Jw_Ritschl - The Christian Doctrine Of Justification And Reconciliation

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Ritschl (who)

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Ritschl was born in Berlin. Father became in 1810 a pastor at the church of St Mary in Berlin, and from 1827 to 1854 was general superintendent and evangelical bishop of Pomerania.

Studied at Bonn, Halle, Heidelberg and Tübingen.

At Halle he came under Hegelian influences through the teaching of Julius Schaller and Johann Erdmann. In 1845 he became a follower of the Tübingen school, and in his work Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium des Lukas, published in 1846 and in which he argued that the Gospel of Luke was based on the apocryphal Gospel of Marcion,[2] he appears as a disciple of the Hegelian New Testament scholar Ferdinand Baur. This did not last long with him, however, for the second edition (1857) of his most important work, on the origin of the Old Catholic Church (Die Entstehung der alt-kathol. Kirche), shows considerable divergence from the first edition (1850), and reveals an entire emancipation from Baur's method.

Ritschl was professor of theology at Bonn (extraordinarius 1852; ordinarius 1859) and Göttingen (1864; Consistorialrath also in 1874), his addresses on religion delivered at the latter university showing the impression made upon his mind by his enthusiastic studies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Finally, in 1864, came the influence of Hermann Lotze. He wrote a large work on the Christian doctrine of justification and atonement, Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, published during the years 1870–74, and in 1882–86 a history of pietism (Die Geschichte des Pietismus). His system of theology is contained in the former. He died at Göttingen in 1889. His son, Otto Ritschl, was also a theologian.

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Ritschl (hates)

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1) Speculative metaphysics: faith can't be put in philosophical categories (ala Hegel, FC Baur)

2) Subjectivism: faith based on an individual's experience (ala Schleiermacher)

Both tendencies are unhistorical.

He applied the historical critical method.

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Ritschl (community)

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Ritschl's standpoint is not that of the individual subject. The objective ground on which he bases his system is the religious experience of the Christian community. The "immediate object of theological knowledge is the faith of the community," and from this positive religious datum theology constructs a "total view of the world and human life."

He's an anti-scholastic in the vein of Schleier.

That God is love and that the purpose of His love is the moral organization I of humanity in the "Kingdom of God" – this idea, with its immense range of application-is applied in Ritschl's initial datum.

From this vantage-ground Ritschl criticizes the use of Aristotelianism and speculative philosophy in scholastic and Protestant theology, He holds that such philosophy is too shallow for theology. Hegelianism attempts to squeeze all life into the categories of logic: Aristotelianism deals with "things in general" and ignores the radical distinction between nature and spirit. Neither Hegelianism nor Aristotelianism is "vital" enough to sound the depths of religious life. Neither conceives God "as correlative to human trust " (cf. Theologie und Metaphysik). But Ritschl's recoil carries him so far that he is left alone with merely "practical" experience. "Faith" knows God in His active relation to the kingdom," but not at all as "self-existent".

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Ritschl (value-judgments)

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Religious judgments of value determine objects according to their bearing on our moral and spiritual welfare. They imply a lively sense of radical human need. This sort of knowledge stands quite apart from that produced by "theoretic" and "disinterested" judgments. The former moves in a world of "values", and judges things as they are related to our "fundamental self-feeling." The latter moves in a world of cause and effect. (N.B. Ritschl appears to confine Metaphysic to the category of Causality.) The former is good; the latter is bad/scholastic/speculative.

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Ritschl (metaphysics and epistemology)

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His limitation of theological knowledge to the bounds of human need might, if logically pressed, run perilously near phenomenalism; and his epistemology ("we only know things in their activities") does not cover this weakness. In seeking ultimate reality in the circle of "active conscious sensation", he rules out all "metaphysic". Indeed, much that is part of normal Christian faith—e.g. the Eternity of the Son—is passed over as beyond the range of his method. Ritschl's theory of "value-judgments" (Werthurtheile) illustrates this form of agnosticism. Religious judgments of value determine objects according to their bearing on our moral and spiritual welfare. They imply a lively sense of radical human need. This sort of knowledge stands quite apart from that produced by "theoretic" and "disinterested" judgments. The former moves in a world of "values", and judges things as they are related to our "fundamental self-feeling." The latter moves in a world of cause and effect. (N.B. Ritschl appears to confine Metaphysic to the category of Causality.)

Influenced by the philosophy of Kant rather than of Lotze, Ritschl denies human reason the power to arrive at a scientific knowledge of God. Consequently religion cannot have an intellectual, but merely a practical-moral foundation. Religious knowledge is essentially distinct from scientific knowledge. It is not acquired by a theoretical insight into truth, but, as the product of religious faith, is bound up with the practical interests of the soul. Religion is practice, not theory. (Catholic Enc.)

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Ritschl (theology)

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Theology is reflection on the faith of the community in constructing view the whole of life. Theology is NOT concerned with metaphysical or speculative categories.

Therefore, R. was a systematic theology, but not one who articulated the connection between master categories of theology. Instead all stems from the faith of the community.

With God as "First Cause" or "Moral Legislator" theology has no concern; nor is it interested in the speculative problems indicated by the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. "Natural theology" has no value save where it leans on faith.

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Ritschl (revelation)

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Revelation God as the ultimate, spiritual personality working himself out in the world through history (note Hegel but without H.'s speculation). God reveals through Jesus Christ through history.

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Ritschl (God)

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Spiritual personality not conceived in metaphysical categories b/c those are not serviceable to the life the community.

That God is love and that the purpose of His love is the moral organization of humanity in the "Kingdom of God." He must be regarded in His active relationship to the "kingdom", as spiritual personality revealed in spiritual purposiveness. His "Love" is His will as directed towards the realization of His purpose in the kingdom. His "Righteousness" is His fidelity to this purpose.

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Ritschl (nature of the world)

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The kingdom of God in social and ethics form.

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Ritschl (Christology)

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Christ has for the religious life of the community the unique value of Founder and Redeemer. He is the perfect Revelation of God and the Exemplar of true religion. His work in founding the kingdom was a personal vocation, the spirit of which He communicates to believers, "thus, as exalted king", sustaining the life of His Kingdom. His Resurrection is a necessary part of Christian belief (G Ecke, pp. 198–99). "Divinity" is a predicate applied by faith to Jesus in His founding and redeeming activity. We note here that though Ritschl gives Jesus a unique and unapproachable position in His active relation to the kingdom, he declines to rise above this relative teaching. The "Two Nature" problem and the eternal relation of the Son to the Father have no bearing on experience, and therefore stand outside the range of theology.

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Ritschl (sin)

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Sin is the contradiction to God's purpose in love to constitute a family of the kingdom.

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Ritschl (redemption, etc.)

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Redemption, justification, regeneration, adoption, forgiveness, reconciliation all mean the same thing-the restoration of the broken family relationship. He served as mediator by remaining a de facto son of the Father and by being brother of humanity, in which humans shares together.

Forensic concepts of redemption rejected b/c they conflict with the love of God.

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Ritschl (ethics)

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Ritschl stresses the ethical and social aspects of Christianity. He has no interest in God itself, rather he focuses on the impacts of God’s Work toward human beings and the Kingdom of God as the supreme good. Also he regards the sin as a egotistic tendency placed in all human beings, and therefore, the sin is not inherited but universal. Also Christian perfection is understood in the religious and the moral aspects, that is, Christians’ dominion over the world and their constant vocational fulfillment in the world.

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Ritschl (chapter 1)

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1. Justification or the forgiveness of sins, as the religious expression of that operation of God upon men which is fundamental in Christianity, is the acceptance of sinners into that fellowship with God in which their salvation is to be realised and carried out into eternal life.

2. Justification is conceivable as the removal of guilt and the consciousness of guilt, in so far as in the latter that contradiction to God which is realised in sin and expressed in guilt, works on as mistrust, and brings about moral separation from God.

3. In so far as justification is viewed as effective, it must be conceived as reconciliation, of such a nature that while memory, indeed, preserves the pain felt at the sin which has been committed, yet at the same time the place of mistrust towards God is taken by the positive assent of the will to God and His saving purpose.

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Ritschl (chapter 2)

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1. Justification, or the reception of sinners into the relation of children of God, must be referred to God under the attribute of Father.

2. The justification of sinners by God depends on the condition of faith: in other words, justification results when, conceived as reconciliation on God's part, it calls forth in the sinners that faith which, conceived as the direction of the will to the highest end represented in God and as trust in God in Himself, does not include love to men, and, conceived as freedom from the law, excludes all ceremonial conditions, equally with any co-operating presupposition of a legal claim before God.

3. Justification, or reconciliation, as positively connected with the historical manifestation and activity of Christ, is related in the first instance to the religious community founded by Christ as a whole, which maintains the Gospel of God's grace in Christ as the direct means of its existence, and to individuals only as they attach themselves, by faith in the Gospel, to this community.

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Ritschl (chapter 3)

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1. The problem of personal assurance is insoluble if it be conceived in a form which represents the subject as passive.

2. Personal assurance can be attained neither through the active "conflict of penitence" (Busskampf) nor by observation of the moral activity which accompanies it.

3. Personal assurance, springing from justification, is experienced in and through trust in God in all the situations of life, and especially in patience, by him who through his faith in Christ incorporates himself into the community of believers.

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Ritschl (chapter 4)

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1. The conception of God which is given in the revelation received through Christ, and to which the trust of those who are reconciled through Christ attaches itself, is that of a lovingJKjll which assures to believers spiritual dominion over the world and perfect moral fellowship in the Kingdom of God as the summum bonum.

2. This final end of God in the world is the ground from which it is possible to explain the creation and government of the world in general, and the interrelations between nature and created spirits.

3. The reconciliation of sinners by God, if it is to be conceived, is conceivable without inconsistency as the means used for the establishment of the Kingdom of God by God's love.

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Ritschl (chapter 5)

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1. Sin, which alike as a mode of action and as a habitual propensity extends over the whole human race, is, in the Christian view of the world, estimated as the opposite of reverence and trust towards God, as also the opposite of the Kingdom of God—in the latter respect forming the king dom of sin, which possesses no necessary ground either in the Divine world-order or in man's natural endowment of freedom, but unites all men with one another by means of the countless interrelations of sinful conduct.

2. Of the evils which make themselves perceptible as hindrances to human freedom, those have the significance of Divine punishments—presupposing the Divine government of the world—which each individual, through his unrelieved consciousness of guilt, imputes to himself as such — that consciousness of guilt, as expressive of the lack of religious fellowship with God, being itself already the initial manifestation of puuishment as the forfeiture of the privilege of Divine sonship.

3. In so far as men, regarded as sinners hoth in their individual capacity and as a whole, are objects of the redemption and reconciliation made possible by the love of God, sin is estimated by God, not as the final purpose of opposition to the known will of God, but as ignorance.

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Ritschl (chapter 6)

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1. In order to determine the specific significance of the Person of Christ in Christian thought, whether as regards our view of the world or our judgment of ourselves, account must be taken of the whole range of Christ's activity, and of these two essential considerations—first, that the Christian religion is not a national religion; and, second, that the Christian religion, as the perfect and complete revelation of God, has this object, namely, to render men, in virtue of their relation to the supramundane spiritual God, free and independent with regard to the world.

2. In so far as the speech and conduct and patience under suffering, which make up the life of Christ, arise out of His vocation to exercise the moral lordship of God and realise God's Kingdom, and are the perfect fulfilment of this vocation, even to the extent of His willingly and patiently enduring the pains of death, it follows from the relation of this purpose of Christ to the essential will of God, that Christ as the kingly Prophet is the that He is the eternal object of the Divine love, and as such also the ground of the eternal election of the community of the Kingdom of God.

3. In so far as the unbroken faithfulness of Christ to His vocation not only exhibits in detail the religious relation of the Son of God to God as His Father, but always arises out of this relation, Christ maintains in His whole life His priestly relation toward God. If, therefore, His Priesthood is to be regarded as availing for others, it can only be in virtue of this fact.

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Ritschl (chapter 7)

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1. Justification, or the forgiveness of sins, signifying as it does in principle that the relation of men to God is changed from the separation due to the feeling of guilt and mistrust, and from the opposition or enmity of sin, into the fellowship of trust and peace with God, has for its immediate end the introduction of men into the enjoyment of eternal life, which is present in our experiences of freedom or lordship over the world, and in the independence of self-feeling both from the restrictions and from the impulses due to natural causes / / or to particular sections of society.

2. Although no part of the direct aim of justification, or the forgiveness of sins, is the production of morally good action—for the latter finds its proximate motive in the supramundane final end of the Kingdom of God—still the freedom of the moral disposition from statutory law, a freedom which manifests itself in the continual production of the moral law in the form of special principles and particular judgments of duty, is a function similar in kind to religious freedom over the world, in the exercise of which without regard to result there is also given an experience of eternal life; in this respect, therefore, the course of moral action is conditioned by justification or reconciliation.

3. Justification, as the reception into God's fellowship of sinners conscious of their guilt and formerly destitute of trust in God, and reconciliation, as the directing of the hitherto sinful will to the universal final end of God Himself, are, as the fundamental precondition of the Christian life, necessary in order to explain the fact that believers, through trust in God, humility, and patience, occupy that position of supremacy over the world which constitutes eternal life, and in which is experienced that blessedness which is in harmony with the God Who rules over the world as our Father through Christ.

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Ritschl (chapter 8)

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1. The forgiveness of sins or reconciliation with God, as the common and permanent determination of the relation of men towards God, is not recognisable and operative outside the community founded by Jesus Christ, and dependent upon His specific action.

2. If forgiveness or reconciliation is understood as the right of this community to place itself, in spite of sin and a lively sense of guilt, in the relation towards God of children to their father, it is indispensable to trace forgiveness to Christ in the sense that He, as the Revealer of 1 I take the liberty of calling the attention of certain readers to the fact that I, too, recognise mysteries in the religious life, but that when anything is and remains a mystery, I say nothing about it. God, through His whole conduct inspired by love to men, manifested God's grace and truth for their reception into God's fellowship, and, with the intention of creating a community of the children of God, proved His religious fidelity to God by the faultless discharge of the task of His vocation; and that God vouchsafes to sinners who are or shall be Christ's disciples, that position relatively to Himself which Christ thus maintained.

3. While it is only as a member of this community that the individual becomes assured of his reconciliation with God and his Divine sonship, this connection does not serve as a means to that spiritual acquisition in such a way as to render superfluous his conscious subordination to Christ as the Reconciler; on the contrary, the conviction of faith in Christ, within the community which shares the same faith, is the permanent form of the individual's reconciliation and Divine sonship, in the sense that the community both is the medium of our clear remembrance of Christ, and, in spite of all defects of knowledge and of religious and moral practice, exerts an impulse to the religious estimate of self which corresponds to the specific action of Christ.

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Ritschl (chapter 9)

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1. Religious dominion over the world, which constitutes the immediate form of reconciliation with God through Christ, is exercised through faith in the loving providence of God, through the virtues of humility and patience, and, finally, through prayer, and through this last likewise receives common expression.

2. In the exercise of trust in God in all situations of life, in the production of humility and patience—these inward activities, too, supported by prayer—the believer experiences his personal assurance of reconciliation.

3. The freedom of action in the imposes a law upon itself by the production of principles and judgments of duty, and serves to confirm the appropriation of reconciliation, forms, together with the foregoing religious functions, that perfection invested with which each believer must show himself to be a whole or a character who occupies a permanent place in the Kingdom of God and enjoys practical experience of eternal life.

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Ritschl (thesis)

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Reconciliation is “the realized ideal of human life” (Barth, Protestant Thought, 393)