Pro EcclEsia Vol. XXiV, No. 1 37 FREI’S LATER CHRISTOLOGY: RADIANCE AND OBSCURITY Jason A. Springs Hans Frei died much too young, leaving behind him a body of published work as compelling in its content as it was slender in its magnitude. Even more so, he bequeathed a trove of materials at least as rich to be worked through, made sense of, and grappled with in their details and implica- tions. The twenty-five years since Frei’s passing has inspired numerous attempts to sift and clarify, explicate and extrapolate, expand upon it, and of course, to critically assess its strengths and weaknesses. Frei’s work evokes interest from so many different directions—theological and hermeneutical, of course, but also sociological, philosophical, literary, and historical. In my judgment, this is one of the reasons that Frei’s work has remained so compelling for several generations of students in the twenty- five years since his death. The title of my essay gestures toward both the radiance and obscurity of the role of Christology in Frei’s later work. The role of Christology in Frei’s later work has been rightly characterized as its most pivotal dimension. In an article that perhaps most precisely differentiates Frei’s later work from that of his friend and colleague, George Lindbeck, Mike Higton pinpoints the force of Frei’s Christological focus and objectives as one of the points at which Frei and Lindbeck most starkly diverge. 1 As Higton has stated it, in Frei’s later work, the Church’s taking the narrative reading of the Bible as primary is not to say that “the Church mastered the Bible,” but rather, precisely by taking a narrative reading as primary Jason A. Springs, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, 305 Hesburgh Center, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: jspring1@nd.edu 1. Higton, “Frei’s Christology and Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic Theory,” Scottish Jour- nal of Theology 50(1) (1997): 83–95.