Friedrich Gogarten

1887-1967. German Protestant theologian. A native of Dortmund, he established his reputation with an essay on Fichte as a religious thinker (1914), was pastor at Stelzendorf and Dorndorf, and from 1927 taught systematic theology at Jena. Reacting like Barth from religious liberalism, but unlike others of the new orthodoxy from a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist background, he believed he had recaptured the true insight of Luther by upholding an existential interpretation of sacred history which sees it not as an objective series of happenings to be accepted from the outside, but as dynamically to be apprehended by ourselves who are within the same historical process. Two of his numerous theological writings to be translated into English are Demythologizing and History (1955) and Christ and Crisis (1970).