REVIEW: RELIGION & THE SCIENTIFIC FUTURE Langdon Gilkey

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The role of myth in a scientific culture, and the reasons why our modern technological society requires both myth and theology in order to understand itself and guide its destiny, are explored by Gilkey.  Science has changed our attitudes toward religious statements and the traditional sources of Christian belief.  There has been a shift from the belief that religious truths are made up of statements of fact, to the understanding of religious truth as a system of symbols.  Such reinterpretation of religious language has moved theology even further out of the mainstreams of science and  history, fostering increasingly a belief in the meaninglessness of theology, leading to the God-is-dead movement.  Gilkey proposes that myth has great importance for science, and advocates a renewed interpendence of science and theology.  Dr. Gilkey was Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and this book consists of four long chapters which were previously given as lectures.  Gilkey has written other books on related subjects, as well as a personal account of his two and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp in China during WW2. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Langdon Brown Gilkey (February 9, 1919 – November 19, 2004) was an American Protestant Ecumenical theologian.  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]  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.  He died of meningitis on November 19, 2004 at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. [2] He was 85.  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." [2]  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.

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.

ITEM XX06 in the NEBIRU CROSSING bookstore

CONDITION:  READER  [book is intact, but both boards warped, minor markings, dust jacket has extensive wear; FIRST EDITION]