Born in Berlin in 1822, Albrecht Ritschl, the most influential of nineteenthcentury German theologians, studied at the universities of Bonn, Halle, Heidelberg and Tübingen, at the first of which he was appointed professor in 1852. In 1864 he moved to Gottingen. Like most of his contemporaries he came under Hegelian influence, particularly from the radical Tubingen school of New Testament critics led by F. C. Baur. A work on the gospels of Mark and Luke published in 1846 revealed him as among Baur's closest followers, but in the ensuing years his enthusiasm for Hegelian principles waned, as is clear from the considerably revised second edition (1857) of his Entstehung der altkatholische Kirche. Ritschl's thinking now bore the marks of Kant and Schleiermacher, but the culminating influence was to be that of Rudolf Lotze, apparent in all his major publications. Most important of these is Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung undder Versöhnung (1870–4; 2nd ed., 1882; 4th ed., 1895–1902), the work on which his reputation as a theologian largely rests, although Die Geschichte des Pietismus (1880–6), Über die christliche Vollkommenheit (1874)—a study of‘Christian perfection’—and Theologie und Metaphysik (1881) are also noteworthy. His Unterricht in die christliche Religion (1875) is a summary, none too lucid, of his general theological position. Ritschl found Gottingen much to his liking and subsequent calls to Strasbourg and Berlin were refused. He died in 1889, after a lifetime as little remarkable for external event-apart from theological controversy, which he relished-as that of Kant himself.