This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The approach Ritschl founded, generally called the Ritschlian school, shaped a generation of German Protestant theology, a documented reach beyond his own lecture hall at Bonn and then Gottingen into a wider movement carrying his name. That the movement is named for him rather than for any single doctrine it produced is documented as reflecting how thoroughly his own method, relocating theology onto ethical and historical ground, defined the school's identity beyond the specific conclusions individual followers reached within it.
The school's best known statement is documented as reaching its clearest expression in the work of Ritschl's own student Adolf von Harnack, whose 1900 lecture series What Is Christianity? reduced the gospel to themes of ethical and historical substance rather than dogmatic metaphysics, a documented continuation of the teacher's method carried forward and popularized by the student rather than an independent invention. That the school's most widely read statement came from a student rather than from Ritschl's own writing is recorded as typical of how the Ritschlian approach reached its broadest audience.
That a theological method built to relocate Christian doctrine onto ethical and historical ground found its clearest, most widely read statement not in its founder's own writing but in a student's later lecture series marks the Ritschlian school's reach through Adolf von Harnack as a documented case where a teacher's method became most visible in the form a student gave it.