 | R. Lansing Hicks |
Renowned at YDS for his teaching, integrity
R. Lansing Hicks, professor emeritus of Old Testament and former associate
dean of academic affairs at Yale Divinity School (YDS), died on Jan. 14 in
Hamden, Connecticut, after a long illness. He was 86 years old.
T H I S
IN MEMORIAM
In Memoriam: R. Lansing Hicks
Hicks joined the faculty of YDS in 1971, following the affiliation between
YDS and Berkeley Divinity School, and retired in 1990. He had been appointed
to the Berkeley faculty in 1954 and then named full professor in 1958.
An Episcopal priest with roots in the South, Hicks focused primarily on teaching
rather than on writing books — over the course of his career his publications
were mostly in the realm of encyclopedia articles, scholarly journals and book
reviews. He will be remembered as a teacher who cared deeply about his students
both in and out of the classroom, and as person of particularly high personal
and academic integrity.
That sense of integrity was demonstrated when, as a young scholar 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 wrote a widely publicized letter calling
the school’s position “untenable in the light of Christian ethics
and of the teaching of the Anglican Communion.”
“He always reflected the graciousness of his Southern roots, but at the
same time his fine ethical and moral sense made him a shining example of religious
opposition to segregation in the South of the 1950s,” said Robert Wilson,
associate dean of academic affairs at YDS and a longtime colleague of Hicks. “As
a teacher he was thorough and comprehensive; as an administrator he was open
and fair; as a scholar he was both meticulous and creative; and as a colleague
he was congenial and kind.”
Joseph Britton, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, said, “Lansing
was one of the real heroes of Berkeley Divinity School. His courageous decision
to walk out of the University of the South over the issue of racial segregation
always endeared him to our students, who looked to him not only as a learned
teacher of the scriptures but as a real role model as well.”
As a biblical scholar, Hicks’s interests lay
primarily in the area of 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, 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 archaeology course, leading excavations
at Tell Dan in 1976, et-Tell in 1966 and Tell er-Rumeith in 1962.
Hicks earned a B.A. in 1942 from Wake Forest University, where he was elected
to Phi Beta Kappa, and received a B.D. from the School of Theology at the University
of the South in 1945. He did postgraduate study in 1948-1949 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 Sept. 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.
He is survived by his wife, Helen, of Hamden; two sons, Peter Hicks of Hamden,
and Robert L. Hicks Jr. of Casa Grande, Arizona; a daughter, Katherine M. Hicks
of Northampton, Massaschusetts; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Plans are also underway for a memorial service at YDS at a later date.
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