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The historian and theologian, Albrecht Ritschl, has accused him of sectarian motives and of wilfully creating a split in the Lutheran Church. The accusation is absolutely false. There is nothing more attractive in the character of Zinzendorf than his unselfish devotion to one grand ideal. On one occasion, after preaching at Berlin, he met a young lieutenant.
I had a dim impression of this when he talked to us, and now I consider every one enviable who has only himself to thank for all he is, like Drake, his friend in art Ritschl, and my dear friend Josef Popf, in Rome, all three laurel-crowned masters in the art of sculpture.
This is the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl says that we cannot come to God save in and through the historic Christ as he is given us in the Gospels. The inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us is, in this outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide. Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic insistence upon history.
The result has been that not only have Volkmar and Hilgenfeld proved their point to their own satisfaction, but they also convinced Ritschl and partially Baur; and generally we may say that in Germany it seems to be agreed at the present time that the hypothesis of a mutilated Luke suits the dogmatic argument better than that of later Judaising interpolations.
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.
All men being sinners, there is a vast solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or responsibility of man is impaired. God forgives all sin save that of wilful resistance to the spirit of the good. That is, Ritschl regards all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness.
For English readers Sanday's Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty years. It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus. The understanding of Jesus is through faith.
It has grown with a giant growth, and has reckoned among its professors Niebuhr, Schlegel, Arndt, Dahlmann, Johann Müller, Ritschl, Kinkel, Simrock and other less world-famous but marvellous specialists.
Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who collected the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong."
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.
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