Background

Gilkey was born in Chicago, Illinois, on February 9, 1919. He is the son of Charles Whitney and Geraldine Gunsaulus Gilkey, maiden name is Brown.

Education

Langdon Gilkey attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School before graduating from the Asheville School, North Carolina, in 1936 and enrolling at Harvard, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude, in June 1940. Gilkey received his Ph. D. in Religion from Columbia University in 1954.

Career

Langdon Gilkey, Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School since 1977, formally retired in March 1989 after 25 years at the school where he taught with distinguished theologians and students of religion, such as Mircea Eliade, Bernard Loomer, Bernard Meland, and the others. The author of fourteen books and more than one hundred articles, Gilkey's theological method was "correlational," a discussion that reflected a more basic pattern of thinking, namely, "to ponder the character of our existence, both personal and historical, before God in the light of the historical and social situation, the massive contours of events, in which we find ourselves." He characterized the half-century in which he self-consciously matured and worked as a "theologian" as a "Time of Troubles," the apparent beginning of a process of social disintegration and historical decline. It was within this context of personal and social crisis that Gilkey thought, wrote, and spoke forcefully and creatively; reinterpreting the classical Christian symbols of the transcendence and mystery of God, the fall and sin of humans, and divine providence and the direction of history in relation to a secular and scientific culture and the plurality of religions as they encounter the post-Christian and postmodern culture of the West. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Gilkey was in China and became a captive as a citizen of a rival country. At the Japanese-run internment camp in Shantung province, Gilkey served as a helper to the camp mason, the cook, and the kitchen administrator. The extraordinary impact that captivity with some 1500 to 2000 men, women, and children had on his future theological reflection is powerfully recorded in Shantung Compound, published in 1966.

After returning to the United States and experimenting with the possibility of a career in law and international diplomacy, Gilkey began the formal study of theology, philosophy of religion, and ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City under the tutelage of his "spiritual father," Reinhold Niebuhr. From 1951 to 1954 he taught at Vassar, and after receiving his Ph. D. in Religion from Columbia University in 1954 he moved to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he remained for nearly a decade. The years at Vanderbilt were memorable for his participation with the divinity school faculty in the university's civil rights struggle over the expulsion of a Black divinity school student, James Lawson, for "coaching" neighboring protesters in the techniques of nonviolent resistance. In the end, virtually the entire divinity school faculty and five medical school faculties resigned over this issue. Gilkey moved to a new teaching position at the University of Chicago in the fall, out in 1963. During his years at Vanderbilt Gilkey received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Germany in 1960 and 1961. For the next 23 years, Langdon Gilkey exercised an extraordinary influence as a member of the theological faculty of the divinity school there. His brilliant lectures, concern for students, and social activism added renewed vigor to the "Chicago School." He completed three distinctively neo-orthodox books-Maker of Heaven and Earth, out in 1959, How the Church Can Minister to the World Without Losing Itself, out in 1964, and Shantung Compound, published in 1966.

Gilkey was challenged by the Second Vatican Council, which had been called by Pope John XXIII in 1961. In the summer of 1965, Gilkey received a second Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Rome for the next several months to study the "new theology" in Roman Catholic circles that were making this extraordinary ecumenical event possible. A decade later after continuous research, public lectures in Catholic colleges and universities, and teaching many Catholic students entering the divinity school, Gilkey published the results of his ecumenical inquiry in Catholicism Confronts Modernity in 1975. Another unforeseen development during the 1960s and early 1970s was Gilkey's involvement with the "Death of God" theological movement. His earlier philosophical pursuits at Harvard - his senior thesis had explored the atheistic naturalism of George Santayana - alerted him to the novelty of Protestant theologians affirming secular humanism's central thesis regarding the loss of religious transcendence in the post-Enlightenment world. However, Gilkey's personal and social experience had assured him of the continuing relevance and validity of the classical Christian theological symbols. Indeed, his next four major theological works - Naming the Whirlwind, published in 1969, Religion and the Scientific Future, out in 1970, Reaping the Whirlwind, published in 1976, and Message and Existence of the year 1979 - are each a deliberate attempt to respond to these arguments and show that religious discourse is meaningful in interpreting our uniquely human experience and our quest for existence, meaning, and value.

According to Gilkey, civilization remains as precarious and as ambiguous a venture as ever, requiring faith in grace and providence to address religious conflicts brought about by the disintegration of modern secular faith. This cultural critique is developed in his collection of essays Society and the Sacred, 1980. In the late summer of 1981, Gilkey was unexpectedly invited to be a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union in the "Creationist Trial" in Little Rock, Arkansas. What was surprising about this trial was the mutual support provided by the American Civil Liberties Union plaintiffs by the local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities versus the Creationist proponents' defense, based on the testimony of witnesses well trained in the method and content of modern science. The details of this trial and argument appeared in his book Creationism on Trial, 1985.

Achievements

• 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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Blue Twilight

    (Gilkey's latest work takes the measure of the current Ame...)

    2001
  • Maker of Heaven and Earth

    (A thoughtful, clear consideration of the Christian idea o...)

    1959
  • On Niebuhr

    (Langdon Gilkey's insightful, engaging book offers a detai...)

    2001
  • Through the Tempest

    (Western society continues to be faced with numerous conse...)

    1991
  • Shantung Compound

    (This vivid diary of life in a Japanese internment camp du...)

    1966
  • Naming the Whirlwind 1970
  • Catholicism confronts modernity 1975
  • Reaping the Whirlwind 1976
  • Message and Existence 1979
  • Nature, Reality, and the Sacred 1993
  • Creationism on Trial 1985
  • Religion and the Scientific Future 1970
  • Society and the Sacred 1981
  • Gilkey on Tillich 1990

Religion

A thinker of diverse interests and profound existential, ethical, historical, and scientific insights, Gilkey's theology mirrored the rise and fall of the dominant Protestant neo-orthodoxy of the middle years of this century and proposed a theological agenda for the new religious and cultural pluralism appearing on the horizon toward the end of the century.

Gilkey moved in the direction of a "liberal" or "post-liberal" interest in the post-Christian dialogue with other world religions, especially Buddhism and modern Sikhism, stimulated by the writings of Mircea Eliade, the opportunity to teach at Kyoto University, Japan in 1975, and his own active participation in yoga classes and Sikh summer retreats in New Mexico. What he called the "rough parity" among religions was first manifest to him in these experiences and, together with his earlier interest in the relations of science and religions and the relativity of our historical, political, and cultural judgments, formed his theological agenda at the end of 1986.

Views

In the latter, Gilkey proposes that theology and science depend on each other for their completion. He demonstrates that science draws its presuppositions from a broad cultural context that includes religious perceptions about the power, life, order, and unity of nature.

Gilkey also was a humanist and pacifist - although he and his student generation detested Hitler, many detested war more.

Quotations: "Religion, or interest in it, played absolutely no part in my personal or my intellectual life... I was, I suppose, an ethical humanist if I was anything."

"The question for our age may well become, not will religion survive, as much as will we survive and with what sort of religion, a creative or demonic one?"

Membership

• 

  Langdon Gilkey was one of the twenty-eight Presidents of the American Academy of Religion.

  American Academy of Religion , United States

Personality

Langdon Gilkey was raised in an exhilarating atmosphere of American Baptism and political "liberalism" in Hyde Park, where his father was the first dean of the university's Rockefeller Chapel and his mother an equally prominent and successful early feminist. In September 1939 while touring France with the Harvard-Yale tennis team, Gilkey saw the early manifestations of Hitler's Third Reich. However, in the spring of 1940 something quite unpredictable happened. Gilkey went to the Harvard Chapel to hear a friend of his father, the noted Protestant neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He left that service "converted" to an entirely new view of the power struggles among nations, shortly leaving behind the optimistic illusions of his humanistic idealism. A major turning point in Gilkey's life was his departure in mid-August 1940 for Peking to teach English to Chinese students at Yenching University. This experience in the Orient - he did not return to the United States for five years - was unquestionably the most significant and formative experience of his life. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Gilkey and other "enemy nationals" were placed under house arrest. Fifteen months later, in March 1943, they, mostly British and Americans, were sent to an internment camp in Shantung province, where Gilkey remained until the war ended in August 1945.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Langdon Gilkey recognized that if theological discourse is to be meaningful today, it must be grounded in ordinary experience." - Joseph L. Price, associate professor of religion at Whittier College, Whittier, California.

Connections

Langdon Gilkey was married to Sonja Weber in 1963. He had a son Amos Welcome Gilkey, and a daughter, Frouwkje Gilkey Pagani. He also had a son from the first marriage, named Mark Whitney Gilkey.

Father:

Charles Whitney Gilkey

Mother:

Geraldine Gunsaulus Brown

Wife:

Sonja Weber

Son:

Amos Welcome Gilkey

Son:

Mark Whitney Gilkey

Daughter:

Frouwkje Gilkey Pagani

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233