Page 45

Page 45

46 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA

sisted, in his opinion, in its maintenance of the lootrine of justification by faith, lacking in the Eastern Church, but established in the West by Augustine and defended by the medieval representatives of classical Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, this very position led him to depreciate the work of the " Reformers before the Reformation " and of the mediating theology. Like the Reformers, Ritschl made justification and atonement the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, and this fact is the key to his chief theological teachings. So strongly, moreover, did he consider that the sole basis for a knowledge of God is in the divine revelation in the works and person of Christ, that he rejected all natural theology and ignored its proofs for God's existence. Since, however, such an estimate of Christ presupposes Christian belief, and since this belief can arise in the Christian community only through experience of justification and atonement, religious comprehension of God and Christ necessarily has as its sole foundation the personal faith which arises through justification. In accordance with this position, he reversed the usual method, and placed the subjective elements of Christianity first, disregarding the ontology of the object of faith as a basis of a religiously conditioned theological knowledge. It thus becomes clear that Ritschl's concept of the Bible was not one of a mere external standard, but rather implied that the revelation of God in Christ, in so far as drawn from the New Testament, possesses the character of revelation only for a faith which comprehends and recognizes it as such.

Faith, according to Ritschl, is not a mere passive service of man, but an active trust in God and divine providence, directly displayed in humility,

patience, and prayer, and influencing

3. Faith's the development of the moral life. Relation to The reconciliation of this religious and justification ethical independence of the Christian and Atone- with his sense of absolute dependence

meat. on God was the cardinal problem of Ritschl's theory of justification and atonement. To solve the difficulty Ritaehl advanced the theory that the sinner who becomes a believer is first passively placed by God in a state of justi fication, justification in turn being practically real ized in the atonement which perfects it, and the atonement constituting the basis of Christian activ ity. Justification, which is synonymous with for giveness of sins, frees the sinner from the guilt that separates him from God; the mistrust of God ari sing from consciousness of sin vanishes before the promise of divine grace; and the old active oppo sition to the divine will gives place to an equally active obedience to the commandments of God. Though good works may be imperfect even when the will of man has been renewed, yet, on the whole, the exercise of trust, humility, patience, and prayer, and the fulfilment of moral requirements in the spirit of Christian love, constitute what was under stood and required by the New Testament and by the Reformers as Christian perfection, though this must be understood qualitatively, not quantita tively. Justification and atonement lay the foun dation for the transformed sinner's new status as a child of God; but at the same time justification, B.itechl

which finds its practical realization in the atonement, is a creative act of the divine will, conditioned by no human merits or circumstances, but due to the fact that the sinner who comes to believe is held by God to be righteous despite his sin, so that the Father takes the initiative by establishing religious fellowship between himself and man, the basis of this being, not the sinner, but the work of Christ and its efficacy.

Like Luther, Ritscbl made the concept of the religious community bear directly upon his theory of justification, this religious community in question connoting, not the Church as a visible

4. Theory organization, but the complex of all of the justified believers and the permanent Church. result of its lord and founder, Christ, whose influence it ever preserves and perpetuates. The agency which produces belief in justification in the individual, and thus leads to re generation and divine sonship, is preaching; and through this proclamation of the word of God or of the Gospel the religious community comes to be the mother of the individual believers. Thus Ritschl was able to avoid the sectarian theory of the Church as a voluntary association of individual believers; and he could, on the con trary, maintain that the Church traces her origin back to her founder Christ, and that her members receive from a preexisting organization those powers of the Holy Ghost within her which call forth their faith and influence their subsequent lives. To es tablish the genetic bond between individual be. lievers within the Church and Christ as its head, Ritschl maintained that the Church, which is not subject to the limitations of empiricism or time, is an organic whole which, though visibly existing only in its parts, logically posits the preexistence of the whole. Accordingly, the Church was the object of divine love before the individuals who belong to it. At the same time, the experience of justifica tion and atonement is individual, not collective; especially as the consciousness of guilt and the mis trust of God, which are removed by justification, are considered by him to be individual defects. These empirical personal experiences, however, do not conflict with the logical construction of the ideal relation of the Church to Christ (who founded it for the salvation of its individual members) and God (who chose it as the body of all future believers and as the means for the realization of his kingdom on earth). Only thus could he establish the prior ity of justification, as a supratemporal creative act of God, to regeneration, as a personal experience of the believer.

In conformity with this theory of the Church Ritachl construed the work of Christ under the two aspects of royal prophet and royal priest, the royalty of both phases being derived from the

g. The spiritual kingship exercised by Christ Work of throughout his life. The prophetic Christ office of Christ is exercised from God to man, the priestly from man to God. In the priestly function, which logically presup poses the achievement of his prophetic mission, is found the essential reason why, for Christ's sake, God grants regeneration to sinners-the fact that