Of course I bought them when I saw the reference to my own ‘brilliant’ work in these books. With Types of Christian Theology (Yale University Press 1992) and Theology and Narrative (Oxford University Press 1993), both edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, we now have two substantial posthumous volumes of essays by Hans W. Frei, one of the most influential American theologians in recent years. It is not just the glancing mention of my book that invites attention, although that will turn out to be an instructive entry into critique of Frei’s typology of modem theology. The first thing is to outline the significance of his work.

Born in Breslau in 1922, Hans Frei was baptized as a Lutheran but, since the family was of Jewish ancestry, they had to flee to the United States in 1938. Hans won a scholarship to study textile engineering, in which he graduated, but a lecture by H. Richard Niebuhr, visiting from Yale, completely changed his life. He enrolled as a B.D. student at Yale. On graduation he became minister of a small-town Baptist congregation in New Hampshire. After much internal struggle he decided to become an Episcopalian and to pursue an academic career. He returned to Yale in 1947, married a year later, got ordained in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1956 for an enormously long thesis, supervised by Niebuhr and still unpublished, reconstructing ‘Barth’s break with liberalism’. In a way, the rest of his life was spent trying to subvert liberalism in theology by making Barth’s Church Dogmatics accessible. He taught at Yale from 1956 until his unexpected death in 1988.