Similarly, God adopts Christians as children through a synthetic
judgement which does not manifest an already existing state of affairs
but adds a new fact to their status.^195
In some sense, this view is close to Schleiermacher, who also
stresses the performative dimension of adoption. Ritschl, however,
wants to be more genuinely Protestant than Schleiermacher. He does
not consider adoption as a new being of the Christian, but wants to
maintain the forensic picture of performative statement and status
change. While adoption for Schleiermacher offers a bridge towards
Catholicism, for Ritschl it strengthens the forensic understanding of
justification. At the same time, the idea of adoption as the actual
content of justification is common to both. While adoption for
Schleiermacher is extended towards ontological reality, for Ritschl it
remains a strictly forensic performative.
Ritschl employs the termAnerkennungfairly regularly, but his
usage is not consistent. His basic distinction between analytic and
synthetic judgement may, however, provide some help in under-
standing his statements regarding religious recognition. Ritschl does
not employAnerkennungas a term that depicts God’s judgement in
the act of justification. However, his moderate criticism of Schleier-
macher also shows an affinity. Ritschl maintains that the divine act of
justification brings about a status change that leads to adoption.
While this performative move is called synthetic judgement, not
recognition, it has a structural resemblance to Schleiermacher’s view.
At times, Ritschl employsAnerkennungto characterize a view that
does not represent his own position. For instance, he considers that
‘faith is not meant as the recognition (Anerkennung) of the correct-
ness of inherited facts nor as the approval of true sentences. Instead, it
is trust in God’s grace.’^196 In this statement, recognition depicts an act
that is‘analytic’in the sense of merely epistemic assent. Ritschl may
here have in mind the view of Protestant orthodoxy in which know-
ing and assent precede trust. He emphasizes that the knowledge of
faith must be very different from‘knowledge of the world’.^197 The
proper act of religious recognition cannot be analytical or merely
epistemic in the manner of ordinary knowledge.^198
(^195) Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, 3, 94.
(^196) Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, 3, 97.
(^197) Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung,3,97–8.
(^198) Cf. Lange 1998, 479.
154 Recognition and Religion