The Purpose of Pentecost

In Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy he makes a largely accurate, yet shaming set of observations about Christianity. As Frieda Fordham excerpted:

Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the inner-most possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a paganism which, now in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the world of so-called Christian culture.

As Frieda Fordham observed, “Man needs to experience the god-image within himself and to feel its correspondence with the forms that his religion gives to it.”

Something that I have repeatedly observed, and I am not passing judgments on Jung or Fordham, is that non-Christians seem to have an excellent grasp (or at least in their own minds) of what is to be expected of Christians. Jung, and his disciple Fordham, nonetheless have a valid complaint.

The apostle Paul knew the feeling all too well, “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). Jesus himself had issued the warning to his disciples, “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me” (John 15:4). My Christian walk cannot be just me.

We place these sometimes convenient chapter and verse divisions into our thinking of the Scripture passages. Looking at John 15 we assume that this is a distinct and separate section. John 14:31 helps affirm that appearance by concluding, “Arise, let us go hence.” But chapter 15’s setting also has a similar bookend, marker of change but that does not start until 18:1, “When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron.” Chapter 17 was a prayer, “These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven,” where he made yet another famous prayer. Chapter 16 is a continuation of the teaching in chapter 15. Are we to make the picture that Jesus taught in chapter 14 as they all lounged about but that the teaching of chapters 15 and 16 had to be some time or place different, added later as some insist, simply because Jesus told his people to stand at the end of chapter 14? In Matthew 13, Jesus “sat by the sea side” (v. 1) and the crowd gathered to hear him, “and the whole multitude stood on the shore” (v. 2). When Jesus fed the crowds in Matthew 14 and 15, why did have to do this: “he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground” if they were already seated?

Jesus taught us a great deal in John 15–16, and his prayer is an excellent example in John 18, but it is all tied to John 14. Jesus began a teaching that started by a connection.

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (14:1–3)

There is God, there is Jesus, and there are you, those who follow Jesus. Jesus has the place and relationship to make room for you in God the Father’s house, “that where I am, there ye may be also.” It is not necessarily an easy thing to grasp. One of the disciples present at that original moment had to be told again in verses 9–11 that Jesus and God the Father had this close, family connection. The subsequent verses 12–14 extends this connection to the disciples. It is not just the disciples present with Jesus at that Passover meeting (see John 13), it is also true of those of us who believe Jesus today.

Jesus made still another God to man connection in John 14,

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. (v. 16–17)

The “world cannot receive” and the reason is connected to the explanatory phrase, “because it seeth him not.” In that expression who is “it” and who is “him”? The “it” is a person because there is the question of sight. The “him” cannot be Jesus without Jesus making a very odd and uncharacteristic reference to himself. The “Comforter” was not described as we translate, “that it may abide with you for ever” but “he may abide.” Jesus made clear that while he spoke of a person, he did not speak of a human with a separate human body (which Moslems attribute to Muhammad), “for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.”

Jesus continued to describe a person, “which is the Holy Ghost” (v. 26), and then they arose from their lounging after a meal. The teaching of chapters 15 and 16 we of his almost parabolic style recorded in other Gospel examples. There is a formality that is unlike that just among friends in chapter 14. The military typifies what happened in this Scripture passage. An officer comes among a group of soldiers, they jump to a rigid standing posture called “attention.” The officer then opts for one of three situations: “as you were”, to continue in the rigid “attention” posture and attitude, or more formally line up and assume a slightly more relaxed “parade rest” form. People would sit or recline to eat and converse, but standing in respect to hear the words of someone important saying something important is a concept that our casual society sometimes does not grasp.

What was so important that Jesus wanted the disciples to stand and hear? He spoke of a relationship in important and comparatively precise terms. Jesus is in God. If his disciples abide in Jesus, then they will also abide in the presence of God. The world, the people who do not know or have this understanding cannot share in this relationship. Jesus was sending his disciples to make disciples of the world, but that the world would aggressively fight against them. It was an essentially simple task, but with enormous consequences, and costs.

Whether Jung knew Jesus, the matter is not clear. But Jung was clear on one thing, the Christianity he typically saw was not the Christianity typified by Paul in Acts of Christians that “have turned the world upside down” (17:6). What is missing? Jung knew. It was the image of God in our hearts.

Jesus not only spoke of the coming Holy Spirit in John 14 and following. Luke 24:49 gives hint to it, “behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.” Even the cryptic “Lo, I am with you always” of Matthew 28:20 suggests it. The Acts 1:4–5 passage tells it:

And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

In Acts 2 is where it first happened, that was where “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost” (v. 4). People were changed. Blundering Peter spoke eloquently. The church that Jung had seen was not that body of three thousand on Pentecost Sunday almost two thousand years ago. They had that image of God not merely stamped inside them, but living in and with them.

I grew up in an Assembly of God tradition in two churches in the areas where I lived. As an adult I was member and church worker although I had never “spoken in tongues.” Struggling through some problems in my young adulthood, I had a desire to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but like all the other times of decision before, I really did not want to bother with tongues. Meaningless babbling is not what I needed.

One evening I heard the same Pentecostal message, but this matter of closeness and communication with God was almost as if spoken twice as loud and echoed in my soul. Reluctantly I went down to the bench that was our altar of prayer when the invitation came for those who wanted to receive the Holy Spirit baptism. I tried very hard not to laugh as I literally experienced someone on one side saying “hold on!” while someone on the other side said “let go!” Tired of my lack of success, people started to drift off to pray with others. Simply tired from my troubles, I drifted off as in a dream to a bright room where I just looked at the floor and talked to Jesus. It was as if in a distant part of the church that I heard people giving those pleased sounds as if someone else had started speaking in tongues. I returned to my conversation and while I do not remember words there were moments as if a nod or a comforting hug affirmed my words and feelings. I leaned back, took a deep breath and it seemed like it was over. Yet I felt rested. I felt comforted. There was a moment of disappointment about not speaking in tongues, but for the first time in months I was something close to feeling happy. As I left, there were about three people that slapped me on the back and said things like “You sure got it tonight” and “you just started talking in tongues and talking and talking, it was something.”

I would love to be able to say that everything worked out rosy and I was the model of sainthood afterwards, but that wasn’t the case. Still, there were no more doubts and reservations about God. On many times before I had prayed and felt like God had heard me, or even that at times I had heard from God. But this time, and several times since, I had been with God.

As Jung noted, “Christian education has done all that is humanly possible.” Still, the difference, as our Scripture makes clear, is when God lives in us. Pentecost is much more than a debate on speaking in tongues. It is living in God.



Fordham, Frieda. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=852&Itemid=41#Contents4 at The Jung Page: Reflections on Psychology, Culture, and Life: http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php (accessed May 1, 2009).
Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, vol. 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Terror Management Theory

When reading in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, I stumbled across an article by Mike Friedman and W. Steven Rholes, “Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management.” Thinking that the subject was one of Islamic terrorists, normal American that I am, I was surprised to find that the “fundamentalism” Friedman and Rholes studied was essentially Christian. On the bright side, however, the terror management was not one, directly, of blowing up buildings and busses.

Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg borrowed from Anthropologist Ernest Becker and produced something called the Terror Management Theory, or TMT. In a 2004 article for Social Research, Pyszczynski generally described a synthesis that Becker began as “to integrate and combine what he saw as the best and most enduring insights that had come out of the human sciences and humanities over the years—ideas from Darwin, Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, G. H. Mead, and many others.” Pyszczynski then “took Becker’s ideas and combined them with” what they were seeing from their psychological and then-current studies. From this, to summarize Pyszczynski, TMT dealt with the role of self-esteem, a preference for one view of truth (“out of all the different ways of conceiving reality”), and why don’t people just get along with people who are different. From reading in related articles, I get the idea that the “Terror” in the Terror Management Theory may be some sensationalism to help sell the theory.

Back to Friedman and Rholes, they describe two primary aspects in TMT. First, there is the aspect of “mortality salience” and, second, an “anxiety buffer.” From reading further on the matter, the anxiety buffer is what makes the TM theory more than just applicable for hospice care counseling for those on the verge of dying. Many want to expand the anxiety buffer to extremes of prejudicial actions. It is almost as if the terror of dying lends itself to the fear of people that are different, and that to the attack and murder of people who are different, thus resolving the conflicts in mind. Rather than managing terrorists, as I first surmised, Terror Management is to keep such narrow minded souls as we who find only one solution to our human mortality, Jesus Christ, from becoming a terror to those who do not.

The TMT subscribers are mostly humanists, to whom God and religion was a human invention. It makes me wonder, however, that if God really created us, then the author of terror management set in motion the process to alleviate all our fears of death. Jesus died in our place, accepting the punishment of our sins, our failing to live up to God’s expectations of us. Jesus makes us accepted, new creatures, children of God so that when our souls are called to account, Jesus will stand in the middle and say, “My blood was shed for this one.” My terror management is the reality of following Christ.

Sweet Hope

In Plato’s Republic, there is an interesting passage:

When a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age. (Book I)

When I think of people I’ve approached concerning the Gospel message of Jesus, this comment by Cephalus to Socrates is so fitting, “deeds done here were once a laughing matter.” I recall when friends and acquaintances were driven to drink, or smoking hand-rolled leaves of strange grass, sometimes their talk in the quiet moments were as Cephalus supposedly said well over two millennia ago, “but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true . . . he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others.” Even today we have not much moved from what the song writer of the previous century quipped, “I swear there is no heaven and I pray there is no hell.”

Many people grow up in search of purpose and grasping vainly for meaning. The existential fad and a line from still another melancholy and cynical song says “Is that all there is?” The conclusion of the tune was that drink and dance were as good an occupation of their time as anything.

This is the realm of the Bible’s Ecclesiastes. Solomon said it himself,

I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life. (Ecclesiastes 2:1–3, KJV)

As every student knows, and Solomon long ago himself noted, “and much study is a weariness of the flesh” so I will, as we say, ‘cut to the chase’:

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14)

Ah, but this is so archaic, so ‘old school’ and antiquated an answer. Solomon also had this right, “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails” and therefore would agree with you. Still, read further of Solomon’s advice, which seems strangely close to answering Cephalus’ lament:

Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is
for the eyes to behold the sun:
But if a man live many years,
and rejoice in them all;
yet let him remember the days of darkness;
for they shall be many.
All that cometh is vanity.
Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth;
and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth,
and walk in the ways of thine heart,
and in the sight of thine eyes:
but know thou,
that for all these things
God will bring thee into judgment.
Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart,
and put away evil from thy flesh:
for childhood and youth are vanity.
Remember now thy Creator
in the days of thy youth,
while the evil days come not,
nor the years draw nigh,
when thou shalt say,
I have no pleasure in them
(Ecclesiastes 11:7–12:1)

In Plato’s story, Cephalus had described how “when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings.” Directly after this little speech Cephalus excused himself, he had to go tend to the sacrifices for his deity.

Our deity made a sacrifice for us. Sufficient for us all. We have the confidence that will allow those of us who dare to trust upon it, to sleep well when the pains and cares of life do not distract us. Cephalus concluded, “But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age.”

This brings me to two questions, one small and one great. First, have the cynical among us reviewed the Scriptural treasures of Solomon in his moment of reflection on a good life gone bad? Ecclesiastes is quite telling, and compelling. I know it helped guide and sustain at least one cynical soul, which was me.

The most important of questions in light of this discussion may be, have you found the “sweet hope” that the ancient philosophers searched for? If Jesus has forgiven, and you have trusted that He has taken away your sin, then you have that “sweet hope” that Plato wrote of as he expressed a fear and yearning that has not disappeared from humanity in the intervening centuries. It is interesting how John phrased it:

But if we walk in the light,
as he is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another,
and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son
cleanseth us from all sin
(1 John 1:7)

That poetic cadence, the light metaphor in the context of following God’s will, it is almost as if the same Spirit that spoke into Solomon’s ear also spoke into John’s. Has it spoken into yours? There is hope, and it is sweet.

The Word and God

I recently read some things in G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker’s book on Ludwig Wittgenstein that reaffirmed in my mind part of what we do in biblical theology. Baker and Hacker summarized some of Wittgenstein’s starting thoughts, where he pondered Augustine’s notions of language like this:

The essence of language: namely, that words name objects and that sentences are combinations of names. This primitive picture of naming as the foundation of language displays the seed from which numerous philosophical conceptions of language and linguistic meaning grow. . . .every word has a meaning, the meaning is correlated with the word, it is the object the word stands for. Sentences are essentially complex, composed of words in appropriate combination. . . . central to this Augustinian conception is also the idea that language is connected with reality, i.e. that words (names) are endowed with meaning by means of word-world connections. So ostensive definition of primitive terms is conceived to be the fundamental form of explanation of word-meaning, and it is taken to be the point at which names are linked to things. (8)

From this section Baker and Hacker then began a literal “Exegesis” of Wittgenstein and his writings in order to explore what that thinker more fully felt and therefore meant.

When people study the Bible, especially in the area of higher education, we might want to have some form of this word picture in mind as to what we are doing. While there are numerous philosophical concepts of how people think and obtain meaning, in biblical studies a person cannot go far without resorting to some Greek or Hebrew expression having certain ranges of meaning.

Each explorer of the biblical texts are trying to conceive of the objects “that words name” and explore the meaning that these “words in appropriate combination” have. While Baker and Hacker tried to intricately ferret out the meaning of a person in recent years, the student of the Bible has a different task.

When we see a string of Greek or Hebrew words, we have to struggle first with the fact that they are of another language than that we currently use. But, if Augustine and Wittgenstein were on to something, these words were placed and ordered for a purpose. This purpose is part of the meaning. Looking at one word, seeing what experts in that language have said that it does or could mean in our language, is nice but the sentence is more than one word. The context of the time it was written in has some bearing in the meaning and even the word order.

But whose meaning are we finding? Are we more concerned with the persons of such as Moses, David, Isaiah, and Daniel or the God that spoke to them, inspiring, sometimes commanding them, to write? Luke Timothy Johnson described the New Testament writings in human terms, after making allowance for competing ranges of view, “I mean at the simplest level that the writings must be taken seriously as fully human productions. Divine inspiration is not excluded, but inspiration is not a fact available for study” (5, emphasis his).

I understand Johnson’s discussion, but I personally fit in the group he calls “supernaturalists.” As Johnson describes, in part, “the NT looks like the OT because it has the same author, God. The human writers were passive recipients of the divine impuse, secretaries taking down dictation” (3). I don’t know how passive an Isaiah was when watching Hezekiah spread a letter on the altar in asking for a rescue from Assyrians (2 Chronicles 32), or a David after watching his child die in punishment for his sin could then write something such as Psalm 51, yet as the human part was present the divine part cannot be divorced.

Certainly, John and Paul had a part, but definitely God did too. As we search through biblical words for meaning, not all meaning was for the prophet and the people of his time. The prophets themselves sometimes had to ask what this meant or why that was hidden. But if God had not intended a message beyond that of men in their assorted problems, then those like Ezra or Luke would have labored inconsequentially and there would be no worth for us to read today.

Search the words for Ezekiel’s meaning, or Hosea or James, read your mechanical translations and ask the One who made you if there is more. It may surprise you how often the answer is “Yes.”



Baker, G. P., and P. M. S. Hacker. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. 2nd edition. Vol. 1. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Johnson, Luke Timothy, and Todd C. Penner. The Writings of the New Testament. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999.

Democracy and People

Someone asked a question recently about a word we were describing in a textbook. There are those interesting moments when something in one language looks very much like another word in a different language. In this case a Greek word, δημον, or as commonly transliterated dēmon or daemon, looked distractingly like something very different in English, which most readers have already surmised at this point.

R. W. Browne said that this term for a group of people “combined the good and bad points in the character of a populace, with the distinguishing features of an educated deliberative assembly” (p. 361). Notice the "deliberative assembly," we were talking about democracy in action, and the action word was rooted in dēmon. Kurt Raaflaub wrote an interesting article called "The Breakthough of Dēmokratia" and others such as Eric Robinson gave some description of the concept at work as well (see note 68 on page 55 of his book).

In the formation of this country we adopted the terms "Assembly" and even "Congress" to borrow from the classical "deliberative" bodies in antiquity. In the largely forgetable movie of the stage play 1776, there was a wonderful moment when one of the founding fathers of the United States turned his head to the sky to address God, saying essentially that he permits us to cope with things like famine and pestilance, "But Congress? That's not fair!"

When you read through the book of Acts, think that some of those words like "crowd" or even "mob" are presented to you in translation of some form of the word dēmon. Thinking of the expression and some of our "deliberative assemblies" I can't help but think that this is a God-given pun at times. (This is about as political as I intend to get)


Robert William Browne. History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature. http://books.google.com/books?id=uPwQAAAAIAAJ

F. D. Morice. Stories in Attic Greek. http://books.google.com/books?id=GYkCAAAAQAAJ [see page 153, for δημος as “the people, the commons”]

Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. http://books.google.com/books?id=6qaSHHMaGVkC

Eric Robinson. The First Democracies. http://books.google.com/books?id=T1kfcobFRSMC

Francis Edward Thompson. Syntax of Attic Greek. http://books.google.com/books?id=GfEIAAAAQAAJ

S. C. Woodhouse. English-Greek Dictionary. http://books.google.com/books?id=UR2bLaOYhucC [For "assembly" see sustrophe and ekklesia; for "crowd" see ochlos and plethos; for "body" see δίμας]