A few days ago a fellow flocker asked for a theological analysis of Jung’s notion of Synchronicity. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his work for about five years but his question was less academic and more concerned with the broad perspective of coincidence and meaning so wikipedia was a reasonable place to start for information on the subject:
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”
I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.
Categories: Culture, Theology
Tags: Jung, language, psychology, sychronicity, Theology
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