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The household's religious environment also shaped Jaroslav's later scholarly focus. He remembers both his father and grandfather as "orthodox Lutherans, in one way or another," firmly committed to the classical teachings on the Trinity, justification by faith, and the sacramental presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper as articulated by the Lutherans' Augsburg Confession. Both were energetic pastors, the grandfather an early president of the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church (which came to have close ties with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod). Pelikan remembers his father as "an Easter Christian, an enabler, a man whose enthusiasms were contagious, and a great preacher in several languages."

Pelikan breezed through school, finding a "tonic" in his schoolwork at Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod parochial schools. His childhood introduction to languages gave him what he calls "a fantastic early start" in his scholarly pursuits. Indeed, he completed a bachelor of divinity degree from the Missouri Synod's Concordia Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago before he was 23. Even by then he had intimations of his life's work, and a growing sense of personal destiny.

By the time he was 30, Pelikan had published his first book, From Luther to Kierkegaard, and was well launched on a distinguished teaching career that has taken him from Valparaiso University in Indiana and Concordia Theological Seminary in Missouri to the University of Chicago and then, in 1962, to Yale. In addition to his teaching, Pelikan read omnivorously, wrote constantly, and lectured widely. As editor, he helped produce editions of Luther, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Erasmus and advised in the production of several large-scale religious encyclopedias. As author he wrote several books on Luther, and he turned lectures into books on Augustine, Bach, and several ancient fathers. His Jesus Through the Centuries, richly illustrated with reproductions of paintings and icons of Jesus, has been his most popular.

All the while, Pelikan never lost sight of the ultimate goal of writing a history of doctrine on a grand scale. "There was never a day I didn't think about it—whether I was fishing or whatever."

Even family life was affected. Pelikan recently wrote sons Martin and Michael, both of whom work at local outlets of National Public Radio, and daughter Miriam, a classics student at Berkeley. "I wrote to thank them," he says, "not just for being there [through the long years of my writing], but for their understanding and forgiveness along the way. They admitted that there were times when they wished I had been more available than I was. But they also said they believed that it meant something to them that their father was engaged in a mission important beyond the personal gratification. One of my sons said, 'If you had spent those years making lots of money, it would have been something different.'"

In 1989 the University of Chicago Press issued the fifth and final volume of Pelikan's epic work, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. The first of its four predecessors, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), had been published nearly two decades before. The five volumes (dedicated to his wife, Sylvia) were devoted to an apparently simple subject—the history of what, in its 20 centuries, "the church of Jesus Christ has believed, taught, and confessed on the basis of the word of God."

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