RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. – Protestant theologian, born in Berlin in 1822 and died in Göttingen on 20 March 1889. He held a chair of theology at Bonn from 1859, and moved 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. 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 combine in a conception of Christian dogma that eliminates every strictly supernatural character from Revelation. From the Aristotelian A. Trendelenburg he derives the rigorously scientific demonstration of God’s existence: our thought is always finite and always confronted by the limit of the thing in itself, yet this does not prevent our thought from communicating with things and, in a certain sense, possessing them. This “confidence” (Zuversicht) that the intellect places in reality would be a contradiction if both things and thought did not have a common foundation (Grund), which is God; and this is the only scientific proof of God’s existence. In his interpretation of religion and Christianity he was influenced by the converging effects of Kant, advocate of “natural religion,” and 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 R. maintains the necessity of a “Christian philosophy” and of theology’s dependence on metaphysics, or of direct collaboration with the latter. He therefore rejects the Christology of the ancient Church, founded on the doctrine of the hypostatic union, on the dogma of original sin, on the doctrine of Christ’s expiatory Redemption, and on the “unio mystica” of the soul with Christ, because Luther taught that there is no more intimate union than that which the Christian obtains through faith (cf. Theologie und Metaphysik, cited ed., p. 48 ff.). For R., redemption or “reconciliation” (Versöhnung) is nothing other than the ethical ideal of human life realized, and consists in this: that the Christian regard God as Father, show Him filial trust, and cooperate in the coming of the “Kingdom of God” on earth. This state constitutes “Christian perfection,” which consequently consists entirely in faith in divine Providence, in patience, in prayer, and in fulfilling one’s “vocation” (Beruf) according to Luther’s precept. Only in this way does man redeem himself and obtain “justification” (Rechtfertigung). “Redemption” is therefore an event accomplished in the “community,” understood as the “community of the faithful,” whereas sin is “self-seeking” and therefore covetousness for inferior goods. The consequence of sin is the loss of “divine sonship” in relation to God and of the exercise of natural freedom itself. R. reduces sin at its root to “ignorance” (Unwissenheit), intensified through contact with the sinful actions of other human beings, who contaminate one another; and in this social solidarity of moral negativity, according to R., original sin consists (cf. Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, cited, III, 99, 41–43). The distinctive feature and superiority of Christianity in relation to other religions is that it regards God as “love” and, as such, makes Him man’s proper end; man must strive toward this end with unceasing aspiration, according to the task assigned to him in the community of the faithful.
R.’s theology thus gathers together and makes explicit the implicit denial of the supernatural origin of Christian Revelation, Enlightenment (v.) Idealism (v.), and reduces dogma to a mere condition of practical activity oriented within the “historical situation” that Christianity presents to man according to the times and forms of culture. R.’s theology is rigidly hostile to every form of “mysticism,” whether Catholic or Protestant (Pietism); it has therefore been called a form of “positivism of Revelation” (Offenbarungs-positivismus). R.’s ideas found 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 has also been a desire within Protestantism to return to the traditional concepts of Revelation and Redemption, which R. had pulverized. R. may, in retrospect, be regarded as modernism (v.).