Frederick Herzog (1925-1995) was born in Ashley, North Dakota, from German parents. He studied theology in Germany and Switzerland, got his doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary, taught at Mission House Seminary in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and was the last thirty-five years of his life professor of
systematic theology at Duke University, where he initiated intensive academic exchanges with Bonn, Germany, and Lima, Peru. In the spring of 1970 he wrote the first North American article on Liberation Theology. In 1972 his Liberation Theology: Liberation in the Light of the Fourth Gospel forged a new way of writing theology by letting it grow out of biblical thoughts and images as well as the wrenching
experiences of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. South. It was a daring challenge to traditional white theology, asking it to "become black" in solidarity with "the wretched of the earth."