A theologian without a school of thought

When Douglas John Hall died on April 10, we lost not only one of the most important North American Protestant theologians of the past 50 years but also the last prominent student of two of the great theologians of the mid-20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. John Bennett, Hall’s doctoral adviser and the former president of Union Theological Seminary, considered Hall the heir apparent to Niebuhr and perhaps the finest theologian the school had produced. And a certain poetry can be discerned in the fact that Hall died a day after the 80th anniversary of the execution of one of his theological lodestars, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It is nearly impossible to talk about Hall’s contribution to theology without reference to his influences, teachers, and peers. Outwardly, he could seem a singular and even lonely figure in theology, never consistently named alongside his contemporaries in terms of his significance (much to his chagrin). He often seemed to be waging an uphill, one-man battle for a theological vision that was, as he and his friend Jürgen Moltmann said of the theology of the cross they both championed, “not much loved.” But a deeper look into his life reveals a man who was deeply shaped both by the company he kept and the labels he resisted. Given that he titled his final book What Christianity Is Not, perhaps the best way to honor his memory is to take an apophatic approach to his legacy.

That is all to say that Hall was much more complicated and sometimes contradictory than he often seemed, and for that, he and his work have at times been misunderstood. So rather than focus on individual books or specific dimensions of his thought, such as the theology of the cross or the collapse of Christendom, I want to posit that to appreciate Hall and his contribution fully, one must look not just at his thought and his output but at the man himself, a man who knew himself at heart to be a theologian.