The second shoe: an appreciation and critique of Walter Wink's The Human Being.

In this exegetical and theoretical tour de force, Walter Wink has dropped the second shoe. The first shoe was dropped twenty-nine years ago with the publication of his Bible in Human Transformation. The subtitle of that book reads: "Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study" (italics added). Wink's plan in 1973 was to "do a sequel spelling out with case studies the process" he had described there. Twelve volumes later, with his Principalities and Powers trilogy and Transforming Bible Study in tow, we have the sequel, the second shoe, and a fitting match for the first. Why?

In that 1973 volume, he opened with the memorable declaration, "Historical biblical criticism is bankrupt." He explained that by "bankrupt" he did not mean something valueless, or useless, but rather something

   no longer able to accomplish its avowed purpose.... It is bankrupt
   solely because it is incapable of achieving what most of its
   practitioners considered its purpose to be: to interpret the
   Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present
   with new possibilities for personal and social transformation.
   (1-2)

Wink hasn't skipped a beat. This has been his purpose from beginning to end.

The Human Being is a virtuoso combination of historical and literary criticism, of ethics, philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach has an entire chapter), of spirituality, etymology, of Geistesgeschichte (which means not only the history of ideas but also the history of the strong cross-cultural currents that move in the human psyche), of depth psychology, and even a touch of neurophysiology.

For the biblical scholar there is a feast of original exegetical insight in well-traveled Synoptic territory, but also, virtually for the first time, the full inclusion of the Fourth Gospel as a worthy interlocutor in conversation about the impulse that the historic Jesus inaugurated in the human psyche. But above all, the book alters forever the way in which the Son-of-the-Man passages will be read by all of us who have read Wink's book. It achieves this by placing the discussion in a totally new context, namely, the process, in which and out of which the Son-of-the-man image emerges as a heuristic force within the human psyche.

Wink writes out of two hearts. I could say two minds, but it would fail to capture the passions with which he thinks and writes. The first heart is focused on what he calls, the pre-Easter Jesus, as opposed to the post-Easter, following Marcus Borg's categories. Wink is heavily invested in the pre-Easter Jesus because it provides for him the paradigmatic image of the Human Being archetype.

But, it is the second heart of Wink, associated with the phenomenon of the post-Easter Jesus, that marks his most original contribution, and we should add, at a considerable remove from the classical historical critical method. Three examples of this remove will suffice.

First he spells out his method, telling us he will "not seek to get behind the text" as much as to "penetrate deeply into the texts." "I employ historical-critical tools wherever they seem appropriate," Wink tells us, but basically wants us to see the text as "the Sinai of the Soul, where God still speaks," hardly a run-of-the-mill historical-critical objective (5).

Second, Wink tells us that truth is to be valued above historical accuracy. Throughout, Wink intriguingly insists that his goal is to determine not "so much whether Jesus actually said something, but whether it is true, regardless of who said it" (15). To illustrate his point he adds a flourish seldom heard on the plains of historical biblical scholarship, quoting Black Elk the Lakota Sioux, "This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know but if you think about it, you can see that it is true" (112).

Third, reflecting the work of his former student Hal Childs and his highly important volume, The Myth of History and the Evolution of Consciousness, Wink concurs that all attempts to reclaim the historical Jesus are mythic in content and agenda and that the goal of historical Jesus research from the perspective of psychological realism (in Childs's words) is to contribute to "the evolution of consciousness, both for the individual and for culture ... in the service of self-understanding and world-understanding" (260, 230-31). Or in Wink's words: "True, the quest for the historical Jesus has not presented Jesus 'as he really was.' Rather, that quest has all along been the largely unconscious search for a Jesus who can bring us to life" (112). Wink writes, "If we are successful, we will have contributed, through historical reflection and interpretation, to a new myth, the myth of the human Jesus" (3). Wink also makes plain what he understands by the word "myth": "not a made-up story, fiction, or false idea. Rather, it refers to those founding narratives that provide whole societies with orientation to the world" (271).

With these statements of presupposition and purpose, Wink acknowledges a debt to the Jesus seminar, but at the same time recognizes, correctly, that his book "deviates ... greatly" from their conclusions (xii).

Wink's second heart is focused on what I like to call "psychological realism," following the lead of Hal Childs. Whereas historical realism tells us about physical, economic, social, and political facts, psychological realism tells us about the psychic facts and factors at work in every human scenario. These psychic factors are cut from both conscious and unconscious cloth, and they permeate all human activity. They are "real" with "real effect." They operate in the individual and in the collective. And they are at work at the heart of Jesus research, both in its method and motive, as much as they are in my speaking this sentence and your listening. And they may in the end prove to be the most decisive determinants of what a text includes, why its sayings and stories were remembered, for what purpose it is written, how it is read, and how and why it affects human lives and history.

Wink's work in psychological realism stands on many shoulders. He mentions many in the Jungian tradition, most notably Elizabeth Howes, to whom the book is dedicated. But there are others within the biblical scholarly tradition, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century ,who have set up flares along the way, signaling the need for the introduction of psychological realism into biblical scholarship, from Wilhelm Bousset, Johannes Weiss, B. H. Streeter, to Vincent Taylor, C. A. Simpson, Henry Cadbury, and F. C. Grant. In 1968 Grant wrote of the need to go "beyond the historical and exegetical interpretation of the Bible ..." to the "whole new field of depth psychology and psychoanalysis" (Rollins, 1999, 65).

To help the uninitiated, Wink helpfully provides a glossary of psychological terms: archetype, Ego, the God-image, imaginal plane, individuation, myth, the numinous, projection, and Self (270-271).

I would like to comment on three dimensions of Wink's approach to the enigma of the son-of-the-man from the perspective of psychological realism.

1) The first is Wink's portrait of the collective unconscious at work in the promulgation of the Son of the Man archetype. Wink proposes that we can observe "around the beginning of the first millennium, the explosion of a massive archetypal mutation: an inner Anthropos, a divine child, born of the divine Human--a homing device orienting us toward our true selves" (247). "This revelation had steadily been asserting itself from the time of Ezekiel forward, and was now affecting everything in its path. It not only dominated Christian and Jewish theology and mystical practice, but manifested itself in a novel way in Gnosticism, and within the bosom of Islam, in Sufism" (229). "This new spiritual understanding burst onto the scene with incomparable power" (246). A major thrust of Wink's book is to provide the rationale and evidence for advancing this hypothesis.

2) A second set of observations has to do with the psychology of effects, captured in Wink's useful phrase, "the original impulse of Jesus" (italics added). "My goal ... is to recover what Jesus unleashed--the original impulse that prompted the spread of his message" (13). Wink is probing the alchemy that occurs between the historic Jesus and those whose psyche, conscience, will, and vision have been catalyzed by the encounter. Wink quotes an oft-cited statement of Carl Jung's that makes the point exceptionally well:

   Christ would never have made the impression he did on his followers
   if he had not expressed something that was alive and at work in
   their unconscious. Christianity itself would never have spread
   through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity had its ideas
   not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. (151)

3) A third application of psychological insight is seen in Wink's trenchant observations on Gnostic texts and the Gnostic mind, "wild metaphysicians" as he calls them. Wink reminds us: "Gnostic writings were largely unintelligible until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts and the advent of depth psychology, both in the twentieth century" (214). What depth psychology discovered is that in their Zen-like mystery and the tangled copse of their metaphors and symbols, Gnostic writing constituted a treasury of "radical inwardness and imagination" and sounded the beginnings of depth psychology (240). Wink comments: "Scholars have erred ... by applying exclusively rational categories to what are essentially archetypal images" (256). In evidence of the depth psychological dimension of Gnostic literature Wink cites a remarkable passage from the Gnostic Monoimus, preserved in the Refutations of Hippolytus. Wink calls it "one of the most pregnant passages in all Gnostic literature":

   Cease to seek after God and creation ... and seek after yourself of
   yourself, and learn who it is who appropriates all things within
   you ... and says, My God, my mind, my thoughts, my soul, my body,
   and learn whence comes grief and rejoicing, and love and hatred, and
   waking without intention, and sleeping without intention, and anger
   without intention, and love without intention. And if you carefully
   consider these things ... you will find yourself within yourself.
   (243)

What is there to critique in this work? As a New Testament scholar I would like to cite four items that would catch the craw of most biblical critics:

1) It is hard not to experience a little irritation or frustration at Wink's use of son-of-the-man synonyms. Wink has a string of such synonyms: Wisdom's child, Child of the New Being, Sister child, the Human One. One finds it a tad jarring to come across the biblical quotation that begins with the familiar words, "Foxes have holes," to read the predicate, "but the Mother's Son has nowhere to rest his head" (80).

2.) Then there are statements that defy immediate understanding, but invite commentary, such as "The final answer to Feuerbach is prayer" (46).

3) Wink is occasionally given to overstatement, especially on matters closest to his passions. He may be right in saying that "Jesus hammered out the first consistent critique of domination that we know of since the world began," but it has the ring of hyperbole (104).

4. One also finds occasionally cavalier historical judgments reminiscent of the Jesus Seminar, e.g., "The Markan form of this saying clearly reflects a spirit other than that of Jesus" (183). One asks, "Just how does anyone know?" It seems to allow little room for the quote of Albert Schweitzer that Wink cryptically uses as preface to the book: "The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma." One wonders whether Wink may have missed something of the stranger in Jesus that might be voiced in the culprit Markan version of the saying that Wink rejects.

But a more major critique has to do with Wink's treatment of Apocalyptic and of the Ecclesiastical tradition, both of which tend to reap rather bad press in his book.

Wink speaks programmatically of two stories that survive about Jesus, like one painting painted right over another. "The first was the mundane life of a human being seeking to embody God. This story was overlaid by the exalted life of a divine being who descended from heaven, and, dressed in human flesh, suffered rejection, and was apparently killed ... escaped death and ascended back to heaven ..." and eventually "became the second person of the Holy Trinity.... Please note ..., (Wink tells us), both stories are mythic.... "I will not think badly of anyone who prefers that second story. But more and more people no longer find it credible" (143-44).

It is odd indeed, that Wink, dealer in archetypes, metaphor, and myth, is concerned with questions of historical credibility rather than mythic truth. And although he promises not to think badly of anyone who prefers that second story spelled out in ecclesiastical traditions and creeds, he marshals all of his forces to denounce the forms, treating them, again surprisingly, as literalizations rather than re-mythifications of the archetype.

For example, Wink deprecates ecclesiastical tradition as guilty of creating "the almost inhuman Christ of Dogma," and of incarcerating the mythos in a sacrament, "in which we repetitiously remember Jesus' dying for us without necessarily dying to the Powers ourselves" (94).

Apocalyptic fares even worse. The human Jesus "is swallowed by apocalyptic fantasies of revenge" (158, 183). The kind gospel Jesus now has a face "crimson with wrath." The "Human being who are with tax collections and sinners" now condemns them. And the most preposterous change that Wink makes is that Apocalyptic is the literalization of myth. A very strange charge to be brought before the same court in Wink's book that sees no literalization at all in the doctrine of the Ascension and the seating of Jesus at the right hand of God, applauding these figures, as profound and necessary myth. Eschatology is fine with Wink. Apocalyptic is out. Eschatology speaks of a future open to change; apocalyptic sees the future as closed and inescapable. Eschatology is hopeful; apocalyptic abandons hope and seeks divine miraculous intervention. Eschatology inspires action against the Dominant Powers, in anti-Apocalyptic action, (a phrase coined by Gunther Anders and an idea Wink develops in the Powers trilogy), but apocalyptic counsels passive acceptance, submissiveness, and despair (161). Eschatology is somehow archetypal myth; apocalyptic is not.

To be sure, Wink on occasion has positive things to say about ecclesiasticism and apocalyptic. For example, he acknowledges that philosopher A. N. Whitehead regarded the doctrine of the Trinity as "the only metaphysical doctrine to have improved on Plato." Though a few paragraphs later he denigrates Christian Trinitarianism as an illustration of "what could happen when one did not take sufficient care" (226). Wink also concedes "Truth can be found in the apocalyptic 'son of the man,' though we may have to dig deep to find it" (166; see pp. 159, 176, 193).

Wink's castigation of ecclesiasticism and apocalyptic deserves not less but more attention from Jung, who urges taking a more careful, discerning measure of the mythic character of these traditions and the archetypal truths embedded in both. As a case in point, commenting on the promulgation of the Dogma of the Assumption by the Roman Catholic Church in 1950, Jung wrote that to regard "beliefs such as the virgin birth, divine filiation, the resurrection of the dead, transubstantiation, etc. (we might add apocalyptic), as mere 'moonshine' or worse, or to interpret a religious pronouncement such as the Dogma of the Assumption as an intellectual slap in the face" (as the rationalist historian is apt to do), indicates a mentality out of contact with the meaning to be found in metaphor, symbol, allegory and even fantasy and myth. For Jung, the appearance of the Dogma of the Assumption provided "a favorable opportunity" to ask oneself, "what is the meaning not only of the new dogma but of all more or less dogmatic assertions over and above their literal concretism" and to "bend to the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions" which involves " a question of truths which are anchored deep in the soul." (Jung, 467; Rollins, 1983, 50).

What are some of the truths anchored in Apocalypse that Winks might have ignored? The apocalypse dares under siege to speak out against systems of Domination and to identify and name the Beast, a task to which Wink himself has long been disposed, but which he now seems impervious to. The apocalypse acknowledges the reality of evil and that its only cure is the saint committed to standing against it, daring to eyeball evil, even in the knowledge that she will be destroyed. The apocalypse, offers us great hymns and doxologies, more than any other New Testament book, that remind us of the place of prayer, hymn and song, in the life of the psyche, and the need to contemplate the mystery of the holy when we find ourselves speechless, and when the Promethean resistance to which Wink feels called, is pointless. And finally the Apocalypse offers a range of Christological images, not just of a Christ whose face is "crimson with wrath," but of a King of Kings set over against the power of Rome, of the Faithful Witness, and above all, what I regard as the dominant Christological image in Revelation, the image of the Victorious Lamb: passive, accepting, yet resistant. A symbol of the victory of powerless integrity, innocence, and faithfulness over evil in the end.

Wink tells us something of his future plans. "In a sequel, I will search for clues about how to be more human" (xi). One hopes that he might find time also to extend his exploration of the archetypal meaning and power of the son-of-the-man myth to a deeper probing and appreciation of further truths anchored within the range of Christian tradition, from its creeds and dogmas, to its litanies and prayers, its stained glass teaching and its monastic disciplines (not ignoring the dark side), developing sensitivity to the myriad of configurations that the tradition has developed to voice and incarnate the archetype of human and divine wholeness.

References

Childs, H. (2000). The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness. Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature.

Jung, C. G. (1953-78). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Yd. "Answer to Job." Princeton, Princeton University.

Rollins, W. G. (1983). Jung and the Bible. Atlanta, John Knox.

Rollins, W. G. (1999). Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective. Minneapolis, Fortress.

Wink, W. (1973). The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study. Philadelphia, Fortress.

Wink, W. (2002). The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress.

Wayne G. Rollins is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at Assumption College, Worcester, Massachusetts, and Adjunct Professor of Scripture at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. He is the founder and chair (1990-2000) of the Society of Biblical Literature Section on Psychology and Biblical Studies, His writings include The Gospels: Portraits of Christ (1964), Jung and the Bible (1983), and Soul and Psyche, The Bible in Psychological Perspective (1999).