Why the Excarnated Christ Can't Save You Pt 1
Jung and the Psychologized Christ, Peterson and the Mythological Archetype, and Modern Gnostic Waves of Respectability
Since the days of old humanity has had the tendency of excarnating Christ — either stripping Him of His humanity or severing Him from His Divinity.
We hear Christ say, “This is my body, broken,” and we say, in response, “This is Christ, fragmented into myth, or moral teacher, or psychological archetype.”
We tear His Body into ideals, into symbolic patterns, into tools for our own flourishing.
And we excarnate Him.
Excarnation fragments the body of the Flesh and the Divinity of the Word.
This is the same poison of two ancient heresies — new expressions, but no less deadly.
Gnostic tendencies which elevate myth and secret knowledge, and
Nestorian tendencies which separate Christ into two persons, human and divine.
But these excarnated, fragmented Christs are no Christ at all — the parts, so it seems, do not make up the whole.
The parts cannot heal, cannot resurrect, cannot lead into Life Eternal.
I used to wonder why the modern evangelical world languished in-between, why we suffered, and why no matter what we did, we couldn’t find wholeness or healing.
And it is because we worship a fragmented Christ that we starve — hungry for communion, for Life, for God Himself.
That’s the thesis :
Our modern world seeks to excarnate Christ — to strip Him of either His Flesh or His Divinity.
I want to first unpack the new Gnosticism :
the modern temptation to psychologize and mythologize Christ — to turn Him into an archetypal pattern, an ideal, or a mythic symbol for survival ( Jung, Peterson ).
Then, I want to look at the new Nestorianism :
this pragmatism and domestication of Christ — a reduction of the Living God to Life Coach; a guide for human flourishing, or therapeutic for emotional wellness ( “Comer” and the caricatures of formational pragmatism ).
Finally, I’d like to mend those core issues and pave a way forward — by getting back to the Real Christ — not as tool, not as symbol, but as Person.
Let’s begin, first, with the the new Gnosticism.
But tread carefully.
The ground ahead is holy — or it is broken — and there is nothing in between.
The Psycho-Mytho Christ
Once upon a time, in the long forgotten hinterlands of the soul, there was a well in the heart of an ancient desert. The well went deep and the water it drew up was alive.
Weary travellers would find their way to it and they would drink.
And they would live.
Those who passed it by turned to dust themselves, blown into the arid sands that surrounded them.
In time the path to the well was mapped — no longer passed ear to ear, whisper by whisper. Trails were made. Scholars came, not to drink, but to study.
These scholars came back to civilization and, clever as they were, taught theories about the water, disputations about its properties.
The artists painted its likeness.
The poets sang of Ambrosia.
And soon, the people forgot to drink.
Soon, the people forgot how to drink.
Their mouths dried, their lips cracked, and their bodies turned to dust; blown away by the same winds that carried the whispers of the well.
The books remain.
The paintings remain.
The songs remain.
But the people are gone.
The Well is our world now.
The scholars are here.
The artists are here.
The poets, too.
But the drinkers are few.
1. Carl Jung and the Psychologized Christ
I remember hearing about Carl Jung in a video essay about Ocarina of Time.
Late in the Water Temple, Link faces his shadow — a mirror of all he fears and all he hides.
The essay argued that Link must face and integrate his darkness to prepare for the final battle. I remember playing the game, facing Shadow Link, too — but all I got for effort was twenty rupees.
Later I learned more about Jung, and read some of his work, most recently : The Undiscovered Self.
He was a Swiss psychoanalyst and psychologist — and if memory serves, founded analytical psychology, which is focused on understanding the unconscious mind. He’s famous for his ideas of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation — and had lots to say about myths and dreams and the religious impulse and how these shape human identity.
And of late, he’s been popularized by Jordan Peterson.
A. Religion as Psychological Instinct
One of Jung’s ideas was that religion and the religious impulse could be boiled down to some kind of psychological need; a kind of instinctive attitude. In his own words :
“ Religion…is the instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all throughout human history. Its evident purpose is to maintain psychic balance.”1
For Jung, religion is dependence on, and submission to, the irrational facts of experience — it is a relationship of subjection to “extramundane factors”. Flattering, to say the least.
And he defines this in opposition to what he calls creeds - the lists of beliefs or tenets of faith, as an “intramundane” affair. In Jung’s conception, the meaning and purpose of religion has to do with “the relationship of the individual to God”2 and to the “path of salvation and liberation.”3
Jung suggests that instinct has less to do with “blind and indefinite impulse.”4 His reasoning for this lays in the fact that instinct is adapted and shaped by all kinds of external factors and situations which he believes gives instinct an irreducible form.
Namely, something hereditary and archetypal.
We’ll work through more of this soon — but with this understanding, it’s more clear what Jung means by religion as instinctive attitude.
That is, the subjugated relationship an individual has with God is an adaptive one — sort of like a survival mechanism — shaped by external situations and becomes a way of endurance.
It is an evolved strategy.
Religion is a way to endure the horrors and suffering of life and it has been shaped by countless obstacles and pressures over human history. Religion is not a response, for Jung, to the Living God, nor is it a way of life aimed at God — it is a coping mechanism.
B. Christ as Psychic Symbol
Beyond his views of religion as some kind of collective coping mechanism, Jung goes a bit deeper — stating that the Christ figure is an archetype of the Self.
In Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, he states :
“Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self. He represents a totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of God, sine macula peccati, unspotted by sin.”5
His ideas go further. If Christ embodies the self then the antichrist is a parallel to the shadow self.
“If we see the traditional figure of Christ as a parallel to the psychic manifestation of the self, then the Antichrist would correspond to the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality, which ought not to be judged too optimistically.”6
Christ and Antichrist are psychic opposites, and both symbols for inner tension — and integration, here, is the name of the game.
By archetype, Jung means : “Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.”7 Which is to say that it is inherited, and forms the “chthonic portion of the psyche” — or that which corresponds to our nature.
“It is not . . . a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. Nor are they individual acquisitions but, in the main, common to all, as can be seen from [their] universal occurrence.”8
If that’s confusing to you, good — that means you’re starting to get it.
Summed up, Jung’s ideas of archetype are universal, inherited patterns / images buried deep in the unconscious, shaping how humanity perceives, feels, and acts across all cultures and times.
By self, Jung means a transcendent concept that “expresses the unity of the personality as a whole.”9 And in this concept is laid the idea of who we might become.
On the whole, for Jung, is this idea of psychological value and need — this becomes the heart and purpose of the religious impulse.
The symbolic Christ is the exemplar of an integrated human, from a psychological perspective. Christ, as the archetype of self, is nothing more than some inherited pattern or image that shapes not only how we understand the world around us, but who we might become.
He is not the Incarnate Word.
And in this, the psychological usefulness triumphs over Transcendent Truth — if not entirely, then at the very least from a hierarchy of values.
In Jung’s vision, man does not bow before Christ. Christ bows before the needs of man.
C. The Evolving God and Self-Therapy
In Answer to Job, Jung presents Yahweh — the God of the Old Testament — as a being caught in some sort of slow and painful evolution; not as I Am.
Yahweh, in Jung’s vision, needs an upgrade in morality and an awakening of self-consciousness.
Here’s how the book opens :
“The Book of Job is a landmark in the long historical development of a divine drama.
At the time the book was written, there were already many testimonies which had given a contradictory picture of Yahweh — the picture of a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack of moderation.
He himself admitted that he was eaten up with rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him.
Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness.
Everything was there, and none of these qualities was an obstacle to the other. Such a condition is only conceivable either when no reflecting consciousness is present at all, or when the capacity for reflection is very feeble and a more or less adventitious phenomenon.
A condition of this sort can only b described as amoral.”10
Now, let me sum this up for you, just in case you missed it.
For Jung, Yahweh is emotionally unstable. He’s morally contradictory — both loving and cruel, both creative and destructive. He’s amoral — he lacks the sufficient self-awareness and reflection required for morality.
Jung does not present these ideas as literary tensions, the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the text. Instead, he sees them as psychic realities by which the suffering of Job allows Him to confront His own injustices.
Job is presented, by Jung, as morally superior :
“Job, in spite of his doubt as to whether man can be just before God, still finds it difficult to relinquish the idea of meeting God on the basis of justice and therefore of morality.
Because, in spite of everything, he cannot give up his faith in divine justice, it is not easy for him to accept the knowledge that divine arbitrariness breaks the law…He cannot deny that he is up against a God who does not care a rap for any moral opinion and does not recognize any form of ethics as binding.”11
And this moral quality in Job, this ability to remain pure is exactly what changes the nature of God : “The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”12
The change, the upgrade, the God 2.0 — well, that’s the Christ :
“The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time.
It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality.
Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”13
And so, in Jung’s mind, Christ is not the Word made flesh, God Incarnate — He’s just the psychic fusion of the ideas of Job and Yahweh.
And more telling, this Christ, the God-Man, has the Divine aspects of His Symbolic Source healed and restored by Humanity. A great reversal.
It is not Cosmic Love breaking in, incarnating, to triumph over Death and Hell — It’s a self-therapy of a broken divinity, stitching itself back together through the suffering of a human.
2. Jordan Peterson and the Practical Myth
I first heard of Jordan while I was living in Toronto — him having gained all kinds of local notoriety for his refusal of compelled speech.
That local infamy very quickly became a global scandal; and Peterson himself became a kind of lightning rod : lauded by some, reviled by others, but seemingly rising to some kind of mythical stature.
By my understanding, at the heart of this Peterson Phenomena, are two thinkers he has popularized, interpreted, and expanded upon :
Frued and Jung.
Beyond this, and beyond the politics, I want to discuss what Jordan has to say about Christ in both Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life.
A. Christ as the Pattern to Noble Suffering
In Peterson’s conception, Christ stands as a kind of Archetypal Hero — one who bears infinite suffering without surrendering to despair.
Peterson describes the hero as :
“The hero is narrative representation of the individual eternally willing to take creative action, endlessly capable of originating new behavioural patterns, eternally specialized to render harmless or positively beneficial something previously threatening or unknown.
It is declarative representation of the pattern of behaviour characteristic of the hero that eventually comes to approximate the story of the saviour.”14
The hero, for Peterson, then, is the one who willingly steps into the unknown — who orders chaos, and who transforms danger into blessing.
How ?
Through strength and the courage to face each threat without wearying, and then to overcome it. And this culminates in the figure of Christ.
Here is a clear parallel in Peterson’s own writing :
“Participation in acts whose sole purpose is expansion of innocent pain and suffering destroys character; forthright encounter with tragedy, by contrast, may increase it.
This is the meaning of the Christian myth of the crucifixion.
It is Christ’s full participation in and freely chosen acceptance of his fate (which he shares with all mankind) that enables him to manifest his full identity with God—and it is that identity which enables him to bear his fate, and which strips it of its evil.
Conversely—it is the voluntary demeaning of our own characters that makes the necessary tragic conditions of existence appear evil.”15
Christ freely accepts His fate, confronts suffering directly, and by that confrontation strips it of its evil.
Christ becomes, in Peterson’s mythic framework, the final form16 of the hero : one who does not flinch, who does not curse the darkness, but who endures infinite suffering.
The weight of this pattern is immense. For Peterson, Christianity becomes the central heroic structure of Western culture,17 and the story of Christ becomes the pattern every individual must imitate.
As he says :
“The significance of the Christian passion is the transformation of the process by which the goal is to be attained into the goal itself:
the making of the “imitation of Christ”—the duty of every Christian citizen—into the embodiment of courageous, truthful, individually unique existence.”18
And I should make it clear — this is not the Pauline idea of imitation; not the call to union with Christ through love, obedience, and worship.
This is an archetypal pattern that helps a person endure suffering; bordering on the same paradigm as Jung : psychological usefulness over metaphysical truth or ontological reality.
But Christianity must be more than psychological usefulness; and it cannot be, in the primary sense, utilitarian or pragmatic by nature.
It is first, and foremost union with Reality — and then, by extension, it is healing.
B. Suffering as Telos ( What do you do about that ?!? )
If you have read Peterson — or heard him lecture — you know that he holds suffering as the most real feature of existence.
And in this conception, life as suffering, there is no real escape. Salvation won’t come from utopia, from revolution, or from ideology. The solution, he says, is to reject resentment. The solution is voluntary confrontation, it is sacrifice, and it is the bearing of unbearable burdens — without bitterness.
Peterson writes:
“Pain and suffering define the world.
Of that, there can be no doubt.
Sacrifice can hold pain and suffering in abeyance, to a greater or lesser degree—and greater sacrifices can do that more effectively than lesser. Of that, there can be no doubt. Everyone holds this knowledge in their soul.
Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering—who wishes to rectify the flaws in Being; who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures; who wants to create Heaven on Earth—will make the greatest of sacrifices, of self and child, of everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the Good. 19
And so, if you want to heal the world, you must sacrifice everything. Yourself on the altar, your dreams, and those you love, too. And you sacrifice these for ultimate meaning.
And what is this meaning ?
He will forego expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning. And he will in that manner bring salvation to the ever-desperate world.”20
Again — we must hear Peterson on his own terms.
Words have meaning and the salvation he speaks of here is not union with the Living God. It is not victory over death, for real, and it is not resurrection, for real, and it is not Life Eternal, either.
Salvation, in Peterson’s frame, is survival — the sheltering of the soul against fear and despair.
And so we are left, once more, with the same haunting why.
Why should I embrace suffering?
Why should I pursue the good?
Why should I reject resentment?
Why should I model myself after the Symbolic Christ?
For salvation?
Salvation from what?
And for what?
If Christ and His Resurrection are not Real — as in more than psychologically useful, more than mythological patterns and exemplars — if there is no ontological foundation beyond mere survival, then suffering itself becomes the final end.
Suffering is ultimate meaning.
Suffering is the telos of life — for in it, all of meaning is found.
And here, we are not redeemed, we simply endure; and the two are not the same.
And sure, maybe we can face the grave, but sure as hell, we won’t rise from it.
C. The Pragmatism Problem, The Personal Solution
There is a very pragmatic root to all of this — and I mean that in the philosophical sense.
Pragmatism is the idea that truth can be summed up by what actually works in real life — foundations don’t matter, as long as it’s all useful.
Peterson — and Jung, too — operate within a kind of psychological pragmatism : religion is true, inasmuch as it heals the soul or stabilizes society. The healing matters more than the foundation and flourishing matters more than metaphysical fact.
But here’s the problem — pragmatism can only get us so far.
It can only get anyone so far.
No matter how profound the myth, no matter how intricate the archetype, no matter how deep the psychic structure — if Christ is merely psychologically useful, then Christ is not Lord.
And that’s the ultimate hazard of this kind of psychological pragmatism — spiritual truths are reduced to useful tools.
Belief is therapy, not transformation.
All throughout Maps and 12 Rules, Christ, or the Christ-pattern, is framed as valuable because the archetypal story is true psychologically.
But that’s not Christianity — Christ is not simply a pattern to emulate or the mythic symbol of an integrated life. Christ is a Person to be united with.
Emulation is not worship, in its proper sense.21
Patterns are not communion.
Pragmatic utility is not mystical participation.
Worship is the experience of Divine Love; it is participation in the Divine Life.
The antidote to pragmatism is not a better pattern, or a deeper myth, or a stronger psychic survival strategy.
The antidote is a Person —
the Person by whom all things were made,
in heaven and on earth,
visible and invisible.
3. Secret Knowledge, Suffering, and a Respectable Christ
A. Survival Myth, Not Saviour
There is a great divide between a survival myth and a real, historic Saviour.
And let me be clear — for Christians, because the Real Christ is more than psychologically useful — because He is the Son of God, Light from Light, true God from true God — He is not merely helpful for survival.
He is the Lord of Life.
Survival, for us, goes beyond psychic integration.
Beyond healing.
Beyond a boon against suffering.
Survival, for us, goes beyond the Grave itself.
We seek integration — but because the Good is not an idea, we seek integration because the Good is a Person.
We seek healing because the destiny of the world is not survival; it is restoration.
All of Creation longs to be drawn into the full joy and love of Christ.
Suffering, for us, is not ultimate; it is invitation — an opportunity to show our love for God in the Valley of Shadow, an alchemy where pain burns away the dross, the weak and sinful parts of us, until only gold remains.
Truth cannot be reduced to usefulness, nor can it be measured by healing alone.
Truth is a Person — and that Person, the King of Kings, reshapes everything in His image:
Theology.
Ethics.
Anthropology.
Epistemology.
Politics.
Art.
Beauty.
Suffering.
Meaning.
Remove the Person and the metaphysic fragments and fractures, as well. Remove the metaphysic and everything else collapses into mere survival. Usefulness cannot cause resurrection, and resurrection is what we need — you, me, and the entire Cosmos.
The Christ of Jung and Peterson can help a man endure life —but He cannot open the Grave. He can teach survival but He cannot offer Paradise.
Christ, excarnated into myth, into psychic tool, is not the Word made Flesh, not the Bread of Life, not the Lord of all.
He’s an idol, built by humans and unable to save them.
B. Secret Knowledge That Saves
Gnosticism is a heresy that teaches salvation comes by secret knowledge, not by union with Christ; and it teaches that the physical world is evil — something that needs to be escaped, not redeemed.
Gnostics hated the incarnation because the immaterial Good, the Divine, could never inhabit the fallen material world.
And there is a gnostic streak in this uprooted symbolic Christ — a Christ reduced to secret knowledge:
of myth,
of pattern,
of symbol.
“This will save you,” they say. “Well, integrate you, psychologically.”
The “salvation” offered by Jung, and by Peterson, comes through this sacred, secret, almost esoteric knowledge — a knowledge to be understood and acted upon.
It is only by recognizing that the Christ-pattern is humanity’s survival map, our emobodied paradigm, they suggest, that we can find redemption.
Neither of them, I am sure, would call themselves Gnostics. Both would likely reject the title outright.
And motives do matter, but so does actual content.
Let me explain:
In classical Christianity, salvation comes through a Person — and union with that Person : Jesus, the Christ.
Salvation does not come through decoding hidden truths, psychological patterns, or mythological pragmatism.
Grasping and embodying “the pattern” is not salvation. It is a mirror of gnosis — a secret saving knowledge one realizes internally.
The Christian contrast is stark, and lays out a salvation by unity with a real, vital, and living external God.
The Gnostics saw the physical world as a prison, a tomb to be escaped. And in Peterson’s framing, suffering is the final reality — the “inescapable cost of Being” — and the only redemption left is to endure it nobly.
Enter in the Christ figure : the heroic pattern who bears suffering bravely, but who cannot actually destroy death, cannot actually raise the dead, cannot actually redeem the world.
There is no final healing of matter. No redmeption for Creation.
No great cosmic marriage when heaven and earth overlap, as we pray in the Our Father.
And so the gnostic echoes ring : a subtle disdain for creation, a survival within corruption, but no hope of full redemption.
This pyhsical, material life, is a kind of corruption to be endured, a prison we learn to survive — not a wound to be healed, not a gift to be transformed.
And Christ still speaks :
“Behold, I am making all things new.”
C. The Respectability of an Intellectual Idea
I heard someone very close to Jordan Peterson once say that he will make Christianity popular, again, for better and for worse.
And there is a deep wisdom in that.
It’s pretty clear that, in some major sense, this mythic view of Christ and religion has eviscerated the new atheist movement. What was once some apocalyptic fury, four horsemen included, has been reduced to whimpering and pearl clutching.
But a more subtle danger rises in its place.
There are many who, now, come to Christ, not through the Narrow Gate, not denying themselves, or taking up their crosses, and following — but coming in some intellectual and psychological capacity.
“The Narrow Gate,” they say, “is just the idea that there’s a million ways to do things wrong and only one way to do them right. The notion of the narrow pathway is the line between chaos and order.”22
“Denial of self is simply the pattern of human flourishing.”
“Resurrection ? Ah — you mean integrating the shadow and embodying the heroic archetype.”
It is easy — and respectable — to come to Christ as a mytho-pattern.
To intellectualize Him.
To psychologize the Word made Flesh.
It is harder to come to Him as a sinner, needing mercy.
Harder to fall at His feet and worship Him — not as a symbol, but as the true and living Son of God.
The new gnostics follow the same path — they proclaim a secret knowledge, a psycho-mythological truth to be decoded for redemption.
And it is difficult to see, sometimes, because we do not always speak the same language.
It is easy to hear Peterson speak of the Narrow Way and think :
"Yes, he sees what we see — that many roads lead to death, but only one way leads to life in Christ."
But that is our root, not his. We graft his words into our own metaphysic but he has not planted them in the same soil.
And that is the danger because not everyone has deep Christian roots, not everyone has a metaphysic, not everyone has known the Real Christ.
Many are being taught a Psychological Christ — a symbol. A shadow.
Not the Second Person of the Trinity; not the Word made Flesh.
And a Christ excarnated into myth cannot save.
He will not save the world and He cannot save those who follow Him only as pattern and idea.
Chesterton wrote :
“There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him.
If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected to expect.
And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils or prophesying doom.”23
And I would like to add to Chesterton’s list - the Christian Analytic Psychologist.
And to note, there are at least five main ways of reading and understanding Scripture :
Literal
Analogical
Allegorical
Moral
Tropological
The tropological reading is a kind of psychological reading.
Christ is big enough to bear the tropological reading — the psychological and moral meanings within His life.
But He is bigger still.
Christ is not true because He is psychologically useful; Christ has psychological bearing because He is True.
First things first, and all that.
Truth is a Person.
And the Person is bigger than the pattern.
Conclusion ( And For My Next Trick )
The Christ of myth can teach a man to suffer, the Christ of symbol can teach a man to endure —
But only the Word made Flesh can teach a man to live.
The psycho-mytho Christ of Jung and Peterson can gird the soul for survival —
But He cannot open the Grave.
And if we trade the Word made Flesh for a word-made-pattern, we will find ourselves in-between, masters of endurance, but in an intellectual halfway house, strangers of Real Resurrection.
And this was only the first excarnation.
There is another excarnated Christ waiting.
A bit more respectable, a bit more polished, a bit more therapeutic. A Christ for your habits, for your calendar, for your flourishing, for your lifestyle.
A Christ who will heal your burnout, but the jury is out on if He can save your soul.
We will meet him next.
Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.
Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self. New York: New American Library, 1958. pg 36
Ibid. pg 31
Ibid. pg 31
Ibid. pg 81
Jung, C.G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of Self. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. New York: Patheon Books. 1959. pg 37
Ibid. 42
“The Jung Lexicon by Jungian Analyst, Daryl Sharp, Toronto.” n.d. Www.psychceu.com. https://www.psychceu.com/Jung/sharplexicon.html.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Jung, C G. 2011. Answer to Job (from Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung). Princeton University Press. 560
Ibid. 567
Ibid. 617
Ibid. 648
Peterson, Jordan B. 2002. Maps of Meaning. Routledge. pg 187
Ibid. pg 464
Yes, a DBZ ref for y’all
Ibid. pg 317
Ibid. pg 407
Peterson, Jordan B. 2018. 12 Rules for Life. Penguin UK. pg 143
Ibid.
And yes, I know how Jung and Peterson psychologize worship — as the thing we aim our life around. But that isn’t the Christian conception of worship; which is primarily eucharistic, participative, embodied, and draws the person deeper into theosis. Worship isn’t psychologized attention, it is the full way of love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naos2jjLNM4
“The Project Gutenberg EBook of the Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.” 2025. Gutenberg.org. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65688/65688-h/65688-h.htm.
"Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist" - GKC
Dude you’re cooking with this one. Perfect summary of the pitfalls of Jung and Peterson. We have striped or excarnated Christ. Many of us are creating masochists in our churches when we should be making redeemers and reconcilers.