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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The general aim of an anthropology may be said to be the determination of man's characteristics in his environment. In social anthropology, however, the trend has been to emphasise the environment at the expense of man. The present article argues that a similar tendency prevails in theology's typical description of man as a ‘hearer’ of the Word of God and finds illuminating parallels in Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge. The failure of these two authors to maintain a true dialectic between individual creativity and the formative influences of society appears in connection with their view of human inquiry. By developing George Kelly's model of man as an inquiring scientist, the article attempts to show that a theological anthropology is bound to take the empirical fact of the theologian's own spirit of inquiry into account and also that it must develop a theory of its own activity which overcomes conceptually the tendency to lose sight of man the inquirer in favour of divine grace or human social structures.
page 201 note 1 See, e.g., Needham, Rodney, Belief, Language, and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), p. 2.Google Scholar
page 202 note 1 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), pp. 346 and 75.Google Scholar
page 202 note 2 See Barth's concessions, ibid., p. I2f.
page 203 note 1 Prenter, Regin, ‘Anthropologie IV. Dogmatisch’, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1957), 421Google Scholar. (The quotation is my summary of Prenter's views.)
page 203 note 2 See Altner, Günter and Sauter, Gerhard, ‘Anthropologie im interdisziplinären Gespräch’, Verkündigung und Forschung 2 (1972), pp. 3–36.Google Scholar
page 203 note 3 Cf. Needham, op. cit., pp. 243–6.
page 203 note 4 For discussions of the language of perspective see, e.g., Wisdom, John, ‘Gods’, PAS 45 (1944–1945), pp. 185–206Google Scholar; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), esp. Part II, xiGoogle Scholar; Richmond, James, Theology and Metaphysics (London: SCM, 1970)Google Scholar; and Jeffners, Anders, The Study of Religious Language (London: SCM, 1972).Google Scholar
page 203 note 5 See Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, 1971)Google Scholar; this work has been taken as representing their joint methodological position.
page 204 note 1 ibid., p. 79; further references to this work will be given in the text.
page 204 note 2 ‘Ein Ausdruck hat nur im Strome des Lebens Bedeutung’; cited in Malcolm, Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 93Google Scholar; for a gloss on this sentence, see Needham, op. cit., pp. 244–6.
page 204 note 3 An important exception would be Kaufman's, GordonSystematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Scribner's, 1968) where man's defining characteristic is his ‘historicity’ in the sense that he is both made by his history and himself makes history (Chap. 23).Google Scholar
page 204 note 4 Needham, op. cit., p. 245.
page 205 note 1 The word ‘model’ is used here in the sense of a symbolic construct which by means of an analogy interprets and orders a certain area of experience. See, e.g., Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models and Paradigms: The Nature of Scientific and Religious Language (London: SCM, 1974).Google Scholar
page 205 note 2 Schutz, Alfred, The Problem of Social Reality. Collected Papers I (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962).Google Scholar
page 208 note 1 This usage is based on the insights of the psychologist, George Kelly; see Part III below.
page 208 note 2 Hamilton, Peter, Knowledge and Social Structure: An Introduction to the classical Argument in the Sociology of Knowledge (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 139.Google Scholar
page 209 note 1 Prenter, art. cit.
page 210 note 1 Calvin, John, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, J. T. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), I. ii. 2.Google Scholar
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page 211 note 2 Kelly, George, The Psychology of Personal Constructs (New York: Norton, 1955, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Bannister, D., ‘A New Theory of Personality’ in New Horizons in Psychology, ed. Foss, B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966)Google Scholar and Bannister, and Fransella, Fay, Inquiring Man: The Theory of Personal Constructs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 212 note 1 Kelly, op. cit., p. 46.
page 212 note 2 Bannister and Fransella, p. 16; see also Kelly, pp. 38–9.
page 212 note 3 Kelly, p. 50.
page 213 note 1 Schutz, op. cit., pp. 20–1.
page 213 note 2 Bannister and Fransella, p. 21; their italics.
page 213 note 3 See the survey in Pervin, L. A., Personality: Theory, Assessment and Research (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 367–381Google Scholar; also Bannister and Fransella, passim.
page 213 note 4 Wittgenstein, op. cit., §§ 19, 23 and 241.
page 214 note 1 Kelly, , ‘Personal construct theory and the psychotherapeutic interview’ (1969)Google Scholar; cited in Bannister and Fransella, p. 82; my italics.
page 215 note 1 For the view that theology turns the language of faith (e.g. the union of God and man in Jesus) into that of problems (the various Christologies would be examples of proposed formulations and solutions), see Sauter, Gerhard and Stock, Alex, Arbeitsweisen systematischer Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1976).Google Scholar
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