Philosophy

Christian Kamleiter shows how Rudolf Otto's theory of religion is based on extensive reflections on the possibilities and limits of religious communication. He places a special focus on Otto's unpublished lecture on dogmatics and reconstructs how Otto's theory of religious communication is an actualization of concepts prefigured by Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Hartmut von Sass explores the four levels of factual, evaluative, normative, and implicative relations to the future and asks what attitudes toward the future the Christian faith already contains - in the face of concrete challenges of our present in which the future has become fundamentally uncertain.

Gotthold E. Lessing's literary work reveals a profound theological dimension. Especially in his early writings, the pastor's son engages critically and intensely with Christianity. Christian anthropology however is, as Steffen Götze's analysis shows, a cornerstone of Lessing's literary oeuvre.

The problem of natural theology has become more acute in late modernity. With impulses from the philosophy of religion, problem-historical analyses and contemporary systematic-theological reflections, the contributors to this volume undertake a reassessment of the problem field of natural theology.