God's Autopsy and the Living Truth of Soul: A History of Western Consciousness - Hardcover

by Hal Childs (Author)

The Grand Narrative of Christianity that the Bible created is dead, and the Bible is silent. Does the Bible have anything relevant to say to our modern circumstances? We ask, where did God come from? What happened to God? God's Autopsy reinterprets soul and God as historical-psychological phenomena related to the cultural structure of consciousness, the invisible shared context of thought, which has changed dramatically over the past three millennia. This book offers a new way to understand the trajectory of Western civilization by making the implicit foundation of Western consciousness--soul--visible and conscious. Our modern Western consciousness is radically different from that of antiquity when the Bible emerged. Jung's psychological-philosophical insight that whenever we speak about the psyche it is the psyche speaking about itself, leads to the realization that today consciousness has come home to itself. Beginning with preliterate polytheism, the emergence of the transcendent god Yahweh and Christ, which led directly to the Enlightenment, objective soul continues to unfold itself. How did late modernity become a topsy-turvy, quantum, virtual, digital, impersonal, and abstract world that appears to be running away from us? The answer is unexpectedly and shockingly in the Bible itself.

Author Biography

Hal Childs is a psychotherapist (halchilds.com) with an MDiv and PhD in San Francisco, California. He has been a seminar leader with the Guild for Psychological Studies (guildsf.org) for over forty years. He is the author of The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness (2000).