Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), professor at Bonn and from 1864 at Göttingen, and after Schleiermacher the most influential German Protestant theologian of the century. Having begun in the Tübingen school of F. C. Baur, he broke with it over the origins of the early Church, and went on to build a theology on the historical revelation in Christ and the community’s experience of it, setting metaphysics aside: religious statements are value-judgments, and the Kingdom of God, the ethical fellowship of mankind, is the goal of the Christian life. His three-volume Justification and Reconciliation (1870–74) founded the Ritschlian school of Harnack and Herrmann.
Works (3)
- A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation — The first, historical volume of Ritschl’s Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (1870), the companion of the constructive third volume. Ritschl traces how the Church has understood the saving work of Christ: from Anselm and Abelard, through Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus and the mediaeval idea of justification, to the Reformers’ principle of justification by faith and their doctrine of reconciliation set against Osiander’s; then the orthodox Lutheran and Calvinist systems and the Socinian controversy, their disintegration under the theologians of the Illumination, Kant’s restatement of the problem, Schleiermacher and his followers, Pietism and the revived Lutheran orthodoxy, and the speculative school of Schelling, Hegel and their successors. (14 notes)
- Instruction in the Christian Religion — Ritschl’s Unterricht in der christlichen Religion (first published 1875; this translation follows the fourth German edition), a compact set of numbered paragraphs, with notes, that he wrote as a manual of his own theology. After an introduction on the standpoint of the Christian community, it sets out the doctrine of the kingdom of God, the doctrine of reconciliation through Christ, the doctrine of the Christian life, and the doctrine of public worship. (5 notes)
- The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation — The third and constructive volume of Ritschl’s Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (1870–1874), translated from the third German edition (1888). After an introduction on the place of the doctrine in theology and on the theory of knowledge it assumes, Ritschl defines justification as the forgiveness of sins by which God admits sinners into fellowship with Himself; sets out its relation to the Christian community and the Kingdom of God; treats in turn the doctrines of God, of sin, and of Christ’s person and life-work; argues for the necessity of forgiveness and for basing it on the work and suffering of Christ; and closes with the religious functions — faith in providence, humility, patience, prayer — that spring from reconciliation, and with the moral life of the Christian in his calling. (12 notes)