Hans Wilhelm Frei
Encyclopedia
Hans Wilhelm Frei is best known for work on biblical hermeneutics
, especially on the interpretation of narrative
. His 1974 book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press) is an influential history of eighteenth- and nineteenth century biblical hermeneutics in England
and Germany
; The Identity of Jesus Christ (Fortress Press, 1975) tried to show what kind of theology
(specifically Christology
) would cohere with a renewed attention to the narrative nature of the Gospel
s. He is regarded as having become, in the 1980s, part of a movement known as the Yale school (with George Lindbeck
and David Kelsey
), a form of postliberalism, focusing attention on the embeddedness of theological and hermeneutical claims in the lives and practices of Christian communities.
, a venereologist
on the medical faculty of the University of Breslau). That Jewish culture did not play a huge part in his upbringing can be seen from the fact that he was baptized into the Lutheran church
along with most other members of his class, and from his memory that he was forbidden from using Yiddish phrases at home. His family was reasonably respectable and well-to-do (indeed, they had a distinguished past), and young Hans seems to have spent a good deal of time getting a solid German education and reading widely in the German classics. However, as the atmosphere in Germany soured, he was for his safety sent away from that world - away from Nazi Germany
to the Quaker
school in Saffron Walden
, England, in January 1935.
Although he found the language problem daunting and was sometimes lonely, he found England a welcoming and courteous place, and despite his own isolation and anxiety was struck by the absence in England of the pervasive fear which he thought had been a feature of life in 1930s Germany. Young Frei believed that war was on the way, and wanted to stay where he was in safety.
It was, it seems, whilst at the Friend's school that Frei saw a picture of Jesus
and suddenly 'knew that it was true' - a conversion experience of some kind which led him to a form of Christianity
which at this stage had nothing to do with attendance at church. Later in his life, even when it ran against the grain of his theology, he still found Quaker meetings more deeply satisfying than his adopted Anglicanism
.
, where he was terrified by his encounter with New York City
. It was a difficult time, and Frei had trouble feeling that he belonged. The family were very short of money, and were only able to find him a scholarship to study textile engineering at North Carolina State University
(after seeing an advertisement for it in a paper). He gained a B.S. there in 1942. Nevertheless, he took to his adopted country and made it thoroughly his own - so much so that when he went back to Germany for a visit in the 1950s he felt most definitely like a visiting American Professor rather than a German exile returned. In particular, he found a home within America in New Haven, Connecticut
, at Yale University
.
, began corresponding with him, and eventually enrolled for a B.D. degree at Yale Divinity School
, Niebuhr's base. It was there that he found a kind of home. Despite some wanderings in the years between 1945 and 1947 and 1950 and 1956, Frei described YDS as the 'world not left behind'. There he was taught by Niebuhr and by R.L. Calhoun and Julian Hartt, and there some of his deepest theological attitudes were shaped, some of his deepest friendships formed, all his most important work done, and his tremendously successful teaching and administrative duties carried out.
He graduated in 1945, and became a Baptist
minister, at the First Baptist Church, North Stratford, New Hampshire
. Despite the work involved in the parish, in being a local preacher, and in some teaching work, Frei found time to read a great deal in solitude. He found himself drawn towards Anglicanism, towards what he saw as its more obviously 'generous' orthodoxy - to such an extent that in later life he was to say that Baptist ministry had always felt like a staging post on the way to somewhere else. At the same time, he developed a yearning for more academic work.
Frei returned to the graduate school at Yale Divinity School in 1947, and began a lengthy doctoral dissertation under H. Richard Niebuhr, on Karl Barth
's early doctrine of Revelation
. This was to take until 1956 to complete - but some of that time is explained by the other things Frei was doing. In 1948, on October 9, he married Geraldine Frost Nye. He landed a job as Assistant Professor of Religion at Wabash College, Indiana, in 1950. A son, Thomas, was born in 1952. In 1953 Frei became Associate Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
(with some time as Visiting Lecturer in the Southern Methodist University
in 1954), and was involved with St. John's Episcopal Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana
. In 1955 a second son, Jonathan, was born. He completed his thesis in 1956 and was promoted to Professor of Theology. A year later, he returned to Yale Divinity School as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
, and, in the same year, his daughter Emily was born.
Between 1958 and 1966 Frei worked away more or less in obscurity. As can be seen from an annotated bibliography, there are very few recorded writings from this period. After the publication of two essays for a festschrift for Niebuhr in 1957 (including extracts from his thesis), and a short article on 'Religion, Natural and Revealed' in a handbook of Christian theology published the following year, there is a great gap. Frei delivered a talk on Feuerbach
at the 1965 meeting of the American Academy of Religion
, admittedly, but this does not seem to have been particularly central to his work. All the indications are that he had thrown himself into teaching, and into the slow, painstaking research that would eventually emerge as The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. In many ways he felt that the stands he had taken in his thesis against prevailing modes of apologetical and anthropocentric theology isolated him (again), made his work a struggle against the tide. He did not have the temperament for the kind of sweeping statements and rabble-rousing clarion calls which might have pulled supporters to his side, and he produced his careful and complex writings only after taking great pains.
It was during this period of obscurity that Frei received a Morse Fellowship and a Fulbright Award
for research at the University of Göttingen (1959–60) . A little later, with the help of an American Association of Theological Schools Fellowship and a Yale Senior Faculty Fellowship, Frei spent some time in Cambridge
, England (1966-7). His trip back to Germany was clouded by the sense that the recent past had been brushed under an inadequate rug, that it didn't matter, that Germany had re-invented itself rather than dealing with what had taken place. A meeting with Emanuel Hirsch
, which was only granted when Frei agreed not to raise the question of Nazism, confirmed Frei's impressions. Frei also spent time in England, which he appears to have enjoyed, and even though he found that nothing much was going on theologically in Cambridge that interested him, he frequently referred back in later life to how much he had enjoyed his time there.
and, even though Frei soon developed doubts about various important aspects of it, it sets the tone and the themes for most of the rest of what he went on to say in theology.
After that brief flurry of activity, Frei returned to honing his work on Eclipse, which was eventually published (to much wider recognition) in 1974. By that time, Frei had been Acting Master of Silliman College
, Yale (1970–1971), and Master of Ezra Stiles College
(from 1972), the latter a post he was to hold until 1980. The publication of Eclipse coincided with Frei's appointment to a full Professorship. Frei then entered another period of comparative silence, although this time it was not in complete obscurity: his name was out, rattling around in theological and historical circles attached to the massive and ground-breaking Eclipse, with Identity as a strange accompaniment. His silence was not so much due to the pressures of teaching or to isolated and exhaustive research, but to his commitment to his job as Master of Ezra Stiles. Frei also served as chair of the council of masters in 1975.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Frei. He found himself troubled about his links to the church. Firmly convinced theologically that he should have some kind of ecclesial grounding and location for his work as well as his academic setting, he nevertheless felt distanced from his adopted Anglican home, and yet committed to stay there. He found himself theologically uneasy about the places where he did feel less isolated - in particular, Quaker meetings. At the same time he found himself unable easily to call himself a theologian, particularly not a systematic theologian, and he concentrated his energies instead on the 'religious studies' (for which read 'historical') side of his work. Nevertheless, the questions he asked, the issues which interested him, the way he pursued that historical work - all were theological, and he knew it. The ambivalence seems not exactly to have haunted him, but at least to have been never far from his working mind.
The major work which Frei completed in this decade (after Eclipse) was all historical. He directed a National Endowment for the Humanities
summer seminar in 1976 (his title was 'Modernity
as Temptation'), and he delivered various lectures including the Rice Lectures in 1974 (on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
, Johann Gottfried Herder
and Immanuel Kant
) and the George F. Thomas Memorial Lectures in 1978 (on Lessing). He also produced a piece of work which he thought of as perhaps his finest: the essay on David Friedrich Strauss which was eventually published in 1985, although Frei finished it in the very early 1980s after having worked on it throughout the last years of the 1970s.
and towards social history
; in tandem he found his doubts about aspects of the Identity and Eclipse phase of his work crystallising in a shift away from more theoretical hermeneutical solutions towards more social, 'cultural-linguistic' - and, we might say, more ecclesiological
and pneumatological
- solutions. In the 1978 George F. Thomas Lecture, he issued what can in retrospect be seen as something of a personal manifesto, using the word 'sensibility' to denote the object of a kind of historical study which would look for the shape and development of religious styles, attitudes and doctrines firmly embedded in the development and interaction of social institutions of various overlapping kinds. In 1981, he spent some time in England during which he looked, on advice from Owen Chadwick
, at visitation
returns and sermons from the eighteenth century life of a couple of English parishes, hoping to find a way to combine the more social and cultural historical insights which these things gave him into the Christianity of the time with the insights he had hitherto gained through a more traditional study of well-known high-culture theologians and philosophers.
From 1982 until 1988, his time as Master over, Frei returned to publishing and writing with a vengeance. Although still not prolific by the standards of many of his contemporaries, by his own standards his output was vast. He returned to both strands of his earlier constructive theological work: hermeneutics (which had been the subject matter of Eclipse) and Christology (the subject matter of Identity). In 1982 he delivered a paper on the interpretation of narrative
, at Haverford College
; in 1983 the Shaffer Lectures at Yale (in which he began to develop what has subsequently become a famous five-place typology for understanding modern theology) and delivered a long paper on hermeneutics at the University of California
. His work did not even flag when he became chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1983 to 1986. He spoke in 1985 in response to an assessment of his work by the evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry
; in 1986 he spoke at a conference in honour of Jürgen Moltmann
, delivered a lecture at Princeton University
, and spoke on Barth and Schleiermacher
at a conference at Stony Point, New York
. In 1987 he delivered the Cadbury lectures in Birmingham
, England, and the Humanities Council lectures at Princeton. He prepared a contribution to Bruce Marshall's festschrift for George Lindbeck
, and another for a conference on H. Richard Niebuhr to be held in September 1988.
Most of these papers and lectures were indirectly or directly directed towards one end: a history of the figure of Jesus in popular and high culture in England and Germany since 1750. Frei seems to have found a new theological confidence bubbling up with this historical project, however: now, more than ever, the two sides of his work (which had been the source of his ambivalence in the 1970s) become inextricably linked. One moment he can be talking about the rise of the professions in Germany and the impact that had on theology in the Universities. The next moment he can be talking about the sensus literalis of scripture and theology as Christian self-description. The next moment (although this is not immediately evident from his published work) he can be talking about providence
and pilgrimage. It is hard now to gauge exactly what shape the final project would have taken in which all this rich material would have been combined, but it is clear that Frei wished to pursue theological reflection through the medium of detailed historical work, and wished to hone a full-blown Christology of his own - a Christology which would have had a significant political dimension - by paying detailed attention to the ways in which Jesus had been described and redescribed in Western Protestant culture since the Enlightenment
.
This article incorporates text from Mike Higton's online biography of Frei at http://www.people.ex.ac.uk/mahigton/Frei.html, with the author's permission
Biblical hermeneutics
Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible. It is part of the broader field of hermeneutics which involves the study of principles for the text and includes all forms of communication: verbal and nonverbal.While Jewish and Christian...
, especially on the interpretation of narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
. His 1974 book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press) is an influential history of eighteenth- and nineteenth century biblical hermeneutics in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
; The Identity of Jesus Christ (Fortress Press, 1975) tried to show what kind of theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
(specifically Christology
Christology
Christology is the field of study within Christian theology which is primarily concerned with the nature and person of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament. Primary considerations include the relationship of Jesus' nature and person with the nature...
) would cohere with a renewed attention to the narrative nature of the Gospel
Gospel
A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
s. He is regarded as having become, in the 1980s, part of a movement known as the Yale school (with George Lindbeck
George Lindbeck
George Arthur Lindbeck is an American Lutheran theologian. He is best known as an ecumenicist and as one of the fathers of postliberal theology.-Early life and education:...
and David Kelsey
David Kelsey
David H Kelsey is Luther Weigle Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School. Like his colleagues Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, David Kelsey received both a BD and PhD from Yale, and he has taught theology at Yale Divinity School since 1965.In 2011, he delivered the Warfield Lectures...
), a form of postliberalism, focusing attention on the embeddedness of theological and hermeneutical claims in the lives and practices of Christian communities.
Early life: Europe
Hans Frei once described his early years as involving a series of 'worlds left behind'. He was born in Breslau, Germany to secularised Jewish parents (Magda Frankfurther Frei, a pediatrician; Wilhelm Siegmund FreiWilhelm Siegmund Frei
Wilhelm Siegmund Frei was a German dermatologist best known for his contributions to Durand-Nicholas-Favre disease, a sexually transmitted disease found mainly in tropical and subtropical climates...
, a venereologist
Venereology
Venereology is a studio album by the Japanese noise musician Merzbow. It was the first of five Merzbow albums released by the American heavy metal label Relapse Records, under their Release Entertainment imprint, and as such was responsible for bringing Merzbow's work to a much wider audience in...
on the medical faculty of the University of Breslau). That Jewish culture did not play a huge part in his upbringing can be seen from the fact that he was baptized into the Lutheran church
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...
along with most other members of his class, and from his memory that he was forbidden from using Yiddish phrases at home. His family was reasonably respectable and well-to-do (indeed, they had a distinguished past), and young Hans seems to have spent a good deal of time getting a solid German education and reading widely in the German classics. However, as the atmosphere in Germany soured, he was for his safety sent away from that world - away from Nazi Germany
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
to the Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
school in Saffron Walden
Saffron Walden
Saffron Walden is a medium-sized market town in the Uttlesford district of Essex, England. It is located north of Bishop's Stortford, south of Cambridge and approx north of London...
, England, in January 1935.
Although he found the language problem daunting and was sometimes lonely, he found England a welcoming and courteous place, and despite his own isolation and anxiety was struck by the absence in England of the pervasive fear which he thought had been a feature of life in 1930s Germany. Young Frei believed that war was on the way, and wanted to stay where he was in safety.
It was, it seems, whilst at the Friend's school that Frei saw a picture of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
and suddenly 'knew that it was true' - a conversion experience of some kind which led him to a form of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
which at this stage had nothing to do with attendance at church. Later in his life, even when it ran against the grain of his theology, he still found Quaker meetings more deeply satisfying than his adopted Anglicanism
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
.
Early life: America
After three years, in August 1938, his parents left Germany, and Frei moved with them to the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, where he was terrified by his encounter with New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. It was a difficult time, and Frei had trouble feeling that he belonged. The family were very short of money, and were only able to find him a scholarship to study textile engineering at North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University at Raleigh is a public, coeducational, extensive research university located in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Commonly known as NC State, the university is part of the University of North Carolina system and is a land, sea, and space grant institution...
(after seeing an advertisement for it in a paper). He gained a B.S. there in 1942. Nevertheless, he took to his adopted country and made it thoroughly his own - so much so that when he went back to Germany for a visit in the 1950s he felt most definitely like a visiting American Professor rather than a German exile returned. In particular, he found a home within America in New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
, at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
.
Turning to Theology
While at North Carolina State, Frei heard a lecture by the prominent theologian H. Richard NiebuhrH. Richard Niebuhr
Helmut Richard Niebuhr was one of the most important Christian theological-ethicists in 20th century America, most known for his 1951 book Christ and Culture and his posthumously published book The Responsible Self. The younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Niebuhr taught for...
, began corresponding with him, and eventually enrolled for a B.D. degree at Yale Divinity School
Yale Divinity School
Yale Divinity School is a professional school at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. preparing students for ordained or lay ministry, or for the academy...
, Niebuhr's base. It was there that he found a kind of home. Despite some wanderings in the years between 1945 and 1947 and 1950 and 1956, Frei described YDS as the 'world not left behind'. There he was taught by Niebuhr and by R.L. Calhoun and Julian Hartt, and there some of his deepest theological attitudes were shaped, some of his deepest friendships formed, all his most important work done, and his tremendously successful teaching and administrative duties carried out.
He graduated in 1945, and became a Baptist
Baptist
Baptists comprise a group of Christian denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers , and that it must be done by immersion...
minister, at the First Baptist Church, North Stratford, New Hampshire
Stratford, New Hampshire
Stratford is a town located on the Connecticut River in Coos County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 746 at the 2010 census. Within the town are the villages of North Stratford and Stratford Hollow. U.S...
. Despite the work involved in the parish, in being a local preacher, and in some teaching work, Frei found time to read a great deal in solitude. He found himself drawn towards Anglicanism, towards what he saw as its more obviously 'generous' orthodoxy - to such an extent that in later life he was to say that Baptist ministry had always felt like a staging post on the way to somewhere else. At the same time, he developed a yearning for more academic work.
Frei returned to the graduate school at Yale Divinity School in 1947, and began a lengthy doctoral dissertation under H. Richard Niebuhr, on Karl Barth
Karl Barth
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas...
's early doctrine of Revelation
Revelation
In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing, through active or passive communication with a supernatural or a divine entity...
. This was to take until 1956 to complete - but some of that time is explained by the other things Frei was doing. In 1948, on October 9, he married Geraldine Frost Nye. He landed a job as Assistant Professor of Religion at Wabash College, Indiana, in 1950. A son, Thomas, was born in 1952. In 1953 Frei became Associate Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
Seminary of the Southwest is one of 11 accredited seminaries of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Founded in 1951 by Bishop John E...
(with some time as Visiting Lecturer in the Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...
in 1954), and was involved with St. John's Episcopal Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana
Crawfordsville, Indiana
Crawfordsville is a city in Union Township, Montgomery County, Indiana, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 15,915. The city is the county seat of Montgomery County...
. In 1955 a second son, Jonathan, was born. He completed his thesis in 1956 and was promoted to Professor of Theology. A year later, he returned to Yale Divinity School as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Religious studies
Religious studies is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.While theology attempts to...
, and, in the same year, his daughter Emily was born.
Between 1958 and 1966 Frei worked away more or less in obscurity. As can be seen from an annotated bibliography, there are very few recorded writings from this period. After the publication of two essays for a festschrift for Niebuhr in 1957 (including extracts from his thesis), and a short article on 'Religion, Natural and Revealed' in a handbook of Christian theology published the following year, there is a great gap. Frei delivered a talk on Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach...
at the 1965 meeting of the American Academy of Religion
American Academy of Religion
The American Academy of Religion is the world's largest association of scholars in the field of religious studies and related topics. It is a nonprofit member association,...
, admittedly, but this does not seem to have been particularly central to his work. All the indications are that he had thrown himself into teaching, and into the slow, painstaking research that would eventually emerge as The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. In many ways he felt that the stands he had taken in his thesis against prevailing modes of apologetical and anthropocentric theology isolated him (again), made his work a struggle against the tide. He did not have the temperament for the kind of sweeping statements and rabble-rousing clarion calls which might have pulled supporters to his side, and he produced his careful and complex writings only after taking great pains.
It was during this period of obscurity that Frei received a Morse Fellowship and a Fulbright Award
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
for research at the University of Göttingen (1959–60) . A little later, with the help of an American Association of Theological Schools Fellowship and a Yale Senior Faculty Fellowship, Frei spent some time in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, England (1966-7). His trip back to Germany was clouded by the sense that the recent past had been brushed under an inadequate rug, that it didn't matter, that Germany had re-invented itself rather than dealing with what had taken place. A meeting with Emanuel Hirsch
Emanuel Hirsch
Emanuel Hirsch was a German Protestant theologian and also a member of the Nazi Party...
, which was only granted when Frei agreed not to raise the question of Nazism, confirmed Frei's impressions. Frei also spent time in England, which he appears to have enjoyed, and even though he found that nothing much was going on theologically in Cambridge that interested him, he frequently referred back in later life to how much he had enjoyed his time there.
Earlier theological work
Frei was appointed Associate Professor in 1963. Then, between 1966 and 1968, almost as an interruption to the work which was proceeding towards Eclipse, Frei produced a 'theological proposal' - a lengthy article, expanded a little later into an adult education course, commented on in a lecture, and accompanied by a contribution to a seminar on the work of Karl Barth, after the latter's death. This 'proposal' emerged to wider scrutiny only some years later, when (in 1975) the adult education course was republished as The Identity of Jesus Christ. This strange project, an exercise in the rethinking of the structure and bases of ChristologyChristology
Christology is the field of study within Christian theology which is primarily concerned with the nature and person of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament. Primary considerations include the relationship of Jesus' nature and person with the nature...
and, even though Frei soon developed doubts about various important aspects of it, it sets the tone and the themes for most of the rest of what he went on to say in theology.
After that brief flurry of activity, Frei returned to honing his work on Eclipse, which was eventually published (to much wider recognition) in 1974. By that time, Frei had been Acting Master of Silliman College
Silliman College
Silliman College is a residential college at Yale University. It opened in September 1940 as the last of the original ten residential colleges, and includes buildings that were constructed as early as 1901...
, Yale (1970–1971), and Master of Ezra Stiles College
Ezra Stiles College
Ezra Stiles College is a residential college at Yale University, built in 1961 by Eero Saarinen. Architecturally, it is known for its lack of right angles. It is adjacent to Morse College.-Origin:...
(from 1972), the latter a post he was to hold until 1980. The publication of Eclipse coincided with Frei's appointment to a full Professorship. Frei then entered another period of comparative silence, although this time it was not in complete obscurity: his name was out, rattling around in theological and historical circles attached to the massive and ground-breaking Eclipse, with Identity as a strange accompaniment. His silence was not so much due to the pressures of teaching or to isolated and exhaustive research, but to his commitment to his job as Master of Ezra Stiles. Frei also served as chair of the council of masters in 1975.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Frei. He found himself troubled about his links to the church. Firmly convinced theologically that he should have some kind of ecclesial grounding and location for his work as well as his academic setting, he nevertheless felt distanced from his adopted Anglican home, and yet committed to stay there. He found himself theologically uneasy about the places where he did feel less isolated - in particular, Quaker meetings. At the same time he found himself unable easily to call himself a theologian, particularly not a systematic theologian, and he concentrated his energies instead on the 'religious studies' (for which read 'historical') side of his work. Nevertheless, the questions he asked, the issues which interested him, the way he pursued that historical work - all were theological, and he knew it. The ambivalence seems not exactly to have haunted him, but at least to have been never far from his working mind.
The major work which Frei completed in this decade (after Eclipse) was all historical. He directed a National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
summer seminar in 1976 (his title was 'Modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
as Temptation'), and he delivered various lectures including the Rice Lectures in 1974 (on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...
, Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
and Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
) and the George F. Thomas Memorial Lectures in 1978 (on Lessing). He also produced a piece of work which he thought of as perhaps his finest: the essay on David Friedrich Strauss which was eventually published in 1985, although Frei finished it in the very early 1980s after having worked on it throughout the last years of the 1970s.
Later theological work
In the late seventies, Frei's outlook began to shift. He found himself increasingly drawn away from purely intellectual historyIntellectual history
Note: this article concerns the discipline of intellectual history, and not its object, the whole span of human thought since the invention of writing. For clarifications about the latter topic, please consult the writings of the intellectual historians listed here and entries on individual...
and towards social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
; in tandem he found his doubts about aspects of the Identity and Eclipse phase of his work crystallising in a shift away from more theoretical hermeneutical solutions towards more social, 'cultural-linguistic' - and, we might say, more ecclesiological
Ecclesiology
Today, ecclesiology usually refers to the theological study of the Christian church. However when the word was coined in the late 1830s, it was defined as the science of the building and decoration of churches and it is still, though rarely, used in this sense.In its theological sense, ecclesiology...
and pneumatological
Pneumatology
Pneumatology is the study of spiritual beings and phenomena, especially the interactions between humans and God.Pneuma is Greek for "breath", which metaphorically describes a non-material being or influence....
- solutions. In the 1978 George F. Thomas Lecture, he issued what can in retrospect be seen as something of a personal manifesto, using the word 'sensibility' to denote the object of a kind of historical study which would look for the shape and development of religious styles, attitudes and doctrines firmly embedded in the development and interaction of social institutions of various overlapping kinds. In 1981, he spent some time in England during which he looked, on advice from Owen Chadwick
Owen Chadwick
William Owen Chadwick, OM, KBE, FBA, FRSE is a British professor, writer and prominent historian of Christianity. He was also a rugby union player.-Early life and education:Chadwick was born in Bromley in 1916...
, at visitation
Visitation
Visitation may refer to:In history:* Heraldic visitation, tours of inspection to establish the right of a person to bear arms, and are used today in genealogical research.In law:...
returns and sermons from the eighteenth century life of a couple of English parishes, hoping to find a way to combine the more social and cultural historical insights which these things gave him into the Christianity of the time with the insights he had hitherto gained through a more traditional study of well-known high-culture theologians and philosophers.
From 1982 until 1988, his time as Master over, Frei returned to publishing and writing with a vengeance. Although still not prolific by the standards of many of his contemporaries, by his own standards his output was vast. He returned to both strands of his earlier constructive theological work: hermeneutics (which had been the subject matter of Eclipse) and Christology (the subject matter of Identity). In 1982 he delivered a paper on the interpretation of narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, at Haverford College
Haverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
; in 1983 the Shaffer Lectures at Yale (in which he began to develop what has subsequently become a famous five-place typology for understanding modern theology) and delivered a long paper on hermeneutics at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
. His work did not even flag when he became chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1983 to 1986. He spoke in 1985 in response to an assessment of his work by the evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry
Carl F. H. Henry
Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry was an American evangelical Christian theologian who served as the first editor-in-chief of the magazine Christianity Today, established to serve as a scholarly voice for evangelical Christianity and a challenge to the liberal Christian Century.-Early Years and...
; in 1986 he spoke at a conference in honour of Jürgen Moltmann
Jürgen Moltmann
Jürgen Moltmann is a German Reformed theologian. The 2000 recipient of the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.-Moltmann's Youth:...
, delivered a lecture at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, and spoke on Barth and Schleiermacher
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He also became influential in the evolution of Higher Criticism, and his work forms part of the foundation of...
at a conference at Stony Point, New York
Stony Point, New York
Stony Point is a triangle-shaped town in Rockland County, United States. Rockland County is part of the New York Metropolitan Area. The town is located north of the town of Haverstraw, east and south of Orange County, New York, and west of the Hudson River and Westchester County. The population...
. In 1987 he delivered the Cadbury lectures in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, England, and the Humanities Council lectures at Princeton. He prepared a contribution to Bruce Marshall's festschrift for George Lindbeck
George Lindbeck
George Arthur Lindbeck is an American Lutheran theologian. He is best known as an ecumenicist and as one of the fathers of postliberal theology.-Early life and education:...
, and another for a conference on H. Richard Niebuhr to be held in September 1988.
Most of these papers and lectures were indirectly or directly directed towards one end: a history of the figure of Jesus in popular and high culture in England and Germany since 1750. Frei seems to have found a new theological confidence bubbling up with this historical project, however: now, more than ever, the two sides of his work (which had been the source of his ambivalence in the 1970s) become inextricably linked. One moment he can be talking about the rise of the professions in Germany and the impact that had on theology in the Universities. The next moment he can be talking about the sensus literalis of scripture and theology as Christian self-description. The next moment (although this is not immediately evident from his published work) he can be talking about providence
Divine providence
In Christian theology, divine providence, or simply providence, is God's activity in the world. " Providence" is also used as a title of God exercising His providence, and then the word are usually capitalized...
and pilgrimage. It is hard now to gauge exactly what shape the final project would have taken in which all this rich material would have been combined, but it is clear that Frei wished to pursue theological reflection through the medium of detailed historical work, and wished to hone a full-blown Christology of his own - a Christology which would have had a significant political dimension - by paying detailed attention to the ways in which Jesus had been described and redescribed in Western Protestant culture since the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
.
Death
The project was, however, never completed. Before he could deliver a paper he had written for a conference on H. Richard Niebuhr, he fell ill, and the paper was given in his absence. Frei died at the peak of his theological and historical career.Key writings
- The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1974)
- The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975)
- 'The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?', in Frank McConnell, The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
- Types of Christian Theology, (1992)
- Theology and narrative:Selected Essays, (1993)
Further reading
- Charles Campbell, Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei's Posthberal Theology, (Grand Rapids & Cambridge Wm Β Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997)
- John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity, (London: University of California Press, 2002)
- David F Ford, ‘Hans Frei and the Future of Theology’, Modern Theology 8:2, (April 1992)
- Garrett Green, ed, Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987) (a Festscrift produced for Frei on his 65th birthday)
- Mike Higton, Christ, Providence, and History: Hans W. Frei’s Public Theology, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004)
- George Hunsinger, ‘Hans Frei as Theologian: The Quest for a Generous Orthodoxy’, Modern Theology 8:2, (April 1992)
- John F Woolverton, ‘Hans W Frei in Context: A Theological and Historical Memoir’, Anglican Theological Review 79:2, (1997)
External links
- The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, By Hans W. Frei
- Types of Christian Theology, By Hans W. Frei, George Hunsinger, William Carl Placher
- Theology and narrative, By Hans W. Frei, George Hunsinger, William Carl Placher
- Hans Frei, Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School Archive (ed. Mike Higton)
- Guide to the Hans Wilhelm Frei Papers, Yale Divinity Library Special Collections
This article incorporates text from Mike Higton's online biography of Frei at http://www.people.ex.ac.uk/mahigton/Frei.html, with the author's permission