GOGARTEN, FRIEDRICH

Theologian and defender of secularization; b. Jan. 13, 1887; d. Oct. 16, 1967. Gogarten was educated at the universities of Berlin, Jena, and Heidelberg in the typically liberal Protestant theology characteristic of German university faculties at the turn of the century. During his time as pastor in a small country parish in Thuringia, he steeped himself in the thought of Martin Luther and began to question the optimistic assumptions of liberal thought. In an intellectual shift similar to that of Karl Barth, Gogarten rejected the historicism of theologians such as Ernst Troeltsch which seemed to be based upon an individualistic understanding of man and an identification of the Word of God with human conscience. Instead, especially during his career at the University of Göttingen (1935–55), Gogarten insisted that Christianity is not found in a realm of ideals or universal truths but in a summons to historical self-understanding in which the believer accepts responsibility for his existence under the Word of God addressed to him in Christ. Thus human beings encounter God not in abstract categories but in a personal Thou-I relationship within the relativity of history and the gratuity of the divine initiative.

Gogarten departed somewhat from his earlier neoorthodoxy by supporting the demythologizing of Rudolf Bultmann. He affirmed the existentialist position that faith is not the affirmation of objective historical truths but the personal acknowledgment of the efficacy of God's present action within the believing community.

Gogarten later came to insist on the value of secularization. The Christian must avoid any divinization of the historical process and is thereby rendered free to assume a radical concern for the world in its meaning-filled yet less-than-ultimate significance.

Bibliography: f. gogarten, Demythologizing and History (New York 1955); Christ the Crisis (Richmond 1970); The Reality of Faith (Philadelphia 1959). l. shiner, The Secularization of History (Nashville 1966).

[t. m. mcfadden]