“The Punch Line Was Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, or
What Do We Preach and Teach about God?”
Text of a devotional talk given at the Trinity Lutheran
Seminary year-end faculty meeting,
I
As I prepared for this last faculty meeting of the year, my
mind drifted back to my first faculty meeting in the Theological Consortium of
Greater Columbus in the fall of 2004. I
won’t identify which seminary.
I came in during the informal gathering time and overheard just
the punch line to a joke that one faculty member was telling another:
“Mysterium tremendum!”
A third faculty member chipped in: “. . . et fascinans!!”
“Mysterium tremendum et fascinans!” Quite a punch line, isn’t it?
When I related this episode to my wife later that day, she
asked, “What in the world do you people talk about!” A question she has asked ever since her first
trip with me to a meeting of the
What do we talk about in seminary? Specifically, what do we preach and teach about God?
II
I was comforted that some of my new faculty colleagues
understood the theories of a classic author in my academic discipline, the comparative
study of religion. The phrase “mysterium
tremendum et fascinans” summarizes Rudolf Otto’s view of the human response to the
Divine, as laid out in his 1917 book, Das
Heilige (The Idea of the Holy).[1]
We human creatures sense the reality of Something Holy and
Utterly Other than ourselves, a Divine Presence. This is the innermost core of religious
experience, according to Otto.[2] Our creaturely-ness experiences the Divine
Holiness as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery both daunting and
fascinating, awe-full and wonder-full, uncanny yet attractive.
Rudolf Otto located this experience in the realm of feeling,
identifying it as the “non-rational factor” of religion, and explored its
relationship to religion’s conceptual and moral aspects (not to be denied, but
also not to be overstated).[3]
Most insightful to me, Otto explained that the Divine
Presence eludes our attempts to describe it fully. The deepest human response to it is speechlessness:
“Let all the earth keep silence before him,” Otto quotes the Hebrew prophet (Habakkuk
Our doctrinal statements, important as they are in
articulating our faith, in the end remain human formulations of divine
things. As the hymn writer exclaims,
“Triune God, enfolding Mystery greater than our creeds recite. . . .”[5]
III
I somehow had the impression that Rudolf Otto’s theories
emerged first out of his comparative “field work” on the world’s non-Christian
religions. He wrote, for instance, of the
Divine Presence worshiped in the Yom Kippur liturgy, particularly in the
seraphim’s song from Isaiah 6: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the
whole earth is full of his glory” (vs. 3, NRSV).[6] Otto found analogous elements in Hindu
scriptures, Islamic doctrines, the art of Taoism and Buddhism, and so on.
But long before these investigations, Otto first understood
these things from his study of Luther’s writings.[7] Like most German scholar-theologians of his
day, Otto wrote his dissertation on Luther, as well as his first book.
And he devoted an entire chapter of The Idea of the Holy to Luther,[8] in
which he cited one of Luther’s sermons to illustrate the great preacher’s
response to divine goodness and grace: “Who will extol this enough or utter it
forth? It is neither to be expressed or
conceived. If thou feelest it truly in
the heart, it will be such a great thing to thee that thou wilt rather be
silent than speak aught of it.”[9]
This sermon of Luther was based on Phil. 4:4-7, which includes
Paul’s telling phrase, “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding,
will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (vs. 7, RSV). Luther comments: “This peace of God is beyond
the power of mind and reason to comprehend. Understand, however, [that] it is not beyond
man’s power to experience—to be sensible of. Peace with God must be felt in the heart and
conscience.”[10]
Again: “If thou feelest it truly in the heart, it will be
such a great thing to thee that thou wilt rather be silent than speak aught of
it.”
IV
Rudolf Otto was critical of those who denied the importance
of the non-rational in Luther’s writings.[11] He also criticized the Lutheranism of his day
for neglecting the non-rational in overemphasizing the moral and conceptual
aspects of the faith.[12] He advocated a type of liturgy, separate from
a Communion service, that would culminate in silent worship, adoration, and
prayer, modeled in part on the Quaker worship style.[13]
You Lutherans can debate these things, if you wish. I hope we can all see the value in
experiencing the Divine Presence, and in preaching and teaching about that
experience.
Have we stood, both daunted and fascinated, in the presence
of God?
Have we, like Luther, truly felt God in our hearts to such a
great extent that we could not speak aught of the feeling?
Can we testify to an experience of God that both informs and
transcends our propositions about God?
How often have we found ourselves “rapt in worship,”[14]
rather than bored, or even intellectually stimulated? That’s never enough.
Early on in The Idea
of the Holy, Rudolf Otto advised those who have never had “a moment of
deeply-felt religious experience . . . to read no further.”[15]
If we have nothing to offer along these lines, we should preach and teach no further.
V
I will conclude my discussion of Rudolf Otto with brief
mention of his insight about the popularity of ghost stories and other grisly
and gruesome tales.
I’ve wondered about this in our time—why the fascination
with horror and the supernatural in the movies?
Otto suggested that such are feeble attempts to capture the
Divine Presence, to experience something utterly other than our mundane reality,
something that can arouse the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in us. He called such efforts “degraded,” a
“travesty,” and “only a caricature of the genuine thing.”[16]
We can certainly do better in our preaching and teaching,
can’t we?
VI
I will close this devotion with the first two stanzas of the
hymn, “Praise the Source of Faith and Learning,”[17]
written by onetime Bexley Hall faculty member, Thomas H. Troeger. This hymn was sung at the
These words capture the experience of Divine Presence and its relationship to our vocation. I offer them as a prayer:
Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
with a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray:
God of wisdom, we acknowledge that our science and our art
and the breadth of human knowledge only partial truth impart.
Far beyond our calculation lies a depth we cannot sound
where your purpose for creation and
the pulse of life are found.
[1] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed., transl. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950). For concise treatments of Otto’s life and work, see the entries in Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia of Religion, and Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd ed. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 161-167.
[2] Otto coined the term “numinous” (from the Latin numen, roughly “divine presence”) to refer to this Holy and Wholly Other reality at the heart of religion; see Idea of the Holy, Chapter 2.
[3] The book’s subtitle is “An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.”
[4] Idea of the Holy, 211.
[5] Carl P.
Daw, Jr., “God Our Maker, Whose First Summons” (
[6] Idea of the Holy, 190.
[7] Ibid., 99-100.
[8] Chapter 12, “The Numinous in Luther.”
[9] Quoted in Idea of the Holy, 103. Otto’s reference seems to be in error. The Luther experts at the Trinity Lutheran Seminary library and the Atlantis listserv identified the source of Otto’s quote as Luther’s Sermon on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, preached on either 23 December 1537 (Erlangen edition) or 20 December 1545 (Weimar edition). My thanks especially to Aija Bjornson and Carla Birkhimer at Trinity.
[10] From Lenker’s interpretive rendering of Luther’s sermons; see John Nicholas Lenker, ed., Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988), 110.
[11] Idea of the Holy, 97.
[12] Ibid., 108.
[13] Ibid., 210-214. Also, Religious Essays: A Supplement to “The Idea of the Holy,” transl. Brian Lunn (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 53-67.
[14] See Idea of the Holy, 8.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 28-29.