“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, May 30, 2007, by Rev. Dr. Paul D. Numrich.
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 American Academy of Religion!
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).
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. 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).
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 2:20).
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. . . .”
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). 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. 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, 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.”
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.”
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. He also criticized the Lutheranism of his day for neglecting the non-rational in overemphasizing the moral and conceptual aspects of the faith. 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.
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,” 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.”
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.”
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,” written by onetime Bexley Hall faculty member, Thomas H. Troeger. This hymn was sung at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio commencement a few days ago.
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.
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.
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.
The book’s subtitle is “An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.”
Carl P. Daw, Jr., “God Our Maker, Whose First Summons” (Carol Stream, IL: Hope Publishing Co., 2007).
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.
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.