Jaroslav Pelikan

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Jaroslav Pelikan
Born
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan

(1923-12-17)December 17, 1923
Akron, Ohio, US
DiedMay 13, 2006(2006-05-13) (aged 82)
Hamden, Connecticut, US
Spouse
Sylvia Burica
​
(m. 1946)​
Ecclesiastical history[3]
  • historical theology[4]
    • Institutions
    Doctoral students
    Notable studentsMark McIntosh
    Notable worksThe Christian Tradition (1971–1989)[2]
    InfluencedPhilip Hefner
    Signature

    Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (pronounced /ˈjɑroslɑv ˈpɛlɪkən/; December 17, 1923 – May 13, 2006) was an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University.

    Early years

    Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born on December 17, 1923, in

    Chicago, Illinois. His paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor in Chicago, and in 1902, a charter founder, and later president of, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which until 1958 was known as the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church, a strictly conservative orthodox church of the Augsburg Confession. [citation needed
    ]

    According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a

    Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.[citation needed
    ]

    In 1946, when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from

    St. Louis, Missouri and a PhD at the University of Chicago
    .

    Writings and interviews

    Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public, notably, Mary Through the Centuries, Jesus Through the Centuries, and Whose Bible Is It?

    His 1983 Jefferson Lecture, The Vindication of Tradition, included an often quoted one liner,[7] which he elaborated in a 1989 interview in U.S. News & World Report. He said:

    Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.[8]

    Yale University professor

    He joined Yale University in 1962 as the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History and in 1972 was named Sterling Professor of History, a position he held until achieving emeritus status in 1996. He served as acting dean and then dean of the Graduate School from 1973 to 1978 and was the William Clyde DeVane Lecturer 1984–1986 and again in the fall of 1995. Awards include the Graduate School's 1979 Wilbur Cross Medal and the Medieval Academy of America's 1985 Haskins Medal.

    While at Yale, Pelikan won a contest sponsored by Field & Stream magazine for Ed Zern's column "Exit Laughing" to translate the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association ("Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry") into Latin. Pelikan's winning entry mentioned the martini first, but Pelikan explained that it seemed no less than fitting to have the apéritif come first. His winning entry:

    Semper siccandae sunt: potio
    Pulvis, et pelliculatio.

    Pelikan was appointed to numerous leadership positions in American intellectual life. He was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.[9] He was editor of the religion section of Encyclopædia Britannica, and, in 1980, he founded the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress.

    In 1983 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him to deliver the 12th annual Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor conferred by the federal government for outstanding achievement in the humanities.[10] Pelikan's lecture became the basis for his book The Vindication of Tradition.[11]

    Pelikan gave the 1992–1993

    Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen
    , which were published as the book Christianity and Classical Culture.

    President Bill Clinton appointed Pelikan to serve on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Pelikan received honorary degrees from 42 universities around the world.[citation needed] At the age of 80, he was appointed scholarly director for the "Institutions of Democracy Project" at the Annenberg Foundation.[citation needed]

    In 2004, having received the

    Paul Ricoeur, Pelikan donated his award of $500,000 to Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, of which he was a trustee. At the ceremony, he quoted a leitmotif passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that had moved him all his life: "Was du ererbt von deinen Vaetern hast, Erwirb es um es zu besitzen" ("Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own.").[12]

    Lutheran pastor to Orthodox layman

    For most of his life Pelikan was a Lutheran and was a pastor in that tradition. He was an ordained pastor in the

    Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod before becoming a member of a Lutheran Church in America congregation, which subsequently became part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).[13]

    In 1998, however, he and his wife Sylvia left the ELCA

    Crestwood, New York. According to family members, his conversion followed his meeting Pope John Paul II. Members of Pelikan's family remember him saying that he had not as much converted to Orthodoxy as "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there".[14] Delighted with this turn of phrase, he used it (or close variants) several times among family and friends, including during a visit to St. Vladimir's for Divine Liturgy, the "last before his death."[15]

    Nevertheless, Pelikan was still ecumenical in many ways. Not long before his own death, he praised Pope John Paul II in an article in The New York Times when the pope died in 2005:

    It will be a celebration of the legacy of Pope John Paul II and an answer to his prayers (and to those of all Christians, beginning with their Lord himself) if the Eastern and Western churches can produce the necessary mixture of charity and sincere effort to continue to work toward the time when they all may be one.[16]

    Death

    Pelikan died on May 13, 2006, at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 82, after a seventeen-month battle with lung cancer. He was interred at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 17, 2006. Pelikan was honored by a memorial service in Yale's Battell Chapel on October 10, 2006, with speeches by distinguished scholars and musical performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Yale Russian Chorus.[citation needed]

    Selected bibliography

    References

    Citations

    1. ^ Pelikan 1946.
    2. ^ a b Haykin 2016.
    3. ^ Mong Ih-Ren 2014, p. 59.
    4. ^ Wilken 2010, p. 97.
    5. ^ "Jaroslav Pelikan". The Telegraph. London. May 17, 2006. Retrieved October 15, 2018.
    6. ^ Anders 2010, p. 517.
    7. ^ Pelikan 1984, p. 65: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name."
    8. ^ Carey, Joseph (June 26, 1989). "Christianity as an Enfolding Circle [Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan]". U.S. News & World Report. Vol. 106, no. 25. p. 57.
    9. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
    10. ^ "Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities". National Endowment for the Humanities. Archived from the original on January 17, 2009. Retrieved January 22, 2009.
    11. ^ Pelikan 1984.
    12. ISSN 0731-3527
      . Retrieved February 15, 2017.
    13. ^ a b Scaer, David P. (April 2008). "Theological Observer: Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006)" (PDF). Concordia Theological Quarterly. pp. 180–182.
    14. ^ George, Timothy (2006). "Delighted by Doctrine". Christian History & Biography. No. 91. Christianity Today International. pp. 43–45.
    15. ^ Pelikan, Michael P. (May 2006). Unpublished notes.
    16. ^ Pelikan, Jaroslav (April 4, 2005). "The Great Unifier". The New York Times. Retrieved October 15, 2018.

    Works cited

    External links
    Academic offices
    Preceded by Titus Street Professor of
    Ecclesiastical History
    1962–?     		Succeeded by
    Preceded by Gifford Lecturer at the
    University of Aberdeen
    1992–1993     		Succeeded by
    Cultural offices
    Preceded by Jefferson Lecturer
    1983     		Succeeded by
    Professional and academic associations
    Preceded by President of the American
    Society of Church History
    1965     		Succeeded by
    Preceded by President of the American
    Academy of Arts and Sciences
    1994–1997     		Succeeded by
    Awards
    Preceded by Kluge Prize
    2004
    With: Paul Ricœur     		Succeeded by
    Succeeded by
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