RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. — Protestant theologian, born in Berlin in 1822, died in Göttingen on 20 March 1889. He held a chair in theology at Bonn from 1859, moving to Göttingen in 1864, where he remained, refusing offers from Strasbourg and Berlin.
Principal works: *Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung* (3 vols., 3rd ed., Bonn 1888–89); *Geschichte des Pietismus* (3 vols., ibid. 1886–87); *Unterricht in der christlichen Religion* (4th ed., ibid. 1890); *Theologie und Metaphysik* (2nd ed., ibid. 1887); *Über das Gewissen* (ibid. 1887); *«Fides implicita»*, Eine Untersuchung über Köhlerglauben, Wissen und Glauben, Glauben und Kirche (Bonn 1890); *Die christliche Vollkommenheit* (2nd ed., Göttingen 1889).
Ritschl’s theology was shaped by multiple influences, which he sought to synthesize into a conception of Christian dogma that eliminated any strictly supernatural character of Revelation. From the Aristotelian A. Trendelenburg, he drew the rigorously scientific demonstration of the existence of God, based on the fact that our thought is always finite and encounters the limit of the thing-in-itself, yet this does not prevent thought from communicating with things and, in a certain way, possessing them. This “confidence” (Zuversicht) that the intellect places in the real would be a contradiction if both things and thought did not share a common foundation (Grund), which is God; and this is the only scientific proof of the existence of God. In his interpretation of religion and Christianity, he was influenced by Kant, advocate of “natural religion,” and by Schleiermacher, who had identified in the “feeling of dependence” (Abhängigkeitsgefühl) the content of every religion and the criterion for accepting Revelation itself. In this sense, Ritschl maintained the necessity of a “Christian philosophy” and the dependence of theology on metaphysics or its direct collaboration with II. For this reason, he rejected the Christology of the ancient Church, based on the doctrine of the hypostatic union, the dogma of original sin, the doctrine of Christ’s expiatory redemption, and the “unio mystica” of the soul with Christ, because Luther had taught that there is no more intimate union than that which the Christian attains through faith (*Theologie und Metaphysik*, cit. ed., p. 48 ff.).
For Ritschl, redemption or reconciliation (Versöhnung) is nothing other than the ethical ideal of human life realized in this way: the Christian considers God as Father, places filial trust in Him, and collaborates in the coming of the “Kingdom of God” on earth. This state constitutes “Christian perfection,” which is thus exhausted in faith in divine Providence, patience, prayer, and the fulfillment of one’s own “vocation” (Beruf) according to Luther’s precept. Only in this way does man redeem himself and obtain “justification” (Rechtfertigung). Redemption is therefore an event that takes place within the “community,” understood as the “community of the faithful,” while sin is the pursuit of self and hence the duplication of inferior goods. The consequence of sin is the loss of “divine sonship” with respect to God and the exercise of natural freedom itself. Ritschl reduces sin at its root to “ignorance” (Unwissenheit), intensified through contact with the sinful actions of others, who contaminate one another mutually; and in this social solidarity of moral negativity, according to Ritschl, original sin consists (*cf. Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung*, cit., III, 99, 41–43). The characteristic and superiority of Christianity over other religions lies in its consideration of God as “love” and in being, as such, the proper end of man, toward which he must strive with unceasing aspiration according to the task assigned to him within the community of the faithful.
Ritschl’s theology thus gathers and explicates the implicit denial of the supernatural origin of Christian Revelation, prepared by the Enlightenment (v.) and idealism (v.), and reduces dogma to a mere situation of practical activity oriented within the “historical situation” that Christianity presents to man according to the times and forms of culture. Ritschl’s theology is rigorously hostile to every form of “mysticism,” whether Catholic or Protestant (pietism); for this reason, it has been called a form of “revelation positivism” (Offenbarungs-positivismus). Ritschl’s ideas had a wide following in the “Göttingen School” he founded at the end of the last century; but with the rise of “dialectical theology” (Tillich, Gogarten, K. Barth), even in Protestantism there has been a return to the traditional concepts of Revelation and Redemption that Ritschl had shattered. Seen from a distance, Ritschl can be considered one of the precursors of modernism (v.).