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The Spirit of Inquiry and the Reflected Self: Theological Anthropology and the Sociology of Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Hugh Jones
Affiliation:
Fachbereich Evangelische Theologie, University of Mainz, 6500 Mainz, Saarstrasse 21, West Germany

Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1978

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References

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

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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.)

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page 203 note 4 For discussions of the language of perspective see, e.g., Wisdom, John, ‘Gods’, PAS 45 (19441945), pp. 185206Google 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

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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

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page 208 note 1 This usage is based on the insights of the psychologist, George Kelly; see Part III below.

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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.

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page 213 note 4 Wittgenstein, op. cit., §§ 19, 23 and 241.

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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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