1870–1900

Protestant Liberalism: Ritschl's Value Judgments and Harnack's Thesis of "Hellenization"

Classical liberalism, according to Grenz and Olson, took shape in the ideas of Ritschl: revising beliefs in the light of science, freedom to criticize tradition, and the center of Christianity in ethics and the kingdom of God. In The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1870–1874) Ritschl distinguished scientific knowledge from religious knowledge – a value judgment; theology studies not God as such but his significance for salvation, and metaphysics is inadmissible as its foundation. Harnack in his History of Dogma (1886–1889) argued that the simple religion of Jesus became a religion about Jesus and then dogma: dogma is "a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel." In What Is Christianity? (1899/1900) he sought the kernel of the gospel beneath its changing forms.