Hans Wilhelm Frei - Earlier Theological Work

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 Christology 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 ecclesiastical 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.