Schubert Miles Ogden (March 2, 1928 – June 6, 2019) was an American Protestant theologian who proposed an interpretation of the Christian faith that he believed was both appropriate to the earliest apostolic witness found in the New Testament and also credible in the light of common human experience.

He then studied philosophy for a year at Johns Hopkins before enrolling in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he earned both his BD and PhD.

Ogden's dissertation, published as Christ without Myth, was a critical but positive engagement with the thought of Rudolf Bultmann, an engagement about which one reviewer of Ogden has written: "Although it has been deepened and refined…Ogden’s basic understanding of the contemporary theological task has not changed since the expression given to it in his early appreciation of Bultmann’s contribution.".

Ogden was invited to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in 1956 and served on its faculty for thirteen years.

The second task necessarily involves philosophy because the credibility of the Christian witness can only be established in purely secular terms.

The result of the large literature Ogden has produced that is dedicated to carrying out these two tasks has led one reviewer to write: "Probably no theologian since Schleiermacher has provided a more nuanced and cogent account of Christian theology’s constitution as a complex, yet integral field of critical reflection….

Religions are the cultural systems that provide the concepts and symbols through which a given human community explicitly asks and answers the existential question: what is the meaning of ultimate reality for us?

These religions basically presuppose that there is an authentic self-understanding or way persons view themselves in relation to the world that is normative, and that it is so because it is authorized by ultimate reality itself.

This entails, in turn, that decision for such an authentic human existence could possibly occur otherwise than through the Christian religion and its special means of salvation.

He argues that it is a fundamental existential presupposition of all human beings that life is ultimately worth living and that it is impossible to deny coherently what is thus necessarily implied by any self-understanding at all.

God is not a separate personal being who existed before the creation of the world but the one all-encompassing strictly universal individual whose essence, in symbolic terms, is nothing other than the pure, unbounded love that Jesus decisively represents.