29 Facts About Hans Frei

Hans Wilhelm Frei was an American biblical scholar and theologian who is best known for work on biblical hermeneutics.

Hans Frei spent much of his career teaching at Yale Divinity School.

Hans Frei once described his early years as involving a series of "worlds left behind".

Hans Frei was born on April 29,1922, in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany, to secularized Jewish parents.

Hans Frei's family was reasonably well-to-do and considered themselves to have a distinguished past.

Young Hans Frei got a solid German education and read widely in the classics.

Young Hans Frei believed that war was on the way, and wanted to stay in England.

Hans Frei gained a Bachelor of Science degree there in 1942.

Hans Frei graduated in 1945, and became a Baptist minister at the First Baptist Church, North Stratford, New Hampshire.

Hans Frei landed a job as Assistant Professor of Religion at Wabash College, Indiana, in 1950.

In 1953 Hans Frei became Associate Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and was involved with St John's Episcopal Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana, while teaching at Wabash College.

Hans Frei completed his thesis in 1956 and was promoted to Professor of Theology.

Between 1958 and 1966 Hans Frei worked away more or less in obscurity.

Hans Frei delivered a talk on Ludwig 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.

Hans Frei 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.

Hans Frei 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.

Hans 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.

Hans Frei's 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.

Hans Frei served as chair of the council of masters in 1975.

Hans Frei found himself troubled about his links to the church.

The major work which Hans Frei completed in this decade was all historical.

Hans Frei directed a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in 1976, and he delivered various lectures including the Rice Lectures in 1974 and the George F Thomas Memorial Lectures in 1978.

Hans Frei produced a piece of work which he thought of as perhaps his finest: the essay on David 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.

From 1982 until 1988, his time as Master over, Hans Frei returned to publishing and writing with a vengeance.

Hans Frei returned to both strands of his earlier constructive theological work: hermeneutics and Christology.

Hans Frei's work did not even flag when he became chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1983 to 1986.

Hans Frei 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.

Hans 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 become inextricably linked.

Hans Frei died of a stroke on September 12,1988, at the peak of his theological and historical career.