May 13, 2008: Jaroslav Pelikan
At St. Paul’s Parish today, Tuesday, May 13, 2008:
- Morning Prayer at 9:30 a.m. (in the Church);
- Ladies’ Book Discussion Group at 10:00 a.m. (in the Common Room);
- Al-Anon at 7:45 p.m. (in the Parish Hall).
The May issue of St. Paul’s Sword of the Spirit, our monthly newsletter, is available on line, as is the calendar of parish events for May 2008
Today’s news in the Episcopal Church - Episcopal Life Online.
On the calendar tomorrow, May 14, 2008:
- Holy Communion at 6:30 p.m. (in the Church);
- Youth Group at 7:00 p.m. (in the Dining Room);
- Midweek Study Group at 7:00 p.m. reading The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter (in the Parish Hall);
- Overeaters Anonymous at 7:30 p.m. (in the Common Room).
Today is a feria on the Episcopal Church calendar.
May 13 is the anniversary of the death of one of America’s great church historians, Jaroslav Pelikan. 
Pelikan was born in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father and a Serbian mother. His father was a Lutheran pastor and his paternal grandfather a bishop of the Slovak Lutheran Church in America. He earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1946 when he was 22 and wrote more than 30 books, including his magnum opus, 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?).
In 1983, Pelikan gave the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lectures. The four lectures were then compiled and published as The Vindication of Tradition. In them, Pelikan gives a clear exposition of the role tradition plays in Western culture - even when it has been explicitly denied. What is perhaps his most famous quotation is found in this book. Defining “traditionalism” as any acceptance of tradition for tradition’s sake, Pelikan bluntly asserted: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” For Episcopalians who, like all Anglicans, base our theological method on Holy Scripture, tradition and reason, this is an important warning.
For most of his life Pelikan belonged to the Lutheran Church, and he was ordained a pastor therein, but in 1998 he and his wife Sylvia were received into the Orthodox Church in America in St Vladimir’s Seminary Chapel. 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.”
On May 13, 2006, Pelikan died in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 82 after a battle with lung cancer. It was reported that, before he died, he delivered the last in a lifelong series of memorable aphorisms: “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen - nothing else matters.”
The following collect for the commemoration of the dead is found in The Book of Common Prayer - 1979 and is appropriate to remember Dr. Pelikan:
O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant, Jaroslav Pelikan, being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Posted: May 13th, 2008 under Calendar of Events, Episcopal Church, Daily Prayer.
Fathers, Abba Pachomius of Egypt, known as “Pachomius the Great Martyr” to the Greek Orthodox Church, whose feast day was yesterday. (In this case, the Greek word martyr means “witness” rather than being a reference to death under persecution.) Pachomius set out to lead the life of a hermit near St. Anthony of Egypt, whose practices he imitated. An earlier ascetic named Marcarius had earlier created a number of proto-monasteries called larves, or cells, where holy men would live in a community setting who were physically or mentally unable to achieve the rigors of Anthony’s solitary life. Pachomius set about organizing these cells into a formal organization, thus creating the first monastery.
Saint Gregory of Nazianzus is known especially for his contributions to the theological definition of the Trinity and the nature of Christ. He, St. Basil, and St. Gregory of Nyssa are called “the Cappadocian Fathers”. Brought up in the Cappadocian town of Nazianzus (present-day Bekar, Turkey), where his father was bishop, Gregory as a young man was reluctant to take a position of responsibility in the church, retiring instead to a monastic community started by Basil in Pontus. He explained this action in his Defense of the Flight to Pontus, which became the basis for works on the priesthood by Saint John Chrysostom and Pope Gregory I. Gregory was consecrated a bishop in 371, but did not become actively involved in ecclesiastical affairs until he assumed leadership (379) of the orthodox community in Constantinople, at a time when the city was divided by controversy between rival Christian groups. He played a leading role at the first Council of Constantinople (381), which continued the definition of Christian teaching begun at the councils of Nicaea, but opposition at the council to Gregory’s claim to the bishopric of Constantinople made him decide to return to Nazianzus. In 384 he again retired to monastic life, and died a few years later.