couple of English parishes, hoping to find a way to combine the more social and cultural historical insights which these things gave him into the Christianity of the time with the insights he had hitherto gained through a more traditional study of well-known high-culture theologians and philosophers. From 1982 until 1988, his time as Master over, Frei returned to publishing and writing with a vengeance. Although still not prolific by the standards of many of his contemporaries, by his own standards his output was vast. He returned to both strands of his earlier constructive theological work: hermeneutics (which had been the subject matter of Eclipse) and Christology (the subject matter of Identity). In 1982 he delivered a paper on the interpretation of narrative, at Haverford College; in 1983 the Shaffer Lectures at Yale (in which he began to develop what has subsequently become a famous five-place typology for understanding modern theology) and delivered a long paper on hermeneutics at the University of California. His work did not even flag when he became chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1983 to 1986. He spoke in 1985 in response to an assessment of his work by the evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry; in 1986 he spoke at a conference in honour of Jürgen Moltmann, delivered a lecture at Princeton University, and spoke on Barth and Friedrich Schleiermacher at a conference at Stony Point, New York. In 1987 he delivered the Cadbury lectures in Birmingham, England, and the Humanities Council lectures at Princeton. He prepared a contribution to Bruce Marshall's festschrift for George Lindbeck, and another for a conference on H. Richard Niebuhr to be held in September 1988. Most of these papers and lectures were indirectly or directly directed towards one end: a history of the figure of Jesus in popular and high culture in England and Germany since 1750. Frei seems to have found a new theological confidence bubbling up with this historical project, however: now, more than ever, the two sides of his work (which had been the source of his ambivalence in the 1970s) become inextricably linked. One moment he can be talking about the rise of the professions in Germany and the impact that had on theology in the Universities. The next moment he can be talking about the sensus literalis of scripture and theology as Christian self-description. The next moment (although this is not