Biblical stories are metaphorical

Preface

Acknowledgments

Personal Introduction

1. Miracles as Imagination
Mythos and History; The Miracles of Jesus;
Metaphor and Its Hazards; Preserving the
Spiritual Meaning

2. 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 Speak

4. 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 Projections

5. 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 Better

6. 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 Up

7. 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 Order

8. Satan and Literalism
Nicodemus and the Rebirth Story; Incest Fantasies
and Sexual Abuse; Satan as the Personification of
Literalism; The Sublimation of Base Instincts

9. 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 Midst

10. 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 Symbolic

11. 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 Fables

Conclusion: Unveiling the Soul

Rebirth of the Sacred; From the God-Shaped Hole; Depth Psychology as Midwife; Psyche as an Opening to Infinity

Index