Part 2: On Jung's 'Answer to Job'

Some key themes that emerge in our dialogue:

Jung begins the book with an emotional, active imagination style condemnation of Yahweh’s behavior in the Book of Job. In the second half, he steps back to analyze not just what is going on in Yahweh's unconscious and in Job, but to look at all of Western civilization and the perils it faced after World War II.

A key theme is the ongoing nature of the incarnation process. The incarnation of Christ was an incomplete attempt to reconcile Yahweh with man, as Jesus was not fully human. There is a lack of full integration between the divine and human such that the incarnation must be read not as a once and done event but as an ongoing process through the Holy Spirit. This can be connected to the Protestant emphasis on unmediated individual access to the divine, which Jung sees as important but also prone to excess without the counterbalance of church authority and tradition that Catholicism provides. With the Assumption of Mary, Catholicism also takes steps to integrate the feminine, while Protestantism remains overly masculine and so falls out of step with the Zeitgeist.

Jung justifies the importance of both critical and creative approaches to interpreting religious scriptures. Doubt and transgression of norms can be generative. While the church has a role in examining the authenticity of revelations, individuals also have a responsibility to be alert, critical and self-aware in relation to religious claims. Visions and revelations from the unconscious are ambivalent - they can be creative or destructive. So a careful, conscientious approach is needed.

From a developmental psychology point of view, Yahweh can be likened to a father enabling but also needing to constrain the creative transgressions of the son. The son grows up to become a father but with new insights integrated. Psychologically, there is an oscillation between the ego's immersion in the unconscious and its re-emergence in a reformed configuration. Consciousness expands but whenever something new enters consciousness, something else necessarily falls into the unconscious. Completion is never fully achieved.

Jung suggests that it would be psychologically appropriate if the author of John’s epistles is the same John of Patmos who wrote the Book of Revelation. The latter text records an eruption of unconscious contents in compensation for the author's one-sided emphasis in the epistles on God/Christ as all-good and all-loving. Revelation presents a wrathful, apocalyptic Christ making a final judgment: the sacrificial lamb has become a wrathful ram.

We consider the interplay of active and passive principles in the divine and in the human soul. God as pure act requires the passive resistance of matter to enable consciousness. A dynamic back-and-forth between activity and passivity, symbolized by the syzygy of Christ/Sophia, is at play in the individuation of the human soul and the incarnation of the divine.

Jung ultimately points to the autonomous, living reality of archetypes as transcendentally conditioned dynamisms. Their effects manifest in human experience even if their exact metaphysical status remains uncertain. Jung's psychological approach to the Bible and Christianity is not a reductive psychologism but an attempt to understand the continuing incarnation of the divine in the human soul.

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