Franz Bibfeldt
Franz Bibfeldt is a famous, fictitious theologian and in-joke among American academic theologians.
Bibfeldt made his first appearance as the author of an invented footnote in a term paper of a Concordia Seminary student, Robert Howard Clausen. Clausen's classmate, Martin Marty was struck by the name and Bibfeldt became a running joke for Martin and his friends. In 1951, Marty's review of Bibfeldt's The Relieved Paradox was published in the Concordia Seminarian.
Since then Bibfeldt scholarship has greatly expanded, though the preponderance of work has come out of the University of Chicago where Marty was professor and where there is a Donnelley Stool of Bibfeldt Studies.
Most of the scholarship to date is collected in The Unrelieved Paradox: Studies in the Theology of Franz Bibfeldt (ISBN 0-8028-0745-3) edited by Marty and Jerald C. Brauer.
References
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