Owen Clark Thomas

The Rev. Dr. Owen C. Thomas passed away on June 29 at The Berkshire retirement community in Berkeley, California.

Owen Clark Thomas was born in 1922 in New York City. His father, Harrison Thomas, was the Assistant Superintendent of Schools in New York City; taught history and political science at Hamilton College; and published several history books. His mother, Frances Thomas, was the educational director at the League of Nations Association (later the U.N. Association) and worked with Robert Moses at the Bureau for Municipal Research in New York.

Dr. Thomas graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He studied Physics in graduate school at Cornell as World War II broke out. During the war, he worked in the Naval Research Lab in Washington on ultra-high frequency radar and its counter measures. He started to attend Episcopal church services in Washington, heard the Rev. James A. Pike speak at the Church of the Epiphany and St. John’s Church, and grew more involved in church activities.

After the war, in which many of his friends died, he re-thought his vocation, entered the Episcopal Theological School and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1950. Subsequently he completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary in 1955. His theological mentors have included James Pike and Howard Johnson at St. John’s and Columbia; Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Columbia and Union; and Karl Barth, with whom he studied on sabbatical in Basel, Switzerland in 1963.

Dr. Thomas taught Theology and Philosophy at the (renamed) Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) for over forty years, retiring in 1993 at the age of seventy as the Francis Lathrop Fiske Professor of Systematic Theology. He moved to Berkeley with his present wife, Margaret Miles, in 1996 and taught briefly at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He has written ten books, one of which - Introduction to Theology - became a central reference for seminary students studying for their General Ordination Examinations. Many former students around the country remember him fondly for this book. He recently edited a collection of essays on Kierkegaard by his late friend, Howard Johnson.

He also served as the summer rector at Emmanuel Church in Dublin, New Hampshire for 22 years, starting in 1958.

Dr. Thomas was a lifelong, liberal Democrat, member of the ADA and Cambridge Democratic City Committee, active in local politics throughout his life, and persistent letter-writer to the New York Times. He lived his religious and political principles.

In his 1993 Commencement Address at EDS, he said, “In this School we have consciously and deliberately set our faces against the tide of (discrimination), and we have committed ourselves to those whom our society considers to be the other, the different, the stranger. We have committed ourselves to support fully the ministry of women as well as men, gay and lesbian as well as straight people, and people of color as well as whites, and to express this commitment in our faculty, student body and staff, in our curriculum and in our worship.” He said, “We need a new understanding of community which includes and incorporates and delights in difference and otherness, and thus is coherent with the ending of Scripture in a vision of a city, the new Jerusalem, a city of peace and justice, into which all the rich diversity of human life and culture will be brought.”

Dr. Thomas is survived by his wife of 34 years, Margaret Miles, of Berkeley, California; three sons by his former wife, Bernice Lippitt Thomas - Aaron Beecher Thomas of Seattle; Addison Lippitt Thomas of Oakland; and Owen Clark Thomas, Jr. of Brasilia, Brazil - five grandchildren and one great-grandson.

A memorial service for Dr. Thomas will be held at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Albany, CA on Saturday, August 15, 2015, at 2:00 p.m.