Rudolf Otto

Toward the end of World War I, two books burst upon the theological scene in Germany . The year 1917 saw the publication of Rudolf Otto's major work, Das Heilige; this was followed in the next year by Karl Barth's commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Der Romerbrief. Each, in its own way, set its face against the prevalent secular and rational outlook of the nineteenth century. And both went beyond the predominant liberal Protestant theology which had seemed to promise so much but was found wanting in the context of postwar Europe , the intellectual foundations of which had been totally undermined by existential disillusionment.

Otto was at one with the developing Dialectical Theology initiated by Barth in his recognition of the objectivity and reality of the source of revelation, that is, the divine, and in his grounding of religion in that which, of its essence, cannot be totally grasped rationally. But his position was decisively different from Barth's in at least two important ways. First, although religion is for Otto grounded in the nonrational, this nonrational essence is nonetheless capable of rational analysis. As we shall see during the course of this study, the point of connection between the divine and the human which makes possible some understanding of the former is the universal human capacity to experience the divine. The divine is to be grasped in and as the complex interplay of the rational and the nonrational. After Otto's death, John Harvey, the English translator of Das Heilige, reported that "he always held that the doctrine of the school of Karl Barth with its unmitigated assertion of the Ganz Andere, the 'wholly otherness of God,' was a one-sided abberation." And in his final lecture before his retirement from the University of Marburg , Otto described himself as a "pietistic Lutheran": a Lutheran in his recognition of the objective reality of the ground of revelation, but pietistic in that this recognition was based on the universal human capacity to have genuine religious experience.

In contrast to Barth's implicit assertion that Christianity is the sole and absolute bearer of religious truth, Otto's primary concern is to establish the validity of religion in general in opposition to all attempts to reduce it to a mere function of individual psychology or a product of group psychology- in short, in opposition to all attempts to explain it in solely naturalistic or materialistic terms. For Otto, religion in general is ultimately and only referrable to a preconceptual and preethical nonrational and irreducible ground which cannot be eliminated without the loss of religion's inner essence. Therefore Christianity can only be understood in relation to religion in general and in comparison with other manifestations of the nonrational essence of religion. Christianity needs to be understood, Otto writes, "in its natural affinity and connection with religion in general, i.e., against a background of comparative religion and the history of religion."

The effect of Barth's work was enormous, initiating as it did a new theological epoch. Assuredly, for the major part of Otto's time at the University of Marburg , Dialectical Theology overshadowed all else. Ernst Benz reports that Otto's lectures were ridiculed by students committed to the existentialist theology of Rudolf Bultmann, and that the religious collection founded by Otto was referred to as the "heathen temple" by those students for whom Dialectical Theology entailed the unnecessariness and superfluity of the history and comparison of religions. The polemical situation which resulted was, along with Otto's increasing ill health, an influence on his decision to retire early, in March 1929.

The predominance of Dialectical Theology curtailed Otto's influence on the development of German theology during the first half of the twentieth century. Certainly, during the first few years of his tenure in the chair of Systematic Theology at Marburg , he was highly regarded by both colleagues and students.