritschl. New York: Harper, 1959. Ch. XI, pp. 390–398.
• Garvie, Alfred E. The Ritschlian Theology Critical and Constructive: An Exposition and an Estimate. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1902.
• Ritschl, Otto. "Ritschl, Albrecht Benjamin," in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. X. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1911. Pp. 43–46.
• Swing, Albert T. The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901.