-------- Albrecht Ritschl may be taken as the best modern illustration of the Christ-of -culture type Unlike Jefferson and Kant, Ritschl stays close to the New Testament Jesus Partially responsible for the intense concentration of modern scholarship on the study of the Gospels and the history of the early church He retains a much larger share of the creed of the church than do the cultured lovers of Christ and despisers of the church Counts himself a member of the Christian community And believes only in its context can one speak significantly about sin and salvation Takes the opposite extreme from his contemporary Tolstoy in his attitude towards the science and state, economic life and technology He rejected the idea that we could or should begin our Christian self-criticism by seeking out some ultimate truth of reason, self-evident to all;p or by accepting the dogmatic pronouncement of some religious institution “Theology,” he wrote which out to set forth the authentic content of Christian religion in possitive form, needs to draw its content from the New Testament and from no other source. The church is not the foundation of Christ, but Christ is the founder of the church ------------------------------------------------
Had another point in the community of culture which has as its prinicple the will of man to gain mastery over nature (p.95) (as a modern man and a Kantian) and so understands the human situation in terms of man’s conflict with nature Popular thought celebrates as the greatest human achievement the victories of applied science and technology over natural forces But what concerned him more as a moral thinker and as a Kantian was the effort of the ethical reason to impress on human nature itself the internal law of the conscience; to direct individual and social life toward the ideal goal of virtusous existence in a society of free yet interdependent virtusous persons.
In the ethical realm man faces a double problem: he needs not only to subdue his own nature, but also to overcome the despair which arises from understanding of the indifference of the external natural world on his own loft interests What Ritschl accepts as given is “man’s self-disctinction from nature and his endeavours to maintain himself against it or over it.” Man must regaurd personal life, whether in himself or another, as an end in itself. All the work of culture has its sourse in the conflict with nature and its goal in the victory of personal, moral existence in the achievement, to use Kantian terms, of the kingdom of endes--or, in the New Testament phrase, of the kingdom of God. --- With these two starting points Ritschl might have become a Christian of the median sort , who sought to combine two distinct principles by accepting polar tensions or grades of existence or otherwise. (may be a tendency here and there towards a position of such) But on the whole he found no problem. --- In his own views there were dualities, to be sure, but no real conflicts save between culture and nature. Christianity itself needed to be regarded as an ellipse with two foci, rather than as a circle with one center. One focus was justification or the forgiveness of sins; the other, ethical striving for the attainment of the perfect society of persons. But there was no conflict between these ideas; for forgiveness meant the divine companionship that enabled the sinner after every defeat to arise again and resume his work at the ethical task. There was also the duality of the church and of the cultural community; but here also Ritschl found no conflict, and attacked most sharply monastic and pietistic practices of separating the church from the world. IF the Christian church was the community in which everything was reffered to Jesus Christ, it was also the true form of ethical society, in which members of different nations are combined together in mutual love and for the sake of achievement the universal kingdom of God. There is the duality of Christian calling and Christian vocation, but only medieval Catholocism finds conflict here. The Christian can exercise his calling to seek the kingdom of God if, motivated by love of neighbor, he carries on his work in the moral communities of family, and economic, national, and political life. Indeed “family, private property, personal independence and honor (in obedience to authority) are goods that are essential to moral health and the formation of character. Only by engagement in civil work for the sake of the common good, by faithfulness in one’s social calling, is it possible to be true to the example of Christ. There is duality in Ritschl’s thought between the work of God and the work of man; but it is not of such a a sort that the strictness of anti-Christian exponents of culture regarding Christian reliance on God rather then on personal effort are in any sense validated. For God and man have in common the task of realizing the kingdom; and God works within the human community through Christ and through conscience rather than on it from without There is duality, finally in Christ himself; for he is both priest and prophet, he belongs both to the sacramental and praying community of those who depend on grace, and to the cultural community which through ethical striving in many institutions labors for the victory of free men over nature. But there is no conflict and no tension here either; for the priest mediates forgiveness in order that the prophet’s ideal may be realized and the founder of the Christian community is the same time the moral hereo who marks a great advance in the history of culture.
IT is largely by means of the idea of the Kingdom of God that Ritschl achieved the complete reconciliation of Christianity and culture. When we attend to the meaning he attaches to the term, we become aware of the extent to which he has interpreted Jesus as a Christ of culture, in both sensesl as the guide of men in all there labor to realize and conserve their values and as the Christ who is understood by means of nineteenth century cultural ideas. “The Christian idea of the Kingdom of God,” writes Ritschl,” denotes the association of mankind---an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible--through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations. If Jesus’ eschatological hope in the manefestation of God is lacking here, so also is his none scatological faith in the present rule of the transcendent Lord of heaven and earth. All the references are to man and to man’s work’ the word {“God”: seems to be an intrustion, as perhaps those later Ritschlians recognized who substituted the phrase “brotherhood of man” for “kingdom of God.” This statement of the end of human striving in cultural work,is moreover wholly in line with the thought of the 19th century…. The conception of the kingdom of God Ritschl ascribes to Jesus Christ is practically the same as Kan’ts idea of a mankind gathered into one family “under the bonds of charity, peace, common wants and common aids”; in its political aspects it is Tennyson’s “Parliament of Man and Federation of the World”; it is the synthesis of the great values esteemed by democratic culture: the freedom and intrinsic worth of individuals, social co-operation, and universal peace.
In fairness to Ritschl, if he interpreted Christ through culture he also selected from culture those elements which were most compatible with Christ. He did not find or seek as some did, to establish contact between Jesus Christ and the capitalistic or nationalistic or the materialistic tendencies of the time. If he used Christianity as a means to an end, he chose an end more compatible with Christianity than were many other goals of the contemporary culture. Ritchel saught to do justices to the fact that Christ accomplished some things for men which they could never accomplish for themselves in culture, even by immitiation of the historic example. HE mediated and mediates the forgiveness of sin, and he brings to light the immorality that no human labor and wisdom can achieve. Man’s lordship over the world has its limits, hi is limited by his own corporeal nature, and by the multitude of natural forces he canot tame, and the multitude of hindrances which he has to tolerate from those who suport he is reckoning Though he identifies himself with the advancing forces of human civilization, he cannot hope to conquer by his labor, the system of nature that opposes him. In this situation, religion and Jesus Christ, as a teacher of high religion--assure man that he stands close to the supramundane God and give him the certainty that he is destined for a supramundane goal. Of course this also sounds more like the gospel according to St. Immanuel than according to St. Matthew or St. Paul. It is not necessary to develop in further detail Rithcel’s solution of the problem of Christ and culture; to show how loyalty to Jesus leads to active participation in every cultural work, and to care for the conservation of all the great institutions. --Ritchel….he was a contemporary man who made explicit ideas that were widespread and deeply rooted in the world before the Wars,

-------------------------------------------- Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel presents the same general interpretation of Christ and the gospel, though with greater moral force and less theological depth. Harnack, Garvie, Shailer Matthews, D.C. Macintosh, Ragaz Find Jesus as the great exponent of man’s religious and ethical culture… Popular theology condenses the whole of Christian thought into the formula: The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man Back of all these theologies…..the idea that the human situation is fundamentally characterized by man’s conflict with nature. Man the moral being, the intellectual sirit, confronts impersonal natural forces, mostly outside of himself but partly within him. When the issue in life is so conceived, it almost inevitable that Jesus Christ should be approached and understood as a great leader of the spiritual cultural cause of man’s struggle to subdue nature, and of his aspirations to transcend it. That man’s fundamental situation is not one of conflict with nature but with God and that Jesus stands as the center of that conflict as victim and mediator---this thought, characteristic of the church as a whole, culture-theology never seems to entertain. In its view those Christians who so understand the human dilemma and its solution are obsurantists in man’s cultural life and perverters of the gospel of the kingdom… Me…christ not of the wolrd..necessary so remove as much of our cultured perceptions and goggles as possible? --------------- Tertullian