Gordon D. Kaufman Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In addition to Kaufman’s long tenure at Harvard Divinity School, he was a past president of the American Academy of Religion (1982) and of the American Theological Society, as well as a member of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. Kaufman was the author of 13 books, which influenced how many mainline Christians have considered God language and religious naturalism. Among these are An Essay on Theological Method, God The Problem, Theology for a Nuclear Age, and In the Face of Mystery. This last work earned him the 1995 American Academy of Religion Award for excellence among constructive books in religion. He participated for many years in the discussions on religious naturalism at the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought and the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (Lecturer 2006) He was the subject of two Festschriften.

Gordon Dester Kaufman (22 June 1925 – 22 July 2011) was an American theologian and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, where he taught for over three decades beginning in 1963. He also taught at Pomona College and Vanderbilt University, and lectured in India, Japan, South Africa, England, and Hong Kong. Kaufman was an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church for 50 years.

Kaufman was born on June 22, 1925, in North Newton, Kansas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethel College in 1947. He earned his Master of Arts degree in sociology from Northwestern University in 1948, a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1951, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophical theology from Yale University in 1955. His dissertation was titled The Problem of Relativism and the Possibility of Metaphysics. In 1961–1962 he completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tübingen in Germany.