R. Lansing Hicks, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School, dies at 86
Episcopal News Service. January 17, 2008 [011708-05]
The Rev. R. Lansing Hicks, professor emeritus of Old Testament and former associate dean of academic affairs at Yale Divinity School (YDS), died January 14 in Hamden, Connecticut, after a long illness. He was 86.
Services will be held at Trinity Church on the New Haven Green on Saturday, January 19, at 11 a.m. Plans are also underway for a memorial service at the Divinity School at a later date.
Hicks joined the faculty of YDS in 1971, following the affiliation between YDS and Berkeley Divinity School (BDS), and retired in 1990. He had been appointed to the BDS faculty in 1958.
As a biblical scholar, Hicks’ interests were primarily in the Christian use of the Old Testament in its relation to the New Testament. In 1968, he delivered The Winslow Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, published in monograph form as “Forms of Christ in the Old Testament: The Problem of The Christological Unity of the Bible.” He also published articles in the Anglican Theological Review, the Journal of Bible and Religion, The Oxford Annotated Bible, and The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.
At times, Hicks was the only member of the YDS faculty with enough archeological field experience to teach an Old Testament archeology course. During the summer of 1976 he was visiting archeologist for excavations at Tell Dan, and in summer 1966 he was field supervisor in the excavations at et-Tell. In May 1962, he worked on excavations at Tell er-Rumeith.
Hicks earned a B.A. in 1942 from Wake Forest University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then a B.D. from the School of Theology at the University of the South in 1945. He did postgraduate study in 1948-49 at the University of Basel and earned his Th.D. in 1954 from Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was awarded an honorary D.D. in 1990 by Virginia Theological Seminary.
Born September 20, 1921 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hicks was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1945. He served Grace Episcopal Church in Weldon, North Carolina, and the Church of the Epiphany in New York City before joining the University of the South in 1949. In 1952, he was among a group of faculty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, who resigned their positions to protest the school’s reluctance to desegregate. Hicks and the others had written a widely publicized letter calling the school’s position “untenable in the light of Christian ethics and of the teaching of the Anglican Communion.”
Hicks is survived by his wife, Helen, and three children: Katherine, Peter and Robert.