The crucial thing about Christianity’s fundamental doctrines is that they are first and foremost to be understood in their natural, primary sense. The cross of Christ is not a metaphor. It involved an actual death. The resurrection is not a metaphor. It was a physical event: a “standing up again”5 of a body that had died. However, we know from the Gospels that people listening to Jesus sometimes took him literally when he was speaking metaphorically (in John 6:51, for instance).
