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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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.
page 501 note 1 Tillich, P., Dynamics of Faith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957).Google Scholar
page 502 note 1 Jones, E., The theory of symbolism, in Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1916), p. 146.Google Scholar
page 503 note 1 Ibid. p. 158.
page 503 note 2 Jung, C. G., The Transcendent Function, in Collected Works, vol. VIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1916), p. 75.Google Scholar
page 503 note 3 Jung, C. G., Psychological Types, in Collected Works, vol. VI (1921), p. 474.Google Scholar
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page 504 note 1 Jung, C. G., Psychological Types, in Collected Works, vol. VI (1921), p. 476.Google Scholar
page 504 note 2 Jung, C. G., The Symbolic Life in Collected Works, vol. XVIII (1939).Google Scholar
page 504 note 3 Tillich, P., Op. cit. pp. 48 ff.Google Scholar
page 507 note 1 Winnicott, D. W., Transitional objects and transitional phenomena, in Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953).Google Scholar
page 507 note 2 See Segal, H., Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth, 1978) chap. 6.Google Scholar
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page 509 note 1 Cf. Stein, L., What is a symbol supposed to be?, in Analytical Psychology: A Modern Science (ed. Fordham, M. et al. ) (London: Karnac, 1957).Google Scholar
page 510 note 1 Jackson, M., ‘Symbol Formation and the Delusional Transference,’ Journal of Analytical Psychology, VII, 2 (1963), p. 148.Google Scholar
page 515 note 1 For a recent re-evaluation of the common representation of Freud as anti-religious, see Fordham, M., Explorations into the Self (London: Academic Press 1985), chap. 13Google Scholar, ‘Is God supernatural?’
page 517 note 1 Redfearn, J. W. T., My Self, My Many Selves (London: Karnac, 1985), especially chap. 8Google Scholar, ‘The winning of conscious choice: the emergence of symbolic activity.’
page 518 note 1 Gordon, R., Dying and Creating: A Search for Meaning (London: Karnac, 1978).Google Scholar
page 518 note 2 Winnicott, D. W., The location of cultural experience, in Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957)Google Scholar
page 519 note 1 Cf. Baldridge, W. E. and Gleason, J. J., A theological framework for pastoral care, in The Broken SymbolGoogle Scholar, Papers presented at a Day School sponsored by the University of Leicester, Department of Adult Education and the Association for Pastoral Care and Counselling.
