Carl Jung - Answer to Job

[Proinsias]

I'd be keen to hear any opinions on this book if anyone has read it. I picked it up from a charity shop and I'm about halfway through. It's an interesting commentary but one which I imagine is rather unpalatable to Christians.

At this point in the book he is outlining that moral law is above God and why the Job event placed Job morally above God thus requiring God to incarnate as Jesus and basically be in the same position Job was in. Matthew 27:46.

I'm not saying I'm in agreement with Jung but more looking towards the forum to help me understand what he is saying. Of the time I've spent with the bible Job has always stood out for me as a very profound piece which influences me more than most - in very basic terms to never blame outside forces or become bitter with what life throws at you.

[cslewislover]

Can you be more specific about what Jung is claiming or arguing?

[coldblood]

cslewislover » Here are a couple of "copied" reviews, but I think they can serve as good mini-reference for anyone considering delving into the book. Proinsias » is probably right, I think, in that the book raises questions about God, which will make most Christians uncomfortable.

Copied from Routledge Books
Book overview:

Of all the books of the Bible few have had more resonance for modern readers than the Book of Job. For a world that has witnessed great horrors, Job's cries of despair and incomprehension are all too recognizable. The visionary psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung understood this and responded with this remarkable book, in which he set himself face-to-face with 'the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness'. Jung perceived in the hidden recesses of the human psyche the cause of a crisis that plagues modern humanity and leaves the individual, like Job, isolated and bewildered in the face of impenetrable fortune. By correlating the transcendental with the unconscious, Jung, writing not as a biblical scholar but 'as a layman and physician who has been privileged to see deeply into the psychic life of many people', offers a way for every reader to come to terms with the divine darkness which confronts each individual.

Copied from Amazon Books
Customer Review:
By Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore Romeo* and *61 Bang*

God on the couch -- and brother, does the Big Guy have problems! Read any biography of Stalin side-by-side with the Old Testament and you don't see much difference between the dictator and the Almighty. Paranoid, jealous, vain, ruthless, and vengeful, they demand unquestioning, unthinking obedience and they will crush you with unlimited violence if they don't get it. Gulag, Hell, it's all the same, except you can't escape Hell even in death.

God, as Jung points out, isn't quite right in the head. As Exhibit A, Jung uses the biblical story of Job--the faithful servant tortured to within an inch of his life by the God he loves--to deal with that age-old question: why do horrendous things happen to good people, or, if God is so powerful, so good, so infallible, why are there concentration camps, cancers, pederastic serial killers, tsunamis, terrorists--so many Evil-doers in the world? And, even worse, why are there so many innocent victims of all this evil? It's a problem inherent in monotheism. If there's only one God, then why shouldn't he be held responsible for all of it...good and bad?

There's got to be a better answer than the one God gives Job in the Bible, which is, basically, "I'm bigger than you, I'm stronger than you, this is my world, I made it, and if you don't shut yer yap I'm gonna rip you a new one, you worm!"

Job gets the point: might makes right--and he does obeisance and keeps quiet as any sensible person would confronted by an armed and pumped up lunatic in full-blown `roid rage. But there's got to be a better answer to Job's very valid question than that, doesn't there?

With wit, passion, and probing analytic insight, Jung finally provides Job with the answer God Himself should have given Job--if only the Almighty could have articulated it. For the truth is, as Jung rather stunningly tells it, God is actually unconscious of a large part of Himself and not unlike a lot of his creatures, He's in the process of "discovering" Himself as an individual. Perhaps even more stunning is Jung's assertion that God has a lot of catching up to do with his creatures since men like Job, who've looked deeply into themselves, actually occupy higher moral ground than He does. That, according to Jung, is the reason that God had to become man, and why he is still trying to become man: to come to awareness about Himself.

God, in other words, would be better if only he realized what a lot of pain and misery He's been causing! It's truly a case of His Right Hand not knowing what His Left Hand was doing.

*Answer to Job* is a simply brilliant interpretation of this classic Biblical story and its subsequent influence on the development of New Testament theology from the point of view of Jungian psychoanalysis. The translation is crystal-clear, largely free of technical or scholarly jargon, and livened by Jung's often irreverent sense of humor. You really do get the sense, as Jung says in his preface, that he's writing as a man for whom Job's pained and passionately urgent questioning of God doubles for his own: Why so much suffering? Why so much evil? Ow, can there possibly be a God?

As Jung makes clear, these are questions that are evolving over time, along with their answers. And while in presuming to answer for God, Jung's may not be the final word, but it's sure a lot more satisfying than the answer God Himself gave.

[Proinsias]

Can you be more specific about what Jung is claiming or arguing?

It's basically Jung attempting to psychoanalyze God through his words and actions in Job.

He starts off by painting Yaweh as breaking his own moral law in the book of Job. That he has not consulted with his omniscience or remained bound by moral law when he lets his son, Satan, trick him into a rather pointless bet arranged around the suffering of a good man. He goes on to say that when Job is in the dirt before Yaweh, and Yaweh is still going on about how fabulous he is, Job has already acknowledged this even before the bet but Yaweh is really intent on creating a huge spectacle and going on and on about how vastly superior he is to Job. This act, he argues, places Job morally above God and created the need for God to become human, essentially being nailed to the cross and crying out that God has forsaken himself. This is said to be only partially successful as Jesus was not really a human, being of virgin birth.

He also discusses a lot of the symbolism and mythology. A divine being born of a virgin into very modest surrounding, accompanied by astrological events and foreseen by great kings and wise men. He looks at the femine aspect of Yaweh, Sophia in relation to the Virgin Mary. At Satan, as the son of God, in some ways mirroring Cain, the son of Adam. And that after the death of Jesus the nature of God has changed to a more obviously loving God, but still not a completely changed character as Jesus advised us to pray: "Lead us not into temptation'.

Currently he is explaining why attempts to psychoanalyze Jesus are fraught with difficulty as a being which is both divine and human cannot really be effectively separated out to bitesize chunks to analyze without making a complete mess of the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly for Jung he doesn't really seem to care if Jesus actually existed and is pretty underwhelmed by the evidence he has looked at. He also attributes this attitude, of not really caring about the actual physical existence of Jesus, to Paul. I've heard this sort of attitude expressed in Hinduism - that it doesn't really matter if Krishna actually existed or recited the Bhagavad Gītā on the battlefield, the point is that we have the Bhagavad Gītā and wherever it came from it shows that someone has reached a very high state of divine conciseness and the deep insights expressed are of great value regardless of their origins.

I've not finished it yet and I can't say that I've been able to follow it all in a critical manner as I'm not very knowledgeable about much of the subject matter. I kinda thought that such a famous thinker writing a commentary on such a famous book might be quite well known 'round these parts.

More interesting than reading one of Dawkin's hate filled rants anyday.