An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
emptied himself in becoming flesh, or at least he had them in abeyance.
He had them, but did not use them. What we have here is but a despairing
effort to be just to Jesus' humanity and yet to assert his deity in the
ancient metaphysical terms. It is but saying yes and no in the same
breath. Biedermann said sadly of the speculation that it represented the
kenosis, not of the divine nature, but of the human understanding.
RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS
If any man in the department of theology in the latter half of the
nineteenth century attained a position such as to entitle him to be
compared with Schleiermacher, it was Ritschl. He was long the most
conspicuous figure in any chair of dogmatic theology in Germany. He
established a school of theological thinkers in a sense in which
Schleiermacher never desired to gain a following. He exerted
ecclesiastical influence of a kind which Schleiermacher never sought. He
was involved in controversy in a degree to which the life of
Schleiermacher presents no parallel. He was not a preacher, he was no
philosopher. He was not a man of Schleiermacher's breadth of interest.
His intellectual history presents more than one breach within itself, as
that of Schleiermacher presented none, despite the wide arc which he
traversed. Of Ritschl, as of Schleiermacher, it may be said that he
exerted a great influence over many who have only in part agreed with
him.
Albrecht Ritschl was born in 1822 in Berlin, the son of a bishop in the
Lutheran Church. He was educated at Bonn and at Tübingen. He established
himself at Bonn, where, in 1853, he became professor extraordinarius and
in 1860 ordinaries. In 1864 he was called to Göttingen. In 1874 he
became consistorialrath in the new Prussian establishment for the
Hanoverian Church. He died in 1888. These are the simple outward facts
of a somewhat stormy professional career. 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. This
aversion is one root of the historic positivism which makes him, at the
last, assert the worthlessness of all supposed revelations outside of
the Bible and of all supposed Christian experience apart from the
influence of the historical Christ. He began his career under the
influence of Hegel. He came to the position in which he felt that the
sole hope for theology was in the elimination from it of all
metaphysical elements. He felt that none of his predecessors had carried
out Schleiermacher's dictum, that religion is not thought, but religious
thought only one of the functions of religion. Yet, of course, he was
not able to discuss fundamental theological questions without
philosophical basis, particularly an explicit theory of knowledge. His
theory of knowledge he had derived eclectically and somewhat