Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 35:140 (Oct 1878)
Article: Christian Perfection
Author: Albrecht Ritschl

BSac 35:140 (Oct 1878) p. 656

Christian Perfection

Albrecht Ritschl1

[Editor’s Prefatory Note — There has already appeared in a British Review a translation of this discourse. Yet we publish the following for various reasons. The importance of the Christian doctrine of perfection here set forth may be inferred from the fact that the discourse was prepared by Dr. Ritschl to embody for more popular use the substance of the final results of his work on “The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation.” The doctrine of atonement must be the central one in Christianity, or the religion of reconciliation. It is not hard to see that an accurate statement of those means by which Christ sought to give a fatal blow to sin and sin’s results, and an accurate statement of the results of Christ’s work, must be of immense importance to a Christian preacher. The sense of the importance of this doctrine or statement will grow fast on a student as he finds that just by this doctrine Christianity is sharply distinguished from heathenism, or from its sister, modern polytheism, which believes that there can be a conflict between religion and so-called science, an essential conflict between one set of phenomena in the world and another set, and that a reconciliation is an absurdity. He will find that the line of distinction lies just here, too, from another sister of heathenism, namely, religious formalism, which declares that reconciliation exists only between God and a small group of his creatures; those namely, who perform certain mental, or even physical exercises, all being excluded whose business, as ordained for them by God, excludes the possibility of performing these exercises. For what else is the belief that the forms of religious observance and theological expression produced by any one age must be the standard for men in all circumstances? What else is this than holding that reconciliation with God can be had only by the holders of these forms? And what else is this than to say that men whose birth occurred after that standard age’s philosophical apparatus had been superseded can have no reconciliation?

BSac 35:140 (Oct 1878) p. 657

Again, just on the doctrine of the atonement is Christianity sharply different from the theory of the Roman Catholic clergy.2 For while the latter hold that only the clergy can approach God, and the laity must use the clergy as mediators in their intercourse with God, the former doctrine clearly declares that there is complete reconciliation ready for every man. Every man may have, every real Christian has, constant, immediate intercourse with his Father.

Just the doctrine of the atonement it is, also, which the w...