Anthropology And The Nature Of Man -- By: James Oliver Buswell

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 13:4 (Fall 1970)
Article: Anthropology And The Nature Of Man
Author: James Oliver Buswell


Anthropology And The Nature Of Man*

James O. Buswell, III

The position of anthropology on the nature of man is directly related to its presuppositions regarding the supernatural. Most anthropologists today studiously avoid bringing in matters of sin, moral absolutes, revelation, or religious considerations. When the philosopher-anthropologist David Bidney wrote of the free will of “man, under God.”1 University of Michigan anthropologist, Leslie White, criticizing the current state of American anthropology, commented that, “With the re-introduction of God into ethnological theory, Bidhey sets a new low in the present trend toward regression.”2

Even in the treatment of religion itself anything at all that smacks of the supernatural is similarly avoided. Since the Christian is used to taking God’s revelation as found in the Bible somewhat for granted it may come to him as a shock to find so-called objective, scientific approaches to religion explicitly ruling out the one body of evidence with which he is the most familiar. Thus Edward Norbeck, in his textbook, Religion in Primitive Society, in treating the origin of religion, states:

…we have entirely omitted the most popular theory of origins: among the nonscholarly population of at least the civilized world surely the most common idea is that religion, if it be ‘true,’ has been divinely revealed. Divine revelation as an explanation of religious genesis has no place in this book …

Norbeck held that except for certain historically important ideas, all theological interpretations of the origins of religion would be dismissed from considerations as irrelevant or prejudicial.3

… The sum of all of these theories concerning religious origins can be presented in the simple statement that the origins remain unknown.4

Such a position is representative of the anthropological consensus today. Its implications for a view- of the nature of man are just as clearly

*A shorter version of this paper was read as part of a series on “The Social Sciences and the Moral Nature of Man” at The King’s College, Briarcliff Manor, New York, February 18, 1970. Mr. Buswell is a member of the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York.

stated. Man is seen first of all in his natural setting as related unquestionably to an organic past condition which was non-human. G. S. Carter writes:

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