The Dark Side of God

The extract below from a rough translation of the book ‘The Dark Side of God’ by Wilhelm Haller shows his capacity also for theological themes:

A Justification

If I thought that my inner and outer searching and questioning and my debate with and about God and the world had reached its completion with my last book, I was very much mistaken. Nothing could have been further from the truth! Particularly, as the chapter ‘In the Darkness’ reveals, questionings are being once again, all these forced upon me from within, compelling me to grapple with them and resulting in this book.

Nevertheless, the publishers have generously agreed to allow me to include the last two chapters of my previous work as a preamble, albeit with some adaption and extension,. These chapters represent my inner conflict, the first chapter being rather a justification of my methodology than of the nature of a contextual statement. In particular, it is a plea for bringing my own subjective experiences and persuasions into the discussion while at the same time not claiming them to be universally valid yet worthy of consideration. Primarily I wish to make it clear that the attempt is to interpret my own intrinsic and extrinsic experiences and in particular my personal subjective impressions and thus human evaluation. It goes without saying of course because naturally no human being is in a position to talk of God’s nature from his own perspective, let alone describe it anymore than an ant is in a position to give a detailed account of the European continent. Man is only able to talk in terms of his images of and experiences about God.

My main question is to what extent do we subordinate ourselves to that which has been handed down to us; that is, the teaching of the Church and the Christian identity (conscious or unconscious), in other words, the existing morphic field, to coin a phrase of Rupert Sheldrake. Alternatively, how far are we willing to embrace the freedom to think in our own new ways? Of course, going one’s own way means an incremental procedure, striving and stumbling to win new land, going painfully, slowly and under duress in a situation where distractions and deceptions are unavoidable.

The same thing applies to any description of this as it remains at best, a mumbled attempt at an explanation – a disturbance rather than a clarification. It remains incomplete, disjointed, incoherent and contains no convincing structure, let alone a scientific underpinning. Add to this that it is a record of personal concerns and the result of an inner development not yet come to fruitiion but rather still in the process thereof, the goal and end of which can neither be recognized nor visualized at the outset of putting pen to paper. Thus this piecemeal and fragmentary work is only likely to be of relevance to those who have been confronted with similar questionings and experiences and who experience and express intrinsic and extrinsic reality in comparable metaphors and paradigms. This is a substantial restriction. I am a man of the passing 20th century and come from a Judeo-Christian cultural background. Thus my narration is influenced by these sources, yet I will nevertheless risk the attempt to express that which is occupying my mind.

In order to begin, I have to go back a fair distance, commencing with ‘Old Testament’ Judaism because, as a Christian, the search for fresh sources is bound to lead me via Christianity to Judaism. Exactly in relation to the actual subject of this book, that is, the dark aspect of God, Jewish, contrary to most Christian sources have faced up to this problem without suppression or exclusion. The statement in John’s Gospel, ‘Salvation is of the Jews’ seems to find confirmation yet again. That this statement appears just here is even more surprising as the Gospel of John is not famous for its particularly over-friendly attitude to Jews!

One of the common prejudices towards Judaism is to be found in the belief that the religion is particularly characterized by its demand for the subjection to strict biblical regulations. This opinion has been supported in Christianity through the priority given to Pauline thinking. Familiarly, Paul represented the idea of freedom from the Law through faith in Christ. It was for this reason that he got involved in considerable disputes with the Judeo-Christian community in Jerusalem. In reality, this Pauline approach is often the root of that conviction which sees Jesus in diametrical opposition to the political leaders; where Jesus stands for freedom from the Law and the others for subjection to the Law. This conviction is not supported by tradition. Despite all the generosity which Jesus displays in relation to the keeping of the Law, the statement remains that the last Jot of the Law must be fulfilled before the Kingdom of God can become reality on Earth.

The concrete historical situation makes this mistaken idea about Judaism very apparent. While, on the one hand, a rapid dogmatization of certain principles has occurred which has often resulted in murder, slaughter, the extinction of minorities and even persistent religious wars, within Judaism the realization that there are as many interpretations of the Thora as there are Jews occurred very early. This is apparent in the, now well known, quarrel between learned Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages. Even at that time, the Jewish side displayed much more spiritual flexibility and individual freedom in all these questions than the other party.

In this respect, it appears to me, that here lies a fundamental error on the part of many Christian authors, who observe this openness and individuality on the part of Jesus but are yet unable to credit Judaism with it in general.

This widespread misunderstanding is particularly observable in that the Hebrew script originally contained no vowels. Vowels were considered to be the Breath of God who distances himself from human stipulation. Thus, the Hebrew manner of writing made the way open for almost any number of possibilities of interpretation rather than a generally valid dogmatic definition. Thus, it is admitted that every interpretation is in the end subjective, time-related and influenced by the spirit of the times and thus subject to change. Consequentially, this is also valid for the respective image of God. Latin, on the other hand, is a very precise both as a language and in its script. Therefore, it is no surprise that Latin became not only the language of Christian dogma but also of the exact sciences. Besides, it makes no decisive difference whether the Pope and Vatican in the end are the determining authority, as in Catholicism, or whether the Bible plays this role, as in most Protestant churches.

Actually, the differences just described by the authors above are concerned not with a basic problem of the Jewish people, their religion and language, but rather generally re-occurring internal Jewish rabbinical conflicts over the interpretation of the laws – for example, which activities are allowable on the sabbath – and on the other hand about ancient and inherent conflicts in all confessions between priest and prophet, law and freedom, between dogma and that change born of the spirit and of an immediate overwhelming experience of God.

This conflict is not only found within Judaism but also within Christianity, as well as in other religions and ideologies similar to religions. Thus, for instance, in communism, the writings and speeches of Marx and Lenin have always been virtually divine publications, both sophisticated and dogmatized.

People and above all, power elites, always incline to codify traditions and the statements of unusual personalities to develop generally binding dogmas with legal force, thereupon to enforcing their observance. Apart from this, the willingness to submit to charismatic leaders and the rules they set, even encourages the temptation of such personalities, to assume divine power and the right to direct others. And if these themselves do not succumb to the temptation, as was evidently the case, for instance, with Jesus, then conflict-shy and dialog-hostile successors ensure for their own use and own comfort that the Dogma, and the usually associated exclusive administration of truth and salvation they have constructed, is not called into question by others. This is the classical conservatism which is to be found amongst orthodox Jews as well as in the Vatican, the Evangelicals, the Pietists and the communists and, of course, in other religious or ideological groups in general.

This conservatism is not of course fundamentally despicable. Finally, every society, from the religious community up to society as a whole, needs an internal order which also regulates the way people live together. Therefore, it is not surprising that Paul, after his abolition of the Jewish system of Law, recommended submission to the state under Roman law to his followers. Order has to be but it should not become so rigid that religious and interpersonal experiences from distant history and their interpretation through certain privileged persons becomes permanently fixed in dogmas and laws. It is more important to include those traditions in a dialog of the living and thus to make them into the basis and source of the further development of order and the eternal search for justice and truth. In this way, it is possible to make space for the correction and improvement of misconceptions and erroneous thinking both for previous and our own present generation. Thus it is to be accepted that the absolute and objective truth is at best fragmentarily available to man, whereas his subjective truths on the road to freedom are subject to shared reconsideration, correction and improvement, without neglecting awe and respect for the great traditions. After all, these are utterly soaked in the hopes, desires and suffering of many generations. In this way they therefore receive content and meaning, not seldom gaining the quality of holiness and becoming inescapable from our intention.

The fact cannot be ignored that the individual interpretation of justice and law in Roman power-oriented thinking with its attempt at permanence is given a lot less space compared to the way of thinking in Judaism or even of the early Germanic tribes. It is only necessary to make the comparison between the Roman imperial system of law from Corpus Juris Civilis through the Napoleonic Code up to our present era and thus attempted absolutism, as in the case of the German Constitution, and rabbinical judgments, based as they are on various interpretations of the Thora, or the Anglo-Saxon approach of Common Law. The restriction of all human evidence to that which is time-bound, fragmented and subjective is, of course, valid for this book. This does not exclude the fact that I defend my opinion adamantly and with fervor. On the contrary, I am realistic enough to understand that my views, at least partly, are subjective and in the future may also be subjected to dialectical argumentation in order to provide usable building blocks for the way into the future.

Even when many of the experiences which need to be integrated in this process are timeless, it must be realized that this is valid only for the content but not for the form. This means also that even when we allow such an experience to have eternal divine dimensions, the question will always arise as to which form this content needs to take in order to be able to be experienced and realized in the here and now. The form may have to be changed even if the content stays the same. In this process the fact should not be ignored that content influences form and vice versa.

The problem and the most widespread misunderstanding is most clearly noticeable in the ten commandments. According to the traditions, the preamble where God is described as bringer of freedom and salvation, is followed in the German translation of the Bible by a whole series of ‘Du sollst..’ and ‘Du sollst nicht..’* which are generally understood to be legal requirements. Actually, the whole story taken together means that Man, upon taking the way of freedom from dependence through God, shall be freed from everything deathly and shall no longer do things just because he has to. As Ernst Lang, who described the Ten Commandments as the Ten Freedoms, has understood; it has more to do with ten liberations than the legal pressure of ten commandments. In the same way, Martin Buber talks of God’s guidance rather than law. This is valid both for the Jew as for the Christian (and for everybody else).

The focus of ‘I am thy God who led you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of subservience’ (transl. from Martin Buber’s version) lies in the search after God as in Jesus’ parable of the buried treasure and the pearl of great price make clear and not in law enforcement, even if, of course, one does precede the other, but rather in the requirement to do without all which is unnecessary in order to reach that great goal. How the way to such a release from dependencies and pressures from within is to be found and traveled is a completely different question. The Jewish saying ‘the secret of salvation is to be found in remembrance’ shows the way to finding the answer to this question. The search requires a debate on the collective history and its teachings and traditions as well as with the individual part – that part which has affected us personally. This includes the willingness to involve ourselves in our own feelings, particularly the suppressed ones. Even here it is concerned with both the intrinsic and the extrinsic, with getting up and going to embrace change and a turnaround within and without. In the same way, every therapy for the desired inner change nearly always requires an adaption to life style and conditions.

For too long and too often now, Christianity has behaved as though the Sinai experience, that is, the appreciation of God in purpose, destiny and fulfillment, takes place next to or even within the flesh and melting pots of Egypt – in wealth and in slavery – as the price to be paid for affluence.

All the talk of ‘cheap’ grace has caused a lot of damage. It is an absolute lie. Sinai and Egypt are contradictions in terms, even if of course, in the way in which they are described, the Sinai experience would not be possible without the Egypt experience being in fact a prerequisite.

A person, having once realized that, figuratively speaking, he is living in the slavery of Egypt and suffering therefrom, will have to get up once, twice and many times, over and over again. Sinai is outside in front of us beyond the wilderness. It is however worth the effort because the way is accompanied by God, as history confirms, even if he is not always a close God but a distant God and not always a God of Light but also a God of the Shadows. My experience, which essentially led to this book, shows that we have again seemingly for the second time missed something very fundamental here. We overlook, and too often suppress, the fact that salvation is actually to be discovered in the shadows. As in the conversion of seed to fruit, to use one of Jesus’ examples, the darkness of the earth and the seed’s apparent destruction is decisive. Salvation apparently grows mainly from a suffering experience with oneself and the environment.

But this has nothing to do with that asceticism or self-affliction which forces a grimace and a bitter countenance. This has rather more to do with a way to freedom, releasing man from creeping on all fours in internal and external dependency, to the glorious freedom of the Children of God and the making of us as upright human beings. This way leads to the wilderness, down into hell, into the caverns, into the dark lap of Mother Earth, where wheat corn dies and from which only thus can fruit be born.

The concrete effects of the continually clearer realization that Christianity and thus that the thinking and actions of western man are essentially dualistic and that here the deepest roots of our confusions from the crusades, the burning of witches and right up to Auschwitz are to be found, is even more frightening. This dualistic way of thinking must already have been influential in early Christian thinking in the east Mediterranean area. Not for Jesus himself, who repeatedly emphasized the ‘coexistence of contradictions’, as demonstrated by his declarations about dealing with evil. The love of enemy of which Jesus talks has the same roots. Dealing with the external ‘enemy’ depends basically on the way in which we deal with the enemy within us. I will first be able to love the external ‘enemy’ when I have lovingly accepted the enemy within.

The Evangelists seem to have seen this differently from Jesus himself. This is displayed even in the comparison of the two temptation stories from Abraham and Jesus. In the case of Abraham, it is clearly God Himself who gives the order to Abraham and influences him to sacrifice his son, in other words to act according to the then general understanding. In the case of Jesus, Satan appears in the temptation story trying to convince him that he should become a messianic personality – as was generally expected – a power politician promising success and magical acts. Although Satan in the Jewish tradition is one of the sons of God, as particularly illustrated in the story of Job, mainstream Christianity has in fact made him into a counter-god who has to be fought, as the temptation narrative according to the Gospels clearly illustrates.

The ancient Jewish tradition contradicts this view, despite all their terrible experiences, holding as it does to the monotheistic view of God, tracing not only the bright but also the dark experiences of humanity in their roots back to God Himself.

The confusion of Christianity became particularly clear to me through a talk given by Ilse Schütz-Buenaventura, a Columbian, who traces our directly self-destructive dealings with humanity and nature back to our body- and nature-antagonistic dualistic world view.

She states ‘Modern civilization however, which began to develop in the middle of Europe five hundred years ago, contrasts fundamentally from Antiquity and the Middle Ages in that it has arrived at the formulation of that which is totally unseen as a new principle of power and action against Nature and Man as a living being. To behave according to the principle of the modern subject as immaterial means that not only the contrivance of the subject in open contradiction to the animate as such, but the modern age makes Nature into an enemy, which is denigrated to evil, making the kingdom of abstraction superior to reality.’

In another place she emphasizes this and states:

‘While every pre-modern dualism actually includes two, mostly visibly depicted levels, modern radical dualism has become a principally given dichotomy between spiritualized common sense as a new level and the nonspiritual material world which requires re-modeling.’

The result of this according to Ilse Schütz-Buenventura can ‘be described as a … war against that animate part of us and of our natural and social environment.’

The immaterial self becomes understood as the coveted Good with rights on Eternity and stands in constant strife with ones own superfluous bodily existence. This represents Darkness for us which is suppressed, disavowed and fought against. Modern western Man wants to be lord of himself and tries to make everything material – his own and everyone else’s – into a mastered object. After all, we reckon that we are in command of matter. In the end, however, we have to come to the terrible realization that in fact, just for that reason, are we ruled by it. While to all appearances theoretical-dialectical materialism has been overcome in the East, practical materialism grows and thrives in both the East and the West. It is a fruit of this way of this attitude and is demonstrated both on our sciences and in our approach to Nature as well as in the way we produce and consume.

Suddenly, out of my inner experiences and thoughts, not only subjective, individual speculation arises, which is in the end irrelevant, but it fundamentally questions our individual and societal thinking and actions. Nevertheless, I do not claim that my conclusions are absolutely correct and are generally valid. However, I do believe that no responsibly thinking and behaving person should distance his or herself from my questioning.

Wilhelm Haller

The Incarnation

It requires very little sensibility to behold the world as filled and driven by secret powers. Firstly the darkening of the spirit through theoretical and practical materialism of recent history has led to many neglecting the acceptance of this view. Earlier it was taken for granted. And yet even today, every human being has an inkling, just as his forbears had, that that which our senses recognize and that which is measurable and countable is not sufficient to explain our world and all that happens within it. It is therefore hardly surprising that Man since time immemorial has felt the world to be populated by gods, demons and multifarious spirit creatures. The perception of his inner and outer world allowed no other conclusion. He felt himself to be more or less helplessly at the mercy of innumerable forces.

But even modern Man, distancing himself from and considering himself superior to his ancestors, finds himself in a similar situation. His gods and demons however carry contemporary names and in fact mean that the one involved bows to the spirit of the times, subjecting himself indiscriminately to scientific or pseudo-scientific postulations, driven towards addictive desires such as fame, career, wealth, doped and ecstatic conditions, or attempting to flee from his fears through hunting for military and economic or other forms of external security. The dependencies remain the same – only the names and terms have changed.

The question of where these driving forces originate has occupied people since the time when from the Darkness of our animal subconscious the light of consciousness gradually dawned upon us. This is valid, as everything else which has to be said here on this topic, not only collectively for the history of the intellectual development of Humanity but individually for the path of each person.

At the beginning of this way stood – and still stands – polytheism. The variety of invisible but nevertheless experiential forces leads of necessity to this realization. And it does not take long before Man has the courage and the intellectual breadth of vision to take this multiplicity back to a single source breaking through to monotheism and the concept of the one and only God. For those in the western culture, the origins lie in the Israelite tradition. They are available to all in the Hebrew bible, the so-called ‘Old Testament’.

I consider this step belongs to one of the greatest intellectual attainments of Humankind. It is possessed of such intrepidity that even today only the very few are in a position to comprehend it in a deeply and committed way rather than just an enunciation. The belief on the One and Only God has, in fact, dramatical consequences from two aspects:

Firstly, it has to do with the first commandment of the Bible, through which Monotheism drives the claim to exclusivity to the extreme. Secondly, in the second verse of book of Exodus 20 it is stated, ‘I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ The initial, apparently even audacious, apparently exclusive right is channeled and justified through a positive way through a liberating divine experience. This perception seems to have influenced Jesus as can be concluded from his parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl of greatest price, for which the discoverer is willing to sacrifice all. Ken Willber is of the same opinion when he discusses our ‘gods’, writing, ‘Humanity will never give up this type of genocidal aggression, from war, suppression and disregard, blame and exploitation, I repeat, never give up, until it has not woken to transcendence.’

After this evidence, the only possibility of liberation from the bondage to gods and dependencies is through divine experience and the awakening to transcendence.

The other issue dealt with by monotheism is almost devastating in nature. It is so schocking that it is usually forsworn by the churches even though it is also manifested in the Greek Bible, the so-called ‘New Testament’ particularly, of all places, in the last book, ‘The Book of Revelation’.

If the one God, as our belief teaches, created all from his omnipotence and if, as Jesus says, not a single sparrow falls to the ground without God allowing it to happen, then he is also of course responsible for his creation, for beautiful things as well as the terrible, for good as well as evil. Once we declare God to be the God of Love and deprive him of the responsibility for that which we call evil then it is only possible for customary superficial church Christianity, with its dualistic thinking, to make space in its conceptual framework for a opponent of a god with the same rank in the shape of the Lord of Darkness. In this case, having the same rank is the decisive factor. As soon as we allow God the upper hand over his opponent, we bind Him into responsibility for the activities of his opponent again. At least as long as we consider God to be almighty. He could paralyze or fetter him. There seems to be no escape from this dilemma.

Monotheism cannot release an almighty God from the responsibility for all that happens in the whole of creation. Any compromise on this leads to a dualism with a God of Light and a God of Darkness, a Manicheism which, accepted or not, decisively marks conventional Christianity to this very day.

The way I understand it, these alternatives can and must be differentiated in order, to comply with the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. Thus we will hold to the responsibility of God for all that which happens in and to the creation and all creatures, including humanity. All pain and all suffering which occurs without the involvement of or caused by Man remains in God’s responsibility and can only be reconciled with a good, loving God when it is accepted that the human conceptual framework is restricted and that the consequent rules are not so generally valid that judgment in such fundamental questions is possible.

The human field of operation and influence, Man has the freedom to act responsibly and to decide in favor of good or evil. This freedom it is which differentiates the human from the animal, however, only in the case of the person who is no longer blown unconsciously back and forth but has become conscious of his self and has matured into this freedom.

In the history of life on our Earth it is noticeable that evolution primarily goes hand in hand with a growing physical flexibility which finally leads to a spiritual flexibility in humans – to freedom itself. Thus, nevertheless, the laws of nature and the will of God are not rescinded as principles of order and structure. Yet, however, the growing freedom of humanity depends on the complimentary growth of God’s ineffectiveness. The almightiness of God often found in the Bible and Christian Hymns turns out from our viewpoint to be a polarity consisting of omnipotence and impotence which while it leads to pain and suffering caused when humans go astray, nevertheless allows for them to miss the path.

The key term in this case is ‘allows’. It appears with Jesus in the famous picture of the sparrow, which does not fall from the sky unless God allows it. Thus Helmut Gollwitzer is in error when he says, ‘so he (Jesus) in fact went the way of the cross, not considering for a moment that this was done to him by the evil world, by the Jews or from those that hated him but in the absolute conviction that the all could do nothing if God would not have done it to me. ‘Done it to’ instead of ‘allowed’ is a dramatic change. Man does it, God allows it. Man is more than just an instrument of God. He is at least a henchman with (perhaps limited) freedom of will.

The consequences of Gollwitzer’s thinking do not only assume a highly problematic image of God. They would be quite gruesome applied to the evaluation of history. If God in that case had not only ‘done’ the crucifixion to Jesus then he must have ‘done’ the Holocaust to all the Jews and all the other victims of Nazism.

Let us, however, return to the original Jewish concept of God, monotheism, which never gives up faith in the one God despite all the terrible consequences. The Hebrew Bible bears the stamp of this faith and the consequences are also expressed clearly enough.

In Isisah, chapter 45, God says:

I am the LORD, and there is none else.

I form the light,

and create darkness:

I make peace,

and create evil:

I the LORD do all these things.

Jeremiah presents the same message when he says to Baruch:

Thou didst say, Woe is to me now!

For the LORD hath added grief to my sorrow;

I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest.

Thus shalt thou say unto him,

The LORD saith thus;

Behold,

that which I have built

will I break down,

and that which I have planted

I will pluck up,

even this whole land.

And seekest thou great things for thyself?

Seek them not: for,

behold, I will bring evil

upon all flesh, saith the LORD

In a similar way Amos asks unsparingly:

Shall there be evil in a city,

and the LORD hath not done it?

The ancient Israelites did not avoid expressing the reality of their monotheistic experience of God in respectable language. And even with Luther the commandment to Man regarding God with the words, ‘Thou shalt fear God and love…’. In the same way many old Good Friday hymns contain, at least indirectly, the belief in a terrible God. Contrary to the generally accepted idea of ‘the loving God’, through the widely accepted tradition of the sacrifice mythology, they actually express that he is ‘only to be appeased through sacrificial death and blood of his Son’.

The dispute over the bi-faceted God, both meek and his terrible, reaches its peak in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Job.

According to Job’s idea, his piety and his affluence changes in scene to the heavenly council attended by the ‘sons of God’, including Satan. In this case, Satan is also (still) not the equal opponent to God but a son of God, in other words subject to an hierarchical God who, as the story demonstrates, is subject to Gods instructions. In any case, he holds strictly to the limitations which God has set him.

In the heavenly council a dialog between God and Satan now develops. We find the decrees now issued to Satan and later to Job as alarming. The shed such an awful light on the nature and character of God that we have to ask ourselves how such a book could have found its way into the Holy Scriptures of the Jews and Christians.

Initially, God shows off the faithfulness of Job only without delay to deliver give him into the hands of Satan who not only destroys all his possessions but even kills his children. Job does not waiver. Thereupon, Satan escalates his attack with the express permission of God, covering his body with sore boils. Job does not waiver. However, after a long argument with his friends, he declares, ‘Behold I cry out of wrong…. (God) hath kindled his wrath against me and he counteth me unto him as one of his enemies. But he does not give up hope: ‘For I know that my redeemer liveth… whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another though my reins be consumed within me.’ Finally, God answers Job in manner of speech and content as a weakling, upon which Job gives up and subjects himself to the unbridled violence and dominance: ‘Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. Once have I spoken; but I will not answer; yea, twice; but I will proceed no further.’ Upon which God continues: ‘Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?’

Job’s experience has driven humanity into an existential spiritual crisis which appears at first to be insoluble. This applies not only for the past and not only for Judaism. It is valid for today and for every human being. In this story, God appears in fact as a monster without feelings who delivers his own creatures up to the arbitrariness of his reprobate son (clearly spoken: to his own dark aspect). And Job experiences the brutality of God painfully on his own body, nevertheless, without giving up the hope of another, brighter, friendlier aspect of God.

We could denigrate this story as a document of a primitive concept of God which has become meaningless today if not virtually everybody has been in Job’s situation at some time in their life, not able to understand the reason for the fate which has come upon oneself. In such a situation, the ancient story becomes alive and absolutely up-to-date. Then it is necessary to hold fast and find an answer. This timeless currency is certainly the reason why the story has found itself into the Bible and remains alive to this day.

The way from polytheism to monotheism is thus not just the way of the history of the spiritual development of mankind but also the way of enlightenment for every individual. Sooner or later, the collective as well as the individual way the point of acquaintance with the dark aspect of God, a point which will be unavoidable latest when this confrontation is experienced as physical and psychic suffering as part of our own fundamental fate.

In this situation, the current polytheism with its gods of success, career, affluence or however else they may be named, nor the dualism of a superficial Christianity with its separation of the world of the gods in a Lord of Light and a Lord of Darkness (mirrored in an immaterial, spiritual self) and a Lord of Darkness (mirrored in the material body and the rest of nature). Yet even the conviction of those who see Darkness as only the absence of Light, fades when compared to the brutal reality. In just the same way, the flight into a more or less enlightened atheism is of little assistance to us.

In the existential crisis, polytheism sets out on the futile flight into flippancy and superficiality. The Christ of dualism attempts to split reality, exporting evil and darkness or, on the road to self destruction, to eradicate it inside oneself and externally. It thus succumbs to the scapegoat syndrome, searching for anybody to blame upon whom it can unload its bitterness, yet without being liberated by it. The refusal to recognize darkness as one’s own inner reality leads, in the same way, into delusion. This viewpoint, traditionally to be found amongst Christians and amazingly today also often found amongst the disciples of the New Age Movement, suffers under the dualistic temptation of seeing darkness as destructiveness and evil, distracting attention from these powers of darkness in the naive expectancy that they can thus be banned from existence. This is of course a delusion. Even Jesus was not spared from this consideration before he commenced his public mission. In fact, according to the Biblical reports, he was involved in an active dialog with the Devil.

Apart from what view one holds on demonic powers, even the empirical psychology provides evidence of ‘autonomous mind content’ as Carl Gustav Jung formulated it. Whereby it is clear that these ‘autonomous mind contents’ can have a positive, constructive as well as a negative, destructive nature, which separation nevertheless, as we all are aware, is superficial and often questionable. The avoidance of acknowledging dark psychic and spiritual realities leads only to its suppression causing one-sided recognition and experience itself as destructive forces. The Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation supply a clear example of this. When we compare the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation with each other under the premise that they, according to the theory of a Jewish researcher, probably only partly share a common source (although this opinion is repudiated by most scholars, I support my argument on the research of the Jewish historian, Schonfield, who comes to this conclusion), a frightful ambivalence is apparent. The Gospel and the Letters proclaim a message of Love while the Revelation heralds a bloodthirsty message of destruction. It appears as if the main source of these traditions, the message of Love, finally became too much or at least too one-sided, so that possibly the Dark Side of His Being became the source of inspiration for pictures and an aspect of monstrous destruction. In any case, it is noticeable that thus the same person is the carrier of the main elements of both messages.

Certainly, the suppression of the dark powers and their reduction to the relative easily correctable results of human error does not meet up with reality and can thus not be a way to salvation. It is necessary to stick to the fact that Carl Gustav Jung thus formulated in his life recollections:

‘Now the Christian world is really confronted with the principle of evil, namely with open injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery and suppression of conscience…. evil has become the decisive reality. It cannot be banned from the world just by renaming it. We have to learn to how to get on with it because it wants to live with us. It is not possible to imagine how that should be possible without causing the greatest of damage.’

This is the situation in which we find ourselves. For us Germans it reached a pinnacle of abomination in the, still to this day not processed Third Reich, as well as is clearly apparent in the armaments race, unemployment, the destruction of the environment, the plundering and exploitation of the raw material exporting countries and in racism apparent in the discrimination of foreigners.

How little we have fundamentally changed to date is evident apart from the mostly violent eruptions of our brown inheritance, by the only marginally publicized and recognized scandal from 1987, where representatives of Judaism had to draw attention to a declaration by a German military strategist in which he discussed the economies of various extermination strategies and in which he compared the various methods of mass extermination used in concentration camps. Although as a result a press release was published by the Ministry of Defense in the form of an apology, there was not talk of taking disciplinary measures against the author.

This displays what such masters of denial we are. It would be better to face up to the dark realities and to taking them seriously and consciously. As long as we do not have the courage to do so we will remain apathetic, inconsequent, forcibly ruled by them and driven to and fro. First of all the recognition (German: Wahrnehmung – literally, ‘truth taking’) and acceptance of the truth provides the basics for the dialog (German: Auseinandersetzung – literally, ‘taking apart’) and for the creation of a consciousness as is clear in the example of the temptation of Jesus.

The starting point is especially clearly illustrated in Martin Büber’s translation of Genesis 4.7:

If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?

And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.

And unto thee shall be his desire,

And thou shalt rule over him. (here KJV)

When not integrated, sin manifests itself as that which is separated out (in German, the words for ‘sin’ and ‘separation’ have the same root) and that residue will be a stubborn beleaguerer – a being who is always threatening to makes us subject to himself. How then shall we manage to ‘rule over him’?

Quite obviously, we will have to consciously get involved with him, entering into dialog, accepting his existence and integrating him as part of our personalities. If we fail to do this, perhaps while we prefer to ‘capitulate’, suppress or subjugate ourselves, he will find another way to gain entry and ‘rule over us’ as ‘autonomous mind content’. This autonomy can only be avoided or conquered through integration.

Where is the God of Love in the history of humanity if in fact, as Jesus taught, not even a sparrow falls to the ground without God allowing it?

The answer to this question is of essential meaning for us because the just the very idea that God is a God of Love and/or a monster without feelings could not be endured by humanity. The roots of atheism seem to lie exactly in this problem area.

In the hell of the concentration camp, the Jewess Elie Wiesel found an answer which may appear strangely familiar to a Christian but would be seem like sacrilege for many. Elie Wiesel describes a scene in Birkenau camp:

‘As we came back from our work one day, we saw three gallows set up on the parade ground. Stand to attention. All around us the SS with threatening machine guns, the usual ceremony. Three condemned to death, including one child with finely cut features, the angel with the sad eyes.

This time the camp commander refused to act as executioner. Three SS men stood in for him.

The three condemned climbed together upon their stools. Three necks were set into nooses at the same time. ‘Long live freedom’ cried the two adults. The child remained still.

‘Where is God, where is He?’ asked someone behind me.

Upon a sign from the camp commander, the chairs tipped. Absolute silence ruled over the camp. On the horizon the sun went down.

‘Caps off!’ shouted the the camp commander. His voice sounded hoarse. We cried.

‘Caps on!’

Then the marching past started. Both adults lived no longer… but the third noose did not hang still: the light boy was still alive.

He hung there in that way more than half an hour, thus fighting with death, struggling between living and dying, in front of our eyes. His tongue was still red, the light in his eyes not yet put out.

Behind me, I heard the same man ask, ‘Where is God?’

And I heard a voice answer in me, ‘Where is he? There – there he hangs upon the gallows…’

The incarnation of God, the habitation of God in Man is Elie Wiesel’s answer to the question which has become unendurable, ‘where is God?’.

However, Elie Wiesel only goes half the way in this story. He recognizes the habitation of God in the victim, in the suffering and scourged person and finding yet a consoling image of God in this way. However, he was not in a position to face the terrible question of the habitation of God in the murderer, as in the role of God in the deeds of the Nazi rogues.

Carl Gustav Jung deals with this question, which is in actual fact the central theme of the book of Job, in his later work ‘Answer on Job’ in some detail and, I might add, ruthlessly.

Firstly, he comments on the role of God in this drama and comes to the conclusion that the behavior of God, seen and interpreted from a human point of view, is quite frankly disgusting. He describes how God’s contradictory manner, also observable in older Bible texts, is revealed in all its horror. The God who expects strict moral behavior from Man, as, for example clearly expressed in the ten commandments, is himself totally amoral, at least in the way in which he reveals Himself to Man and how Man experiences and recognizes his works.

With the concept of the divine, as apparent in the Book of Job, the relationship between Man and his God within Judaism has reached its absolutely lowest point because this God has no consoling or loving qualities, even if he He makes up in the end. Man is left to his own devices in the cosmic drama and only the hope, ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ remains as a light in the darkness, as is movingly made clear already in the various expressions of this statement to found in church liturgy.

It requires a dramatic step in the development of the relationship to God or the manner in which man experiences and interpets this relationship. This step is realized for us Christians in the concept of the incarnation of God in Jesus. Carl Gustav Jung writes, “This is where the answer to Job is given…. Yahweh’s intention to become human, which came out of the clash with Job, is fulfilled in the life and suffering of Christ.”

Jesus teaches the fatherly God of love. As Karl Herbst makes clear, this view of God does not seem to be based on something lernt but goes back directly to the personal God experience during the baptism in the Jordan, where Jesus suddenly experiences God as a Loving One (“You are my beloved Son”).

The question of the root of evil and who carries the responsibilty nevertheless remains unanswered. However, the teaching of Jesus on the fatherly, loving God is an event of tremendous importance in view of the story of Job and the Job experience as well as from what history teaches us.

It begins, in fact, with the new era – even if a new age for humanity has not begun – as Franz Alt 19 expressed it, but has only become a concrete possibility in the same way that a future oak tree exists in the acorn.

With the incarnation of God in Jesus, the ambivalence between reconciliation and drawing near, whilst reaching a pinnacle for Christian awareness, is far from being completed. It is really only just beginning because in the image of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit “upon all flesh”, the continuing incarnation of God in Man is actually signalized and completed. This declaration may appear rather hard to swallow for some Christians but Angelus Silesius had come to the same conclusion in the 17th century, “If Christ had been born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be lost.