Christian Dogmatics Vol 1

Protestant liberalism in the nineteenth century provided numerous examples of a strange irony. On the one hand, the biblical critics were zealous in their commitment to scientific historical scholarship; on the other hand, their religious commitments and philosophical presuppositions shine through all their critical scholarship. In trying to be utterly historical they wound up reading the ideas of their own time into the biblical documents. The school of Albrecht Ritschl is a case in point. The Ritschlians were deeply influenced by the Kantian moral philosophy of religion. They looked for the ethical superiority of Christianity