24AR29-48

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AR 29:48 - The influence of Carl Gustav Jung

In this issue:

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV - out with the New Age, and in with Jung

NEW TESTAMENT RELIABILITY - American evangelical scholarship and a new critical female voice in the UK

Apologia Report 29:48 (1,689)
December 26, 2024

PLEASE NOTE: We're taking some time off. Look for AR to reappear the week of January 5, 2025.

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV
The most recent issue in Watchman Fellowship's excellent "Profile" series, dated merely "2024," is titled "Carl Jung" and crafted by Doug Groothuis, who begins: "Over six decades after his death, Jung's influence is considerable. While Freud's star is waning, Jung's is waxing." It is significant that immediately after this, Goothuis recognizes how "the new spirituality" or just "spirituality [are] terms that have largely replaced 'the New Age.'" It is surprising how long it has taken for us to recognize this in general. This input helps us all reconsider the present and, perhaps, recalibrate what may be a shift related to our response to the broad spectrum of the occult.

   Groothuis also finds that "Despite Jung's ambitions, Freud's theories proved far more influential in the coming decades and became a kind of orthodoxy in their own right. ... Nevertheless, 'in sheer numbers alone, it is Jung, who has won the cultural war and whose works are more widely read and discussed in the popular culture of our age.' ...

   "Some Christians are attracted to Jung because of his recognition of the spiritual nature of humanity unlike atheists.... When asked in a 1959 BBC interview if he believed in God, Jung replied, 'I don't believe - I know.' Some Christians claim that Jung provides a fruitful model for the elusive integration of psychology and spirituality. ... Today, the most influential Jungian is Jordan Peterson, although his religious orientation is unclear." 

   This is an important insight of which the many Peterson fans may do well to be kept appraised. Peterson is a frequently featured host on The Daily Wire podcast, but it seems DW may be oblivious to these concerns from our perspective, having long experienced their content. <www.tinyurl.com/4pje34az>

   "Richard Noll, a scholar and critic of Jung makes the judgment that Jung, 'ranks with the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (fourth century C.E.) as one who significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored the polytheism of the Hellenistic world in Western Civilization.'

   "In The Jung Cult <www.tinyurl.com/d9wrrhex> and The Aryan Christ, <www.tinyurl.com/3xjr6fj2> clinical psychologist Noll amply documents Jung's immersion in the paganism and occultism of German culture near the turn of the last century. Although raised in a Christian environment ... Jung resolutely rejected the Christian view that a personal God transcends the creation. Instead, he embraced pantheism, with its god within or divine self. Moreover, Jung deemed himself a kind of liberator who would lead his followers out of the dead ends of Christianity and atheism and into a richer spirituality. He viewed his version of psychoanalysis as something of a new religion. Jung was a highly intelligent and mesmerizing personality who was believed by his followers to have a charismatic authority and esoteric insights." Groothuis goes into much further detail here. 

   "Noll comments that it 'is clear that Jung believed he had undergone a direct initiation into the ancient Hellenistic mysteries and had even experienced deification in doing so.' This was not an isolated event in Jung's life. ... By 1916, an entity called Philemon had become Jung's spiritual guru, and functioned much like the 'ascended masters' of the Theosophical movement in Jung's day."

   Groothuis concludes the second half of his Profile - which is focused on the "Implications of Jungian Spirituality" and a specifically alternative "Christian Response" - for the many who might be inclined to erroneously conclude that the influence of Jung constitutes no threat to the global church. <www.tinyurl.com/2s3j5dvj>

   Also see: <www.tinyurl.com/bdfyt89p>

 ---

NEW TESTAMENT RELIABILITY

"The Case of the Four Gospels" by Bethel McGrew - an introduction to her four-part series, featured in the Further Up Substack. "Part I: A brief sociological history," <www.tinyurl.com/bdeupzsr> she begins: "Recently, my friend Justin Brierley <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-J-Brierley> released a joint live appearance <www.tinyurl.com/2896becu> with historian Tom Holland, discussing Justin's new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God." (book <www.tinyurl.com/44j8nzw5> and podcast <www.tinyurl.com/3y7hfwm5>) This included "Tom's story of how the Blessed Virgin Mary might have healed him from cancer several Christmases ago."

   Tom "thinks, people generally don't become Christians because they fell in love with Five Proofs for the Existence of God. They become Christians because they fell in love with, well, God. Maybe Martin Luther was right. Maybe 'reason is a whore.'

   "Justin Brierley is very British and very polite, and so he accepts all of this with good humor. But he does offer some gentle pushback, suggesting that this is a false dichotomy. Tom doesn't need to cut himself off from reason. He just needs to baptize it."

   McGrew mentions: "I know a lot about apologetics, but some apologists can bore me to tears - at best. ... I cringe at the thought of making my readers feel like they're reading a longwinded textbook or a dry journal article. I would rather make them feel like they're reading a story. It seems like this is how they should feel if they're reading about the story of Jesus. It's the greatest story ever told, after all."

   Several paragraphs later, she writes that "as the 20th century wore on, something shifted. There was a 'Jewish reclamation of Jesus.' The tide began to turn, until a majority of even skeptical scholars came to view the Gospels as 'very credible sources.' ... And if that wasn't good enough news, 'the central facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus are actually acknowledged by the wide majority of New Testament critics today, be they Christian or non-Christian, liberal or conservative.' At least that's how Christian philosopher William Lane Craig frames things  in this clip, <www.tinyurl.com/ycyca6yx> featured in Justin's podcast. 

   "There's no diplomatic way to say this, so I'll just be undiplomatic: William Lane Craig is completely wrong here. But that's okay. I'll explain.

   "Here's the small grain of truth to what Craig is saying: It is true that the second half of the 20th century saw something of a 'Jewish reclamation of Jesus,' during which skeptical Jewish scholars became somewhat less skeptical about how much information could be mined from the Gospels. ...

   "Then there's Craig's claim about a vast bipartisan consensus on 'the central facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus.' Though he doesn't use this phrase, this is a version of the so-called 'minimal facts argument,' which tries to prove Jesus' physical resurrection using only what even skeptical scholars will grant.... The problem is that when people quote-mine scholars like Gerd Ludemann, Géza Vermes, or Bart Ehrman, these scholars are consistently being taken out of context at best or outright misinterpreted at worst....

   "I took William Lane Craig as a jumping-off point, but in fairness to him, he's not alone. He represents a fairly common, though unfortunate trend among evangelical academics in this area, especially American evangelicals: the trend of noticing that there has been some kind of scholarly shift, then rushing to interpret it as a significant shift in their direction. ...

   "A contrarian academic ... was sitting in the back, and at the end of the [presentation by one of these scholars] he piped up to ask why this American evangelical was so interested in building on consensus scholarship, when he himself, a non-evangelical Brit, had spent his whole career saying that consensus was regularly wrong." (At this juncture, one must pay-to-view the rest of Part I.)

   Part II has not been made available beyond McGrew's paywall. However, "Part III: Unnecessary Clues; The details nobody asked for" has been posted (also partially) <www.tinyurl.com/3afcyy2h> and it includes: "As a refresher, my first entry in this series sketched out some academic frustrations with the Christian side of the Christian-atheist debate. ... Christian apologetics is a cottage industry unto itself, capable of being every bit as clubby (and sloppy) as the cottage industry of atheist apologetics. Of course, I still think there's a place for Christian apologetics, otherwise I wouldn't write things like this. I just tend to think it's best unfolded in contexts where the power of the cumulative case can be appreciated. ...

   "My simple contention is that the gospels are pieces of fairly unadorned reportage by Jewish writers who knew whereof they spoke, whether because they were themselves eyewitnesses to Jesus' life.... This is not a popular hypothesis, and it's commonly accepted that even conservative scholars who value their academic integrity will inevitably drift away from it. Which is a shame, because I think it's true.

   "C. S. Lewis famously proposed a 'trilemma' for people trying to decide who Jesus was.... I'm suggesting that as we study the gospels, we will come down to a similar trilemma for the gospel writers: liars, lunatics, or truth-tellers. The one thing they couldn't be was sincerely mistaken." (At this juncture, one must pay-to-view the rest of Part III.)

   "Part IV: Details, Details; On the gospels as history" <www.tinyurl.com/2aabvk5e> (also partial, requiring registration, and now, additional software for the full text) begins: "This spring, I launched a little series about the provenance and reliability of the four gospels, one of my all-time favorite topics for study and writing. ...

   "I've been inspired to kick this series back into gear by the Daily Wire's new guided panel discussion on the gospels, which follows the same freewheeling format as last year's Exodus seminar. Inevitably, with Peterson at the helm, much time is spent chasing various symbolic rabbit trails, which will be intolerable or endearing depending on how used you are to Peterson. Jonathan Pageau drives a lot of typological discussion on parallels between Old and New Testaments, some of which is interesting, though in my judgment it can get quite strained. ... 

   "I do agree with Pageau that the gospels are best taken separately rather than smashed into a harmonization. Peterson has insisted on using the latter for the seminar, but Pageau politely takes issue with the choice, stressing the importance of each gospel writer's unique perspective. In these posts, I've been looking at how numerous small details in the four accounts casually interlock with each other. This interlocking yields a very powerful cumulative case for the texts' reliability as history. I don't see too many contemporary scholars articulating this case at the level of detail it deserves, for complicated reasons I reflected on in Part I. ... But a couple of those scholars happen to be my parents, and these posts are effectively designed as samplers of their extensive research. Anyone who wants more where this stuff came from should have a look at my mother's New Testament bibliography, starting with her recent Testimonies to the Truth. <www.tinyurl.com/58v3awhh> ...

   "In the last couple entries, I looked at some elements of the gospels' composition that provide internal markers of their authenticity as eyewitness accounts, including undesigned coincidences, unexplained allusions, and more. Today, I want to highlight some ways they interlock with external sources on the gritty details of the story's setting - the geography, the culture, the customs, all the sorts of things that would have been impossible to 'research' for someone who wasn't up close to it, especially since Jerusalem was destroyed in A. D. 70. People tend not to realize these are the areas to look for external confirmation, instead asking whether we have other historians who talk about Jesus' miracles, resurrection, etc. ...

   "The best kind of external corroboration is a subtler kind. It's found in the accumulation of obscure details that speak to the writer's intimate familiarity with the place and time. This doesn't mean the writers will never get anything wrong, but it does mean they get a lot of hard things right. Another excellent resource here is Peter Williams' Can We Trust the Gospels?. <www.tinyurl.com/4rk856wy> Once you start digging in, you discover there's an embarrassment of riches here, so I'm just going to pick out some shiny coins that especially catch my eye and arrange them in a way that hopefully whets your appetite for more...."  (And here, one must pay-to-view the rest of Part IV.) 

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