411 - Jesus Answer to God

Jesus' Answer to God
By Elizabeth B. Howes
San Francisco, Guild for Psychological Studies Publishing House, 1984. 233 pp. $15 ($11.50 paper).

This book is the authors answer to Jesus. It is the struggle to distinguish Jesus' own interpretation of his teaching from that of later interpretations,

412 - Jesus Answer to God

and to recover elements of Jesus' own personal myth from the residue of myths about him. Howes' historico-mythic mode of understanding uses historical criticism and Jungian psychology to move behind the mythologizing of the history of Jesus. The deep interior truths leading to individual consciousness that Jesus manifested have been turned, she says, into seemingly historical events which became dogma that had to be believed. He has thus been made the carrier of our inner myth, and we have projected out onto him the divine potentialities for healing, heroism, and transformation that God's presence within us makes entirely possible.

Jesus lived his own inner myth as the immanent expression of God transcendent and incorporated it into his personal history. He taught others how to live their history. Christian mythology is not in his teachings. He did not heal "in the name of Jesus." He taught others how to relate to the same Source to which he was related ;to find the same sonship or daughtership that had come upon him, as a quantum leap in the divine-human relationship, at his baptism; to experience the messianic as God within rather than projecting it out on a deliverer. By so doing, he became a deliverer, and in bringing so vast a human consciousness to God, inaugurated an evolutionary shift of cosmic proportions. He incarnated God by bringing God into the stuff of everyday existence, not as a once and final incarnation, but as the harbinger of the next evolutionary step we are all called to risk.

This continuing incarnation in humanity meant that God had moved closer to conscious awareness, not just as the God of history, but as the core of the self as well. But hosting God requires transformation. Death and rebirth become the pattern of resurrected existence. God had entered newly and wholly into the heart of Jesus at the Jordan-this was God's call to Jesus. Equally, Jesus had entered into God's heart-this was Jesus' answer to God.

For those who are no longer moved by a Jesus-did-it-all-for-you Christology, and are wary of the new do-it-yourself narcissistic spiritualities. this study, the fruit of a lifetime of teaching, may come as a refreshing new, start.

Walter Wink
Auburn Theological Seminary
New York, N.Y.