The Use of Symbols in Religion from the Perspective of Analytical Psychology

Abstract

The consecration of Dr David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham, and many of his public utterances before and since, have concentrated public attention on the resurrection of Christ. What happened on the first Easter Day? Can we ever know for sure? If not, is that a bad or a good thing? What do Christians mean by their credal professions of faith? Do we, must we, all mean more or less the same thing when we repeat them? If that mysterious but constitutive event was not just a conjuring trick with bones, what else may it have been?What is central to the debate around such questions is the symbolic character of the resurrection story. That is to say, the resurrection was not just a dead person coming to life, although it may include that. It concerns also who the dead person was, and what his coming to life again might be believed to effect. So the resurrection story is the symbol, and the meaning to which it points is what is symbolized. A symbol is an event, act, story, object which essentially points beyond itself to such ulterior meaning, and also participates in the reality to which it points, according to Tillich's definition. The question at issue in this debate centres on the relation between the symbol and the symbolized. One extreme view tends to affirm the literal facticity of the symbolic event, and to assume that its meaning is ipso facto incontrovertibly established. The other extreme regards the precise nature of the event as irrecoverable, and as anyway irrelevant to the validity of the symbol's meaning.