Religious Theories of Religion. A synthesis between
participation in the Western traditional valuation of
holiness and behavioral description of it was the most
notable accomplishment of Rudolf Otto, a German
Protestant theologian who had, among other things,
traveled in Asia. His book
The Idea of the Holy, pub-
lished in German in 1917, was widely influential. In-
debted to Schleiermacher's analysis of religion as feel-
ing, Otto termed the object of such feeling “the holy.”
The word implied, as all Christendom knew, goodness;
but there was more to holiness than goodness, in the
realm of power so recently explored as
mana, taboo,
and the like. For this realm Otto coined the word “the
numinous,” describing this aspect of the holy as an
overwhelming yet fascinating mystery. Otto's effort
was to show that the central object of all religion was
sui generis, reducible neither to philosophical nor
psychological nor any other components. With Otto
“the holy” as a noun became at last a prime term for
analysis, combining what we have reviewed as the
participant's perception of God with the observer's
perception of religion, in that language where the holy
and the sacred are one.
While Christian theologians after Barth were eager
to argue that the Christian revelation is sui generis as
against religions, certain comparativists after Otto were
to state, notably in what was termed the phenomen-
ology of religion, a similar claim for religion in general
as over against other aspects of culture, at times draw-
ing on Otto for support. Holding that each religious
experience must be understood on its own terms, the
school has sought to chart the variety of man's re-
ligiousness in general patterns as a response to the
sacred, according the sacred the status which Otto gave
the holy. Whereas Otto had argued the ultimacy of
the holy largely in terms familiar within European
religion and philosophy, Gerardus van der Leeuw and
other phenomenologists of religion were arguing its
ultimacy from non-Western practices, myths, and texts
as well.
Thus although many behavioral scientists have re-
garded such endorsement of the sacred as highly sus-
pect, there has emerged an explicitly comparative
sense of “the holy” or “the sacred” in theological and
literary circles. Such usage is fraught with ambiguity
as to the objective status of a power such as “the holy”
correlated with man's religious concern. Like Paul
Tillich, a theologian reminiscent of and indebted to
Otto, many who employ “the holy” or “the sacred”
as nouns to denote a transcendent power argue from
man's religiousness as the best accessible evidence.
A use of “the holy” where once one might have used
“God” has developed as a result of the information
and the attitudes of recent cultural and religious plu-
ralism. Christendom's long-standing tradition of the
holy and Western culture's long history of description
of diverse sacreds have interacted and to some extent
fused in modern times. The tendency to include other
cultures' sacred as well as one's own is not likely soon
to be reversed.
