Answers to Jung from Job 

No doubt Job is a tough book theologically. It is also entertaining and impressive to read Job and his friends sharply debate without interrupting each other and speaking in these long-form ripostes. With hilariously sharp replies like "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." (Job 12:2) "But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom." (Job 13:4-5) Or "I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all. Shall vain words have an end?" (Job 16:2-3) Perhaps as sharp as the Buckley and Vidal debates minus the threats of punches to the face.

We will consider a presentation of the book of Job from the view of a scoffer and slanderer who instead of being challenged to struggle with deeper questions concerning God interacting with creation, he is compelled by other forces inside him to break asunder the bands and cast away the cords binding his mind to the Creator (Rom.1:17-25). This frees him up to form an image of God in his own mind that is more like himself, to which he can worship with a seared conscience. In this case we consider God as ever evolving, changing and self-realizing as the individuation process is occurring in him/it while integrating his shadow into consciousness... like us. This seems to be the view of analytical psychologist founder Carl Jung in his book Answers to Job. I have not to date read that book, and am still trying to recover from reading his Red Book, Liber Novus (I hope to write about that episode soon). So, I am not responding specifically to particularities in Jung’s book, but to positive summaries others have provided in videos about it and reading sections from it. 

 Basically, the literal interpretation of the story of Job is criticized by Jung in the following manner- God seeming to falter in his omniscience engages in a particularly reprehensible wager with Satan (thereby legitimizing the devil intellectually) regarding the most righteous man on earth, Job. Why doesn’t God resist the devil instead of conversing with him? Instead “Satan is treated with remarkable tolerance and consideration”. (Answers to Job, pg.17) God loses the moral upper hand here and lets Satan persuade him to afflict Job cruelly and unjustly, destroying his great wealth, killing his family, and subjecting him to slanderous mockery from his friends and his advice to curse God and die from his wife. God is judged as seemingly unrighteous as he murders people indiscriminately like in the days of Noah. He broke his own 10 commandments! (Although Job pre-dated Moses.) ‘What an ogre!’ it is opined. I suppose God should be pro-life and not pro-choice. 

 But the slanders continue against God; ‘why didn’t he just tell Job what was happening?’ This seems fair enough; but no, God continues to terrify Job for trying to make sense of it all. God secretly has something against Job; a sort of grudge. It must be, in Jung’s view, that since God is omnipotent and eternal, he is unacquainted with the constraints of mortality. Man possesses “a keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence.” (Answers to Job, pg.13) Man thus has a more concentrated light than the immortal being as he is faced with death. God tried to scare Job from surpassing God’s goodness through this concentrated light man possesses. The psychologist proceeds, ‘God is jealously fretted about this advantage Job (the ideal man) holds over him.’  God suffers from a pathology it would appear.  

  This gentleman quotes a particularly blasphemous section of Jung’s Answers to Job: “Being omniscient God has no concentrated self to speak of. Being a part of everything God has no opportunity to distinguish self from non-self. However, as God knows the thoughts of humans through the thoughts of his creation, he can experience what self-awareness is. And out of this astonishing reflection induced of God by Jobs stubborn righteousness, the Almighty is pushed into a process of transformation that leads eventually into his incarnation of Jesus. God develops empathy and love through his confrontation with Job.” (The last minute or so of the video.) Apparently, God is not “I AM THAT I AM” - Ex.3:14 

 Jung of course doesn’t believe in the personal God of scripture but ‘God’ is a psychological force trying to experience consciousness through us. “God wanted to become man, and still wants to… ” (Answers to Job, pg.455) Plus, “Man must know that he is man’s worst enemy just as much as God had to learn from Job about his antithetical nature.” (Jung quote from 1 min.27 sec.) But the main point this guy brings out during the video linked first, is that, in Jung’s view, had God consulted his omniscience he would not have needed to put poor Job through the trials. This ongoing bluster is what I want to address. Because the question of God’s seemingly very human behavior in Job should be considered in a biblical context. God uses the devil to accomplish his purposes regarding sin, (e.g. Prv.16:4; Job12:16, 26:13; 1 Kin.22:19-23; 2 Sam.24:1; 1 Chr.21:1), since sin does not arise from his eternal nature. (1 Jn.1:5,3:5-8, Job 34:10-12, 40:8, Dt.32:4, Psa.92:15 etc.) God does know what Job will do, but will not reward or punish people for potentialities, rather he rewards or punishes actions and thoughts that are manifested. Consider how God uses the devil to perfect his saints- Lk.22:31-2, 2 Cor.12:7-10, Eph.6:10-18. God uses circumstances to improve us; to make us better; to expose our weakness. God manifests himself in time/space to interact with his creation and as omnipotent he need not explain all his works, nor could man necessarily understand them. Job learned of his lack of understanding of the Almighty which lead him to question if an injustice possibly occurred (Job 38:2-3, 40:3-8, 42:1-6). Sometimes we are not as strong and principled as we might flatter ourselves. Job also shows us that the righteous can suffer (Jam.5:10-11), which points us to Christ, and that the longsuffering of God is salvation. (2 Pt.3:15)

 C.S. Lewis employed a more reasonable assessment of the “problem of evil” which led him out of the moral hypocrisy and philosophical simplicity of atheism. (Yes, the atheistic emperor has no clothes.) In ‘Mere Christianity’ he recounts “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? ...Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too- for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.” “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” (pg.45-6)

 The same consistent presuppositional approach is used logically and scientifically with the transcendental argument for Gods existence (see Van Til, Bahnsen). If we are absent these absolute, invariant, immaterial, planes of existent entities (logical, mathematical and moral laws) and we ourselves not reliable participants in these planes (as the bible teaches- man made in God’s image exercising dominion over the earth), then there should be no meaning anywhere of anything. Meaning would reduce to private fancies (see David Hume). And what can that prove? I think therefore I am? No, I think therefore thought is occurring perhaps, but nothing more. If Jung was by chance correct, we could never know it, and neither could he. If he could know it then it would not be correct. Jung did not ‘gird up his loins like a man and answer God’ (Job 38:2-3). Given his pantheistic presuppositions Jung can only know that thought occurs in a mind he participates in- and not even that he is a 'self'. And whether these thoughts correspond to truth or error or reality or dream he need not pursue, for they are unattainable and the same nature. He could not even know this unless logic was being utilized to organize these thoughts in a way that suggests logic is invariant and immutable. That is not an idea compatible with evolutionary pantheism. 

 Instead, it is the longing of a deluded and lost soul hopelessly seeking down the path of German Romantic idealism. Jung, influenced partly by Schelling’s philosophy (Red Book, pg.513, nt.86) would be more persuaded that “The goal of the Absolute is ultimate self-recognition. The Absolute does not know itself, yet it seeks to; within it is a yearning, a desire for self-consciousness, for recognition, for actualization. Were the Absolute to reach its end, were it to become aware of itself eventually, there would be no distinction between that which is the Absolute and that which is not, meaning everything would be made void; hence self-recognition is impossible for the Absolute, so its striving for awareness is infinite, with no end; while it can get closer and closer to recognizing itself with each adaption, it will never completely grasp itself."

This analysis from that same essay is very fitting: "Such is a metaphor for Romanticism itself and the atmosphere it created–a yearning for something, something that is missing yet unknowable, a never-ending ambition for that which can never be attained, an unquenchable feeling known as Sehnsucht. As a result, the Absolute is never static but dynamic, in constant flux, more like the flowing river than the immobile rock.” 

 In contrast Jesus said “whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” (Mt.7:24-7)

For their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges. Deuteronomy 32:31