Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

German Protestant theologian. Originally of the Tubingen school, and professor of theology at Bonn (1851–64) and Göttingen (1864–89), his thinking exercised considerable influence on liberal theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch. Suspicious of mystical and individualistic religion, Ritschl stressed the importance of the community of believers—the church—as the vehicle of salvation. He argued against ‘absolutists’ from the early church Fathers onwards, whose claims for, for instance, the eternal, pre-existent nature of Jesus he traced back to philosophical hellenizations of the original gospel of the historical Jesus. God had worked in history, but since no empirical proofs could be made about this, all theological statements were ‘value judgements’. His theology was moralistic in emphasis: Jesus was divine in the sense that he was fully and perfectly human. His main works were Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (1870–4) and Die Geschichte des Pietismus (1880–6). 1959 : From Rousseau to Ritschl . London . 1969 : An Introduction to the Theology of Albert Ritschl . Philadelphia . 1978 : Ritschl: A Reappraisal . London . ... log in or subscribe to read full text