Jung and God
In Man and His Symbols, Jung attempts to tackle the topic of religious experience:
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”As interesting as Jung’s interpretation of the rabbi’s quote is, I find the quote itself more interesting. Why don’t we have direct experiences of God? There is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation. (92)
What does the Bible say about finding romance?
Perhaps the two most frequent things young Christian men ask me for advice about are relationships and overcoming a pornography habit. I’ll stick with relationships, though Dallas Willard has great advice for those who struggle to kick pornography: Beyond Pornography. On to relationships.
Most of the guys who ask for advice, though sometimes women come to my wife for such advice as well, ask how to enter into a relationship in the first place in the current dating market. Many of them suffer from a glut of two pieces of advice:
Memory and Hearing Scripture
Joshua Foer, in his book on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, observed this about adding versification to the Bible:
For the first time, a reader could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through. (144)
This observation is quite important because when we notice obvious quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, it is likely that this rhetorical device was meant to bring a range of emotions, concepts, and themes to mind that were exemplified by the context of the passage quoted. It is certainly possible to over-read things when we make this realization. The opposite danger is more readily possible though. If we assume that ancient readers thought of the Bible in terms of discrete versified units, then we are contradicting a fact about human memory that has been documented by modern science and thousands of years of observations by practitioners of memorization. So, when you notice a quote of the Old Testament in your New Testament, go read the context or the whole book. You'll get a better picture of what the New Testament author is saying.
Body of Christ
Nick posted about the Body of Christ. His chief insight, which is true, is that Jesus himself, though head of the church, is a member of the church. This is because the head is a member of the body. It reminded me of how a man I work with prays. He prays, "In the name of our older brother, Jesus." Sometimes people mention to me that that find this unusual. So I point them to these passages (ESV today, didn't feel like translating this morning):