Jaroslav pelikan biography for kids

It has been nearly ten years since Jaroslav Pelikan died and a full twenty-five since he completed The Christian Tradition, his five-volume, 2,100-page history of “what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the Word of God.” Who was Jaroslav Pelikan, and why does his work remain so important for serious Christian scholarship today?

Pelikan loved to quote this line from Goethe, his favorite poet: “What you have received as heritage, take now as task and thus you will make it your own.” Pelikan’s remarkable scholarly career was rooted in his Slavic family background. Both of his parents were born in Europe. His father and grandfather were Lutheran pastors. His mother was a school teacher who learned English by reading the essays of Emerson. They bequeathed to young Jary, as he was called, both a love for learning and a desire for God.

When he was a little boy and couldn’t quite reach the dinner table, his parents had him sit on stacked-up volumes of Migne’s Patrologia, a collection of patristic writings in the original languages. He later quipped, “I thus absorbed the church fathers a posteriori!” His facility with languages was astounding—not only the classical tongues of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew but also German, Slovak, Czech, Dutch, Russian, Serbian, all the romance languages, and many more. On occasion he would stay up late at night listening to a short-wave radio to keep fresh his language skills—including Albanian, which he once found useful in a conversation with a taxi driver.

Pelikan’s deep religious faith was nurtured on Luther’s Small Catechism, the great chorales of J. S. Bach, and, above all, the Bible. Each of these – Luther, Bach, and the Bible – would play a major role in his scholarly work. Though he became an ordained Lutheran minister and once taught at Concordia Theological Seminary, Pelikan spent most of his life in the environs of the secular academy. But

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Distinguished Christian historian, Yale professor emeritus to speak at St. Olaf commencement

By Amy Gage
May 23, 2003

Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and a well-known author and distinguished theological scholar, will be commencement speaker at St. Olaf College in May 2003. Commencement ceremonies will be held Sunday, May 25, at 2:30 p.m. on Manitou Field, weather permitting.

"Unto the Third and Fourth Generations" is the working title of Dr. Pelikan's commencement address.

Among the world's leading scholars in the history of Christianity, Pelikan has authored more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971-89). He taught at Yale from 1962 until his retirement in 1996 and was dean of the university's graduate school from 1973 to 1978. Pelikan also has held faculty positions at Valparaiso University, Concordia Seminary and the University of Chicago.

He is the John W. Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress and immediate past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Pelikan also is a distinguished visiting professor at the Annenberg School for

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, church historian: born Akron, Ohio 17 December 1923; ordained minister 1946; member of faculty, Valparaiso University 1946-49; member of faculty, Concordia Theological Seminary, St Louis 1949-53; member of faculty, University of Chicago 1953-62; Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale University 1962-72, Sterling Professor 1972-96 (Emeritus), Dean of the Graduate School 1973-78; President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1994-97; married 1946 Sylvia Burica (two sons, one daughter); died Hamden, Connecticut 13 May 2006.

As a church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan fought all his life to overcome Christians' amnesia of their own past - not only Protestants' ignorance of Reformation history, but Western Christians' ignorance of the Eastern Christian heritage, Christians' ignorance of Christianity's Jewish past and Christians' and Jews' ignorance of their Classical Greek heritage.

Pelikan's magnum opus was The Christian Tradition: a history of the development of doctrine, published in five volumes between 1971 and 1989, a project he claims to have conceived in his teens. Unlike his great hero Adolf von Harnack, whose own magnum opus, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (History of Dogma), was completed exactly 100 years before his, Pelikan was determined that Eastern Christian thought would be fully integrated, complaining that Harnack had been "tone-deaf to Eastern Orthodoxy".

Pelikan was desperate to overcome ignorance of languages - particularly ancient languages - which prevented theology students and lay people understanding key historical texts. He lamented:

It is still astounding to be reminded that, throughout most of Christian history, most theologians have expounded most Christian doctrines without any knowledge of the Hebrew language. I saw my polyglot upbringing and schooling as a further moral obligation to interpret - a word that means both "to translate" and "to make sense of" - the Chri

American Christian scholar (1923–2006)

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (; 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 Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Slovak mother Anna Buzekova Pelikan from Šid in Serbia. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church 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.

According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old because he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That facility was to serve him well in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist) as an historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.

In 1946, when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in 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 T