Rudolf Otto Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Lattke

Critical Essay by Michael Lattke

SOURCE: "Rudolf Bultmann on Rudolf Otto," in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 78, No. 1-2, January/April 1985, pp. 353-60.

In the following essay, Lattke discusses Otto's friendship with and intellectual split from Rudolf Bultmann at the University at Marburg.

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937),¹ well known for his book The Idea of the Holy,² and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976),' even more famous for his hermeneutical programs of demythologization and existential interpretation, had, according to Bultmann himself, "been friends at Breslau."⁴ Although Bultmann admitted in 1969 with incorruptible fairness that "the calling of the systematic theologian Rudolf Otto was a great gain for the theological faculty at Marburg," he also had to state that "Otto and I grew so far apart that our students, too, were aware of the antithesis between his work and mine."⁵ Already ten years earlier, in his first autobiographical draft of 1959, Bultmann mentioned "tensions with R. Otto, Hermann's successor," which...
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