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Like Bultmann, Ogden believes that the language of philosophical existentialism may be the key to a relevant new expression of the faith. Ogden supplies what one theological friend calls "an Anglo-American horse-sense tint" to demythologizing, and colleagues regard his efforts to rid the Christian faith of cliches as intellectually refreshing and sincere rather than heretical. Says Perkins' Dean Joseph Quillian Jr.: "If I had to name the ten or twelve most devout churchmen I know, Schubert would be among them." ∙LANGDON GILKEY, 43, professor of theology at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Although his father was a minister, Gilkey came relatively late to a career in theology. He was educated at Harvard and taught English at Yenching University in China before World War II, spent 2½ years as a Japanese prisoner in a mission compound turned prison.
Torn between the ministry and the foreign service, he studied international law and theology at the University of Chicago before entering Union in 1946. Raised as a Baptist, he worships at a church of the Disciples of Christ in Nashville, Tenn. Gilkey is a deductive, philosophical theologian, steeped in church history, who attempts to show how "the experienced characteristics of human existence make sense only when life is looked at, and lived" through the Christian faith. Christianity, he argues, is the one belief that can successfully illuminate the fragmentary nature of finite existence.
This faith must be expressed in understandable language, and Gilkey is particularly interested in the usefulness of linguistic analysis to theology's understanding of its own words and symbols.
His own major work in progress is a study of one of Christianity's oldest concerns—the idea of God as Lord of time and history—in light of questions raised by modern philosophy. Gilkey fears that too much of U.S. religious fervor is theologically uninformed, worries that the gap between the seminaries and the people may prove fatal to the church. "If it is to live," he says, "Christian faith must inform the most intelligent thought and most serious commitment of each of its adult adherents."