Toward a Genealogy of the Holy: Rudolf Otto and the Apologetics of Religion

Abstract

This article reads Rudolf Otto's thought, especially his classic book, Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy), against the background of an intense, early struggle to reconcile the religiosity of his childhood with the claims of the natural and historical sciences. In doing so, it sees Otto as creatively continuing and combining two theological traditions : the neo-Lutheranism that he learned especially from F.H.R. Frank at Erlangen and the liberal theology that he learned from Hermann Schultz at Gottingen. Although it has become customary to see Otto's thought, including Das Heilige, as a classic contribution to the science of religion, Otto's work emerges from this reading as a late moment in the branch of systematic theology hnown as apologetics. In his best-known writings Otto developed an apologetics not of Christianity but of religion.