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.

The Book of Job and the idea of Theodicy

In February 1987, “Diamond Jim” McClelland wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that Senator Graham Richardson was a numbers man who took politics to the extent of ensuring power at any cost. After describing what was essentially a political career of expediency he finished his essay with the adage, “Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword”. In this he expressed contemporary folk wisdom that encapsulates the concept of cosmic cause and effect.

In the Solomon Islands, swimming in the reef is safe if you are pure of heart and mind. It is said that if a shark takes you, it is inevitably because you have transgressed a religious or moral code and have been living in a state of disgrace, secret or otherwise.

In December 2004, the tsunami in the Asia Pacific region destroyed many villages on the coastal ring of the Indian Ocean. Countless lives were lost and the aid and repairs across those countries continues. Those who died were young and old, of many religions and were inevitably both just and unjust, sinners and saints.

Our very existence as human beings in history means that we will respond to incidents of evil, disaster and suffering with a moral framework in which to make sense of what is happening. Carol Newsom draws from Bakhtin when she calls our moral frameworks “Moral Imaginations”. She describes these as “the fundamental aesthetic and cognitive means by which persons and cultures construct meaning, value and significance”.

The concept of theodicy describes a process where the meaning, value and significance of suffering, guilt, and experiences of evil are explored and constructed within theological discourse.