Albrecht Ritschl

German religious leader

• Born: March 25, 1822
• Birthplace: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: March 20, 1889
• Place of death: Göttingen, Germany

Ritschl contributed to the liberalizing of nineteenth century Protestant theology by moving its concerns away from the speculative, neo-Scholastic abstractions that the faithful could not understand toward a renewal of a practical examination of the life of Jesus Christ as revealed in the New Testament. Because Christ was the perfect manifestation of the love of God, believers could have a model upon which to make proper value judgments.

Early Life

Albrecht Ritschl (RIHCH-ehl) came from a solid religious background. His father, Carl Ritschl, was a bishop and general superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Pomerania, and the boy grew up in the town of Stettin. He was an excellent student throughout his preuniversity career, excelling in languages and science. His mind welcomed complex information, because it gave him an opportunity to see how complexity grew and came together to formulate antithetical arguments that endlessly repeated the process. It was no doubt his penchant for synthesis that drew him early to the revolutionary work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the leading professor at the University of Berlin during the first part of the nineteenth century.

Ritschl pursued his education at a number of prestigious universities during the years from 1839 to 1846. He studied at the University of Bonn and Halle, where he received his doctoral degree in 1843, and then pursued postdoctoral work at Heidelburg and Tübingen, where he studied church history with one of its leading scholars, Ferdinand Christian Baur. Baur became, for the next ten years or so, Ritschl’s major mentor and influence. Ritschl’s earliest scholarly works came out of the deep influence of Baur and his Tübingen school, which was an amalgamation of theologians and biblical scholars and historians that had been highly influenced by Hegel and his so-called conflict model of human history. This model proposed that history, like all other components of naturalistic process, works itself out in terms of the convergence of conflicting elements that then fall into necessary opposition and then form a new synthesis of meaning. History, like everything else in nature, operates within the laws of process, and Hegel had delineated the terms of those laws in his famous model of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

It was this Hegelian method of Baur and the Tübingen school that had informed Ritschl’s first major scholarly work, Das Evangelium Marcions und das Kanonische Evangelium des Lucas (1846; the Gospel of Marcion and the canonical Gospel of Luke), and the success of this work established his career at the University of Bonn, where he became a full professor in 1859 at the age of thirty-seven. Although this early work on the Gospel of Luke broke no new scholarly ground, it was an intelligently reasoned and lucidly written examination done within the mode of the Tübingen school of radical New Testament criticism.

It was Ritschl’s next book, however, that broke all ties to Baur and his followers. During the years following the publication of his highly abstract book on the Gospel of Luke, Ritschl became increasingly disillusioned and disturbed at the intensified metaphysical approaches that theological and biblical studies were following. With each new theoretical-speculative volume emerging, the laity, the community of Christian believers, was being left behind, buried in the impossibly complex language and heady intellectualism of German scholarship.

Ritschl had found, however, an anchor and antidote to the cause of the increasing abstraction, Hegelian historical process, and he discovered it during the writing of his next book, which concerned the intellectual and spiritual ethos of the early Christianity of the first and second centuries. He performed a simple process of laying the emphasis on the first word, the adjective “historical,” and removing it from the word “process.” He found that the solid ground of history could save him from involvement in the endless speculative abstractions of the Hegelian dialectic.

Ritschl’s next study was of the early Church Fathers and led him, historically, to the earliest forms of Christianity. He found that the closer Christianity came to the temporal and physical proximity of Jesus Christ—and to the earliest apostles and Church Fathers, the roots of the faith—the simpler and more pristine the message of Christianity became. History, then, stopped the Hegelian cyclic process and led him back linearly to the essential simplicity of the message of the Gospels. After Ritschl disengaged himself from this cyclic model of history and attached himself to a linear model, he found relief in the bedrock of history.

In the second edition (1857) of his Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (1850; the rise of the old Roman Catholic Church), Ritschl announced the dramatic break, both personal and intellectual, with his mentor Ferdinand Baur. The move was a shattering blow to his former teacher. Two years later, Ritschl was appointed a full professor at the University of Bonn, rejecting similar offers from such prestigious schools as Strasbourg and Berlin. He became, then, the principal founder and exponent of what would be known as the liberal Protestant theological school that took root and flourished until just after World War I.

Life’s Work

Ritschl’s work after his major break with Baur proceeded with a serious redirection and reevaluation of the whole Christian enterprise. After he found the anchor of hope in reinstating the historical Jesus Christ as the principal model for a Christian lifestyle and direction, a linearly sanctioned one at that, he was able to develop the major tenets of his revolutionary project. His basic working premise was the adaptation of a view regarding the moral nature of human beings that was new within the basic beliefs of Christianity:

In every religion what is sought, with the help of the superhuman spiritual power reverenced by man, is a solution of the contradiction in which man finds himself as both a part of nature and a spiritual personality claiming to dominate nature.

Although this was his definitive statement of his views on humankind’s moral nature made in his next work, the monumental three-volume study Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnuns (1870-1874; The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation , 1872-1900), his lectures and publications from 1857 through the 1860’s thoroughly embodied this view.

What Ritschl had done, in effect, was to move Christianity away from its persistent and losing battles with two of its primary demons: the overly intellectualized speculations of natural philosophy on one hand, and the emotionalism of Pietism, on the other. Indeed, Ritschl’s second major three-volume work was his definitive attack on such emotional subjectivism. Ritschl had to concede Immanuel Kant’s proposition that humankind was unable to show evidence of or prove through any rational arguments the existence of God and, therefore, what a Christian’s duty is to God. Therefore, he was forced to discard the overly neat proofs of God’s existence simply because they started from outside personal Christianity and built on general ideas unconnected either with biblical revelation or with a living Christian faith.

What was left for the sincere Christian was the other end of the philosophical spectrum: subjectivism and its expression, mysticism. Without rational proof of God’s existence and influence in the world, the seeker after God is left with his own subjective responses and feelings about his experiences and, therefore, runs the risk of mistaking the knowledge of his own religious consciousness for some kind of valid knowledge of God. Ritschl, having found a way back to the authentic roots of Christianity via history, leaps over the mystical and rationalistic barriers and exhorts the Christian to return to the original message of the New Testament as it was presented by Martin Luther himself. The original message is available, he argued, in the life and revelation of Jesus Christ directly observed through a rigorously historical examination of the texts themselves.

In short, what Ritschl offered was an enfreshened vision of the very purpose of Christianity. Religion should stop engaging in fruitless searches for direct knowledge of God. Kant proved such efforts hopeless. Humans must also admit that they are part of nature and, therefore, are divided beings who must constantly war with their natural impulses. However, human beings are also gifted with two qualities that lift them above mere beast consciousness: self-consciousness and the ability to assign value to their actions. Humans are capable of making moral and ethical choices that the lower animals are not. Those gifts qualify them, then, to assume moral domination in the world that, as Christians, they are obliged to do.

In positing these enlightened views on the moral nature of human beings, Ritschl does away with several key Christian beliefs. He reveals unmistakably Romantic views when he dismisses the Calvinist view of humankind’s innate depravity. Human beings, he believes, are basically good but must continually war with their animal impulses. With one dramatic gesture, Ritschl does away with Satan, Original Sin, and innate depravity. Humans are, however, divided beings who need the example of Jesus Christ, who bridged the gulf between his animal and spiritual impulses. Out of humankind’s recognition of its plight, humans derive their sense of obligation to rule over the natural world, to take dominion and stewardship over it, and to attempt to shape it into what Ritschl called the “Kingdom of God on earth.”

Ritschl, in his magnum opus, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, changed the older, guilt-laden term “justification,” which had earlier meant the “forgiveness of sins,” to mean the lifting of “guilt-consciousness” and a consequent bridging of the gulf between God and humankind. The second stage of the transforming operation he called “reconciliation,” God’s free act of mending the split between God and humankind through the life example and death of Jesus Christ. It was the original intention of the great Protestant Reformers, he claims, to restore “justification and reconciliation” to their previous central positions within early Christianity and to tap its infinitely vital energies and use them to renew the original force and meaning of Christianity.

The first volume of the work delineated the various propositions he used to make his points. The third volume lays out what the results and effects of the reorganization of the entire Christian enterprise will be. If Christianity returns to the early pragmatic interpretation of “justification and reconciliation” based upon replacing the knowledge about God with the practical revelations made in the life of Jesus Christ and recoverable through a historical study of the New Testament, the possibility of an ethical human community comes into being.

By 1864, Ritschl had moved to the University of Göttingen as a full professor, where he finished his two major works and taught not only biblical subjects but also dogmatics and ethics. His last twenty-five years at Göttingen brought forth his full powers as both a thinker and a writer. He died quietly there on March 20, 1889.

Significance

The achievement of Albrecht Ritschl was so significant during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that theologians have invented the term “Ritschlianism.” Unquestionably, Ritschl became the most famous proponent of the new liberal Protestant theology during those years. His major works, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation and Geschichte des Pietismus (1880-1886; the history of Pietism), brought Protestant theology into the modern era by denying the validity of its endless oscillations between highly abstract, speculative debate over whether God can be known and how He can be known and the overly subjective, emotional, and mystical avenues into the divine mystery.

Before Ritschl could approach these seemingly insurmountable projects, he first had to admit that Kant had been correct and that Christianity was forced to discard any remaining vestiges of natural philosophy. History must replace metaphysical speculation as an avenue to certainty, but a certainty only verified through action, not ideas. Jesus Christ’s life and death immediately, simultaneously, and permanently effected justification and reconciliation and created the possibility of an ethical human community.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl. Translated by Brian Cozens. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Although renowned for a brutal attack on Ritschl and other liberal Protestant theologians, Barth nevertheless delivers a brilliant summary of all the various theological schools leading up to Ritschl and places him at the conclusion of a tradition that was summarily destroyed by World War I.

Heron, Alasdair I. C. A Century of Protestant Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980. In a chapter devoted to Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ritschl, the author clearly distinguishes their unique contributions but shows that Ritschl was forced to reject the older theologian’s overemphasis on what came to be called “the theology of feeling.” Succinct and highly informative.

Jodock, Darrell, ed. Ritschl in Retrospect: History, Community, and Science. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1995. Essays by historians and theologians who reassess Ritschl’s ideas on reviving the Reformation tradition, the communal dimensions of the church, community, the relationship of science and the church, and other topics.

Lotz, David W. Ritschl and Luther: A Fresh Perspective on Albrecht Ritschl’s Theology in the Light of His Luther Study. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974. Lotz devoted much time and energy to revealing exactly what Ritschl derived from his own deep study of Martin Luther’s major contributions to theology, particularly Luther’s interpretations and explanations of the terms “justification and reconciliation.”

Mackintosh, H. R. Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth. London: Collins, 1964. The first and, perhaps, still the most comprehensive treatment of Ritschl that is not an entire book. Mackintosh clearly places Ritschl in a nineteenth century tradition and shows how he emerges from Schleiermacher, corrects him, and creates the way for other important theologians. There are many points in Ritschl’s approach that clearly disturb Mackintosh, but he explicates him with fairness and equanimity. Highly recommended.

Marsh, Clive. Albrecht Ritschl and the Problem of the Historical Jesus. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1992. An analysis of Ritschl’s ideas about the life and work of Jesus Christ.

Richmond, James. Ritschl, a Reappraisal: A Study in Systematic Theology. London: Collins, 1978. Richmond shows how theologians are reviving Ritschl since he seems to have so closely foreshadowed the more existential modern theologians. This is one of several correctives to certain Barthian neoorthodox criticisms.

Tillich, Paul. Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestant Theology. Edited with an introduction by Carl E. Braaten. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Although he does not offer a comprehensive treatment of Ritschl, Tillich discusses Ritschl’s influence on American theology long after it seemed dead in Germany. He credits the Ritschlians with introducing Kantianism into theology and labeling Kant the philosopher of Protestantism. Highly informative and intelligent.