Guus Bosman

A History of God is an account of how humans have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. The book discusses the three major monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam with some side steps into other religions. The book is very ambitious in scope but Mrs. Armstrong has the skills to clearly and convincingly explain the major developments of the concept "God" over the last 4000 years.

I read this book in Dutch years ago when my parents brought it from the library. I found it a fascinating book then, and I still do.

Particularly interesting is the discussion on the concept of Trinity -- the doctrine stating that God exists as a perichoresis of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The author explains where this concept came from and what a major difference this caused between Christianity on the one hand, and Judaism and Islam on the other.

A major factor in the history of God has always been the difference between a philosophical and a mystical approach to God. The author.s preference for a mystical approach is clear from her writing, for example when she poses the following rhetorical question:

"Could it be that a deliberately imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally?"

Mrs. Armstrong makes a case that Catholicism and Protestantism are especially vulnerable to loosing their relevancy in a modern society:

"At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims than heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all."

The book describes what an incredible change atheism is, historically speaking. Only since the late 1700s started the word 'atheist' slowly to change from a rude insult to a word that many people now use to describe themselves. However, there is a "God shaped hole" in the human consciousness after rejecting the traditional notions of God:

"I look upon myself as a child of age, a child of unbelief and doubt; it is probably, nay, I know for certain, that I shall remain so to my dying day. I have been tortured with longing to believe -- am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the way." (A quote from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky].

In the last chapters Mrs. Armstrong warns against the dangers of fundamentalism in the monotheistic religions, and the danger of idolizing goals such as "Family Values", "The Holy Land", "Islam" above the true goal of religion: human compassion.