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 pre-literate 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.

This work is a psychological examination and critique of the philosophical assumptions guiding historical knowledge in the quest for the historical Jesus. By combining a critical historiography with a phenomenological reading of C. G. Jung's analytical psychology, this work brings the hermeneutic question in the quest for the historical Jesus to the foreground. Psyche and world cannot be separated in research and interpretation, and the unconscious ground of our “knowledge” cannot be escaped. The picture of the “historical Jesus” is always a story we tell and not knowledge we discover. While historical criticism cannot recover Jesus, the historical approach to Jesus is important because, rightly understood, it participates in the process of individuation, as described by Jung, through the withdrawal of the projection of the self from the figure of Jesus. This leads to the evolution of consciousness as a contemporary form of incarnation within the individual and society. (Society of Biblical Literature, 2000)

“In this brilliant tour de force, Childs lifts the quest for the historical Jesus to a whole new level. Freed from objectivism, positivism, and hermeneutical naiveté, the quest becomes a search for our own true selves reflected in the mirror held up to us by Jesus. The task is not to produce the historical Jesus “as he really was,” but to help co-create the “myth of the human Jesus.” Thus understood, the Jesus-quest is the attempt to create a plausible historical portrait of Jesus in response to personal, social, and theological needs of the present.” —Walter Wink, Auburn Theological Seminary