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The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms

Jung and postmodern theology

Gallaudet University, Washington DC, U.S.A.

Department of English, Gallaudet University, Kendall Green, 800 Florida Ave., NE, Washington DC, 200023659, U.S.A. Version of record first published: 23 Jun 2008. To cite this article: Catherine ElmesKalbacher , Joseph F. Kalbacher & Catherine ElmesKalbacher (1997): Jung and postmodern theology, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 2:4, 664-667 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848779708579792

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WORKSHOP 86

The Legacy of Carl Jung in American Culture

Jung and Postmodern Theology

1 he term "postmodern theology" is loosely used to describe what was left of Christian beliefs in the wake of Darwin, Freud, World War II, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It can include non-Christian deities such as the goddess religions of the feminist movement, Eastern religions, and Christian doctrine modified by late twentieth-century cultural changes. One of the increasingly important cultural changes is the influence of Carl Jung on theology in the United States. The Jungian psychiatrist Eleanor Bertine summarizes the main points of Jung's contributions: 1. The assertion that a spiritual element is an organic part of the human psyche. 2. The spiritual element is regularly expressed in symbols. 3. These symbols reveal a path of psychological development that can be traced not only backward towards a cause in the past but forward towards a future goal. 4. The goal is expressed by images of completion in a whole, which Jung calls the Self and which is unique for each individual. It is formed by the integration of the ego, or self, and the unconscious. 5. This whole, the Self, is characterized by spiritual qualities that are associated with the image of God or the holy in many religions.

Department of English, Gallaudet University, Kendall Green, 800 Florida Ave., NE, Washington, DC 200023659 U.S.A. The European Legacy, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 664-667,1997 1998 by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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In the last twenty years or so, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant clergy found that Jung's work offered wide enough parameters that they could build theological bridges into their churches for those who had "lost their faith" but clearly needed some spiritual support system. Jung's familiarity with world religions led to his conviction that religion was a psychic fact of great importance in both individual and collective existence. The universality of religion reinforced his view of it as a manifestation of the collective unconscious. Religion referred to two distinct things: First was religious experience, a direct contact with the divine, manifested in dreams, visions, and mystical experiences. He borrowed the term numinosum from Rudolph Otto to describe this. Second was religion as it consists of religious practice, doctrines, and dogmas, as well as rituals and enactments, which Jung saw as necessary for many people to protect them from the awesome power of a direct experience of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum. Jung's understanding of symbols is based on his assumption that they are all manifestations of the collective unconscious. By describing religion more as an attitude than a set of beliefs and according it the status of a psychological phenomenon of the first order, Jung's writings on religion appear to have had a profound effect on late twentieth-century persons who have "lost faith" in traditional religious beliefs and practices. His "Answer to Job," which confronts the problem of good and evil, and the psychological interpretation of Roman Catholic ritual and theology in "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass" are standard readings in many seminaries. Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst and long-time director of the New York Jung Institute, has been one of the major expositors of Jung's psychology as it relates to Christianity. He sees the myth of incarnation as representative of the process of individuation. Christ is the ultimate whole personality; symbolic images of His life can be understood as the Self as it undergoes incarnation in the individual ego. Morton Kelsey, who was a professor in graduate studies at Notre Dame University, is also an Episcopal priest and a Jungian analyst. In Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit (1968) he shows how dreams can provide the religious insights necessary to personal spiritual growth and individuation. In 1974, some 20 years after the German theologian Rudolph Bultman had painstakingly "demythologized Christianity," Kelsey urged the remythologizing of Christianity. Kelsey places responsibility for the spiritual poverty of the modern human being on Thomas Aquinas, who "is largely to blame [for the fact that] modern man is like one who has been stuffed into a box which gives him no outlook, no idea that any reality exists outside his (rational, Aristotelian) cubbyhole." Despite Aquinas, the Roman Catholic liturgy, shrines, art, and ritual have kept the mythology alive. The Eastern Orthodox church never lost the living mythology; it continues to be mediated through its images, stories, and icons. Kelsey believes it is the bankruptcy of Protestantism that explains the proliferation of fundamentalist sects in America as well as the growing interest among young people in religions of the east. A friend of Kelsey, the Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst John Sanford, is the son of Agnes Sanford, and Episcopal clergyman's wife who made her own reputation in the 1940s as a writer on the power of spiritual healing. The younger Sanford has observed that

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JOSEPH R KALBACHER AND CATHERINE ELMES-KALBACHER

"the rediscovery of the personal and creative side of Christianity is more possible today than it has been for many centuries, because of the uncovering of the unconscious. The discovery of the reality of the inner world of man . . . is the most important religious fact of our time and adds great impetus to our search for an inner Christianity." Sanford has written interpretations of Old Testament stories as archetypal myths. He begins his interpretation of the sayings of Jesus with a Jungian personality typology analysis of the personality of Jesus, finding him to be "the paradigm of the whole man, the prototype of all human development, a truly individual person, and therefore someone unique." More recently the popular Roman Catholic monk Matthew Fox, a Dominican, finally was asked to leave the order because his ideas of "Creation Theology" grew beyond the parameters of even this tolerant and philosophical order. He was received into the Episcopal priesthood early in 1994 by the Bishop of the San Francisco Diocese. Ann Ulanov, a Jungian analyst, teaches at Union Seminary, the leading interdenominational Protestant institution. Her husband, Barry Ulanov, is a professor of English at Columbia University. Their fusion of Jungian psychology with Christian theology has been a vital factor in the education of two generations of clergy. But the most influential, by far, of the Jungian writers on religion has been the work of Thomas Moore. Entering a Roman Catholic seminary at age thirteen, Moore finally opted out of ordination to the priesthood thirteen years later and instead trained to become a Jungian psychotherapist. He emphasized the function of the soul as imagination. The image is more important than language to connect the Self with the collective unconscious. One "cares for the soul" by depth involvement in the here and now. Writing a poem, looking at a great work of art, listening to great music, yeseven going to church or temple, any religious rituals feed the imagination and help our awareness of soul. Giving credit to the American nineteenth-century philosopher and cleric Ralph Waldo Emerson, Moore keeps the balance between God's immanence and transcendence. He gives us an image of soul as not only the "burning flame of Divinity within us, but as surrounding us." To "find soul," walk outside and look up at the stars. Then know that you are "in soul." Jungian archetypal theories have been a foundation as well as a bridge for feminist theologians, as the women's movement in the United States gathered strength during the 1970s. Theologian Naomi Goldenberg, among other writers, has called attention to the oppressive effects of patriarchal imagery in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The biblical mythology and language has kept woman in spiritual bondage since the overthrow of the last goddess religion in Crete, according to anthropologists Gimbutas and Eisler. Goldenberg writes that Jung's importance for feminists "lies in the methods he devised to cure religious alienation.... We have seen that when father-gods fall, people tend to look inward to understand the forces or gods that are at work in their lives." Since Jung pioneered the psychological search for religious forces, his work becomes increasingly relevant in the post-Oedipal age. In 1984, the Jungian psychiatrist Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote:
The two perspectivesJungian and feministprovide binocular vision into the psychology of women. The Jungian perspective has made me aware that women are influenced by powerful inner forces, or archetypes, which can be personified by Greek goddesses. And the feminist perspective has given me an understanding of how outer forces or stereotypesthe roles to which society expects women to conformreinforce some goddess patterns and

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repress others. As a result, I see every woman as a 'woman-in-between': acted on from within by goddess archetypes and from without by cultural stereotypes.

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Since the discovery of the Nag Hummurabi scrolls following the sensational unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Essene sect, in Egypt, considerable attention has been devoted to the second-century "heresy" of Gnosticism. The idea that God could contain both goodness and evil was carefully expurgated from the consciousness, if not the collective unconscious, of the Christian tradition. James Hillman, Elaine Pagels, and analyst June Singer are among those who have written about the implications for the Judeo-Christian faith of this long-buried archetype. These writers agree that all the main ideas of the principal world religions occur psychologically as archetypes, and they emerge from the unconscious expressed in the language of symbols, art, and literature, as well as religious liturgies. Jung's assertion that psychology, far from proving religious insights to be invalid, does exactly the reverse by showing that the main ideas of our various religious heritages are not just stories and teachings from the past, as many people fear, but instead embody in symbolic form basic truths of the human soul, which are brought to life again in each generation. The "conflict" between science and religion is a mistake; it is a confusion of the twentieth century in attempting to reduce life to the limitations of human reason. For centuries, we have taken too literal a view of religious symbols and stories, fighting wars and oppressing "unbelievers," without being aware that each religion is a valid expression of its psychic reality. These psychological discoveries of a Swiss clergyman's son have opened up for us a new approach to religious experience as well as a new breadth of scientific understanding, seen now as related aspects of the same truth.