1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lipsius, Richard Adelbert

LIPSIUS, RICHARD ADELBERT (1830–1892), German Protestant theologian, son of K. H. A. Lipsius (d. 1861), who was rector of the school of St Thomas at Leipzig, was born at Gera on the 14th of February 1830. He studied at Leipzig, and eventually (1871) settled at Jena as professor ordinarius. He helped to found the “Evangelical Protestant Missionary Union” and the “Evangelical Alliance,” and from 1874 took an active part in their management. He died at Jena on the 19th of August 1892. Lipsius wrote principally on dogmatics and the history of early Christianity from a liberal and critical standpoint. A Neo-Kantian, he was to some extent an opponent of Albrecht Ritschl, demanding “a connected and consistent theory of the universe, which shall comprehend the entire realm of our experience as a whole. He rejects the doctrine of dualism in a truth, one division of which would be confined to ‘judgments of value,’ and be unconnected with our theoretical knowledge of the external world. The possibility of combining the results of our scientific knowledge with the declarations of our ethico-religious experience, so as to form a consistent philosophy, is based, according to Lipsius, upon the unity of the personal ego, which on the one hand knows the world scientifically, and on the other regards it as the means of realizing the ethico-religious object of its life” (Otto Pfleiderer). This, in part, is his attitude in Philosophie und Religion (1885). In his Lehrbuch der evang.-prot. Dogmatik (1876; 3rd ed., 1893) he deals in detail with the doctrines of “God,” “Christ,” “Justification” and the “Church.” From 1875 he assisted K. Hase, O. Pfleiderer and E. Schrader in editing the Jahrbücher für prot. Theologie, and from 1885 till 1891 he edited the Theol. Jahresbericht.

His other works include Die Pilatusakten (1871, new ed., 1886), Dogmatische Beiträge (1878), Die Quellen der ältesten Ketzergeschichte (1875), Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten (1883–1890), Hauptpunkte der christl. Glaubenslehre im Umriss dargestellt (1889), and commentaries on the Epistles to the Galatians, Romans and Philippians in H. J. Holtzmann’s Handkommentar zum Neuen Testament (1891–1892).