A Response to Billy Graham - Why All Religious Individuals Should Also Vote Against North Carolina's Amendment One on May 8th!

This amendment is misguided on so many levels. First, dictating social norms through the arm of the state is the least effective and most harmful form of education. (Isn't this what the whole Reformation thing was about?) Churches should know this by now.

But beyond this, the church ought to realize the shift in its role within the present times.

The churches who support Amendment One are shooting themselves in the foot. The reality is that we are in the midst of a great cultural shift. Historically, the guidelines for compassionate behavior have been defined by religious leaders--today, science defines our social norms and public expectations regarding compassion. Historically, religious life has predominantly meant belief in orthodox doctrine and ritual--today, religious life is the quest for fantasy and symbolic meaning, which the modern age is currently missing.

How should compassion be taught? There is no absolute answer to this question, as the the concrete circumstances of every individual's life varies greatly. However, a general social norm is needed in order to meet the practical preconditions for public interaction. Without an accepted greeting, such as a smile or hand-shake, than many of us would probably never interact socially with a stranger!  Historically, the guidelines for compassion has been set by religious leaders. Today, however, the authority of the scientist has replaced the authority of the priest regarding compassion.

Ask yourself this: Does science now define compassion as a cultural norm in our society? When we look at the role of science in medicine, in education, in political decision-making, the answer can only be "yes". Which is more influential within these ethics-focused spheres? The opinions of scientists or of religious leaders?

This is not to dismiss religion as irrelevant, however, as it will continue to serve two important functions.

First, religion will continue to play its traditional role, as its presentation of issues such as compassion will continue to appeal to many individuals, even while they are no longer being accepted as general social norms. Science may be replacing religion's authority in defining the general cultural norm for expectations of compassionate behavior for public life in a society, but such social norms become meaningless within the personal life of the individual. Cultural norms say nothing about what best suits a specific individual, and so religion will continue to be an important teacher of compassion for many individuals.

Secondly, religion itself is going through a shift in its social function. Religion's influence on public, collective life is increasingly devitalized, so that its role within the personal life can be enhanced.

In his treatment of hundreds of patients, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung discovered that the orthodox interprations of Scripture no longer communicated religious truth to the adapted modern psyche. He proposed that the gnostic-influenced interpretation's time has finally come. The following chart summarizes this position.

Layers of meaning in Jesus’s crucifixion story	First-layer interpretation (Orthodox-influenced)	Second-layer interpretation (Gnostic-influenced)
God	Good	the Unknown
Jesus	Ego	Ego
Christ	Ego	God-image / fate
Incarnation	God’s compassion for us / God’s grace	God’s struggle to overcome his dark side
Satan	Evil	God’s shadow / dark side
Salvation / Redemption	Acceptance of God’s grace	discovery of one’s God-image / discovery of one’s fate
Crucifixion	A one-time deal, in which Jesus paid the “blood debt” that we owe to God for our sins	a religious experience open to everyone, in which we let ego ‘die’ as the sovereign center of life so that both our unique development and our collective God-image are taken into account/ discovery of one’s fate
Resurrection	rebirth into a church-body where Good has overcome Evil	rebirth into a life guided by Spirit -- a life centered around the relationship between ego and God / discovery of one’s fate

Carl Jung wrote about the reigious shift that is occurring:

Today Christianity is devitalized by its remoteness from the spirit of the times. It stands in need of a new union with, or relation to, the atomic age, which is a unique novelty in history. The myth needs to be retold in a new spiritual language, for the new wine can no more be poured into the old bottles than it could in the Hellenistic age... It is my practical experience that psychological understanding revivifies the essentail Christian ideas and fills them with the breath of life. This is because our worldly light, i.e., scientific knowledge and understanding, coincides with the symbolic statement of the myth, whereas previously we were unable to bridge the gulf between knowing and believing. [Jung, Man and his Symbols]

In describing the difference between the collective, public sphere and the individual, personal sphere, Carl Jung wrote,

There can be no self-knowledge on theoretical assumptions... [the individual] is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular. [Jung, Man and his Symbols]

Cultural norms say nothing about what best suits a specific individual, and religion will continue to be an important teacher of compassion for many individuals.

At the same time, cultural norms are absolutely necessary within our collective, public lives. Jung continues,

At the same time man, as a member of a species, can and must be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could be said about him.  [Jung, Man and his Symbols]

To have a meaningful culture, we must have social norms that dictate the expectations of public interactions.

The mind adapted to the the rationalistic spirit of the modern age lacks fantasy and symbolic life. The church, the caretakers of a particulary impactful set of symbols, instead tries to dictate more codes of behavior. The church's role should be that of a trusted counselor in the individual's effort to find his or her own way. But instead of the counsel and support that the modern adapted mind wants, in supporting oppressive proposals like North Carolina's Amendment One, the evangelical religious leaders offer us only more rigidity. Shame on Billy Graham and all religious leaders who support Amendment One--they are misusing their position as religious authorities and in doing so are shooting Christianity in the foot.

Jungian Marxism - Theoretical Groundwork

One accusation against Jung is that he is an idealist--that he is, as Alex Callinicos writes about Hegel, "tied down with the Enlightenment's conception of history as 'the progress of the human mind.' " [The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, p. 65]

Jung actually responds to this claim himself, and actually calls Hegel out on it himself, writing, "Hegel hypostatizes [or reifies] the idea completely and attributes to it alone real being. It is the concept, the reality of the concept and the union of both." I'll get to Jung's viewpoint on ideas in a minute, but first a quick overview on Jung's view on the evolution of the mind.

Jung's theory actually fits nicely within the field of Evolutionary Psychology. Jung, writing in 1921, hypothesizes an evolutionary understanding of the brain. In addition to the five exterior sensory organs, Jung hypothesizes four interior functions of the mind. Jung claims that each function lays claim to separate parts of our existence. Thinking claims exclusive validity within one sphere of life, and likewise, feeling, sensation and intuition each to their own spheres. Jung believe that these functions evolved evolutionarily, as a process of adaptation.

That is probably why there are different psychic functions; for, biologically, the psychic system can be understood only as a system of adaptation, just as eyes exist presumably because there is light. Thinking can claim only a third or a fourth part of the total significance, although in its own sphere it possesses exclusive validity--just as sight is the exclusively valid function for the perception of light waves, and hearing for that of sound waves. [Psychological Types, par. 158]

For Jung, ideas are not Ultimate Reality as for Hegel. In Jung's theory, archetypes originate from "primordial images", which arise when functions overlap and contents from one function get mixed up with contents from another. Jung uses the term “concrete” to describe these mixed-together mental contents. It would be like if you could see sound waves or hear light waves. It would probably be most distracting and difficult to cleanly decipher. Jung is claiming that is how our mental functions have evolved, though. Thinking gets mixed up with Sensation, Feeling, and Intuition. Sensation, the oldest and most refined of the functions, still sometimes gets mixed up with Thoughts, Feelings, and Intuitions, and so on. These overlapping contents--and NOT ideas--are precursors to Jung’s archetypes.

Other than the one small paragraph above, Jung rarely mentions the evoluationary aspect of his theory of mental functions, despite using the functions frequently in his analysis. I suspect he did not want to alienate religious readers, and therefore chose not to emphasize the evolutionary aspect of his theory. For this reason, many readers miss the fact that archetypes are derived from a materialist, evolutionary hypothesis. This is a common mistake made when reading Jung, as the following quote attests.

Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression be admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree." (C.G. Jung, CW 9, par.155 "Ps. Aspects of the Mother Archetype").

For more on Jung and Evolutionary Psychology, see Genes on the Couch: Explorations in Evolutionary Psychotherapy By Paul Gilbert, Kent G. Bailey.

Okay, so why do I think that Jung's theory agrees with Marx? After all, Jung dismisses communism multiple times in his writings, and Marx was a self-proclaimed atheist whereas Jung considered religion to be of utmost importance.

Two responses:
First, Jung married into a Swiss ruling-class family, was aware of his one-time mentor, Sigmeund Freud's, disapproval of communism, and also was understandably horrified at Stalin's religious persecution in the nominally-Marxist Soviet Union. Jung seems to have spent all his effort in writing trying to connect with religious-minded people and remain strictly scientific in his work, and largely ignored Marxism publicly, assuming he even seriously read Marx at all.

Second, here are two passages that I believe get at the heart of each writers' philosophies.

Here's Marx's closing paragraph to his essay "The Power of Money":

Imagine man as man and his relation to the world a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person, if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others.

Now here is Jung:

The psychological individual... exists consciously only so far as a consciousness of his peculiar nature is present, i.e., so far as there exists a conscious distinction from other individuals... Individuation is need to bring the individuality to consciousness. [Psychological Types, par. 755]

For Jung, individuation means exploring one's uniqueness, bringing previously repressed contents to consciousness. Jung believes this is accomplished through developing each of the four functions relatively equally. In fact, as Janice Hocking Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, this is one of the layers of meaning Jung sees within the Christ myth [this excerpt is from a chapter on James Cameron’s film The Terminator]:

It is... typical... to interpret the Christ story exoterically--that is, in a way that reinforces the ego by keeping the unacceptable parts of the psyche (the shadow) separated and disowned. In this version, Satan carries the sins of the world, and Christ substitutes for us in deaing with Satan. In the Old Testament prophecy and in Paradise Lost, the messiah vanquishes Satan in glorious military combat, much as Sarah defeats the Terminator in the present and John is prophesied to do in the future. In the New Testament story, of course, Christ dies for our sins, much as Kyle Reese does in this film, so that we will not have to. In both exoteric versions, all that is required for redemption is belief, because the savior of humankind banishes that shadow for us.

The Christ story can [also] be taken esoterically--that is, the way in which specially initiated persons would understand it... In this interpretation... as an infant, Christ is the “divine child,” a personification of the Self archetype, the potential for wholeness in all of us that is constantly threatened by hostile forces and must be carefully guarded and nurtured. To move toward wholeness, a person follows Christ’s example as an adult and sacrifices one’s self, or, in psychological terms, the ego, on the “cross,” symbolizing the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious. Although Christianity does not deal explicitly with the problem of technology, it does, when understood esoterically, address the problem of the shadow, that rejected part of us all which is projected onto an Other, a devil figure that carries the sins of humanity. In contemporary times one form of this shadow is technology. Taken as an example, Christ’s crucifixion models what each person must do him- or herself--namely, let ego “die” as the sovereign center of the psyche so that the Self can take its place. Light cannot be brought into the world--the shadow cannot be raised to consciousness, the divided self united--without this willingness to suffer and let the old ways die. [Projecting the Shadow, p. 180]

To summarize the esoteric interpretation, Jung draws the following symbolic correspondences:

God ->	unconscious
Christ ->	Self (or God-image)
Incarnation ->	integration of the unconscious
Satan ->	shadow
Salvation or Redemption ->	individuation
Crucifixion or sacrifice on the Cross ->	realization of the four functions or of wholeness

- [Jung, Collected Works, XVIII, p. 736]

The result of seeking wholeness within each of the four functions is to give up on the idea of maintaining a social persona with one, extra-developed function:
"A direct attack against the predominance of the one differentiated and socially valuable function, since it is the primary cause of the repression and absorption of the inferior functions,... would signify a slave-rebellion against the heroic ideal [[reinforced by the exoteric interpretation]] which compels us, for the sake of one [differentiated, socially valuable function], to sacrifice the remaining all... The direct outcome of this renunciation is individualism, i.e.the necessity for a realization of individuality, a realization of man as he is." [Psychological Types, par. 167, 168]

The realization of the four functions can also be described, as Frentz and Rushing put it, as letting "ego 'die' as the sovereign center of the psyche so that the Self can take its place." In other words, an imbalanced development of one function at the expense of the others throws off the connection between ego and Self.
Marx and Jung are talking about the same thing here! Marx claims the removal of money will allow individuals to truly develop their unique potentials, to explore what elements of one's uniqueness has a "stimulating and encouraging effect". Similarly, Jung claims uniqueness is discovered when we are freed from the competitive market-demand that we develop one, specialized function to maximize the price of our labor, and thus are able to pursue the religious experience of Christ--the "crucifying of the ego", which contains one's most developed function-- and the development of the other functions that have been repressed into the inner, unconscious world.

Layers of Truth - Jung's History of Religious Symbols

These thoughts are based on the following passage from Jung and Christianity by Wallace B. Clift:

The life of the Church (after the early centuries of the beginning of Christianity) could be divided into three eras... (1) The uneducated individual in medieval society accepted the authority of the institutional Church. (2) The newly awakened minds of the Renaissance accepted the authority of theology based on the Bible. (3) The humanistic, scientific, and pragmatic spirit of this age will accept the authority of experiential, personal encounter with the living God. [p. 101]

Also, this quotation from the book Projecting the Shadow by Janice Hocking Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, arguing that the story of Christ has two separate layers of meaning:

The Christ story can be taken esoterically--that is, the way in which specially initiated persons would understand it... In this interpretation... as an infant, Christ is the “divine child,” a personification of the Self archetype, the potential for wholeness in all of us that is constantly threatened by hostile forces and must be carefully guarded and nurtured. To move toward wholeness, a person follows Christ’s example as an adult and sacrifices one’s self, or, in psychological terms, the ego, on the “cross,” symbolizing the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious. Although Christianity does not deal explicitly with the problem of technology, it does, when understood esoterically, address the problem of the shadow, that rejected part of us all which is projected onto an Other, a devil figure that carries the sins of humanity. In contemporary times one form of this shadow is technology. Taken as an example, Christ’s crucifixion models what each person must do him- or herself--namely, let ego “die” as the sovereign center of the psyche so that the Self can take its place. Light cannot be brought into the world--the shadow cannot be raised to consciousness, the divided self united--without this willingness to suffer and let the old ways die.

[ In this esoteric interpretation, Jung draws the following symbolic correspondences:

God ->	unconscious
Christ ->	Self (or God-image)
Incarnation ->	integration of the unconscious
Satan ->	shadow
Salvation or Redemption ->	individuation
Crucifixion or sacrifice on the Cross ->	realization of the four functions or of wholeness

- Jung, Collected Works, XVIII, p. 736 ]

It is much more typical, of course, to interpret the Christ story exoterically--that is, in a way that reinforces the ego by keeping the unacceptable parts of the psyche (the shadow) separated and disowned. In this version, Satan carries the sins of the world, and Christ substitutes for us in deaing with Satan. In the Old Testament prophecy and in Paradise Lost, the messiah vanquishes Satan in glorious military combat, much as Sarah defeats the Terminator in the present and John is prophesied to do in the future. In the New Testament story, of course, Christ dies for our sins, much as Kyle Reese does in this film, so that we will not have to. In both exoteric versions, all that is required for redemption is belief, because the savior of humankind banishes that shadow for us. [p. 180] [this excerpt is from a chapter on James Cameron’s film The Terminator]

Jung, like Marx, understands that truth has multiple layers, and that one historical era is likely to emphasize a different layer than another.

Jung expressed the different layers in terms of four fundamental functions--sensing, feeling, thinking, and intuition. Jung hypothesizes that these functions develop

as a system of adaptation, just as eyes exist presumably because there is light. Thinking can claim only a third or a fourth part of the total significance, although in its own sphere it possesses exclusive validity--just as sight is the exclusively valid function for the perception of light waves, and hearing for that of sound waves. [Psychological Types, par. 158]

Jung separates history into eras depending on what layer was most emphasized. Primitive religious systems emphasize only sensation, and so the thinking, feeling, and intuitive layers of truth remain undifferentiated and mixed together in the unconscious. For primitive religions, the authority of gods is sensational in nature. The authority of gods was expressed in images with strong sensory connotations--Mother, Sun, or Fire. The Sensory gods were indifferent to human-kind. The Mother-god may have cared, but she was too distant and removed from real human history for her caring to make any difference. The image of God as Saviour marked the beginning of a new religious era, in Jung’s view. The Saviour-god, unlike the impersonal Sun-god or fire-god, provides a concrete image of God as “good.” With the Incarnation, God is not only good in a far-away, mythic sense, but He/She actively does good things in the present. In this way, Feeling becomes a legitimate source of authority. Society’s moral norms come to include emotional considerations for the first time. Jung sees the Christian age as a major victory against barbarism in this regard.

The next era is marked by the Protestant Reformation, and is the era that differentiates the Thinking function as a legitimate source of moral authority. Philosophers go back to the time of Ancient Greece, but it’s not until the Protestant Reformation that their ideas first have a signficant impact on the moral norms of society, in Jung’s view.

Development of Religious Symbols	How God is experienced:	psychological result	Differentiated Functions within predominant religious symbols
Primitive Era (10,000 BCE - 1st century CE)	association to Sensation: Sun-god, Fire-god, Mother-god	Nature-gods give humans an external reference point to direct their energies towards.	Sensing
Medieval Era (1st century CE - 16th century CE)	God as Goodness: God is a Saviour, who champions the good and banishes evil from our lives. Religious authority is controlled by an elite group of religious leaders.	Society’s dominant moral norms include emotional considerations for the first time	Sensing, Feeling
Rationalistic Era (16th century CE - present day)	Each individual has license to interpret scripture and come to theological conclusions.	The authority of the Scientist replaces the authority of the Priest as the source of truth concerning the physical world. But thought becomes overvalued. The "false uniqueness" of economic specialization is increasingly reinforced by market-based economies.	Sensing, Feeling, Thinking
De-institutionalized Era (near future - distant future)	God as Wholeness, achievable through authentic religious experience--the uniting of the opposing tensions within our inner Self, aka "God-image", the deepest layer of our collective, largely unconscious natures	Orthdoxy--the adherence to correct creeds--loses its importance. The religious task becomes to uncover one's subjective biases. In this way, we discover our "true uniqueness." This requires a "crucifying the ego," which contains one's most developed function, and setting out to develop the other functions that have been repressed into the inner, psychic world.	Sensing, Feeling, Thinking, Intuition

Jungian Marxism

I honestly am still confused about why no one has tried to find parallels between Jung and Marx, (no English author, at least). This is not that surprising, I suppose, as there are a number of factors discouraging it. I guess what's surprising is how many parallels I can see between the two.

My experience is that spiritual values led me to reject capitalism, and thus into Occupy and Marxism, and so therefore I believe it could do the same for others. It seems to me the biggest problem facing Marxism today is communication. Marxism has pretty good ideas about how to build towards a better world--the problem is to convince other groups that those ideas are in fact good. My hypothesis is that Jung's terminology can bridge the communication gap between Marxism and religious communities. I realize that I have no evidence for this beyond my own individual experience, which contains my sujbective biases, but I still feel compelled to pursue the topic.

While most people see Marx's and Jung's views about religion as irreconciliable, I do not believe this is at all the case. For Jung religion meant religious experience, which is separate from orthodox doctrine and rituals. When Marx says “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness,” he is talking about what Jung would call religious doctrine and ritual. I totally agree that religion as it exists today would wither away as society transitions into socialism. Jung had fundamental issues with orthodox Christian doctrines of both Catholicism and Protestantism, (and is nearly as shut out from the academic theological circles as he is from Marxist writings). For Jung the problem is that society has become overly-rational--we don't put enough energy into the symbolic truths of religion. As a result of society's over-rationality, there is a tendency to interpret religion in historical rather than symbolic terms and to believe that given enough time science or the state will solve all problems. As Jung writes in his autobiography, "The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism; under its dominion the individual is pauperized."

Jung's mistake, I believe, is that he didn't recognize that capitalism's competitive markets are the chief reproducers of today's overly-rational mode of existence. 'Rational' means "in accordance with laws", which in a market-dominant society are primarily the laws of the compeitive market, as the necessity of competing leaves people with little time to engage in other systems. There are a few obvious reasons why Jung did not see the political consequences of his idea. First, he was legitimately scared of Stalin's state-mandated atheism, which he saw as a big step backward for civilization. Second, Freud was an outspoken critic of Marxism, saying "But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which [communism] is based are an untenable illusion... Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery." While Jung had long since broken with Freud's school of thought, he still was involved in the same social circles and so I suspect was influenced by his mentor's attitude towards Marxism.

From a Jungian perspective, the most important benefit from Communism's elimination of the competitive mode of existence would be that it would free people to explore their fate, defined by Jung as "a daemonic will, not necessarily coincident with [one's] own." Recall that Socrates speaks of such a Daemon, which compelled him to actions that he otherwise would not have taken. Jung believes that such influences come through our connection to the collective unconscious part of our psyche. The unconscious is a layer of potential mental content underneath consciousness. The unconscious consists of many layers, the first of which is the individual unconscious, which contains the mental content repressed by the ego. The collective unconscious comes next and itself consists of multiple layers, the deepest being the archetype of the Self, which for Jung is equivalent to “God-image.” Marxism would allow people to pursue the "inward journey"--the integration of ego and the archetype of the Self, which for Jung is Holy Grail of religious experience. As Erich Fromm writes, "[Marxism] is the realization of the deepest religious impulses common to the great humanistic religions of the past... provided we understand that Marx, like Hegel and like many others, expresses his concern for man's soul, not in theistic, but in philosophical language."

Jung's theory and Marxist theory contain a few parallels that have been largely ignored. For example, in A Marxist Philosophy of Language Jean-Jacques Lecercle follows Valentin Voloshinov in convicting Freud of methodological individualism--the idea that social interactions necessarily start with intentional mental states of individuals. Jung, however, is not guilty of this, as his theory proposes collective layers of the unconscious out of which mental contents can arise, as opposed to Freud for whom the unconscious was completely individual.To be sure there are many complications to work out--Lecercle dismisses the idea of the unconscious as abstraction: “what Freudians call ‘unconscious’ is nothing but the internalisation of public dialogue,” and this charge also applies to Jung. Jung claims the unconscious is more than just abstraction in that it is compensatory to conscious interactions, and that this compensatory nature of the unconscious is empirically verified through a long-term analysis of his patients lives, and more immediately through analysis of their dreams.

While there are obvious barriers, the more I've read, the more optimistic I am, actually, about the potential of combining Jungian and Marxist thought.

My perception is that Jung and Marx had quite different personalities. Jung is more concerned with reflection, while Marx is more concerned with action. For instance, for Marx, "humans as social beings" refers to one's relationships--the people you do things with. Jung, on the other hand, focuses on the meaning of experience. The more fully you understand your inner, subjective biases, the more capably you will navigate the public, social world. Experience happens--the important thing for Jung is the meaning attributed to experience, and that people become aware of all the potentials the experience contains.

Just as action and reflection are both essential in life, my hope is that Jung and Marx can be joined in a complementary way that enhances the theories of each.

reflection on the meaning of God

Page references are from Jung on Christianity by Murray Stein.

What causes us to become aware of our subjective biases?

There are many possible sources--introspection, empathy with other viewpoints, analysis of our dreams--but chief among them for Carl Jung are those jarring and sometimes violent experiences that lodge themselves in our minds and refuse to let us return to the way things were before. In Jung's view, such “religious experiences” are from God, the Supreme Wholeness, who makes us step back and take stock of our subjective biases.

pg. 6 - The essence of the religious life is, for Jung, religious experience, not piety or correct belief or faithfulness to tradition.

pg. 8 - In Jung’s interpretation, Job is completely innocent. He is a scrupulously pious man who follows all the religious conventions, and for most of his life he is blessed with good fortune. This is the expected outcome for a just man in a rationally ordered universe. But then God goes to work on him, tests him with misfortune, reduces him to misery, and finally overwhelms him with questions and images of divine majesty and power. Job is silenced, and he realizes his inferior position vis-a-vis the Almighty. But he also retains his personal integrity, and this so impresses God that He is forced to take stock of Himself. Perhaps He is not so righteous after all! [ As Marc Fonda observes, God’s omniscience precludes self-awareness. Being omniscient, God has no concentrated self to speak of. Being a part of everything, God has no opportunity to distinguish self from non-self. However, as God knows the thoughts of humans, through the thoughts of his creation he can experience what self-awareness is. ] And out of this astonishing self-reflection, induced in God by Job’s stubborn righteousness, He, the Almighty, is pushed into a process of transformation that leads eventually to His incarnation as Jesus. God develops empathy and love through his confrontation with Job, and out of it a new relationship between God and humankind is born.