On your recommendation, I read Carl Jung’s book, The Answer to Job, and as you said, it is a difficult book – the language is not the easiest nor is the conclusion. What comes across to me is that the God portrayed has some really big issues with his self-image. Since your recommendation was a response to my question if God has both good and evil, then must I conclude that the divine encompasses both? Yet, you often refer to God as the source of love, but isn’t it the hard truth that God is also the source of hate and evil? Perhaps the unique thing about being human is that we can actually choose which of God’s qualities we nurture. I think there is an Indian saying that the side of God (good/evil) that becomes the strongest in you is the one you feed. So my belief is that our quest is maybe to give God the answer God cannot give to Godself – namely which of God’s sides is the better one? I can see that this is perhaps the conclusion that Jung drew. God needs man and woman to become human – not the other way around.
Dear Frederick,
Thank you for your letter and for your comments. I believe you have understood Carl Jung better than you think! What Jung said about the Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven, declared by Pope Pius XII in 1950 was that now, at last, “the feminine has been lifted into God” in Western religion. Jung regarded this as a major accomplishment. Church leaders rejoiced in his affirmation.
Then Jung went on to say that the next step in the “development of God” would be for the devil, that is for evil, to be lifted into God and then God would be complete. Church leaders did not rejoice in that Jungian suggestion. That is, however, because the church leaders do not understand symbols as well as Jung did. God is beyond gender so God cannot be male or female, but must represent and transcend both.
If human life has a shadow, as Jung suggests that we all do, then human wholeness will not be found until we embrace that shadow and make it part of ourselves. One cannot split off and reject a part of what one is, one must embrace it and transcend it. That is what Jung meant when he said that the devil, evil, is like the shadow side of God.
Yes, God is the source of love, but where love is absent and evil is present that evil could be said to root in God. Human life is always a struggle between survival and love. If we could see Jesus, not as the savior of the sinful as the church has so often proclaimed, but as the love that calls us beyond survival into wholeness, then I think we would be closer to understanding the meaning of Jesus. We would also begin to understand the meaning of Jung’s idea that God cannot be separated from evil.
I think your last sentence captures this truth powerfully and succinctly “God needs man and woman to be human not the other way around!”
My best.
John Shelby Spong
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