Book excerpt

“We may distinguish pure religions of self-exploration from religions of historical revelation. Christianity and Judaism are religions of historical revelation. Essential to the Jew’s knowledge of God is the story of the liberation from Egypt: for the Jew, God is identified and experienced as the one who delivered the people of Israel from Egyptian bondage. The Jew’s knowledge of himself is likewise historical. Who is he most essentially, this individual man? He is a member of the people that God delivered from Egypt. He belongs in and gets his identity from that historical lineage. The pious Jew knows God not merely as the one who performed those distant historical actions; he also meets God as a ‘very present help in trouble,’ the source of blessings in the here and now. But this present God is experienced as the God who delivered his people from bondage long ago.

“In the same way, the Christian’s knowledge of God is cradled in the story of Christ. She knows God as the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified to reconcile the world’s sinners to God and was raised by God on the third day. She knows God as the king whose kingdom, inaugurated in the acts of Jesus and furthered in the acts of the apostles and of the disciples in subsequent centuries, will one future day be elaborated before her dazzled eyes. She experiences herself as a member of that past, present, and future kingdom, and in this way she belongs not just to this present moment but to the ages of God. This does not exclude her meeting God in the here and now; on the contrary, she could not meet that God in the here and now if she did not know him as the one who has that history.

“Jung’s religion, by contrast, is one of pure self-exploration. God is known not by reference to any acts that God may have performed in the past (or any ‘doctrines’ that report and interpret such historical data) but purely by a process in which the individual explores the goings-on within his own psyche. The individual finds God only in the depths of his own being. The first principle of this theology is this: There is nothing in true religion that was not first in the psyche.

“This does not rule out our getting help from ‘history,’ for human history casts up artifacts of religious experience — symbols in art, mythology, and dreams— that reflect the self-exploration of earlier individuals and communities. (It is a corollary of Jungian theology that all testimonies about God, insofar as they are genuine and useful, are symbols of psychic transformation.) Such historical symbols may be of use to the individual in interpreting what’s going on in his own psyche, for the process of bringing into consciousness what is going on within oneself is an essential part of the religious quest, and other people’s symbols can aid that process. Thus Jung spent a lot of effort on historical research, especially the study of mythology, Gnosticism, and the symbolism of alchemy.

“But the abundance of Jung’s interest in history should not hide from us the difference between his religion and religions of historical revelation. It is important to see how history functions in Jung’s theology. His many historical studies all aim to provide us with ways of understanding what is already going on inside us and would be going on inside us even if, say, we knew nothing of the Exodus or the gospel history. By showing us historical parallels to our own dreams and fantasies, these historical studies give us keys to unlock the secrets of our minds, thus bringing to consciousness religious truths that are there but might otherwise remain hidden. History and the doctrines about God and man which derive from that history do not function to identify God by his deeds and consequently to identify us as members of his people. For Jung, history functions instead to ‘reveal’ to us what we already are, quite independent of that history. (Notice that the Jungian too has a use for the word revelation, but that it carries a very different concept than the Christian one.) . . .

“Christians should know that Jung affirms Christianity only on the assumption that it can be reinterpreted as a religion of a different kind than original Christianity — as a pure religion of self-exploration.”

— from Robert C. Roberts, Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies (Eerdmans, 1993)

Related reading and listening

Related reading and listening

Links to posts and programs featuring D. C. Schindler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Junius Johnson;

Links to posts and programs featuring Reinhard Huetter;

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P.:

Links to posts and programs featuring Louis Markos:

Links to posts and programs featuring William C. Hackett:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Albert Howard:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Pfau:

Links to posts and programs featuring Hans Boersma:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Hindmarsh:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Budziszewski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve L. Porter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Norman Wirzba:

Links to posts and programs featuring Timothy Larsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Herman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rod Dreher:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kevin J. Vanhoozer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Esther Lightcap Meek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alan Jacobs:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kimbell Kornu:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Lyle Jeffrey:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Setran:

Links to posts and programs featuring Peter Bouteneff:

Links to posts and programs featuring Francis J. Beckwith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marianne Wright:

Links to posts and programs featuring David W. Fagerberg:

Links to posts and programs featuring William T. Cavanaugh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Ward:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Dominic Taylor:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robin Phillips:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan McIntosh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marian Schwartz:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Kaethler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Donald B. Kraybill:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Storck:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan Chaplin:

Links to posts and programs featuring James W. Skillen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Stivers:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Regnerus:

Links to posts and programs featuring Emma Mason:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Noll:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Ney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Greg Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring David I. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Paone:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kelly M. Kapic:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric O. Jacobsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jessica Hooten Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring James Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Rubery:

Links to posts and programs featuring Simon Oliver:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Blakely:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kathryn Wehr:

Links to posts and programs featuring Holly Ordway:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Tyson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew D. Stewart:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Sehat:

Links to posts and programs featuring John Durham Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Nigel Biggar:

Links to posts and programs featuring Margaret Harper McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Paul Davison:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alison Milbank:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brian R. Brock:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Newstok:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fiona Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring R. Jared Staudt:

Links to posts and programs featuring Grant R. Brodrecht:

Links to posts and programs featuring Antonio López:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brent Hull:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew B. Crawford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kerry McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robert P. George:

Links to posts and programs featuring Christine Rosen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Cairns:

Links to posts and programs featuring Diana Pavlac Glyer:

Links to posts and programs featuring O. Carter Snead:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven D. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeremy Beer:

Links to posts and programs featuring James K. A. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Weikart:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Evan Bonds:

Links to posts and programs featuring Perry L. Glanzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dana Gioia:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas E. Bergler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Srigley:

Links to posts and programs featuring J.A.C. Redford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Carl Elliott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Victor Lee Austin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Sørina Higgins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve Wilkens:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gilbert Meilaender:

Links to posts and programs featuring Martin X. Moleski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brendan Sweetman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Allan C. Carlson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason M. Baxter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barrett Fisher II:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Weston:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven Knepper:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan M. Felch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fred Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Dickerson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jack R. Baker:

Links to posts and programs featuring W. Bradford Wilcox:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bill Vitek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ted Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dale Ahlquist:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers: