A Semantic Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Religious Theory - Professor Yoshitsugu Sawai

My presentation is a semantic attempt to clarify the totality of Rudolf Otto by describing the characteristics of his religious theory, characterized by such key-terms as “the holy” and “the numinous.” In his academic life, Otto had three “faces,” i.e., a Christian theologian, a philosopher of religion, and a scholar of comparative religion. In the History of Religions, his religious theory is often regarded as the beginning of the phenomenology of religion. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called Otto’s book Das Heilige “a first beginning for a phenomenology of the religious.” Max Scheler, one of Husserl’s disciples, also praised Das Heilige as a book of the phenomenology of religion. In his life, Otto worked on the study of Indian religious thought while conducting Christian theological studies as a Lutheran theologian. His concept of the “wholly other” (das ganz Andere) certainly has the meaning of “God” in his Christian theology. From his perspectives of comparative religion, however, this same term sem