Hans Wilhelm Frei
1922-1988
An Annotated Bibliography
§1: 1950s
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Acknowledgements
This bibliography would not have been possible without the kindness of Geraldine Frei, and the help of Martha Smalley and the staff at Yale Divinity School Library. The latter put up with endless requests and a long visit from me when my work on Frei was at an earlier stage, and allowed me to make many, many photocopies. There are plenty of other manuscript sources in the library ready for research, so why not make a visit?
Scope
This page is a bibliography of writings by and about Hans Wilhelm Frei (1922-1988). It is exhaustive for his published works, but selective for unpublished materials and secondary literature. In all but a few cases, Frei's unpublished works are to be found in the Hans W. Frei collection at Yale Divinity School, and more details are given in the relevant entries. The annotation is partial, but growing. I have also included, in square brackets, papers or works which I believe once existed, but of which no trace now survives.
The list includes several of the drafts and copies of Frei's letters which can be found in the Yale archive (I have tried to include any letter which has substantial reference to theological matters, or which somehow illuminates Frei's work. There are many, many more letters in the collection.) As it is not always possible to distinguish a copy of a letter actually sent from a draft for a letter that was altered before being sent, the details I give, and the texts I quote, will not always match the letters Frei's correspondents received.
I have included in the list a wide range of the many lecture notes that still exist in the archive, but inevitably I have concentrated on those things which were of particular interest to me at the time when I went to the YDS archive, and there are many other sets of notes there.
I have given several items from the archive titles of my own invention (rather than referring to them as 'Untitled notes on various topics' or similar) and have taken the liberty of using those titles in the body of the book. The bibliography entries for those items below give the game away in all such cases
Abbreviations
1956a
We know quite precisely when Frei wrote many items. Such items have dates
in roman type.
1957a
For some items, we know only the date of publication. In the latter case I
give the date in italics.
?1960a
Some items are not easily datable. Where I have been able to give a pretty
good guess at the date, I have put them in the relevant location in the bibliography,
but listed them with a question mark before the date.
U1
Where I have not been able to get further than a vague hunch as to date, I
have listed them at the end of the bibliography, with U (for undated) and
an identifying number.
YDS
I have listed below many items that can be found in the Hans Wilhelm Frei
Papers, Manuscript Group No.76, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School
Library. I indicate these items with 'YDS' followed by the item's box and
folder numbers. So YDS 13-199 is box 13, folder 199.
TCT
Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger
and William C. Placher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
TN
Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative, ed. George Hunsinger and William
C. Placher (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
GF
From the collection of Geraldine Frei.
The 1950s
- 1956a The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth,
1909-1922: The Nature of Barth's Break with Liberalism, unpublished
PhD, Yale University. Sections published in 1957a, pp.40Æ-53, and
in Ten Year Commemoration to the Life of Hans Frei (1922-1988), ed.
Giorgy Olegovich (New York: Semenenko Foundation, 1999), pp.103-187.
The thesis has three chapters. The first is a general tracing of Barth's development from 1909 to the beginning of the Church Dogmatics. The second is a history of nineteenth-century theology from the vantage point of Barth's work, covering Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, K¹hler, Herrmann, Fritz Barth and others. The third chapter asks what continuity Barth's work has with relationalism, with Overbeck's scepticism, with the Blumhardts' Biblical Realism, and with religious socialism. The conclusion poses questions about whether Barth manages to do justice to human freedom and about Christocentrism, but rather more subtly than has sometimes been the case. The extract published in the Olegovich volume is eccentrically and drastically edited. - 1957a 'Niebuhr's Theological Background' in Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, ed. Paul Ramsey (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp.9-64.
- 1957b 'The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr' in ibid,
pp.65-116.
These essays began life as a paper delivered in August 1956 in the presence of George F. Thomas. Frei describes them in the introduction to 1978k. 1957a pp.40-53 = 1956a pp.174-202 with minor changes. There are sections on 'Niebuhr's Theological Concerns', 'The Academic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Protestant Theology', 'Revelation and Theological Method in the Theology of Karl Barth' and 'The Relation of Faith and History in the Thought of Ernst Troeltsch' in 1957a, and 'Niebuhr and the Problem of Theological Method', 'The Doctrine of God', and 'Christology' in 1957b. - 1958a 'Religion: Natural and Revealed' in A Handbook
of Christian Theology: Definition Essays on Concepts and Movements of Thought
in Contemporary Protestantism, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Marvin Halverson
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1958), pp.310-21.
T he volume also contains essays by Frei's colleague George Lindbeck. There are sections on 'Definition', 'History', and 'Contemporary Discussion', the latter divided into three sub-topics: theology and philosophy, revelation and history, and Christian faith and human culture. It contains some concise material on Barth.
There then follows a long gap in Frei's work, for which I have found no documentary evidence. If you know of, or possess, any items which were written or presented in this period, please let me know!
1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | Undated | Secondary