Frederick Herzog

Frederick Herzog (1925–1995) was a professor of systematic theology at Duke University. An impassioned champion of civil rights, his academic focus was liberation theology. A native of North Dakota, Herzog earned his doctorate from Princeton University after having studied in Germany and Switzerland, where he was an assistant to professor Karl Barth. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Christ, the successor to the German Reformed denomination of his childhood. In 1960, he joined the faculty at Duke Divinity School. Herzog taught Christian theology at Duke until his sudden death during a faculty meeting in 1995. In the spring of 1970, he wrote the first North American article by a white theologian on liberation theology, following James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power published in 1969, and in 1972 his Liberation Theology was published. In Justice Church Herzog extended his methodology for liberation theology in North America. During the final ten years of his life, his writings were strongly affected by his work in Latin America, especially Peru where he assisted with the support of a Methodist-Related Seminary, the cause of which he was championing at the moment of his death. His daughter, Dagmar Herzog, is professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.