Search

The paper briefly and appreciatively presents Huntington's thesis that future wars will be fought between civilizations bonded by differing religions. It then shows an extensive initial agreement between Huntington and Carl Jung whose ideas of the participation mystique, representations collectives, the "isms" and the collective shadow jointly con-tend that civilizations are bonded by archetypal powers, the same agencies that generate religious bonding. Consequently the more archetypally based the bonding, the less conscious and so less morally sensitive are those bonded in relation to the differently bonded. But Jung goes beyond Huntington in contending that the psyche itself moves to a conscious and historical actualization of the human commonalities that Huntington acknowledges in passing as the distant solution to the clash of civilizations. By identifying these commonalities and their psychodynamics, Jung completes Huntington by envisaging a humanity cognizant that its cultural/religious differences derive from a common human source, the archetypal unconscious. This realization would relativize religious/cultural differentiation and so contribute to a global myth that would foster the embrace of differentiated cultures and negate the threat they currently pose to the continuance of the species.

In occasional addresses late in his life Paul Tillich confesses to a lingering provincialism in his theology during the same period in which he was completing the third volume of his systematic theology where many of these same provincialisms appear. The article identifies such provincialisms in his ecclesiology, missiology, christology, history of religion and eschatology. The article then argues that his final position, embodied in his understanding of the Religion of the Concrete Spirit, endorses a universal sacramentalism in interplay with mystical and prophetic elements that would appreciate all religions but deny any an absolute claim while able to compensate religious needs specific to each cultural moment. The revisioning of humanity's religious propensity as supporting a mutually relative relation among religions remains valuable in an historical period when the human future may be threatened by competing unqualified religious claims and their secular equivalents.

A Jungian hermeneutic is helpful in the interpretation of shifts in contemporary religion and spirituality. Jung's thought on the psychogenesis of religious experience locates its origin in the unconscious and understands the history of revelation as that of compensation proffered to collective consciousness in the interests of its balance and totality. Jung perceives the unconscious to be currently engaged in the creation of a new myth or revelation containing the divine/human relation within the boundaries of the extended psyche. Such containment implies the relativization of God, and urges a quaternitarian cosmology which would extend the status of the sacred beyond Christian limits. Jung appeals to aspects of the Western mystical tradition itself as anticipating this shift. His appreciation and appropriation of Eckhart and Boehme ground the contemporary myth on an ongoing cycle of identity with the divine preceding divinity's fuller incarnation in consequent human consciousness. The process is natural, at once psychic and religious, and redemptive of both the human and divine.