Three Essays by Albrecht Ritschl

First published: Philadelpha: Fortress Press, 1972, translated with an introduction by Philip Hefner

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Essays; philosophy; spiritual treatise; theology

Core issue(s): Calvinism; Lutherans and Lutheranism; Protestants and Protestantism; social action

Overview

Three Essays, published and translated in its present form in the United States in 1972, is a distillation of the most seminal work of the late nineteenth century German theologian Albrecht Ritschl. It should be noted that Three Essays, edited by Philip Hefner (who supplies a lengthy introduction that situates Ritschl in the history of Christian thought), exists as such only as an English-language book.

The first essay, “Prolegomena to a History of Pietism,” was originally a prologue to a longer history of the Pietist tendencies in Protestantism (those tendencies emphasizing fervent and performed expression of belief as the mainstay of religious devotion). Though strongly Protestant (in fact Ritschl’s great motivation, in wishing to combine Lutheranism and Calvinism and to give a total sense of Christian history, was to provide a Protestant rival to the universal and ecumenical tendencies of Catholicism), Ritschl criticizes his historical precursors for scanting the proto-Protestant tendencies already present in late medieval Catholicism. In Franciscan devotion, for instance, Ritschl finds a sense of piety that both tried to define monastic piety as something distinct from the word and sought to present it to people outside the Church as a model for their own piety. The very concept of reformation, Ritschl argues, was endemic to Catholicism, as Catholicism, unlike Eastern Orthodox Christianity, did not have the Byzantine model of the civil ruler maintaining a theoretical suzerainty over the Church. This Western difference has both historical and theological origins, but it virtually ensures that there will always be reforming tendencies, as there is no external political organism to keep these in check.

On the Protestant Reformation itself, Ritschl distinguished between Lutheranism, which did not expect the Church to be any purer than the surrounding society; Calvinism, which sought to reform the surrounding society by bringing it to the level of the Church; and Pietism, which placed the individual achievement of moral perfection above all. This moral perfection, the expression of the Holy Spirit, could be achieved through religious feeling, through the effect of piety. Whereas Lutheranism and Protestantism continued the Catholic stress on discipline as a way to achieve perfection (although placing the instrument of discipline less in the Church as an institution than in divine grace and the confessing community), Pietism, in its call for perfection, rejected the world in its entirety, not wishing either to reform the world or to use worldly instruments to help achieve religious reform. Ritschl admires the spiritual dedication and sense of mission of Pietism. However (and this is a characteristically Ritschlian move), he admonishes Pietism for losing any social dimension—not because he values society as such, as a substrate undergirding and subtending all human forms of expression, but because he fears that the Pietist striving for human perfection will jettison any sense of sin. Assuming a social context for piety, as both Lutheranism and Calvinism do in different ways, allows, in a sense, for the sinfulness that has always characterized Church history to be exposed and foregrounded, so it can be acknowledged and internalized to check man’s potentially excessive pride. Pietism, which seeks to sweep away particularities of human sin in the fervent rush to individual perfection, does not mean to escape from a moral consciousness. Ritschl worries, however, that it ends up evading moral categories that make Christian experience meaningful.

In “Theology and Metaphysics,” Ritschl contrasts “revealed religion” with “natural religion”; the latter is religion that innately springs up in the human mind, whereas “revealed religion” is that disclosed by a specific scripture, act of divine revelation, or collective historical or cognitive belief experience. Strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant’s belief that truth does not exist outside framing constitutive categories, Ritschl argues that there is no such thing as natural religion. For religious experience to mean anything, it must be public; there cannot be a private religion (in much the same way as the twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein later argued that there cannot be a private language). Revealed religion is a collective act that is historically disclosed in a defined community.

Recollection, or continuity, is the basis for such a community. We believe today because we have remembered we have believed in the past and affirm the continuity of our beliefs. Similarly, when we adhere for the first time to a set of religious doctrines, we vow to carry that belief forward and affirm it in the future. Once again Ritschl is trying to define the historic attributes of Catholicism—its sense of a magisterium or tradition-defining exposition of doctrine—in a way that does not presuppose an institutional structure presided over by bishops. Whereas liturgical Christianity secures the guarantee of continuity through a succession of bishops traceable in historical time, Ritschl stresses that the collective memory of the confessing community, as passed along within and by individuals, is the historical glue. Ritschl thus dismisses any ontological guarantee of religious identity, rejecting it as a secular remnant of pagan Greek philosophy and not properly germane to Christian thought. Ritschl becomes an antimetaphysical thinker who does not see it worth laboring to define a horizon of being as such. The only horizon that is worthwhile for him is one that is ecclesiastical and confessional.

The final chapter of Three Essays is “Instruction in the Christian Religion.” A document originally written to enlighten high school students, it is one of the most accessible of Ritschl’s works. Ritschl begins by sharply distinguishing Christian meanings of concepts, such as human equality, that might have superficial analogues in pagan philosophies such as Stoicism. Ritschl sees everything important in Christianity, including the forgiveness of sins, as transpiring within a community. In the father-son relation of God and Jesus, he finds the prototype of the social bond that links all Christian believers. The God of the Bible is not given his true identity unless one understands him as the God who is the Father of Christ. The baptized Christian is not initiated into individual salvation by Christ but linked in a constituted community that expresses collectively the kinship with Jesus that God has disclosed.

Ritschl ends by discussing theories of Communion. He cites the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist views with respect to the concepts of the body and blood of Christ in the act of Communion, and he ends with the recognition of a tacit pluralism in practice and with the realization that, when Christ originally instituted this sacrament, it was to promote unity, not division.

Christian Themes

Albrecht Ritschl was born into a long line of ministers in the Prussian Union Church, which was officially Lutheran but incorporated Calvinist elements. Ritschl’s intellectual curiosity led him to be influenced by figures ranging from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) to the New Testament critical scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) to the church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930). Compared to some of his influences, Ritschl was practical-minded. He believed that the world around him could be gradually improved and that what people did in their daily lives mattered in a theological sense. He was not, however, interested in isolated gestures or concrete events without a greater historical horizon.

Reacting against both present-minded social activists and textual historians who looked carefully only at selected segments of biblical text or of church history, Ritschl insisted on considering the entire history of the Church, from its earliest Israelite beginnings to the present day, as the overall ground against which ethical and moral judgments must be made.

Though Ritschl understood that the Kingdom of God, as proclaimed in the New Testament, was partially reserved for a future eschatological state—in other words, for the end-time after the Day of Judgment—he also maintained that part of the Kingdom of God was realizable in our own day, expressed by concrete ethical action within a community confessing belief in God and acknowledging the salvation of Jesus Christ as a prerequisite for all morality and judgment. Ritschl is hardly a household word outside college theology departments, but he influenced scores of better-known later thinkers and has provided Christians with one of the most satisfactory accounts of what it means to live a Christian life in community.

Sources for Further Study

Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Gives background on the Prussian Union Church so important to Ritschl’s thought, as well as on the history of German unification that provided the political background for Ritschl’s theology.

Dorrien, Gary J. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Canvasses Ritschl’s underestimated influence on later American Social Gospel and reformist thinkers.

Lotz, David W. “Albrecht Ritschl and the Unfinished Reformation.” Harvard Theological Review 73, nos. 3/4 (July, 1980): 337-373. Views Ritschl as anticipating some of the major themes of twentieth century Protestant theology; reasonably accessible in its approach.

McCulloh, Gerald W. Christ’s Person and Life-Work in the Theology of Albrecht Ritschl. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990. An occasionally dense exploration of the sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit Christological emphasis in Ritschl’s work; also contains useful biographical detail.

Richmond, James. Ritschl: A Reappraisal. London: Collins, 1978. A seminal text in the attempt to rescue Ritschl from the opprobrium placed on him by neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth; particularly concerned to rebut accusations of “liberal optimism.”