Missions and Anthropology: A Love/Hate Relationship

Abstract

This insightful article traces the history of anthropology through its earlier stages, and describes the ambivalent attitudes many missionaries developed toward this brash, emerging discipline. It then turns to the current scene and shows how the fundamental revolution in western thought — which Professor Hiebert describes as a paradigm shift in epistomology — drastically affected the social sciences. Christians in general, and missiologists in particular, should welcome this shift, despite the tensions it generates, for we are thereby brought “closer to the biblical perspective of the limits of human knowledge and of the importance of faith.”