Answer to Job (German: Antwort auf Hiob) was published by Rascher Verlag in 1952 and provoked an immediate scandal. Jung wrote it in a state of intense emotional engagement — “I am writing feverishly,” he told a friend — and the book retains the heat of its composition. It is not a work of biblical scholarship or systematic theology but a psychological confrontation with the problem of evil, cast as a reading of the Book of Job.
Jung’s argument is startling: Yahweh (God) in the Book of Job is an unconscious being — powerful, creative, terrifying, but morally unaware. When Satan challenges God to test Job’s faith, God accepts — and the result is the systematic destruction of a man whose only crime is piety. Job’s response is not mere submission; it is a moral protest that forces God to recognize his own injustice. Job, the creature, is more conscious than Yahweh, the creator. This realization, Jung argues, precipitates a crisis in the divine psyche: God must become conscious, must incarnate as a human being, must suffer as Job suffered, in order to atone for what he has done. The Incarnation of Christ is, in this reading, God’s answer to Job — not a theological abstraction but a psychological necessity.
The book outraged theologians, who accused Jung of blasphemy, psychologizing, and naivety about biblical exegesis. Jung’s response was that he was not making theological claims but psychological ones — he was describing what the text reveals about the human experience of the divine, not what God “really” is. This distinction satisfied few critics, but the book has found a devoted readership among people who find conventional theodicy — the attempt to explain how a good God permits evil — intellectually and emotionally inadequate.
Collecting Answer to Job
First edition (Rascher Verlag, Zurich, 1952, in German): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- German first edition, fine: $200–$500
- English first edition (Routledge, 1954): $100–$300