Monday, July 11, 2005

Jung vs. Christ

“We all must do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. This sounds like a terrible blasphemy, but not so. For then only can we understand Christ as he would want to be understood, as a fellow man; then only does God become man in ourselves.” (Jung, New York Lecture, edited by Lane A. Pratt, 1972.)
Source.

What?! "We all must do just what Christ did...We must make mistakes." Now, out of the many many times I have read the Bible I never once noticed Christ make a mistake. Have you? He knew from the begining what it would all lead to, He knew He would be unjustly accused & murdered, but He knew it was for the good of the one's He loved that He must endure the cross, and He knew He would rise three days later.

So, where is the mistake He made that we must model? Is Jung trying to imply that the cross was a failure, that the cross was Christ's mistake? Because it sure seems like that's what he is saying, no in fact that IS what he is saying here:

“The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion…


Ever noticed that Jesus calls God "God" here and not "Father"? Wonder why? It's not because He realized He's hanging from the cross for no reason, that He has failed, He cries out in this manner because He has accomplished His work. He has taken on our sin and bore the full wrath of His Father for our own sake. He cried out in this manner simply because for the first time in His life He was disconnected from the Father, this was the only moment in His life where He bore sin. And sin disconnects you from God, and sin leads to death. And it wasn't even His own sin He bore!

"Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion…" Oh, this man was so off base and he's led many others astray simply because he has no Biblical concept of Christ or His work on that cross. Jesus didn't see that his life had been a "terrible illusion," and He didn't devote His life "to the truth according to his best conviction," He devoted His life to THE TRUTH. There is no other truth than what Christ spoke and lived. What's right for you may not be right for me is not truth. Truth is truth, and Christ was that truth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dude, he's not talking about Christ making a mistake. He's talking about us mere fallible mortals making mistakes. You had to consciously & deliberately edit the quote to make a misrepresentation to press your agenda.
It's simply amazing! If someone had told me people could misunderstand such a statement and thoroughly take it out of context I wouldn't have believed them! What a naive fool I was to think your type doesn't exist. I guess I had been warned of the nervousness of "literalism" (read fundamentalism)...
sad.