God contains both opposites

Carl Jung’s Claims About the Christian God

Carl Jung’s two main claims about what he believes to be the true nature of the Christian God. In the simplest terms, Jung believes that the Christian God is unconscious, and that he is both the totality, the unity, of all opposites. He is neither an exclusively good God, as many Christians are raised to believe, nor an exclusively evil God. For Jung, God is amoral, in the sense that he is neither good nor evil, since it is impossible to act morally or immorally if a person is unconscious, nor is he all good and all evil at the same time. Having established this, I can now begin to provide further evidence to support Jung’s theses.

The Collective Unconscious: The Common Source of All Life

One of Jung’s most famous psychological theories is the collective unconscious. Jung believed that there are two sides to the human unconscious psyche – the personal and the collective. The personal unconscious is the part of our psyche that connects us to all other human beings. It is what gives humans and all other living beings the mental and physical contents they need at birth, such as instincts. The collective unconscious is the abstract and natural force from which all living beings emanate, and it is the force to which we will all return cyclically. It is also the source of a person’s personal development, containing all that is necessary for them to become a more refined individual. The collective unconscious contains everything that a person needs to develop.

The Jungian Self: The Ultimate Goal of Personal Development

The Jungian self is a concept no less important than the collective unconscious. It is a person’s true self, the highest version of themselves. It can only be achieved when a person restrains all their negative impulses and qualities, and makes proper moral use of all their positive impulses and qualities. All people are unconsciously driven towards their Jungian self, just as they were driven to breastfeed as infants. To discover how to achieve this ultimate goal, humans have invented many religious symbols and concepts, many of which were also created unconsciously. For Jung, the greatest symbol of the self was Jesus Messiah. According to Christianity, the world’s most widespread religion, Jesus is seen as the perfect man and worthy of imitation. If they can be like Messiah, they may achieve their Jungian self.

The Christian God as the Collective Unconscious

Regarding the book “Answer to Job,” Jung saw these concepts as directly related to the psychology of the Christian God. Regarding the collective unconscious, Jungians see God as indistinguishable from the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is everything in its entirety. So is God. All living beings emanate from the collective unconscious, just as Christians see the entire universe as emanating from God. According to Christians, through God we become higher moral beings. For Jungians, it is from the collective unconscious that we derive our higher self. At the end of this process, the Jungian attains the self and the Christian perfectly imitates Jesus. And through both we theoretically attain eternity.

The Contrast Between the Unconscious as Disunity and the Self as Unity

The collective unconscious and the self supposedly contain everything we need to achieve higher development. However, there is one fundamental difference between them. The collective unconscious may contain everything, but it is a disunity, like a box of scattered Lego pieces. In contrast, the self is a unity of all components. If all the Lego pieces were to fit together into a perfect picture of beauty, that would be the self. Disunity reflects the nature of the unconscious and also Jung’s concept of God. It is everything, but the contents within it do not communicate with each other. So, as I said in the previous video, God has omniscience, but He does not use it. His omniscience is scattered, like unjoined Lego pieces. Only through conscious effort can they be put together.

The Incarnation of God through Jesus as an Attempt to Become Conscious

Perhaps the idea may arise that the incarnation of God in Jesus, His Son, was an attempt to become conscious. God could not have become conscious before Jesus was born, because He did not have a mortal body. As we stated in the previous video, consciousness only arises from limitation, from pain. As Edward Edinger quoted, the experience of weakness or defeat is a synchronicity for consciousness. You cannot be a conscious being if you cannot experience weakness and defeat. I do not believe that it is possible to develop consciousness in immortal beings, if such exist. But why would God want to become conscious through Jesus? We will discuss this further as the video and series progress.

The Unconscious’s Need to Be Seen

There is another psychological element that I would like to introduce, and that is the unconscious’s desire to be seen, so to speak. God needs Job’s loyalty so much that he puts him through every possible stress test just to make sure that loyalty is genuine. If we go with the theory that God is the unconscious, his behavior reflects the nature of the contents of our unconscious. For example, if you do something immoral, your conscience torments you. Why does it torment you? It is because you are trying to make that immoral act unconscious. In the case of God and Job, God does not exist as an entity unless there is a conscious being to confirm his existence.

God’s Coping with Becoming Conscious

As God approaches self-consciousness through his relationship with the conscious Job, he copes with it, just as humans cope with the confrontation with their unconscious. He presents his entire array of power to Job in order to avoid becoming conscious. He would have preferred to remain in a state of unconsciousness while humans acknowledged His presence. However, given Job’s higher moral status, God cannot help but yield to self-reflection. God’s immoral actions in the book of Job cannot develop into full consciousness without passing through the mortal ego to bring that consciousness to fruition. In this case, that ego was Job’s.

God’s Need to Answer Job

God became aware of the injustice He had done to Job. He was no longer the moral and righteous supreme ruler of the universe. He was forever changed. He was no longer completely unconscious, for now He had become conscious in at least one capacity. The consequences of this event have dramatic implications. If God is to restore His original status as omniscient, omnipotent, ever-present, and righteous, He will have to provide a response, an answer, to the tragedy He had inflicted on Job. This answer is a continuing struggle toward consciousness. We will discover the outcome of this struggle in the future, but first we must examine the events that preceded it in the Scriptures—the events that support Jung’s theses.

The article presented Carl Jung’s main claims about the true nature of the Christian God, focusing on psychological evidence. Key concepts such as the collective unconscious and the Jungian self were developed, and were linked to Jung’s psychology of God. The article described God’s need to be seen and known by humans, and his struggle with becoming conscious through the story of Job. Finally, the need for God to atone for the injustice done to Job, through a continuing struggle to achieve consciousness, was emphasized. This article provides a foundation for a deeper understanding of Jung’s psychological view of the Christian God.