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

Abstract

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.