This course will discuss some of the psychological processes that underpin various biblical stories and much of the theological speculation to which they have given rise. The course is based on Jung’s ideas that “religious statements are psychic confessions” (CW11, para. 555), and “statements made in the Holy Scriptures are also utterances of the soul” (ibid., para. 557). The course will show that some biblical and theological ideas arise from human psychodynamics, often of a narcissistic type, while some originates in the archetypal level of the psyche.
Religious experiences and the theology to which they give rise are products of the psyche. They do not need to be seen as emanating from a metaphysical deity in a transcendent realm. The experience of transcendent reality reported by characters in biblical stories is the result of contact with non-ego, archetypal or transpersonal levels of the psyche, which is the actual source of sacred experience.