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Corporate Personality in the Bible: Adam and Christ—a biblical use of the concept of personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Extract

Both sociologists and philosophers are becoming more and more aware that a man’s personality is formed by the interplay between himself and his society. If he is transplanted into a different society or different culture at a sufficiently formative period of his life, then that culture will determine the directions which he takes in many fields of thought and activity; if, on the other hand, such a transplantation takes place when he is too rigidly (or firmly) fixed in the ways of a different society, he may be unable to communicate with or relate to the members of his new society, and remain a frustrated member of his old group, from which he is now separated. Examples of both these situations are easy to find among European immigrants to the United States. In more primitive societies where there are less universal conventions and systems of protection, the involvement of the individual within his group, and his dependence on it, are even more obvious. Today the Coca-Cola and Kleenex culture is worldwide; the traveller’s cheque and the passport will provide a fair measure of financial and legal protection the world over. Group loyalties and so group particularism, strong as they may be, need to be less extreme than in primitive times. The psychologists will tell us that a sense of belonging is a crucial factor for psychological stability, but in Hebrew times real belonging to a group was a condition of survival. This was one element which generated the way of thinking which was first characterized by H. Wheeler Robinson as that of the ‘corporate personality’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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