Christ, Providence and History

Hans Frei was born in Germany in 1922 and moved to the USA with his family during World War II. After studying under Niebuhr at Yale University he took up a teaching post there. In the 1960's he went to Europe undertaking research in both Gottingen and Cambridge. He died in 1988 at the peak of his career. This book is the first full study of the whole of Hans Frei's work, from his doctoral thesis on Karl Barth in the 1950's to his great unfinished project on the history of modern theology in the 1980's. Higton draws on a wide range of unpublished material in the Frei archives to present a comprehensive, fresh and original interpretation of Frei's theology. He places Frei's well-known work on biblical hemeneutics firmly in the context of his theological wrestling with Barth and of the dominant traditions of Western Protestant theology. Here is an unprecedented portrait of Frei as a theologian fundamentally concerned with the ability of theology to speak about, and to, the public world - and to regard that world as providentially ordered in Jesus Christ, without diminishing its concrete contingency and freedom. Frei emerges not just a powerful historian of theology, but a persuasive,