Job, Karl (Barth) and Carl (Jung)

Introduction
Writing anything that might compare Carl Jung and Karl Barth is asking for trouble. The two authors can be regarded as representing the opposite poles in the mid twentieth century debate about how to “do” biblical scholarship and theology.

Jung, as a psychologist, wrote substantially on religion and religious experience, and on the archetype of God. Although not a theologian, it has been argued that his approach epitomises the breadth of the Liberal Protestant tradition, which seeks to include contemporary disciplines into its thinking about God.

In contrast, Barth is known for his strong critical response to the Liberal Protestant movement. Richmond has summarised Barth’s approach. He writes,
“Over against liberalism, Barth denied that Christianity is one religion among others, stressing rather that it concerns only God’s unique self revelation. He vigorously tried to free Christianity from philosophical influences; he stressed the centrality of the kerygmatic character of the biblical writings, the radical discontinuity between God and human nature, and made much of the concepts of crisis, judgement and grace. Above all, against liberalism, he taught God’s unqualifiable and indissoluble subjectivity: it is God who acts upon and toward man (sic) and not vice versa.”

However, despite the obvious tension between the approaches of the writers, the fact that they both wrote substantially on the Book of Job makes the comparison worth the trouble. What makes the comparison irresistible is the fact that their texts were published within the same decade, Jung in 1952 and Barth in 1959 , they were of a similar age when they wrote them (Jung was 9 years older than Barth) and they were both children of pastors in the Swiss Reformed Church.

Attempting to explore why two people from the same cultural milieu approach the Book of Job so differently, is a task beyond this essay. However, exploring the different approaches does give an insight into that time of post war theology and how the engagement with Job, a book that is ostensibly about pain and suffering, might still speak to us fifty years on.

Jung’s approach
Jung wrote his book, Answer to Job apparently in a fever and in a matter of days. He writes that he engaged with the Book of Job in order to explore “the way in which modern man (sic) with a Christian education and background comes to terms with the divine darkness which is unveiled in the Book of Job, and what effect it has on him.”

Jung’s exploration of the Book of Job was novel in its development of a psychoanalytical approach to scripture. He proposes that religious statements are statements which are based on transcendental realities, but which are filtered through human consciousness. He writes, “If for instance we say “God,” we give expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time.” Images of God, thus “are psychic processes which are different from their transcendental object; they do not posit it, they merely point to it.”

Newsom and Schreiner write that Jung’s text “does not so much attempt to interpret the biblical text as to read it as an expression of the human unconsciousness in its effort to grapple with the phenomena of good and evil and their relationship.”

Answer to Job, however appears to be much more than a theoretical exploration of human consciousness as revealed by text, Jung also indicates that his approach is a personal and subjective reaction to the Book of Job. This lack of distinction between a theoretical approach and personal engagement with the text leaves us with a work that “veers between the two…at times quite violently at odds with each other, and sometimes are confused and confusing. The clashes arise between those times when Jung is talking objectively in terms of the symbolic meaning of the God image and those times when he is responding emotionally and attacking God as a very concrete person.”

Such an amalgam of an overtly psychological approach and personal story might have been considered to be of no assistance to theological or biblical studies. However, in the true spirit of Liberal Protestantism, Jung writes at the end of Answer to Job, “In order to fulfil its task, the Protestant spirit must be full of unrest and occasionally troublesome; it must even be revolutionary, so as to make sure that tradition has an influence on the change of contemporary values.” It could be argued that Jung therefore saw his contribution to the understanding of Job as a new perspective on traditional approaches, one that might in fact reengage traditional discourse.

Barth’s approach
While Answer to Job may not have done this overtly, it appears clear that negative reaction to the book was heated and strong. About seven years later Barth dismissed Jung’s work as irrelevant to his methodology, he wrote “We may note in passing the most famous of the recent books on Job: Antwort auf Hiob, 1953 (sic), by C. J. Jung. From the human standpoint this is a very penetrating study, and incidentally it throws a good deal of light on the psychology of a professional psychologist. As an attempt to explain Job and the Bible, however, it suffers quite hopelessly from the fact that according to his own declaration on p.15, the author is quite “unashamedly and ruthlessly” giving expression to his very remarkable impressions. Hence he cannot possible read and consider what is actually there, and his work is quite useless in this regard.”

In dismissing Jung’s approach, Barth reinforces his own central approach to theology, which has been described as “revelatory positivism”. Rodin writes “…Barth’s intention, which springs from the heart of this methodology (revelatory positivism), is to describe and not to explain. If that description leads to a paradox or contradiction, the tension of the paradox must be allowed to stand rather than to revert to flawed human reason and logic to solve the paradox according to some philosophical or metaphysical construct.”

Understanding Barth’s approach to the Book of Job requires some understanding about the context in which the exposition appears. As a component of the larger work of his Church Dogmatics, he uses the Book of Job as an example to illustrate the “falsehood of man” as part of a broader theological framework.

Thompson describes Barth as not doing his “doctrinal work in dot-point fashion,” but rather as cumulative, and a matter of obedience, one that “emerges with the work and activity of God.” When it comes to using the Book of Job, Barth is exploring the doctrine of reconciliation, in particular how the “event of reconciliation is made present to all times and to all places,” and how falsehood is unmasked by the nature and content of the truth. Thompson explains, “Job is invoked here because Barth regards him as a type of true witness.”

It is clear from this brief exploration of competing methodologies, and indeed radically different reasons for engaging with the Book of Job, that we are likely to get different understandings about the core components of the text. By exploring each author’s engagement with the text however, some key themes emerge which attest to the deep and powerful story to be found within the Book of Job.

Jung on Job
Jung argues that the Book of Job is basically about the nature of God, as a symbolic entity, whose “nature develops in correspondence with a differentiation in human consciousness.” Simply put, Job as human consciousness, activates a change in God, which is unconciousness. How and why this change in God occurs is the content of Jung’s text.

Mirroring an approach taken by Collins , the text of Answer to Job can be summarised in the following fashion:
• In the Book of Job the nature of Yahweh is disclosed as “an antimony - a totality of inner opposites;”
• “Job realises God’s inner antinomy, and in the light of this realisation his knowledge attains a divine numinosity;”
• This therefore is a “new factor” having “never occurred before in world history…without knowing it or wanting it, a mortal man is raised by his moral behaviour above the stars in heaven, from which position of advantage he can behold the back of Yahweh;”
• God becomes reflective and is reminded of Wisdom (of whom he had lost sight, and whose feminine role had been replaced by the “covenant with the chosen people” );
• Wisdom heralds a coming act of creation, but “this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature.”
• God must be changed as his “creature has surpassed him, he must regenerate himself;”
• God is born as human, through Sophia/Mary;
• Christ’s death is a “fate chosen by Yahweh as a reparation of the wrong done to Job…and as a fillip to the spiritual and moral development of man (sic);”
• However, the immensity of God is still reflected in the Gospels and in Revelation, as both God incarnated as light and God as fierce and terrible; as a result God can be loved but must be feared,”
• Thus, “Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with. God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him (sic) to harmonise and unite the opposing influences to which his (sic) mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite. In his (sic) striving for unity, therefore, man (sic) may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognised.”

This summary of the basic premises of Answer to Job, perhaps gives some understanding to the response of theologians at the time the book was published. However, Crenshaw has written “From the leader of one branch of modern psychology has come a particularly stringent critique of God for the answer given to Job (Jung). This provocative outburst of emotion has been criticised from different perspectives (Hedinger; J.G. Williams, 1971b), but the causes for the outrage are too substantial to ignore.”

So, rather than walking away from such a confronting premise, delving deeper into Answer to Job allows us to find rich veins of description reflected through the light of human experience, as both Jung’s personal take, and his exploration of collective human unconsciousness.

Jung states that in the Book of Job we see God behaving “intolerably…the behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and not a human being.” Thus God acts not as a moral being, but as a creature without insight. Jung uses the whirlwind speeches as examples of the disproportionate effort God puts into asserting his own might. Instead of the speeches containing the answer to Job, the whirlwind speeches in fact demonstrate the movement of God, from unconscious being to a being conflicted by what is occurring, namely the recognition of the moral superiority of the creature, Job.

This inner instability of God however is not a negative thing; instead Jung argues that it “is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also the pleromatic drama for which mankind (sic) serves as a tragic chorus. The encounter with the creature changes the creator.”

Cunningham explains this approach when he writes, “the tension of opposites is in Jung’s view the definition of energy, and energy is life. It is by painfully living through the conflict of opposites that individuals may come, not to be redeemed from them, but better able to live beyond them.”

The role of Satan in the drama is thus one of initiator of this divine development of consciousness. It is the role of “doubting thought”. This thought allows Yahweh to fall into what Jung describes as “revolting behaviour”, which includes no capacity for self-reflection. Indeed Jung argues the story of Job provides no opportunity for God to self reflect, and instead illustrates the lack of circumspection through the concealment of Satan within God’s own bosom.

Jung sees the role of the friends as continuing the torment. Moralising “in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable, (they) “fill him with wrinkles”. Thus they deny him even the last comfort of sympathetic participation and human understanding, so that one cannot altogether suppress the suspicion of connivance in high places.”

From this place of torment however, Job stands his ground claiming “For I know my vindicator lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth. (19:25).” Such a stance precipitates what Kings describes as the second stage of psychic development, the confrontation of the opposites. “Job suffers unaccountably at the hands of Yahweh, and yet he turns to Yahweh for help; he doubts the justice of Yahweh, and yet he looks to Yahweh for justice; in other words, “Job…expected help from God against God. He remains convinced of the unity of God and thus “clearly sees that God is at odds with Himself”; Job becomes aware that God is “a totality of inner opposites” both good and evil.”

The stance of Job together with the reappearance of Wisdom in Chapter 28 forces Yahweh to begin the process of self-examination. Jung explores the nature of Wisdom/Sophia with reference to extra biblical sources as well as apocryphal writings. He describes her as ‘the cosmogonic Pneuma” pervading “heaven and earth and all created things. She corresponds in almost every feature to the Logos of St John.” Her appearance in the story is recognised by Jung as the pointer toward change, as the “master workman; she realises God’s thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings.”

The initial response of Yahweh to these factors is one of resistance to change – hence the thundering from the whirlwind. However in the end, Jung postulates that the change is inevitable and in the first instance this takes the form of the regeneration of God – in order to become human.

Christ is present then in the Book of Job according to Jung, as an inevitable consequence of the encounter of Job and God. Not only Christ, but also a continuing association with humankind in the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth.

From this overview of Jung’s approach we can draw the following themes:
• In the Book of Job, God has a distinct personality which is that of archaic King, which is too unconscious to be moral, and therefore it is inevitable that he searches for self consciousness by becoming human;
• Job illustrates that human beings have a legitimate expectation in their search for understanding about God and themselves, they can legitimately question God, and that the capacity of human self reflection is a “concentrated light” ;
• The God of Job cannot and does not permit Job to have an opinion about God; however as a result of humanity’s capacity to self-reflect, God must be transformed so that he is able to be revealed;
• Thus the story of Job is the beginning of a linear set of events through history, read through the lens of human experience ;
• And still God remains in the paradox of wanting to become human, and we watch this in the evidence of the continual quest of the unconscious to reach light (i.e. consciousness) but to remain unconscious.

Barth on Job
Barth on the other hand does not think or write about God in the form of an archetype, or as representing a form of human consciousness. Instead he rejects the idea that the text might reflect a religious experience of God, instead he asserts that scripture contains God’s word to humanity. “This God – the real God of revelation - is a being wholly other than man (sic), a God who shouts a divine No to all of man’s (sic) efforts to reach him through inner emotion or reason.”

For Barth, Job has a different story to tell. Sherman has written that “Barth distils the theological essence of the book to be Job’s true witness in free obedience to his living God, as based upon the prior fact of God’s remaining free and true to himself in all his actions toward Job.” For Barth therefore the Book of Job appears to be about the issue of freedom, both God’s freedom, and Job’s freedom. Rodin writes, “God is justified not in the ‘happy ending’ but in the midst of his alien wrath and seeming injustice. “God would not be God if He were not free both to give and to take away,” and in line with this creatio ex nihilo, Barth continues “Job would not be Job if he were not free to receive both evil and good from God.”

Newsom and Schreiner have summarised Barth’s approach as follows:
“Job begins with knowledge of God as ELOHIM – that is, God as known through the various qualities that may be predicated through experience and tradition. Job’s suffering at God’s hand confounds his understanding as his angry but bewildered protests indicate. In the theophany, however, Job encounters YHWEH – that is God as unique personality, the radical subject, who cannot be comprehended in terms of the moral and metaphysical categories Job and his friends presumed. Barth suggests that in the revelatory moment Job knows the “two gods” ELOHIM and YHWEH as one; however, it is Job’s submission before the divine subject that is the expression of true faith. In this submission Job finds reconciliation and freedom.”

Barth’s approach might seem by some to close down any possibility of further engagement with the text of Job, however again, a deeper exploration of some of the major elements within Barth’s treatise allows a greater appreciation of the themes he develops.

For Barth, God is constantly present in the engagement with Job. God is infallible and therefore Job will not fail in his encounter, as Job is “protected and preserved” by God, even as God allows Job to be tested. In exposing Job to such events however, God is revealed in a form that is Job’s enemy and persecutor.

Barth however, argues that the two are not mutually exclusive. They are God. What is distinct however is the way that Job encounters God. Thus God is not “otherwise engaged” indeed God is always fully engaged. By addressing Job, God is making “Himself known as the One He was and is even and precisely in this alien form, as the One who has never left the scene but always dominates it.”

To illustrate this, Barth makes much of the different names that are used for God in the text. He makes the point that Job knows God as Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel, and it is this God to whom he makes his appeals to justice. And as Yahweh, God makes the initial transaction with Satan and answers Job. But “in the whole of the central section, whether in the speeches of the friends or Elihu or even in the complaints of Job himself, it (Yahweh) is replaced by the generic names Elohim and Shaddai.”

The crux of the trouble for Job therefore is the unknowness of God as Elohim and Shaddai. Barth writes, “In this predication and activity which are undoubtedly intrinsic and proper to Yahweh, He is unknowable.” As such Job finds himself both right and wrong when it comes to God. “The right of Job is his unwearying demand for the self declaration of Yahweh even in this being and action of His as the most High and Almighty. His wrong is his repudiation of the Most High and the Almighty which, since Yahweh is the most High and Almighty, and unknown to Job is acting as such, is necessarily directed against Him as the One concealed in this predication and work.”

The distinction between Job and his friends is therefore made clear by how they understand God. Job’s story is one of unparalleled sorrow, made profound because he understands that “what has come on him has to do with God, and his no less profound ignorance how far he has to do with God.” Thus the true grief of Job is the relationship with God characterised by the fact that “Job can only be in relation with Him as the One who has the strange and terrifying form of a relentlessly aggressive adversary before whom he is completely defenceless.”

Barth argues that the suffering of Job is an event that is a “partial action in the common history…A partial action in the history in which the relationship between God and Job takes place is the change wherein God executes this change in form in free decision and Job must follow the divine decision with an equally free human decision, i.e. to render suffering obedience to him.” Barth’s concept of partial action in common history is better understood when we are aware that “For Barth, to recall, historical reality was the sphere of falsehood. In this sphere the freedom of God and the freedom of the human being are denied by way of a coordination and systemisation of their properly asymmetrical relation. This is nothing other than a distortion of their eschatological reality; there is no place in other words, for eschatological reality within history. Instead, eschatological reality must be veiled within historical reality if it is to become manifest within it.”

In contrast, the role that the friends play in their dialogue with Job contrasts Job’s obedience with their disobedience. Barth concurs with the idea that the intervention of the friends is indeed a continuation of the assault made on Job, but for him the friends are much more than that. They are in fact representations of the falsehood of humanity. On the one hand they are right in their theological propositions (and indeed he argues Job does not take issue with their theology ), but on the other hand they epitomise all that is false. Barth argues “…when men (sic) think and speak from this divine standpoint and therefore non historically and within the framework of this orderly structure, there is no place in their utterances for two factors, namely the free God and the man (sic) freed by and for Him.”

Ticciati summarises Barth’s position, “The friends, according to Barth are the paragon of falsehood. At base, this means that they seek to deny the free God and the free human being and consequently the free relationship between them. They do not believe in the possibility “for naught” either on the part of Job or on the part of God. Where Job confronts this freedom in all the horror and arbitrariness in which it appears to him, they look away; they domesticate it…. They transform this incomprehensibility itself into a concept – a concept which can be manipulated in order to blunt, indeed to defend one against the real incomprehensibility of the living God.”

In his distinctiveness from the falsehood of humanity, Job is an example of the “true witness”. Within the Book of Job, Barth also incorporates the idea of Christ. He does not claim that Job is a form of Christ for “there can be no question of any work of salvation having been accomplished in the drama of history.” However, Job is a witness to Jesus Christ, as one who engages in the drama and suffering of history with awe and love.

Sherman encapsulates the core message of this idea when he writes “Presupposed in all of Barth’s theology – and to his mind confirmed by the testimony of Job – is the assumption of absolute primacy and initiative of God as Subject and Agent. Thus, whereas human falsehood begins with human perceptions, reasoning and conclusions, Job’s ultimate confession of Yahweh’s sovereign right to appear even in his unknowability and his own human free obedience to God in that form bears witness that the true beginning of all is God…Hence the topic of the book of Job in Barth’s mind is not ethics or existentialism, theodicy or human wisdom, but theology strictly understood and how one knows theology.”

Some of the themes that can be discerned through Barth’s understanding of the Book of Job can be summarised as follows:
• The dynamic of time is found in partial actions of history only, the “truth” is beyond time;
• God is free to be God and Job free to be Job ;
• God cannot be transformed by humanity from incomprehensible to comprehensible , to do so engages in falsehood;
• However the determination of Job to remain in relationship with God, puts Job in the right; and
• Seeing God as living, acting and speaking in every unique circumstance was why Job was right;
• Ultimately the Book of Job is resolved, as Job becomes a witness to the truth.

Conclusion
How then do the two approaches sit with each other? Finding similarities between the two is a tenuous task. However from the broad perspective and despite radically different reasons for doing so, the two perhaps touch on the greatest themes within the Book of Job.

This is possible because the most significant parallel between the two is that they both use the Book of Job as a pointer to deeper understandings than those that present on the “surface” of the text. Thus for both Jung and Barth, the Book of Job is not about the question of theodicy, or why bad things happen to good people, rather it becomes an entry to an exploration of the meta story of the relationship between God and humanity in all its messy and incomprehensible intricacy. Thompson encapsulates Barth’s approach when he writes “Barth’s reading of the book is shaped by notions of divine and human freedom, focused on the idea that God loves Job freely, and that Job freely serves God for naught.”

Jung’s meta story is not only a theoretical exploration of the psychological phenomena to be found in the book, but also demonstrates his own story of lament. And so not only does Jung understand the concept of God as greater than human consciousness; he interweaves his understanding about the ongoing incarnation of God in life. Collins writes that “Jung’s aim was to get beyond “credal formulations” of God and record how God is actually experienced in the depths of the human psyche.”

Nevertheless, as discussed, the two do approach the task from fundamentally different positions. Jung’s approach can be seen as attempting to make the idea of God as reflected through the Book of Job, into a comprehensible form in the light of new understandings. Barth on the other hand uses the Book of Job to demonstrate that attempting to make God comprehensible is folly, despite new understandings.

Nonetheless, the fact that they locate their explorations in the story of Job means they both use the elements of the Book of Job to demonstrate their broader themes. For instance, in both expositions, God is located as ultimately beyond human understanding, and the friends are used as illustrations of the folly of attempting to create an idea of God that does not match God in all of God’s unknowability.

Similarly in both accounts they understand that Job did not doubt that he was engaged with God at all times. In fact in both approaches Job is consistently enmeshed with God, even if Job is not aware of this. Distinctively however, Jung suggested that Job “understands” God, which begins a chain of development in consciousness of God, whereas Barth’s assertion is that Job could never understand God, and his “rightness” was to remain in relationship with God in whatever manner that God chose to be God.

Both understand that the nature of human distortion and misrepresentation will and does continue to plague human existence. Barth however, sets this understanding in a frame of reference that is beyond time and history, whereas Jung very clearly sticks to human experience, in the form of linear time and place.

Both engage in the idea of Christ being present in the Book of Job. However, while Jung sees Christ as an inevitable outcome, Barth sees Christ not as an outcome at all, but rather as the true witness, the victor across history.

Such themes therefore emerge for these two writers as they grappled with their approaches to God and scripture in a post war environment. Half a century later the works of both have continued to inspire comment and commentary in contemporary thought and scholarship, perhaps not as immediately identifiable trends, but certainly as “influencers” in our continued thinking about God.

Bibliography

_____, “”Witness to an Ancient Truth” in Time Magazine: South Pacific Edition, April 20, 1962, 33-37.

Barth, K. “Job: A Theological Reflection” in Church Dogmatics IV, 4.3,1, T and T Clark: London, 1983.

Clifford, R.J. The Wisdom Literature, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998.

Collins, B. “Wisdom in Jung’s Answer to Job”, in Biblical Theology Bulletin, Vol 21, 1991, 97-101.

Crenshaw, J. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, Westminster/John Knox press: Louisville, 1998.

Crenshaw, J. “The Wisdom Literature”, in Knight, D. and Tucker, G. (eds) The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, Scholars Press: Atlanta, 1985.

Cunningham, A. “Jungian Psychology”, in Richardson, A. and Bowden, J. A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, SCM Press: London, 1983.

Jones, D. Wisdom Literature: Lectures and Readings, Trinity Theological College: Brisbane, 2006.

Kings, S. “Jung’s Hermeneutics of Scripture” in Journal of Religion, April ’97, Vol 77 issue 2, p233.
[Accessed online 9 May 2006 at: http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rlh&an=9706264414]

Jung, C.G. Answer to Job, Routledge: London 1998

Newsom, C. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, Oxford University Press: New York, 2003.

Newsom, C. and Schreiner, S. “Job, Book of” in Hays, J. (ed) Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1999.

Newton, K. “The Weapon and the Wound: The archetypal and personal dimensions in Answer to Job”, in Journal of Analytical Psychology, Oct 93, Vol 38 issue 4, pp 375-395.
[Accessed online on 9 May 2006 at: http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rlh&an=12234193]

Richmond, J. “Liberal Protestantism, in Richardson, A. and Bowden, J. A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, SCM Press: London, 1983

Rodin, R. S. Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth, Peter Lang Publishing: New York, 1997.

Sherman, R. “Reclaiming a theological reading of the Bible: Barth’s interpretation of Job as a case study” in International Journal of Systematic Theology; July2 000. Vol 2 Issue 2, p174.
[Accessed online on 9 May 2006 at: http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rlh&an=3748845]

Thompson, G. “Job’s Witness to Jesus: Typology and Commitment in Karl Barth’s Reading of Job” in Arche: The Annual eReview of the Brisbane College of Theology, 2003. [Accessed 7 March 2006 online at: http://www.ereview.bct.edu.au/]

Ticciati, S. Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth, T and T Clark International: London, 2005.