Wednesday, May 17, 2006
The Passing of a Little Known Legend - RIP Jaroslav Pelikan
I hate death. It’s not natural (that is my theological position). Death is of course the price of sin, so it is a penalty we all bring on ourselves. Death means that we lose the presence in this life of so many great men and women. I just learned that one such great man, one you may not know, passed away Saturday from lung cancer in Hamden.
Jaroslav Pelikan was a great historian of the Christian faith and a good theologian himself. The child of ethnic Lutheran parents (his father was a Lutheran pastor, much like another of my heroes, John Richard Neuhaus). If Pelikan had only written his five part history of the Christain Tradition, he would have been worthy of remberance. That five volume series, done by someone who continued throughout his life to believe in Jesus Christ who is at the center of all theological development, allowed good faithful and orthodox theologians to have a source that was both scholarly and easy to engage with in their studies. It showed that the work of Adolph Von Harnack, the 19th century theologian who undertook a similiar project but with what I have always perceived as a negative attitude, was not so great a historian or theologian.
Many Christians in America have interacted with Pelikan even if they did not know it. He was the one who coined the great phrase, “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, tradition is the living faith of the dead.” (Page 9 of the 1st volume of the above mentioned series). This love of tradition led Pelikan in his later life to become a member of the Orthodox faith (similiar to how Neuhaus became a Catholic), but his work stands as a gift from God through this faithful servant to theologians and Christians throughout the world.
If you have not done so, thank God for men like Jaroslav Pelikan, and pray that young men and women who answer that same calling of God to serve the Gospel through good theology and history.
For a great look at Jaroslav Pelikan and his life, check out the following pages:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/152/42.0.html http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/pelikan.html
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