PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPersonal Introduction1. Miracles as Imagination Mythos and History; The Miracles of Jesus; Metaphor and Its Hazards; Preserving the Spiritual Meaning2. Religion as Metaphor The Literary Mode of Scripture; Myth, Metaphor and Jesus; Literal Thinking as Idolatry; Religion as Unconscious Poetry; Pious Fraud; The Greatest Story Ever Sold?3. The Soul's Symbolic Code Why Myth Matters; Myth as Ancient Psychology; When Mythos became Logos; The Ancestral Mind; Mythos, Soul, Eternity; Mythos in Art and Entertainment; Mythos as a Structure of Thought; Mythos Downgraded; Myths, Dreams, Religions; Something Continues to Speak4. Jesus the Metaphor Imagination and Reality; Fear of Myth; The Secret Life of Us; Personifying; Spirit Personified in Jesus; Ongoing Incarnation; The Messenger as the Message; An Eastern Moment in the West; Gnosticism and other Heresies; Absolutism, Violence, and Conflict; When Jesus became God; Onward Christian Soldiers; Jesus the Mirror of Our Projections5. The Myth of the Virgin Birth The Dead Hand of Patriarchy; Can We Be Moved By Myths?; Sexual Politics and the Uses of Myth; The Myth and its Background; Divine Insemination; Spiritual Rebirth; Institutional Literalism; The Less We Believe the Better6. Waking Up The Kingdom; Putting on the New Self; Waking Up to a Higher Authority; Reversal of the Ego's Values; Losing and Finding Life; The Mustard Seed; Many are Called, Few Choose; Completion, Not Perfection; Transformation, Not Repentance; Jesus, Socrates, and Waking Up7. Apocalypse Apocalypse as Psychology; Coming of the New Self; Destruction and Renewal; Spiritual Event and Pathological Obsession; Violation of the Ego's Boundaries; New Self as Original Self; Judgment; Destruction and Punishment; God as Interruption; Rapture; Founding a New Order8. Satan and Literalism Nicodemus and the Rebirth Story; Incest Fantasies and Sexual Abuse; Satan as the Personification of Literalism; The Sublimation of Base Instincts9. Resurrection: Ascending to Where? The Resurrection Conundrum; Joseph Campbell's Straight Talking; Jung: Cutting through Spiritual Materialism; Paul's Mysticism; The Parable of Emmaus; Emmaus Never Happened, Emmaus Always Happens; The Unacknowledged God in Our Midst10. Psyche and Symbol Dreaming the Myth Onward; Reworking the Past; The Therapeutic Function of Myth; Myth as Psychic Truth; Mystery Without Literalism; Respect to a God Unknown; The Assumption of Mary; Elevation of the Symbolic11. After Belief After Literalism; Faith Without Belief; Vision and Uncommon Sense; Bultmann's Progressive Thinking; Saving the Myths; Throwing Out the Baby; Progressives in the Rationalistic Mode; The Sea of Faith at Ebb Tide; From Passive Belief to Active Faith; Stages of Faith; Recreating the FablesConclusion: Unveiling the SoulRebirth of the Sacred; From the God-Shaped Hole; Depth Psychology as Midwife; Psyche as an Opening to InfinityIndex

Biblical stories are metaphorical. They may have been accepted as factual hundreds of years ago, but today they cannot be taken literally. Some students in religious schools even recoil from the "fairy tales" of religion, believing them to be mockeries of their intelligence. David Tacey argues that biblical language should not be read as history, and it was never intended as literal description. At best it is metaphorical, but he does not deny these stories have spiritual meaning.

Religion as Metaphor argues that despite what tradition tells us, if we "believe" religious language, we miss religion's spiritual meaning. Tacey argues that religious language was not designed to be historical reporting, but rather to resonate in the soul and direct us toward transcendent realities. Its impact was intended to be closer to poetry than theology. The book uses specific examples to make its case: Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the Kingdom of God, the Apocalypse, Satan, and the Resurrection.

Tacey shows that, with the aid of contemporary thought and depth psychology, we can re-read religious stories as metaphors of the spirit and the interior life. Moving beyond literal thinking will save religion from itself.