ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the epistemological paradigm of Michael Polanyi. It argues that epistemological paradigm is in a theological appropriation of his concept of 'Personal Knowledge' that a synthesis may be achieved of the participative and revelational accounts of theological knowing already described. The anatomist in an act of such intellectual passion imagines the topography, and yet it is precisely in that imagination that a more accurate reflection of reality is obtained. Tacit knowing, then, is the integration of such focal and subsidiary factors such that the former is held before us by the tacit operation of the latter. Michael Polanyi is not a theologian and unsurprisingly never uses the language of perichoresis, yet undoubtedly his framework of knowledge is one that encapsulates a perichoretic conception. The work of the Spirit is to enable us to think as Christ thinks, by causing us to participate in his mode of rationality. The conceptual metaphor may never come to explicit attention.
