663 - Healing Body and Soul: The Meaning of Illness in the New Testament and in Psychotherapy
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663 - Healing Body and Soul: The Meaning of Illness in the New Testament and in Psychotherapy |
Healing Body and Soul: The Meaning of Illness
in the New Testament and in Psychotherapy
By John A. Sanford
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. 136 pp. $9.99.
In this volume, John A. Sanford presents a kind of mini-Jungian view of healing in the New Testament and in analytical (Jungian) psychotherapy, modified by some of the useful insights of Fritz Kunkel, as well as his own. As Sanford sees it, although healing in the New Testament is not all of a piece, it comes about through a better relating to unconscious factors, or even a better awareness of them, leading to the growth of the self (or center or soul) and the relative diminishment of the power of the ego, or egocentricity.
Jesus seems to be a kind of super proto-psychotherapist who knows about these matters and uses his powers to effect healing. "It seems that even as Jesus showed little interest in people's belief systems, healing them regardless of their theology, so also today healing is generated within people who have little concern for doctrinal beliefs but great concern for their state of enlightenment and their ability to become free of their egocentricity." We can see the strong emphasis on enlightenment or gnosis leading to individuation that pervades this book, whether the healing is ancient or modern. The book also contains a rudimentary anthropology, including a rather nuanced and helpful discussion of various terms for sin in the New Testament, especially as they relate to healing.
As a guide to healing in the New Testament or in psychotherapy, this book is very narrowly from a Jungian perspective. The function of Jesus' healings as signs of the coming (and already present) Kingdom of God is ignored, for instance. The reader seeking to be generally well informed about healing in the New Testament would be better advised to consult a work like Sickness and Healing by Klaus Seybold and Ulrich B. Mueller. Although generally well informed about New Testament and classical Greek scholarship, Sanford imputes a fine grained knowledge and use of spoken Greek to Jesus not generally accepted when I was a student in seminary, nor today, to my knowledge.
James N. Lapsley
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ.