The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meanings of Jesus' Sayings

A psychoanalyst and episcopal priest presents a Jungian understanding of Christ’s teaching in this revised edition of a spiritual classic.

By showing how Jesus’ teachings relate to our inner depths, The Kingdom Within guides us toward a more conscious and creative life. John A. Sanford explores the significance of Jesus’ teachings for our interior life—that inner reality that Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” It is Sanford’s conviction that contemporary Christianity has overlooked this inner dimension of Jesus’ teachings and so has lost touch with the human soul.

Illustrated with case histories and dream material drawn from the author’s work as a psychotherapist, The Kingdom Within examines such characteristics as extroversion and introversion, masculinity and femininity, thinking and feeling, and sensation and intuition to show how Jesus met the criteria of wholeness or fullness of personhood. Step by step, Sanford helps us to shed the outer mask, to eschew sin, which “means living in enslavement to what we don’t know about ourselves,” and to follow the road of consciousness, which leads to “a great treasure waiting only to be discovered.”

© 2023 HarperOne (Ebook): 9780062036827

Release date

Ebook: August 18, 2023