The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions. However, we all tend to see these ancient tales through the filter of subsequent history and project current beliefs onto texts that originally meant something quite different. Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood. In fact, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.2 There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are s...

There is no clear, consistent image of God in Genesis. In the famous first chapter, the Creator God appears center stage, with no rival, supremely powerful and benign, blessing all the things that he has made. But the rest of Genesis seems to deconstruct this tidy theology. The God who was supremely powerful in chapter 1 has lost control of his creation within two chapters; the utterly fair and equitable God who blessed everything impartially is later guilty of blatant favoritism, and his somewhat arbitrary choices (the chosen ones are rarely paragons) set human beings murderously against each other. At the time of the Flood, the benign creator becomes the cruel destroyer. And finally the God who was such a powerful presence in chapter 1 fades away and makes no further appearances, so that at the end of the book, Joseph and his brothers have to rely on their own dreams and insights—just as we do. Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in. As Abraham’s plight on Mount Moriyya shows, it is not easy to “see” what God is, and there are no simple answers to life’s perplexities.

The Bible traces the long process whereby this confusing deity became Israel’s only icon of the sacred.34 Traditionally in the Middle East, it was impossible to confine the holiness of ilam (“divinity”) to a single symbol. Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. If that symbol is a personalized deity, they could easily start to imagine “him” functioning as if he were a human being like themselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Idolatry, the worship of a human image of the divine, would become one of the besetting problems of monotheism.

Once people forget that a particular image of the sacred can only be proximate and incomplete, there is a danger that it will cease to point to the transcendent and become an end in itself.

But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists’ reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image.

In the past, Marduk’s power had always been challenged by Tiamat’s, Baal’s by Mot’s. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests.

When something inherently finite—an image, an ideology, or a polity—is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claima...

Henceforth the tiny Kingdom of Judah would become the pawn of the great powers of Egypt and Babylon, and their foreign policy veered erratically in favor of one or the other. Some of the Israelites insisted that because Yahweh was their God, Judah could not be defeated and urged their rulers to assert their independence. But the prophet Jeremiah and others tried to force them to face facts—to no avail. Twelve years after Josiah’s untimely death, a tragedy of far greater magnitude occurred. Judah rebelled against Babylonian supremacy, and in 597 Jerusalem was brought to its knees by King Nebuchadnezzar, who deported the elite—the king, the nobility, scribes, priests, the military, and artisans—to Babylonia and installed a puppet king in the Holy City. Eleven years later, in 586, after another senseless revolt, Jerusalem was destroyed and Yahweh’s temple, his objective correlative on earth, was burned to the ground.

Eventually Jews would refuse to pronounce the name Yahweh, as a tacit admission that any attempt to express the divine reality would be so limiting as to be almost blasphemous.

But holiness also had a strong ethical component, because it involved absolute respect for the sacred “otherness” of every single creature. Even though they kept themselves apart, Israelites must not despise the foreigner: “If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt.”60 It was a law based on empathy and compassion, the ability to feel with the other. The experience of one’s own pain must lead to an appreciation of other people’s suffering. When P spoke of “love” he did not mean emotional tenderness. This was a law code, its language as technical and reticent as any legal ruling. In Middle Eastern treaties, to “love” meant to be helpful and loyal and to give practical support. Earlier biblical authors had commanded the Israelites to confine tribal loyalty (hesed) to their fellow Jews, but this was not true of P, whose purity regulations are remarkable in that other people are never regarded as contaminating.61 The foreigner was not to be shunned but loved. Impurity came only from yourself, not from your enemies.

P insisted that Israelites must honor all life. Death was the great contaminator. It was an insult to come into the presence of the living God without undergoing a simple ritual of purification after coming into contact with the death of one of his creatures. In the dietary laws forbidding the eating of “unclean” animals, P developed a modified version of the Indian ideal of ahimsa. Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites did not regard the ritual slaughter of animals as killing; sacrifice was universally held to give the beast posthumous existence, and it was usually forbidden to eat an animal that had not been ritually consecrated in this way. P permitted the Israelites to sacrifice and consume only domestic animals from their own flocks. These were the “pure” or “clean” animals, which were members of the community; during their lifetime they must be allowed to rest on the Sabbath, and nobody could harm them in any way.62 But the “unclean” animals—dogs, deer, and other wild creatures— must not be killed at all; it was forbidden to trap, exploit, or eat them under any circumstances.63 This was not because they were “dirty.” It was perfectly all right to touch them while they were alive. They became unclean only after death.64 The law that forbade contact with a dead animal’s corpse protected it: because the carcass could not be skinned or dismembered, it was not worthwhile to hunt or trap it. For the same reasons, those animals classed as “abominations” (sheqqets) must...

He did not have to slaughter or split them in two, and at the end of the day, he blessed them.68 Marduk’s victory had to be reactivated every year in order to make the cosmos viable, but Yahweh finished his creative work in a mere six days and was able to rest on the seventh. This was a nonviolent cosmogony. When P’s first audience heard the opening words “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,” they would have expected a story of fearsome battles. But P surprised them: there was no fighting, no killing. Unlike Marduk, Elohim did not have to fight to the death to create an ordered cosmos; instead he simply issued a series of commands: “Let there be light!” “Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting growth!” “Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night” and each time, without any struggle at all, “it was so.”69 Yahweh had no competition and was the sole power in the universe.70 But there was no stridency in P’s polemic. On the last day of his creation, Elohim “saw everything that he had made and here: it was exceedingly good.”71 P knew that some of the exiles routinely cursed the Babylonians, but, he implied, this was not the way to go because God had blessed everything that he had made. Everybody should be like Elohim, resting calmly on the Sabbath and blessing all his creatures without exception—even, perhaps, the Babylonians.

Socrates was a living summons to the paramount duty of stringent self-examination. He described himself as a gadfly, perpetually stinging people into awareness, forcing them to wake up to themselves, question their every opinion, and attend to their spiritual progress.38 The important thing was not the solution to a problem but the path that people traveled in search of it. To philosophize was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself. At the end of his unsettling conversation with Socrates, Laches had a “conversion” (metanoia), literally a “turning around.”39 This did not mean that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth; on the contrary, he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew nothing at all. Socrates had made him realize that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt (aporia) rather than certainty. The type of wisdom that Socrates offered was not gained by acquiring items of knowledge but by learning to be in a different way.

In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the “winner” did not try force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch you at a profound level.

Faith was purely a matter of commitment and practical living.

The Qur’an has no interest in “belief;” indeed, this concept is quite alien to Islam.

Theological speculation that results in the formulation of abstruse doctrines is dismissed as zannah, self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other but that makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.85 Like any religion or philosophia, Islam was a way of life (din).

The fundamental message of the Qur’an was not a doctrine but an ethical summons to practically expressed compassion: it is wrong to build a private fortune and good to share your wealth fairly and create a just society...

The five “pillars” of Islam are a miqra, a summons to dedicated activity: prayer, fasting, ...

In the Qur’an, faith (iman) is something that people do: they share their wealth, perform the “works of justice” (salihat), and prostrate their bodies to the ground in the kenotic, ego-deflating act of prayer (salat).87

God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East nor to the West, but enlightened all human beings.

it was extremely difficult to implement the will of God in a tragically flawed world.

the far more important and difficult struggle to reform one’s own society and one’s own heart.

Faith, therefore, was a matter of practical insight and active commitment; it had little to do with abstract belief or theological conjecture. Judaism and Islam have remained religions of practice; they promote orthopraxy, right practice, rather than orthodoxy, right teaching. In the early fourth century, however, Christianity had begun to move in a slightly different direction and developed a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness that would become its Achilles’ heel. Yet even while some Christians stridently argued about abstruse dogmatic definitions, others—perhaps in reaction—developed a spirituality of silence and unknowing that would be just as important, characteristic, and influential.

This state support proved a mixed blessing, however. Constantine had very little understanding of Christian theology, but that did not prevent him from meddling in doctrinal affairs when he discovered that the church that was supposed to unify his subjects was itself torn apart by a dogmatic dispute.

Hitherto Greeks, like most other peoples, had seen no impassable gulf between God and humanity. Their philosophers had agreed that as rational animals, human beings contained a spark of the divine within themselves; a sage like Socrates, who incarnated the transcendent ideal of wisdom, was a son of God and an avatar of the divine.

But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm.

Today the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is regarded as the linchpin of Christianity, the truth on which theism stands or falls. So it is interesting to note how slowly and uncertainly this idea emerged. It was entirely alien to Greek philosophy. It would have seemed absurd to Aristotle to imagine the timeless God who was wholly absorbed in ceaseless contemplation of itself suddenly deciding to create the cosmos. Creation out of nothing represented a fundamental change in the Christian understanding of both God and the world. There was no longer a chain of being emanating eternally from God to the material universe, no longer an intermediate realm of spiritual beings that transmitted the divine energy to the nether regions. Instead, God had called every single creature from an abysmal and unimaginable nothingness and could at any moment withdraw his sustaining hand. Creation ex nihilo tore the universe away from God. The physical world could not tell us anything about the divine, because it had not emanated naturally from God, as the philosophers had imagined, but was made out of nothing. It was, therefore, of an entirely different nature (ontos) from the substance of the living God. A “natural theology” that argued from our rational observation of the world to God was no longer possible, because the new doctrine made it clear that, left to ourselves, we could know nothing at all about God.

The immense and all-powerful God could not possibly have been in the man Jesus: for Arius that would be like cramming a whale into a can of shrimp or a mountain into a box.

Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the ousia of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures.

Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly “deified,” entirely possessed and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life.

The man Jesus gave us our only hint of what God was like and had shown that human beings could participate in some indefinable way in the being of the incomprehensible God. We could no longer think “God” without thinking “human,” or “human” without thinking “God.”

Revelation did not provide us with clear information about God but told us that God was incomprehensible to us. Paradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God.

But this did not mean that people had merely to “believe” these unfathomable truths; on the contrary, they had to work very hard to achieve the mental stillness that made the experience of unknowing a numinous reality in their lives.

It was possible to gain an intuitive apprehension of God that was quite different from any knowledge derived from discursive reasoning.

In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life.

It is no accident that in all the faith traditions, people who wanted to engage in this kind of meditative activity organized a monastic life to cater to their needs. Details and emphases differ from one culture to another, but the similarities are striking. The withdrawal from the world, the silence, the disciplines of community—everybody wearing the same clothes and doing the same thing day after day—have been found to support the contemplative during his frequently lonely journey, to earth him in reality and wean him away from an excitement and drama inimical to the authentic religious experience. These practices provided an element of stability to counterbalance the mental extremity to which the monk, yogin, or hesychast was continually exposed. Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, this can indicate that people are losing touch with the psychological rhythms of the interior life.

We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all.29 We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity.

After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.”30 You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.”31

Christians must stop thinking about God as a mere being, a larger and more powerful version of themselves. That was not what God was.

Basil insisted that we could never know God’s ousia; indeed, we should not even speak of it. Silence alone is appropriate for what lies beyond words. But we could form an idea about the divine “energies” that have, as it were, translated the ineffable God into a human idiom: the incarnate Word and the immanent divine presence within us that scripture calls the Holy Spirit.35

When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.”

But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a mythos, because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos, and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience.39 The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being.

But nobody was required to “believe” this as a divine fact. The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a musterion because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine. Basil always distinguished between the kerygma of the Church (its public message) and its dogma, the inner meaning of the kerygma, which could be grasped only after long immersion in liturgical prayer.

Trinity was not unlike a mandala, the icon of concentric circles that Buddhists visualize in meditation to find within themselves an ineffable “center” that pulls the scattered aspects of their being into harmony. Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine. It is probably because most Western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.

There is no selfhood in the Trinity.46 Instead there is silence and kenosis. The Father, the ground of being, empties itself of all that it is and transmits it to the Son, giving up everything, even the possibility of expressing itself in another Word. Once that Word has been spoken, the Father no longer has an “I” and remains forever silent and unknowable. There is nothing that we can say about the Father, since the only God we know is the Son.

At the very source of being is the speechless “nothingness” of Brahman, Dao, and Nirvana, because the Father is not another being and resembles nothing in our mundane experience. The Father confounds all our notions of personality and, since the Father is presented in the New Testament as the end of the Christian quest, this becomes a journey to no place, no thing, and no one. In the same way, the Son, our only access to the divine, is merely an eikon of the ultimate reality, which remains, as the Upanishads insisted, “ungraspable.” Like any symbol, the Son points beyond itself to the Father, while the Spirit is simply the atman of the Father and the “we” between Father and Son. We cannot pray to the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included.

There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt. … This is what I love in loving my God.”

Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an eikon within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype.

Platonists told him that he had within him an innate standard of stability, a light within, “unchangeable and true that was above my changeable mind.”