Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto (25 September 1869 – 7 March 1937) was an eminent German Lutheran theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist.

Quotes

• These materials are found in India, in more primitive forms not merely as a late period but in the remotest pre-Christian Kausitakt Upanishad.
  • Radhakrishnan, S Eastern religions and western thought Oxford, The Clarendon press, 1939. p. 161 as quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture
  • about the idea of a Son of God, see Christ myth theory

• The Gītā, as it is present to us today, is a text in which the religion of a strictly personal god and of the faithful surrender to him in [the attitude of] Bhakti are peculiarly mixed and crossed with the theomonism and the ‘Advaita’ of Upanishadic speculation and which is simultaneously combined with the emergent systems of Sānkhya and Yoga. But Garbe has made it highly probable in his introduction to [his edition of] the Gītā that the present Gītā came about when an older, simpler, and more more equivocal work was defaced by insertions from Vedic priestly theology and changes in the text itself.
  • quoted in Adluri, V., & Bagchee, J. (2014). The nay science : a history of German Indology. Oxford University Press.

• The latter standpoint is my own. I am, in truth, earnestly convinced that Christianity, not in respect of its various historical accidental characteristics, which are disputable in manifold ways, but rather, in terms of its specific ideal content, in terms of its highly individual, typically characterized unique spirit [Sondergeiste] is decisively superior to the other particular forms of religion. . . .
  • quoted in Adluri, V., & Bagchee, J. (2014). The nay science : a history of German Indology. Oxford University Press.