Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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Название: Karl Barth

Автор: Paul S. Chung

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Религия: прочее

Серия:

isbn: 9781498270311

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ went to Berlin, although he wanted to go Marburg. In time, Barth was enthusiastic about going up to Marburg, which he described as “my Zion.”4

      By the early 1890s the theology of Albert Ritschl exercised a dominant influence upon the theological faculties in Germany. Members of Ritschl’s school included scholars such as Wilhelm Herrmann, Adolf von Harnack, Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Johannes Gottschick, Julius Kaftan, Friedrich Loofs, Theodore Haering, and Martin Rade. Die christliche Welt, the representative journal of the day, powerfully represented the view of the Ritschlian school. Although Ritschl was in conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy during this time, Ritschl found Luther himself to be a great figure to use in combat against Lutherans. It was Ritschl who paved the way for new Luther research in the early twentieth century in pupils such as Karl Holl. Moreover, he represented new historical work and exercised a strong impact upon church historians such as Harnack in view of the history of dogma and Ernst Troeltsch in the study of Christian social ethics.

      According to Ritschl, Christianity finds its basis in historical study rather than in immediate religious experience. All theological assertions should be based on the historical life of Jesus; in fact his personal relationship with God, his obedience and trust, and his ethical vocation and fellowship with humankind are personal vehicles of God’s self-revelation. Justification and sanctification are the constructive principles underlying Christian doctrine. From the standpoint in which reconciliation involves an ethical commitment to the kingdom of God, the idea of the unio mystica has no place at all. Thus, the new relationship with God in reconciliation originates in the community of faith directed toward the kingdom of God.

      Seeing the kingdom realized through Christian vocation in the world, Ritschl moves to identify even Christian morality with the cultural consciousness of his day in Germany. As a theologian of culture, Ritschl has been often accused of becoming a strong representative of “Culture Protestantism,” a form of Christendom baptized by bourgeois Prussian society. Cultural Protestantism held that the ethical demands of Jesus and cultural values are in harmony; in cultural Protestantism the true ideal of life led to no potential conflict with social or cultural structures. While uncritical of the political social system in Prussia, Ritschl saw Bismarck’s policies as genuine progress, in contradistintion to the aristocratic conservatives and the social revolutionists.

      Karl Barth in Berlin