RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. - Protestant theologian, b. in Berlin in 1822 and d. in Göttingen on 20 March 1889. He held a chair of theology at Bonn from 1859, moved to Göttingen in 1864, where he remained, refusing the offers of 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. 1880-86); Unterricht in der christlichen Religion (4th ed., ibid. 1899); 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).
R.'s theology underwent multiple influences which he sought to fuse into a conception of Christian dogma that eliminates every strictly supernatural character of Revelation. From the Aristotelian A. Trendelenburg he draws the rigorously scientific demonstration of the existence of God, inasmuch as our thought is always finite and always has against it the limit of the thing in itself, and yet this does not prevent our thought from communicating with things and in a certain way possessing them: this "confidence" (Zuversicht) that the intellect brings to the real would be a contradiction if both things and thought did not have one and the same foundation (Grund), which is God, and this is the only scientific proof of the existence of God. In his interpretation of religion and of Christianity he underwent the converging influence of Kant, champion of "natural religion," and of Schleiermacher, who had indicated in the "feeling of dependence"
(Abhängigkeitsgefühl) the content of every religion and the criterion for the acceptance of Revelation itself. In this sense R. maintains the necessity of a "Christian philosophy" and of a dependence of theology on metaphysics, or of a direct collaboration with the latter: for this reason he rejects the Christology of the early Church founded on the doctrine of the hypostatic union, on the dogma of original sin, on the doctrine of the expiatory Redemption of Christ and of the "unio mystica" of the soul with Christ, because Luther taught that there is no union more intimate than that which the Christian obtains through faith (cf. Theologie und Metaphysik, ed. cit., p. 48 ff.). Redemption or "reconciliation" (Versöhnung) for R. is nothing other than the ethical ideal of human life realized, and it consists in this: that the Christian regard God as Father, show him filial confidence and collaborate in the coming of the "Kingdom of God" on earth. This state constitutes "Christian perfection," which is therefore exhausted in faith in divine Providence, in patience, in prayer and in 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 is accomplished in the "community" understood as the "community of the faithful," while sin is "self-seeking" and hence covetousness of inferior goods. A consequence of sin is the loss of "divine sonship" in relation to God and of the very exercise of natural freedom. R. reduces sin in its root to "ignorance" (Unwissenheit), intensified through contact with the sinful action of other men, who contaminate one another, and in this social solidarity of moral negativity consists, according to R., original sin (cf. Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, cit., III, 99. 41-43). The characteristic and the superiority of Christianity with respect to other religions is that it regards God as "love" and is as such man's own end, toward which he must tend with ceaseless aspiration according to the task that falls to him in the community of the faithful.
R.'s theology thus gathers and makes explicit the implicit denial of the supernatural origin of Christian Revelation, prepared by the Enlightenment (v.) and by idealism (v.), and it lowers dogma to a mere situation of practical activity oriented within the "historical situation" that Christianity sets before man according to the times and the forms of culture. R.'s theology is rigidly hostile to every form of "mysticism," Catholic or Protestant (Pietism); for this reason it has been called a form of "positivism of Revelation" (Offenbarungs-positivismus). R.'s ideas had a wide following in the "Göttingen School" founded by him at the end of the last century; but, with the rise of "dialectical theology" (Tillich, Gogarten, K. Barth), there is a desire to return, in Protestantism too, to the traditional concepts of Revelation and Redemption, which R. had pulverized. R. can be considered, at a distance, one of the precursors of modernism (v.).