Langdon Gilkey

Langdon Gilkey: 1919-2004

The author of Shantung Compound and the first book I am tackling in my portfolio. Gilkey was a theologian at the University of Chicago and is considered to be one of the most influential American Christian theologians of the 20th century. A colleague, students of his and readers referred to him as, "the surest theological guide for the joys and terrors of living as a modern Christian in this 'time of troubles.'"

Gilkey had a way of bringing together theological theories and putting them into the immediate lived experience and he did it in an, "imaginative yet concrete way." In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, he narrates his own experience while living in a Japanese Internment Camp for two and a half years. During this time he departs for the liberal Protestant belief system that he once held. It was his time in the interment camp that led him to rethink Christianity in the modern "time of trouble." No longer were the traditional symbols of sin and grace for Gilkey, rather with a renewed look at the classical Reformation he dived into the individual, societal and historical estrangement, self-delusion and sin.

His early books document his time, and existential power of his experiences, that started from his early pacifist years to his teachings in China and his time in the Internment camp. His teachers--Niebuhr and Tillich--then molded him upon his return from China and helped him develop his own methods and categories which became a well formulated, powerful and creative theologically vision of his own.

His new take on the theology of history, which was based on a rethinking of the questions of "free will and grace, providence and fate, and eschatology and secular history," grew to become his most important, strictly theological work. Towards the end of his life he became one of the leading figures in the inter-religious and pluralist dialogue for Christian theology.


Source:
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/041121.gilkey.shtml
http://www2.stetson.edu/~ljguenth/group/rel_cul.htm