Kenneth L. Pike: An Evangelical Mind

Boone Aldridge

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725293755, 9781725293748
• eBook ISBN: 9781725293762
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This biography examines the life of a most unusual twentieth-century evangelical, Kenneth L. "Ken" Pike (1912-2000), who served with the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Pike began his missionary career as a Bible translator, but he went on to become a world-class linguist who made his mark on the science of linguistics and the study of indigenous languages around the world. Known among linguists and anthropologists for his theoretical contributions, this volume seeks to bring Pike to a wider audience by illuminating his life as a key evangelical figure, one who often broke with conventional evangelical constraints to pursue the life of the mind as a Christian intellectual and scholar. Here is a story of how one evangelical Christian man served the global church, the scientific community, and the world's indigenous peoples with his entire heart, soul, and mind.

1

Beginnings

Kenneth Lee Pike was born in the small town of East Woodstock, Connecticut, on June 9, 1912. His father, Ernest R. Pike, was a dedicated and respected rural doctor who was prone to illness. After only a year of service as a medical missionary in Alaska, he was forced to return home due to poor health.1 One East Woodstock resident described Doctor Pike as “a wisp of a man, almost frail in appearance. He wore black rimmed glasses and spoke very softly. I never heard that he possessed a sense of humor; certainly I never heard him utter anything that was considered humorous.” This same villager did recollect that if Dr. Pike was not mirthful, he was nonetheless “a kindly man, a thoughtful caring person.”2 By all accounts, he was a good family man. Ken Pike certainly esteemed his father. Indeed, when Dr. Pike became gravely ill, his son promised God that he would enter the ministry if his father survived. From his father, Ken Pike seems to have inherited his profound sense of service and devotion.

May Granniss Pike was the mother of eight children, of which Ken was next to the youngest. Hers was a life of toil in a home with no electricity or central heat. She also had to act as the doctor’s secretary, admitting patients, taking calls, and handling office finances. Yet, she found time to nurture her children. One of her favorite ways of doing this was to teach them hymns. Ken’s favorite was “There Were Ninety and Nine that Safely Lay,” a versified portrayal of the lost sheep, which he later connected with his deep concern for indigenous peoples who had often been neglected by missionaries. His mother also played a small but important role in his gaining acceptance to college. Pike was so socially insecure that she had to register him for classes at Gordon College of Theology and Missions in Boston.3 She also forced him to leave for college when his father once again took ill. It was from his mother that Ken Pike seems to have inherited his dogged perseverance.

The Pike family attended services at the local Congregational church. Pike’s younger sister, Eunice, recollected that it was a church where “salvation and missions were not emphasized.” Ken and Eunice both acknowledge it was their father who contributed most to their spiritual formation through daily family devotions and the telling of Bible stories on Sundays.4 And to this was added their mother’s teaching of hymns. “I grew up,” Pike wrote later in life, “in a godly home—with prayers, and worship, and Christian commitment by my parents.”5 Raised in a Christian home and churched in a tradition that did not give prominence to born-again conversion, Pike could not recall how or when he came to faith. “When I came to the Lord I don’t know,” he wrote in 1938, “though it seems that it was when I was very young. I know that at six[,] I was looking to Jesus to watch over me.”6 By most accounts, it was an irenic Christian home in which Pike came of age.

Yet, there was a strain of something less religiously pacific in his father’s outlook. In a letter to his sister Sally, Pike gives evidence that his father had been affected by the fundamentalist movement. “Dad,” he wrote in 1931, “used to rave about the modernists, I too had my dreams of denouncing them from the pulpit.”7 Ernest Pike also seems to have taken up an interest in premillennial-dispensationalism, which was largely promulgated through the fundamentalist network.8 Hence, through the influence of his father, Pike was nudged toward the fundamentalist wing of evangelicalism. The fundamentalism to which Pike was attracted was the more refined and learned variety epitomized by the urbane J. Gresham Machen, the Presbyterian theologian who formed Westminster Theological Seminary as a conservative alternative to Princeton. He also took a lead role in the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a conservative rejoinder to the liberalizing Northern Presbyterian Church. Machen was the most prominent figure of the more moderate wing of fundamentalism. The Machenites were a small minority in the fundamentalist movement, which was otherwise largely led by populist leaders with mass appeal.9 Although Pike would manifest signs of militancy in his early missionary career, the brand of fundamentalism he absorbed was more that of Machen than, for example, the militant separatist Bob Jones Sr. After reading some of Machen’s works in college, Pike expressed his admiration for the theologian and, in many ways, his life and thought would come to resemble that of this scholarly theologian.10

As an adult Pike became a vigorous volleyball and water polo player, but in high school he did not participate in any organized sports. Study, not play, was his forte while attending public school, and he was twice advanced educationally in grade level. The only student of his second grade class to pass, he was forthwith promoted to fourth grade. He also skipped the eighth grade. He graduated in 1928 with a class of twelve.11 Quoting from Pike’s valedictory speech gives us a sense of the young man’s perspective on life, an outlook that permeates the entirety of his life from beginning to end. “We are now on the threshold of our graduation, and as we look back over our four years’ work we realize that it is not the facts themselves which we have learned which are important, but only their application to our present life. . . . In our sciences, too, we have learned how it makes no difference whether or not we have learned facts and rules, if we do not apply them to our needs in life.”12 Although shy and socially awkward, Pike relentlessly drove himself to action and service in the world.

As in high school, Pike proved an excellent student at Gordon College. One professor noted that he possessed a “logical mind and a retentive memory.” His work in Greek and scriptural exegesis were outstanding, and he was asked to write a series of expositions on the book of Luke for The Evangelic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note to the Reader
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beginnings
• Chapter 2: A Missionary Scholar in the Making
• Chapter 3: New Frontiers
• Chapter 4: Translator and Leader
• Chapter 5: Serving and Defending SIL
• Chapter 6: With Heart and Mind
• Chapter 7: The Obedience of a Christian Man
• Chapter 8: Philosophy and Peace in an Era of Conflict
• Epilogue
• Bibliography