Enantiodromia
Enantiodromia is not a word that you hear in the evangelical church. To be fair, it is not a word that you hear pretty much anywhere at all.
It was taken from Greek mythology by psychologist Carl Jung. Jung used it to mean, “the point at which any tendency, pushed to its extreme, will turn into its opposite.”
I draw attention to the word in relation to evangelicalism in order to consider what faith and non-faith, believing and not believing, look like. In my experience non-belief was ascribed to people who either never believed the tenets of evangelical faith or to those who once believed, but had stopped being part of the evangelical community.
What Jung shows us in the word enantiodromia is something that I saw as a pastor over and over again. I saw non-faith present in taking belief to its extreme. This showed up in a kind of extremist faith that saw the world as threat, and at times became energised by battling the culture or the world or secularism or other ways of believing. I used to think, as a pastor, about this kind of militant believing, “If you say you believe in God who is sovereign and all powerful and good, then why do you act as if this whole thing depends on your zealousness and carries a terrible and frightful urgency?”
People who seemed ready to “defend the faith”, people who were so committed to believing that they thought it was right to fight on behalf of the faith, people who lamented the state of the world as if the faith might be overwhelmed if not for the battle, they seemed to me to demonstrate not the presence of faith and trust, but the lack of it. Jung helps me to see that what I was observing was a kind of enantiodromia.
True Christian faith can sometimes be easy to spot in the evangelical church. True belief will bring peace and absence of fear. Enantiodromatic faith will produce haste and warning. I began to think that the non-believers were some of the people attending the most prayer meetings, and issuing dire statements about how the world had turned its back on God. The urgency didn’t feel like faith to me. As a pastor I could feel a kind of sympathy for people whose extreme religious perspective and participation seemed to demonstrate the wish for faith, not faith itself. We are told in Christian scripture what the fruit of the Spirit is and it is not fear and haste and frustration. I got to the place in which I felt that if people were upset about other people not believing, that was a red flag of a lack of faith on their behalf. I aimed to note this in my mind with compassion, not contempt.
Long before Carl Jung, Isaac Ephraim of Syria put it this way;
“Someone who has actually tasted the truth is not contentious for truth. Someone who is considered by people to be zealous for truth has not yet learned what the truth is really like; once he has truly learnt it, he will cease from zealousness on its behalf.”
(c. 690)