Answer to Job

--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

For me this book is a wonderful example of how Jung was able to work with archetypes and myths when dealing with his own relationships. One familiar with the letters between Freud and Jung will find in the description of Yahweh and Jung's complaints against this punishing, abandoning, and at times unself-aware image of God the very real feelings he experienced with Freud.I believe Jung did in this book what he could not do in his real life experience with Freud. That is reconcile parts of the relationship that hurt him deeply while finding a way to understand the limitations of both Freud and the PsychoAnalytic community which he felt abandoned him after the break with Freud.He did this by attributing to God the containment of all things of the paradoxial nature of being both light and darkness/ evil and good.

...and daring in its conjecture that the God-image (NOT God) could only evolve out of its amoral unconsciousness through an encounter with a man of unbending integrity. Highly recommended, especially for open-minded theologians outgrowing the need to idealize images of the deity.

Doctor Jung expresses concern in his Introduction that readers will misinterpret the ideas contained in this book. Jung presents examples of the unconscious, capricious behavior of Yahweh (GOD) who self-righteously proclaims his moral superiority over humankind and enforces a strict adherence to his sense of justice. This self-delusion reaches culmination in the collusion of Yahweh and his 'shadow son' Satan in the undeserved sadistic persecution of a righteous man, Job, in a cosmic wager. Job's principled response to this persecution demonstrates humankind exhibiting a higher morality than shown by Yahweh. Yahweh, reaching a higher level of consciousness, realizes that he must atone to humankind for the wrong he has done. His attempt to make this atonement through incarnation as Jesus Christ is only partially successful. The later appearance of the Holy Ghost is Yahweh's attempt to perfect himself further through a personal incarnation into humankind in general. Jung moves on to a psychological analysis of the Book of Revelation, where the shadow side of the author, the Apostle John, is evident in the torments predicted to befall humankind.Jung's theological ideas are radical and open to misinterpretation. His thinking on the 'problem of evil' and the evolving relationship of God to humankind is the attempt of a wise, old man to make sense of the conflicting images present in the mythology of the Bible.