Hans Frei

Hans Wilhelm Frei (April 29, 1922–September 12, 1988) was an American biblical scholar and theologian who is best known for work on biblical hermeneutics.

Frei's work played a major role in the development of postliberal theology (also called narrative theology or the Yale school of theology).

He was born on April 29, 1922, in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany, to secularized Jewish parents (Magda Frankfurther Frei, a pediatrician; Wilhelm Siegmund Frei, 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 well-to-do and considered themselves to have a distinguished past.

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

Although he found speaking English 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 in England.

It was at the Friends’ school that Frei saw a picture of Jesus and suddenly "knew that it was true" – this conversion experience 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 Quaker theology ran against the grain of his own thinking, he still found their meetings more satisfying than his adopted Anglican liturgies.

As antisemitic violence rose in Germany, he was sent away from that world – away from Nazi Germany to the Quaker school in Saffron Walden, England, in January 1935.

After three years, in August 1938, his parents left Germany, and Frei moved with them to the United States, 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 Bachelor of Science degree there in 1942.

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.

On October 9, 1948, he married Geraldine Frost Nye.

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.

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 Bachelor of Divinity degree at Yale Divinity School (YDS), Niebuhr's base.

It was there that he found a kind of home.

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, while teaching at Wabash College.

In 1955 a second son, Jonathan, was born.

This was to take until 1956 to complete – but some of that time is explained by the other things Frei was doing.

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.

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.

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.

His best-known and most influential work is his 1974 book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press), which examined the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical hermeneutics in England and Germany.

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".