Schubert M. Ogden

Ogden was invited to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in 1956 and served on its faculty for thirteen years. His two sons, Alan Scott and Andrew Merrick, were born in Dallas. In 1969 he left SMU to become University Professor of Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, only to return to Perkins in 1972 for an additional twenty-one years of teaching. He retired in 1993 as University Distinguished Professor of Theology. Ogden died June 6, 2019, in Louisville, Colorado following a lengthy illness.

Schubert Miles Ogden (March 2, 1928 – June 6, 2019) was an American Protestant theologian who proposed an interpretation of the Christian faith that he believes is both appropriate to the earliest apostolic witness found in the New Testament and also credible in the light of common human experience. He has written eleven books and been awarded many honors including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright research scholarship, as well as honorary degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago, and Southern Methodist University. He has been invited to many titled lectureships in universities in Europe and the United States, made President of the American Academy of Religion (1976-7), and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985).

Ogden was born in 1928 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1946. He then attended Ohio Wesleyan University where he met his future wife Joyce Ellen Schwettman. He then studied philosophy for a year at Johns Hopkins before enrolling in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he earned both his BD and PhD. It was at the University of Chicago that he became concerned with the viewpoints of two major scholars who would influence his own theology: the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, a metaphysician with whom Ogden studied, and the theology of Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar whose project was “demythologizing” the New Testament; that is, interpreting the mythical elements of the New Testament in terms of existentialist philosophy. Ogden's dissertation, published as Christ without Myth, was a critical but positive engagement with the thought of Rudolf Bultmann, an engagement about which one reviewer of Ogden has written: “Although it has been deepened and refined…Ogden’s basic understanding of the contemporary theological task has not changed since the expression given to it in his early appreciation of Bultmann’s contribution.”. It was in 1962-3 while in Marburg that Ogden's professional relationship to Bultmann developed into a personal one that was sustained by an extensive correspondence until Bultmann's death in 1976.