Jaroslav Pelican

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan (born December 17, 1923 in Akron , Ohio , † May 13, 2006 in Hamden , Connecticut ) was an American historian and was considered one of the leading international specialists in the history of theology and intellectual history of the Middle Ages .

Jaroslav Pelican

Life

He was born in Akron, Ohio in 1923 to a pastor in the Slovak Lutheran Church and a Serb mother. He had already taught himself to read at the age of two and a half and learned to write on a typewriter because he could not yet use a pencil . In a multilingual environment he learned English , Slovak , Serbian and German as a child , and then Russian , Latin , Greek and Hebrew as a teenager .

By the age of 23 he had a degree in theology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. His doctoral supervisor was a student of Adolf von Harnack . His professional role models were Harnack and Georgi Wassiljewitsch Florowski , with whom he was also personally friends.

In 1946 he married Sylvia Pauline Burica, with whom he had three children. In the same year he became the pastor of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod ordained and worked as assistant pastor in the town of his father in Chicago. At the same time he was an assistant at Valparaiso University in Indiana until he was appointed to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in 1951 . In 1953 he took over a professorship at the University of Chicago and in 1962 moved to Yale University , where he became Sterling Professor of History in 1972 . From 1973 to 1978 he was dean of the historical faculty there.

He was also editor of the religion section of the Encyclopædia Britannica and founder of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress , President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (member since 1966), President of the American Society of Church History , member of the American Philosophical Society since 1978 and under Bill Clinton on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities . In 2000 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

In 1998 he converted from the Lutheran to the Orthodox Church in America . In an open letter to his former congregation , he described this step as the logical culmination of a decade-long spiritual and spiritual development.

In addition to his over 30 other academic honors, he received an honorary doctorate in law from Harvard University in 1998 and, together with Paul Ricœur, the one million dollar John W. Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress in 2004 , a Nobel Prize for humanities corresponds.

Works

He published his first book From Luther to Kierkegaard when he was 30 years old.

He worked on the editions of Johannes Chrysostomos ', Augustinus ' and Erasmus' and edited a new translation of Luther's works in 55 volumes (1955–1971), which is now also available on CD-ROM ( ISBN 0-8006-0359-1 ).

His most popular work is Jesus Christ. Appearance and Effect in 2000 Years of Cultural History (1986), which describes the influence of Jesus on cultural history ( ISBN 3545250628 ). Then he published Maria. 2000 years in religion, culture and history (original 1996, German 1999).

From 1971 to 1989 he worked on the five volumes of The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine , a monumental work in the history of theology, which is rated similar in meaning to the dogma history of Adolf Harnack, which was completed a hundred years earlier .

His 2003 book Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition ( ISBN 0-300-09388-8 ) is praised by the liberal Anglican primate Rowan Williams as well as by the conservative Catholic Pope Benedict XVI.

While Harnack was a model for Pelikan as a scholar, according to his own statement, Pelikan's interpretation of the history of dogma differs in some essential points: In contrast to Harnack, who tries to explain dogmatic positions mainly through philosophy and politics, Pelikan particularly emphasizes biblical exegesis, for example the key texts of the Bible, in the light of which the protagonists of each position interpreted the rest of the Bible. In contrast to Harnack and many of his successors, Pelikan sees an essential part of the Christian tradition in the Orthodox tradition, to which he dedicated a full volume of his five-volume work. His interpretation of Greek and Slavic Orthodox history is described by Orthodox theologians as the most comprehensive work in the history of Orthodox theology.

Pelikan assumes that the Christian doctrine (lex credendi) emerges from the Christian liturgy (lex orandi), which tries to explain it, and not the other way around, as with Harnack, the doctrine determines the liturgy. His relationship to Christian tradition is illustrated by the quote: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living ”( The Christian Tradition , Volume 1, p. 9).

In his 2005 book Whose Bible is it? he describes the history and interpretation of the Jewish and Christian Bibles in the various denominations up to the present day.

literature

  • William Caferro, Duncan G. Fisher (Eds.): The Unbounded Community. Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (= Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. 1822). Garland, New York NY et al. 1996, ISBN 0-8153-1596-1 .
  • Valerie Hotchkiss, Patrick Henry (Eds.): Orthodoxy & Western Culture. A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on his eightieth Birthday. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood NY 2005, ISBN 0-88141-271-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member History: Jaroslav Pelikan. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 23, 2019 .
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 16, 2020 .
  3. ^ Library of Congress Announces Winners of John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences
  4. ↑ Jack Forstman: Review: On the History of Christian Doctrine: A Demurral to Jaroslav Pelikan. In: The Journal of Religion. Vol. 55, No. 1, 1975, ISSN  0022-4189 , pp. 95-109, JSTOR 1202074 .
  5. ^ Reviews on the Yale University Press site
personal data
SURNAME Pelikan, Jaroslav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American church historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Akron , Ohio , USA
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 2006
Place of death Hamden , Connecticut , USA