His father, Georg Karl Benjamin Ritschl (1783–1858), became in 1810 a pastor at the church of St Mary in Berlin, and from 1827 to 1854 was general superintendent and evangelical bishop of Pomerania.

In 1845 he became a follower of the Tübingen school, and in his work Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium des Lukas, published in 1846 and in which he argued that the Gospel of Luke was based on the apocryphal Gospel of Marcion,[2] he appears as a disciple of the Hegelian New Testament scholar Ferdinand Baur.

This did not last long with him, however, for the second edition (1857) of his most important work, on the origin of the Old Catholic Church (Die Entstehung der alt-kathol.

Kirche), shows considerable divergence from the first edition (1850), and reveals an entire emancipation from Baur's method.

[3] Ritschl was professor of theology at Bonn (extraordinarius 1852; ordinarius 1859) and Göttingen (1864; Consistorialrath also in 1874), his addresses on religion delivered at the latter university showing the impression made upon his mind by his enthusiastic studies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

[3] Ritschl claimed to carry on the work of Luther and Schleiermacher, especially in ridding faith of the tyranny of scholastic philosophy.

His system shows the influence of Kant's destructive criticism of the claims of Pure Reason, recognition of the value of morally conditioned knowledge, and doctrine of the kingdom of ends; of Schleiermacher's historical treatment of Christianity, regulative use of the idea of religious fellowship, emphasis on the importance of religious feeling; and of Lotze's theory of knowledge and treatment of personality.

In spite of this resistance the Ritschlian "school" grew with remarkable rapidity, with followers dominating German theological faculties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is perhaps mainly due to the bold religious positivism with which he assumes that spiritual experience is real and that faith has not only a legitimate but even a paramount claim to provide the highest interpretation of the world.

Hegelianism attempts to squeeze all life into the categories of logic: Aristotelianism deals with "things in general" and ignores the radical distinction between nature and spirit.

[6] His limitation of theological knowledge to the bounds of human need might, if logically pressed, run perilously near phenomenalism; and his epistemology ("we only know things in their activities") does not cover this weakness.

)[6] The theory as formulated has such grave ambiguities, that his theology, which, as we have seen, is wholly based on uncompromising religious realism, has actually been charged with individualistic subjectivism.

With God as First Cause or "Moral Legislator" theology has no concern; nor is it interested in the speculative problems indicated by the traditional doctrine of the Trinity.

The "Two Nature" problem and the eternal relation of the Son to the Father have no bearing on experience, and therefore stand outside the range of theology.

Redemption, justification, regeneration, adoption, forgiveness, reconciliation all mean the same thing-the restoration of the broken family relationship.

All depends on the Mediation of Christ, who maintained the filial relationship even to His death, and communicates it to the brotherhood of believers.