Langdon Brown Gilkey

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Langdon Brown Gilkey (February 9, 1919 – November 19, 2004) was an American Protestant Ecumenical theologian.

Contents

[edit] Early life and education

The grandson of Clarence Talmadge Brown, the first non-Mormon minister to gather a congregation in Salt Lake City, Gilkey grew up in Hyde Park Chicago, where his father Charles Whitney Gilkey was the first Dean of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, and his mother Geraldine Gunsaulus (Brown) Gilkey was a prominent feminist, and niece of Frank Wakely Gunsaulus, the first President of the Illinois Institute of Technology. [1]. He attended the Laboratory School (part of the University of Chicago), and in 1936 he graduated from the Asheville School for Boys, in North Carolina [2]. In 1939 he received a magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard, he moved to China in 1940 to teach English at Yenching University and was imprisoned by the Japanese in 1943. [1]

[edit] Career

After the War, Gilkey obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University in New York, and became Reinhold Niebuhr's teaching assistant. He went on to become a professor at Vassar from 1951 to 1954, and at Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1954 to 1963. In 1960 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Munich. In late 1963 he began teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he eventually became the Shailar Mathews Professor of Theology until March 1989, when he retired. While on sabbatical in 1970, he taught at University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and in 1975 he taught at Kyoto University in Japan, where his lecture series focused on the environmental perils of industrialization. He continued to teach at both the University of Virginia, and Georgetown University till 2001. During this last period of his teaching career, he had also been a visiting professor at the Theology Division (now Divinity School) of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong for one year.

[edit] Death

He died of meningitis on November 19, 2004 at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. [2] He was 85.

[edit] Theological work

Gilkey was a prolific author, with 15 books and over 100 articles to his credit. Perhaps his most widely read book was the story of his own religious-theological journey. In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (1968), Gilkey narrates his departure from the liberal Protestant belief system during World War II when he was made a prisoner of war in the "Civilian Internment Center" near Weihsien for two-and-a-half years (1943-1945).

It was this experience that led to his subsequent rethinking of Christianity in the modern “time of trouble.” Acutely responsive to the need to reconsider such traditional symbols as sin and grace in the turbulent and so often “barbarous 20th century,” Gilkey renewed and revivified the classical Reformation insights—largely ignored by optimistic liberal theologians—into individual, societal and historical estrangement, self-delusion and sin.

Gilkey once responded to fellow theologian Edgar Brightman, who believed in God because man's history (to him) represented steady moral progress, saying "I believe in God, because to me, history precisely does not represent such a progress." [3]

Gilkey was celebrated in academic circles for his work on Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, prominent 20th-century Protestant theologians. Yet Gilkey was more popularly known for his writings on science and religion. He published at length on the topic, fighting on two fronts: against Christian fundamentalist attacks on science, and against secularist attacks on religious meaning and truth. In Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (1985), he recounted his experience as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union as it challenged the constitutionality of an article passed by the Arkansas State Legislature mandating that creationist views be taught alongside evolutionary theory in high schools. There, in what was called a “modern day version of the Scopes Monkey Trial,” he argued against Christian fundamentalist claims that “creation-science” was a science, as being distinct from religion cloaked as science.

His early books and articles demonstrated the existential power of his experiences, from his early pacifist professions as a student at Harvard University, where his classmates included, among others, former President John F. Kennedy and Cardinal Avery Dulles, to his teaching in China and his experiences as a POW.

His teachers, especially Niebuhr and Tillich, at Union Theological Seminary, helped him with methods and categories to formulate a powerful and creative theological vision of his own. In the 1970's and '80s, Gilkey's theological vision was colored by the growth of Buddhism, and Sikhism as both religions began to influence religious life in America. He held the view most world religions enjoyed "rough parity".

Gilkey’s new theology of history, based on a rethinking of the questions of free will and grace, providence and fate, and eschatology and secular history, is one of his most important strictly theological contributions.

[edit] Books

  • Maker of Heaven and Earth: The Christian Doctrine of Creation in the Light of Modern Knowledge 1959
  • Shantung Compound 1966
  • Naming the Whirlwind A Renewal of God Language. 1970
  • Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Protestant View 1975
  • Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History 1976
  • Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology 1979
  • Through the Tempest: Theological Voyages in a Pluralistic Culture
  • Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The Nexus of Science and Religion
  • Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock
  • Religion and the Scientific Future: Reflections on Myth, Science, and Theology
  • Contemporary Explosion of Theology: Ecumenical Studies in Theology
  • Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of Culture in Decline
  • Gilkey on Tillich 1990
  • Blue Twilight: Nature, Creationism, and American Religion
  • On Niebuhr: A Theological Study 2001

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Timothy R. Phillips, entry "Gilkey, Langdon Brown" in "Evangelical Dictionary of Theology", Baker Reference Library, p.482.
  2. ^ Adam Bernstein, "Langdon Gilkey Dies; Theologian, Author, Educator", Washington Post.
  3. ^ Adam Bernstein, "Langdon Gilkey Dies; Theologian, Author, Educator", Washington Post.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • The Theology of Langdon Gilkey: Systematic and Critical Studies, Kyle Pasewark and Jeff Pool, editors, Merer University
  • Whirlwind in Culture: Frontiers in Theology—in Honor of Langdon Gilkey, D. W. Musser and J. L. Price, editors
  • "Plurality and Its Theological Implications" in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, John Hick and Paul Knitter, editors
  • Religious Language in a Secular Culture: A Study in the Thought of Langdon Gilkey, J Shea
  • Langdon Gilkey: Theologian for a Culture in Decline, B. Walsh.