The Christian Problem

Like an oriental artist who seeks to create a painting with a few bold strokes of his brush, I will try to sketch the problem of the opposites with a few words. Though I will leave much unsaid, I hope that the reader will see the manner in which our Judaeo-Christian heritage has tried to deal with this problem, and how it has failed to solve it.

The problem of the opposites in the Bible begins as soon as man makes his appearance. First it is suggested in the contrast between the two creation stories. The first creation story describes man as made in the image of God. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . . So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”¹ But the second creation story says: “. . . then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground. . . .”² This is not a contradiction but a paradox. Man is torn between his divine image and his lowly earthy substance.

The story of the origin of the opposites is told even more graphically in the second creation story’s tale of the first man and the first woman. Adam and Eve live in innocent bliss in the beautiful Paradise of Eden. Everything is permitted them, save one thing: they must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Unfortunately there is one flaw in the garden of Eden—the snake. It tempts Eve, appealing to her desire for power and knowledge, “to be like God, knowing good and evil,”³ and she in turn tempts Adam. Man and woman eat the forbidden fruit. As they do so their eyes are opened, they experience shame, and in the realization of their opposite sexuality, they make themselves aprons of fig leaves. Their bliss is shattered because now they know the opposites. With this knowledge, guilt, shame and fear have entered into human existence. Now as they hear the Lord approaching they hide, but to no avail. He calls them, and Adam answers, “‘I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked?’”⁴ To be told something is to become aware of something we did not know before. Now Adam and Eve know.

However else we may take this story it certainly is a story with profound psychological meaning. It tells us that man’s original innocent harmony with creation is shattered the moment moral consciousness dawns upon him. For with the dawn of moral consciousness his natural wholeness falls apart into two seemingly hostile halves. This produces in man guilt and fear, and the burden of moral consciousness expressed in the sentence from God to toil and suffer in exile from Paradise. The beast of prey in the jungle knows no guilt, but lives according to its nature without thinking about it. Were it to receive the gift of self-awareness, and the knowledge of good and evil, its paradisiacal wholeness would also be shattered.

I cannot resist at this point commenting upon the presence of the serpent in the garden. The traditional ecclesiastical teaching that God is the summum bonum ascribes all evil to man and all goodness to God. It was thus man’s evil, his weakness, which introduced sin into the world. Man alone is the guilty one, and God has no part in his fall. Unfortunately, however, this ancient story from Genesis hints at God’s own involvement in human tragedy. After all, who brought the serpent into Paradise? Was it not God? Who created Adam and Eve with their curiosity to be “like God,” and their desire to know, so that they would respond to the tempting voice of the serpent? Should not we suspect that the whole drama was a carefully staged plot by God, who wanted His creature man to be a supremely moral being, not a blissful idiot? For God must have known that the only road to moral value leads through pain and suffering and that the confrontation of opposites is unavoidable.

In talking of God’s plot, His responsibility, and so forth, I am of course talking of God as man sees Him. I do not mean to ascribe to Him an anthropomorphic character. How God is in Himself is not for man to know. We only know Him as He manifests Himself in creation, in the Bible, and in the psyche. It is God as He appears to us to be that we are here concerned with. We are almost forced to use anthropomorphic language to describe this image of God we hold in our minds. But it would be naïve to teach that such language can actually describe Him in His essence. This essence of God is beyond our rational comprehension, at least in this life.

Leaving aside these questions for the moment, it is surprising to find that the Bible begins with the split nature of man. The rest of the Bible can be viewed as the story of man’s growing awareness of what he felt God was doing to recreate man’s wholeness on a higher level. This re-creation is to take place not on the level of Eden’s Paradise (an angel with a flaming sword forbids man’s return), but on a higher level of consciousness. How will this solution be worked out? Will the dark earth side of man with its devilish curiosity be driven from the face of the earth to leave man in pure goodness? Or will there occur a reconciliation of the opposites, a unique realization of man’s total nature?

At first the conflict between the opposites only deepens. Adam and Eve conceive children, but alas, the children reflect the opposition in man more strongly than ever! Cain and Abel are incompatible. Cain, who represents evil, kills Abel, who stands for good. God accepts sacrifices of Abel instead of Cain, whom He banishes but does not kill; this throws a glaring light upon the conflict of the opposites, since Cain still seems to be necessary. The figure of Cain is of particular significance for the development of human consciousness.

The objections that could be raised to such treatment of the Bible come from two different camps. Those who accept the Bible as an historic document might object to my point of view as being too psychological. But an attempt to understand the psychological meaning of the Biblical stories does not say anything against the historical value of these stories. Whether or not Adam and Eve lived as actual people, the story is still filled with important truth about the development of man and his understanding of God. It is this truth and not Biblical criticism that we are concerned with.

Others, who do not believe the Bible, will perhaps ask why one should believe that Cain, Abel or other Biblical figures ever existed? Such a question is psychologically naïve. Cain and Abel might have never have lived, Jeremiah might be fiction, the gospel records may be totally untrustworthy from an historical viewpoint—the fact nevertheless remains that the Bible was recorded because it reflects the story of man’s growing awareness of himself and of God, and this alone matters at this point.

The second attempt at a solution of the problem of the opposites comes in the story of Noah’s ark, a story which—according to scholars—had its antecedents in Babylonian lore [namely Epic of Gilgamesh]. In this story the attempt is made to select the good men and destroy the rest; perhaps in this way wickedness will be stamped out of man, and he can become “perfect” by becoming pure. So the flood comes and everyone is destroyed except the good Noah and his family. The only effect, however, is a change in the image of God as man sees Him, man remains the same and continues to be partly evil, for shortly after the flood, Noah becomes drunk with wine, his youngest son mocks him, and in return Noah places a curse upon him. Hardly an auspicious beginning for the remaining “good” men of the earth!

Man is not changed by the flood, but his understanding is! From now on God is described as growing in self-awareness. He recognizes the inescapable reality of evil in His creature, man. As long as man is man, evil will be with him. So the Lord says, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”⁵

There is one further attempt in the Book of Genesis to solve the problem of opposites, but it has gone largely unnoticed. We have already mentioned it. It is the story of Jacob’s struggling with his adversary. Here a solution was hinted at: if man will only wrestle consciously with the adversary in himself he will be blessed, for he will be wrestling with God.

When the Book of Genesis failed to solve the problem of the opposites, another attempt at a solution was made in the Book of Exodus, in the form of the law. The law is the whole body of moral and religious legislation which according to the Bible began with the tribal laws under Moses and ended with the complex legislation of the priests. Never has the world seen such an extensive body of rules and moral aids for every act and thought in life. The solution these laws offer to the problem of the opposites is this: we will lay down rules and laws for man to follow; if man follows them, then God will be with him and man will prosper. If he does not, then God may forsake him. This amounted to an agreement between God and man. This agreement is the Covenant or Testament from which the Old Testament gets its name. As Moses puts it, “If you will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in His eyes, and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you which I put upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.”⁶

The idea was to give man a definite plan and rule for his life; by his following them, evil would become powerless. But alas! the difficulty was that man could not fulfill the law, just because he also had evil in him. In spite of his best conscious intentions and efforts he kept slipping. And always just around the corner was the old guilt and fear, the old realization that he was not yet whole but torn asunder.

Nevertheless, the men of the Old Testament tried to make the Old Covenant or law work. Perhaps, the prophets thought, if men will only become aware of the extent to which they are flaunting the law they will exert greater efforts and accomplish the task. So began the period of the great prophets. Men like Amos and Jeremiah and Hosea and a host of others harangued and exhorted and implored man to follow the law, do away with idolatrous worship of voluptuous foreign gods and obey the Lord. In the process they immeasurably increased Israel’s awareness of God. The old nationalistic Jahweh became a God for all the world, and the localized God of Mt. Sinai became the Creator of all the universe. They also sharpened man’s moral consciousness and forged that sharp sword, the Judaeo-Christian conscience, which has so influenced our world.

But with all this great emphasis upon God’s demands for justice, correct worship, and charitable deeds, the cleavage in man between what seemed to him good and evil only deepened. (I say “what seemed” to him good and evil since we do not know what good and evil might be in an absolute sense any more than we know God in an absolute sense. We only know what seems to us to be good and evil from our human point of view, just as we can only comprehend God through an image or understanding of Him in our minds.) Indeed, the situation became well-nigh desperate, for black seems all the darker when contrasted with white. Preach what they might, the prophets were unable to exhort men to sufficient goodness.

But while in one way the prophets’ increased moral emphasis served to deepen the cleavage in men, in another way it promoted the conditions necessary for the resolution of the problem. For the problem of opposites has to be clearly seen before it can be solved. The prophets helped towards a clarification, but they could not supply the final answer. No matter how a man tried to banish his anger, desire, passion, and self-seeking, the old problem, the dark drives, remained.

Obviously the situation required something new. And slowly there came the realization that the answer could not come from man, but God Himself would have to do something. So there arose, in the latter part of the Old Testament, the longing for a Messiah. It was expected that God Himself would send someone who would set things right upon earth!

There is no systematic thinking in the Old Testament about the Messiah. The passages which speak of Him are born out of the passion of a people undergoing great suffering, not from rational thought processes. But generally the teaching was that God would raise up for Himself a special emissary, a saviour, who would stamp out evil and forge a new kingdom of justice and goodness upon the earth. Jeremiah writes: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king, and deal wisely, and execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely.”⁷ The coming of the Messiah would usher in the “Day of the Lord”; this would be the creation of a new and just world, and the destruction of the old evil and injustice. Therefore it was a day to be feared as well as longed for: “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!”⁸

What the law could not accomplish was now expected from God. The hope that He would directly intervene in human affairs was a new step towards the solution of the problem, for it meant that it was no longer just up to man; God also would do something about it. But the means the Messiah would employ were not original. We see again the old answer: destroy the evil, solidify the good, solve the problem of opposites by eliminating one of them.

Only one prophet had an intimation that the Messiah might be different from what was anticipated. Isaiah thought of the Messiah in a strangely paradoxical way. He would come, not as the champion of the good over the evil, but as a paradoxical saviour, who would save men by His own moral suffering. “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.”⁹

So man looked forward to a new answer to his problem, this time from God and not from man. This new answer the Christians saw in the birth of God as a man in the person of Jesus Christ. To solve man’s problem, God Himself became a man. In Jesus Christ the living God and earthly man were united.

The Christian teaching contains the possibility of a new kind of psychological development in man. The statement “God preferred to become a man” not only says something about God, but also something about man. For now that God Himself had become man, man has the possibility for understanding his nature in a new way. The teaching about God having become man represents the possibility for the achievement of psychological wholeness. Until now man had tried to stand whole before God by his own moral efforts and he failed. Now that God Himself had become man, human nature had a renewed hope for a wholeness which God would make possible.

To suggest that Christian theological statements also have psychological implications is not to negate or devalue theology, nor do I mean to say that theology is nothing but psychology. Properly regarded, theological statements are concerned with a metaphysical realm of reality not ordinarily perceivable by man. In this realm the Christian theology has a complex and manifold meaning which is not under discussion here. Just the same, there is a correspondence between the metaphysical realm and the realm within man. Christian theology is not isolated from man’s experience but deeply concerned with it. Corresponding psychic realities and possibilities do exist within man. Christian theology contributes to the solution of man’s problem of opposites on a psychological, experimental level. This is what we are here concerned with.

To the psychological problem of opposites, God in Christ answers (I speak of course figuratively): “When I am fully expressed in your life, then will the totality of your own nature be expressed, since I Myself have chosen your human nature. When your own totality is thus expressed, then the conflict of your opposites will have ceased, and will have been replaced by the harmony which is at the heart of My universe.” But when God has expressed Himself in man, then man has also expressed his own nature completely. Or, put another way: when man has expressed his own totality, then he has given expression to his Creator. This is how close the relationship is between God and our total self.

The tension between the new understanding of the relationship of God and man which Christ brought and the old understanding of Judaism was naturally great. The old form and the new form had moved so far apart that those Jews who accepted the new expression of Judaism in Christ eventually were alienated from their fellows. What began as the fulfillment of Judaism came to stand alone, separated from its honored parent.

Every new breakthrough into consciousness has to struggle against opposition from human egocentricity and conventionality. Such was the case with the radical answer God gave to the problem of opposites. “Bring to birth the whole man.” At the birth of the infant Jesus, Herod, who represented literally and symbolically all entrenched human egocentricity, for he feared the “new king” would replace him, sought violently to destroy the child. Only the intervention of divine forces through dreams prevented the untimely destruction of the new birth in man. Again at the inception of His ministry, Christ had to struggle against terrible forces which would have blocked His way. First Satan rose up; “Use your power to feed mankind,” said Satan, that is to satisfy what human beings think they need, food, instead of what they really need, wholeness. “Use your power to rule over the cities of the world,” said Satan another time. That is, forego the kingdom of the soul for a tangible, earthly realm. “Use your power for self-glorification,” said Satan a third time. That is, use the powers of the total man to glorify the ego instead of God. We may take this story as a fully credible authentic account of the inner struggle Jesus must have gone through when He realized the enormity of His task, and of the great danger to the ego of inflation whenever it approaches the powers of the center. Only consciousness of one’s ego motives avails at such a time. But He also had to struggle against the traditional collective values enshrined in the family life of His time. He puts the case as sharply as possible: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”¹⁰ And in many places we read how Jesus rejects too tight bonds of family. “Behold, His mother and His brothers stood outside, asking to speak to Him. But He replied to the man who told Him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.’”¹¹ What was taking place within Christ was so new that it could only be accomplished by a violent breaking away from the collective values of the past, which, however valuable they might be, always are too traditional to be the medium for new expressions of God.¹²

But how can the complexity of human nature be expressed as the whole, therefore Christlike, man? How can irreconcilable opposites be expressed in one life? Only through a highly paradoxical center of reconciliation, a secret known only to God, which can only be accomplished through the intervention of God. The first Christians said God chose to be born through Mary, by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, since they knew human agency alone could not bring the miracle about. Man’s limited and rational consciousness could not conceive of an answer to the problem of opposites.

Christ’s life could only end upon the Cross. Men were not yet ready to accept such a radical solution as that which God offered. So Christ had to be crucified on a Cross. The outstretched arms of this Cross express symbolically the opposites which unite at the center. The four-armed Cross is an example of a mandala, a design or symbol expressing totality through a circle or square. But unlike Eastern mandalas, which are more abstract designs, the Christian symbol is rooted in the earth. For Christianity emphasizes that the totality of the psyche is to be accomplished in this earthly life and not by release from it into “heaven.” Christ was crucified between two thieves, the one who repented and the other who did not; heaven and hell, the motif of the opposites thus being carried out to the bitter end.¹³

Those who crucified Him were not murderers or thieves, the usual “sinners.” He was killed because men could not tolerate His demands for consciousness. His Crucifixion was sought by men who were the best religious leaders of the time, who could not tolerate Him because the new message He embodied would completely upset the traditional and collective religious conceptions. Men have always violently resisted changes which would force them into a new consciousness. Christ was such a change.

He came too early even for His Jewish disciples. Only a few understood what had really happened through Christ. They too deserted Him at first.

But what had happened through Christ could not be destroyed that easily. What God had done men could not undo. So the death on the Cross was followed by the Resurrection. The irrationality of the answer of God triumphed over the rationality of men. Speaking psychologically, the reconciling center in man continued to live and offer men hope. For it enabled men to grasp the miracle of the resurrected Christ and to become aware of the possibility for their own wholeness which they could not reach under the law. Even today, when our ego consciousness “dies with Christ” as we realize the conflicts of our nature and become impaled on the Cross of the opposites, we “rise with Him” again through a new relationship to our center.

In Christ the warring opposites had been united in a paradoxical unity wrought by God. Naturally such a solution escaped man’s rational intellect and refused to be cast into conceptual forms. For this reason all theories of the atonement eventually run into one objection or another.

The Incarnation and the Crucifixion of Christ do not permit any logically consistent theory as to their meaning, yet they still have a profound effect upon men. The best example we have from early Christian literature of the impact of Christ on one of His Jewish brethren is the story of the former Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, the later St. Paul. Here we have the reconciling nature of Christ in all of its naked paradox. St. Paul felt himself torn between the opposites. He writes to the Romans:

These are the words of a man of sensitive conscience who recognizes his human dilemma. He sees the apparently irreconcilable opposites which war in him against his will. His reaction cannot be explained rationally, for it is based upon an irrational experience; “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Christ has saved him from his dilemma through a mystery which cannot be explained with words.

The result is a fundamental transformation of Paul. Gone is the old man with his narrow ego-consciousness. Paul has been baptized with Christ, buried with Him, and transformed through Him into newness of life.¹⁵ The result is that Paul’s psychic life no longer is centered in the ego, but in what would correspond psychologically to the self. “I have been crucified with Christ [impaled on the opposites]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”¹⁶

Theologically Paul knew Christ as the Incarnation of God. Psychologically he knew Christ as a living force within himself, reconciling Paul to himself. The theological formulation and the inner, psychological experience do not cancel each other out, they belong together.

But what has happened today to this Christian answer to man’s psychological dilemma? Any pastoral counselor or psychotherapist knows that in spite of the Cross many people do not feel or act redeemed. The old conflict rages on unconsciously in all of us. And anyone who looks at our world will see it is an unredeemed world, in which the warring opposites confront us on every side. Why do we Christians talk about redemption through Christ while so many of us do not feel redeemed?

From the point of view of psychology, this was unavoidable because the usual Christian’s understanding of Christ leaves out the dark side of man from our relationship to God. Instead of a reconciliation of opposites taking place, and a wholeness emerging, a one-sidely “perfect” man is held up to the Christian as the conscious goal of his religious life. But this leaves the unredeemed shadow side of man in a chaotic condition, banished to the unconscious psychic realm, from which position he perpetuates the war of the opposites. We can rightly assert that we are not yet redeemed in a psychological sense.

Psychologically, the coming of Christ into history coincides with the emergence of a reconciling center in man capable of uniting the opposites one to another in a paradoxical unity which can restore man’s wholeness. The salvation which Christ makes possible in a theological, historical sense has its psychological parallel in a Christlike center in man which when experienced—as with Paul—results in a release from guilt, a restoration of inner harmony, and a feeling of oneness with God. But the tension of this paradox was more than men could hold at that time. Specifically, man could not tolerate the inclusion of man’s morally ambiguous side into the picture of human totality, and he could not accept the irrational solution of the conflict of opposites as implied by Christ the God-man and Reconciler. As a result the psychological wholeness was not fully realized, and the conflict of opposites continued. A glance at later Christian development will illustrate this.

We can see the failure to resolve the split of human nature even within the pages of the New Testament, for in the later epistles of the New Testament the conflict of the opposites again becomes manifest. The Epistles of John and of Peter are filled with admonitions like “eschew evil, and do good.”¹⁷ The author of I John writes: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”¹⁸ Notice the “cleanse us”: we are to be cleansed of evil, so that it no longer exists. But alas! Now the poor Christian is back where he started. For he soon realizes that shortly after being “cleansed” his evil starts to appear again! That dark spot in him just won’t wash away.

So the conflict resumes all the more bitterly. Once again there is the desperate struggle to eliminate the dark opponent. Finally this reaches an extremity in the Book of Revelation. Here Christ is confronted by Satan or the Anti-Christ, and a fearful battle rages. In this struggle Christ is no longer a saving, forgiving figure, but a ruthless avenger of evil:

The saving figure of Christ on the Cross has become the figure of a relentless judge, identified with good, warring against evil. In His “righteousness” He has turned into an angry executor. We see how overemphasis of one side always leads to disaster. The net result for man is of course most unfortunate. Only 144,000 are saved and the rest are damned, “and if any one’s name was not found in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”²⁰

It does not take much imagination to perceive that the war of the opposites had resumed in the Christian tradition as intensely as before. Many a Christian saw himself more in danger of damnation than ever, and his Saviour had turned into his judge.

The debates in the early Church over the meaning of the humanity of Christ also illustrate the declining awareness of the paradox of the reconciliation of opposites. If we look at the life of Christ as it is given us in the Synoptics we get the impression of a very whole human being. Now of course we cannot prove how reliable the Gospels are as historical documents, and strictly speaking we cannot say or know for sure what the “historical Jesus” was like. Nevertheless, we do have the Gospel records, and at the least we can say this is the impression some people received. We can note the following facts: the Christ was born of a simple peasant girl in a stable. Like any man He was subject to temptation, which is why He had to wrestle against Satan. He could become angry, He became inflamed at the hypocrites among the scribes and Pharisees, He aggressively drove out the money-changers, He could lose heart and had to make an effort to overcome His own fear in the garden of Gethsemane. He ate, drank, associated with sinners, and was called a “glutton and a drunkard.”²¹ In short, His humanity was as complete and as real as our humanity.

This completeness of Christ’s human nature was first defended, then obscured and forgotten in the teaching of the early Church. Originally the Fathers fought a noble war against heresies which would have destroyed the essence of the Christian message of the God-man, for instance against the Gnostics, who acknowledged the reality of both spirit and matter, but believed they were entirely separate principles which could have nothing to do with each other. According to the Gnostics, man in his sensual, earthly, material nature belonged to the world of evil. Therefore it was unthinkable that God could really have become human. This led to the Gnostic doctrine of Docetism (a word which comes from the Greek dokein meaning “to seem”), which taught that Christ only seemed to be human. He was just acting out the role of man, acting as though He suffered and died; but in reality He was God and not man, and therefore could not be subject to human, material imperfection. With gallantry the Church rejected this high-sounding heresy and clung to its paradox: that in Christ, God and man, the spiritual and the physical, were united.

On the other hand were those known as adoptionists, who taught the deceptively simple doctrine that Jesus was only a unique man, filled with the power of God, one with God by virtue of His love to Him, but not identical in substance with God. Thus Christ according to this teaching was essentially just a man, just as in Gnostic teaching He was essentially God. A teaching such as this had the virtue of a simplicity not found in such catholic creedal formulations as the Nicene Creed. It might easily have won the day. But from the psychological, as well as from the theological, point of view this would have been a disaster, for it would have missed the mystery of the whole man: that in the fulness of life the transcendental as well as the human is expressed. So it is fortunate that after a struggle this heresy was also rejected by the Church. It is highly impressive to see with what tenacity and brilliance the Fathers defended and preserved the essentials of a Christology which has the psychological merit of reflecting the paradoxical wholeness of man.

Unfortunately, however, as time went on the Church could not hold the tension of this paradox. The Fathers wanted to keep the doctrine that Christ was God and man, yet they could not bear the idea that human imperfection could have been in Him. So the human Christ who shows through the Gospel narratives became obscured and increasingly identified with a one-sided righteousness. He became good, brilliantly perfect man, without spot of sin; naturally by comparison actual human beings looked all the blacker and more evil. Because of this, man’s shadowy, and especially his instinctual, earthly nature was once more excluded from a relationship to God, and so fell prey psychologically to those very errors of Gnosticism which they had refuted theologically. Those emotions and desires which are rooted in the body and are produced or accompanied by chemical changes in the body were particularly excluded from the kind of humanity the Church held up before their people as the Christian goal. This included anger, passion, earthly love, sexual desire, and so forth. Man’s spirit, but not his body, was brought into relationship with God.²²

We can partly understand this difficulty in dealing with man’s physical nature from the spirit of the times. Christianity was born in an extremely sensual era, and man’s precariously won Christian conscience and spiritual outlook could all too easily have been overwhelmed by the predominant instinctuality of the times. The early Church was able to save man’s spirit only by rejecting his body and did not see the possibility for a reconciliation of the two. For this reason, the writings of the Fathers, brilliant though they are, lack the same feeling of wholeness and human warmth which we gain from the picture of Jesus in the Gospels.

It would be interesting to trace the Church’s teaching about Christ, His humanity, and the nature of His salvation throughout the centuries. We would certainly see that in the Middle Ages the Church tended to fall once more into a teaching of salvation by a kind of law, that is by prescribing specific actions and sacraments which would eliminate evil from man. Later, during the Reformation, Martin Luther sought to revive the older Pauline experience with Christ as a reconciling center within himself. But soon this solution fell away into Puritanism’s and Calvinism’s rigid morality, and an even more violent opposition within man took place.

What is the outcome of this ancient struggle between the opposites in man? One glance at our world tells us that men are not whole, and one look into the unconscious depth of almost any one of us shows that the struggle of the opposites continues. The Incarnation and the Cross, like “highly polished stones”—to use a simile originated by Dr. Jung—are still regarded with reverent awe. But because we have lost contact with the corresponding, reconciling symbols in the unconscious, our reverent contemplation seldom moves the inner life. The Christian tree is uprooted and preserved in a glass freezer. We gaze at its cold beauty but cannot touch its living essence, because its roots are no longer in the soil of the soul.

It is the religious task of our age to reroot this Christian tree in the living substance of our inner being. Then that symbol which Christ brings to life will become known to us again, and we will become men who know we can hope for wholeness. Our dreams—in strange and wonderful ways—reflect the life process at work in us which seeks to make us aware of this Christlike, reconciling symbol of totality.

¹ Genesis 1:26–27.
² Genesis 2:7.
³ Genesis 3:5.
⁴ Genesis 3:10–11.
⁵ Genesis 8:21.
⁶ Exodus 15:26.
⁷ Jeremiah 23:5–6.
⁸ Joel 2:1–2.
⁹ Isaiah 53:5.
¹⁰ Luke 14:26.
¹¹ Matthew 14:26.
¹² Cf. Matthew 10:37 ff., Mark 10:29 ff., Luke 8:19, Luke 2:43 ff.
¹³ So we read in the Acts of Andres, “Hail, O Cross, yea be glad indeed! . . . I know thy mystery, for which thou art set up; for thou art planted in the world to establish the things that are unstable, and the one part of thee stretchet up toward heaven that thous mayeste signify the heavenly word, and another part of thee is spread out to the right hand and the left that it may put to flight the envious and adverse powers of the evil one, and gather into one the things that are scattered abroad. And another part of thee is planted in the earth, and securely set in the depth, that thou mayest join the things that are in the earth and that are under the earth unto the heavenly things. . . . O cross, planted upon the earth and having they fruit in the heavens! O name of the Cross, filled with all things.” (M. R. James, tr., The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 359–360.) Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Bk. V, Ch. xvii, Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Ch. li, and Hippolytus, Treatise on Christ and the Antichrist, par. 4.
¹⁴ Romans 7:15 ff.
¹⁵ Paraphrase of Romans 6:3–4.
¹⁶ Galatians 2:20.
¹⁷ 1 Peter 3:11.
¹⁸ 1 John 1: 1:8–9.
¹⁹ Revelation 19:11–15.
²⁰ Revelation 20:15.
²¹ Matthew 11–19.
²² A particularly glaring example among many others may be found in the 158th letter of St. Augustine in the first volume of his writings, p. 510. Eerdmans series, The Ante-Nicene Fathers.