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There was pietistic influence in Ritschl's ancestry, as also in Schleiermacher's. Ritschl had, however, reacted violently against it. His attitude was that of repudiation of everything mystical. He had strong aversion to the type of piety which rested its assurance solely upon inward experience.
Ritschl's positivistic view of the Scripture and of the whole question of revelation, was not congruous with his well-learned biblical criticism. The third volume is the constructive one. It is of immeasurably greater value than the other two. It is this third volume which has frequently been translated.
Some would feel that in Ritschl's remedy the loss is greater than the gain. This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the fountain heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl, that it deserves to be considered somewhat more at length. The Ritschlian movement has engaged a generation of more or less notable thinkers in the period since Ritschl's death.
There is room even for a clause in which to compress the little that we know of anything beyond this life. We have written in unconventional words. There is no one place, either in Ritschl's work or elsewhere, where this grand and simple scheme stands together in one context. This is unfortunate.
Neither by those about him, nor by those after him, has it been reproduced in its entirety or free from glaring contradictions. It was not free from contradictions in Ritschl's own mind. His pupils divided his inheritance among them. Each appropriated that which accorded with his own way of looking at things and viewed the remainder as something which might be left out of the account.
These have dissented at many points from Ritschl's views, diverged from his path and marked out courses of their own. We shall do well in the remainder of this chapter to attempt the delineation in terms, not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may with some laxity be styled Ritschlianism.
His very figure radiated the delight of conflict as he walked the Göttingen wall. A devoted pupil, writing immediately after Ritschl's death, used concerning Schleiermacher a phrase which we may transfer to Ritschl himself. 'One wonders whether such a theology ever existed as a connected whole, except in the mind of its originator.
This is obvious from the very title of Ritschl's great book, Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung. Of this work the first edition of the third and significant volume was published in 1874. Before that time the formal treatises on theology had followed a traditional order of topics.
Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology has had. As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation.
The work taken as a whole is so bewildering that one finds himself asking, 'What is Ritschl's method? If what is meant is not a question of detail, but of the total apprehension of the problem to be solved, the apprehension which we strove to outline above, then Ritschl's courageous and complete inversion of the ancient method, his demand that we proceed from the known to the unknown, is a contribution so great that all shortcomings in the execution of it are insignificant.
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