Hans Wilhelm Frei - Turning To Theology

Turning To Theology

While at North Carolina State, Frei heard a lecture by the prominent theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, 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.