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213 Albrecht Ritschl 26 Liberal Theology 0Albrecht Ritschl was a paramount figure of the liberal theology of nineteenthcentury Germany and the European continent. His embrace of historical criticism led him to abandon much of the dogma of Protestant orthodoxy and instead to a theology resonant with the ethical dimensions of Kant’s critique of practical reason. Consequently, he saw Christ’s kingship as one of leading, shaping, and redeeming the moral community of the church for its role in seeking and leading the community of humankind toward the kingdom of God on earth, a community of mutuality in love. Christianity, so to speak, resembles not a circle described from a single centre, but an ellipse which is deter­ mined by two foci. Western Catholicism has recognized this fact in its own way. For it sets itself up not merely as an institution possessed of the sacraments by which the power of Christ’s redemption is propagated, but also as the Kingdom of God in the present, as the community in which, through the obedience of men and States to the Pope, Divine righteousness is professedly realized. Now it has been a misfortune for Protestantism that the Reformers did not purify the idea of the moral Kingdom of God or Christ from sacerdotal corruptions, but embodied it in a conception which is not practical but merely dogmatical. Apart from Zwingli, whose views on this point are peculiar to himself, Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin define the Kingdom of Christ as the inward union between Christ and believers through grace and its operations. The dogmatic theologians of both Confessions unanimously propagate this view by deriving an argument for religious consolation from the protection against powers hostile to redemption enjoyed by believers in the Kingdom of Christ. Kant (vol. i. 412 fl:) was the first to perceive the supreme importance for ethics of the “King­ dom of God” as an association of men bound together by laws of virtue. But it remained for Schleiermacher first to employ the true conception of the teleological nature of the Kingdom of God to determine the idea of Christianity. This service of his ought not to be forgotten, even if he failed to grasp the discovery with a firm hand. For none of the theologians who found in him their master, with the exception of Theremin, has taken account of the importance of this idea for systematic theology as a whole. Modern pietists are accustomed to describe their favorite undertakings, especially foreign missions, directly as the Kingdom of God; but in doing so, while they touch upon the ethical meaning of the idea, they narrow its reference improperly. This circle, too, have brought the word into use, e.g. to describe 214 # Part 7: Nineteenth-Century Voices the public affairs of the Church as discussed in periodicals. This use of the name, however, involves that interchange of “Church “ and “ Kingdom of God “ which we find dominating Roman Catholicism. Since Jesus Himself, however, saw in the Kingdom of God the moral end of the religious fellowship He had to found (vol. ii. p. 28); since He understood by it not the common exercise of worship, but the organization of humanity through action inspired by love, any conception of Chris­ tianity would be imperfect and therefore incorrect which did not include this specifically teleological aspect. We must further remember that Christ did not describe this moral task, to be carried out by the human race, in the form of a philosophical doctrine, and propagate it in a school: He entrusted it to His disciples. At the same time He con­ stituted them a religious community through training of another kind. For when good action towards our fellowmen is subsumed under the conception of the Kingdom of God, this whole province is placed under the rule and standard of religion. And so, were we to determine the unique quality of Christianity merely by its teleological element, namely, its relation to the moral Kingdom of God, we should do injustice to its character as a religion. This aspect of Christianity, clearly, is meant to be provided for in Schleiermacher’s phrase—“in which everything is referred to the redemption wrought by Jesus.” For redemption is a presupposition of the Christian’s peculiar dependence on God; but dependence on God is, for Schleiermacher, the general form of religious experience as distinct from a moral relationship. Now it is true that in Christianity everything is “related” to the moral organization of humanity through love...

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