Franz Bibfeldt

Who is Franz Bibfeldt?

Franz Bibfeldt is a 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, to the bewilderment of the Concordia faculty. When the ruse was uncovered, Marty's fellowship to study overseas was revoked, and he instead enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his academic career; he thus credits Bibfeldt as the German theologian who had the greatest influence on his work.

Since then Bibfeldt scholarship has greatly expanded, though the preponderance of work has come out of the University of Chicago, where there is a Donnelley Stool of Bibfeldt Studies.