The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

of Genesis, which was not written until the sixth century. J’s account of Yahweh’s creation of Eden is very perfunctory, and E did not contribute at all to the “prehistory” of Israel in the first eleven chapters of Genesis but begins his chronicle with the Patriarchs, when Israel’s history really begins. There were certainly tales in Israel about Yahweh creating the cosmos by fighting sea dragons, like other Middle Eastern deities, but J and E pass them by.

Yahweh was, therefore, making it clear that his cult must not include human sacrifice. But E’s painful story goes further. Moriyya means “Seeing,” and the Hebrew verb ra’o (“to see”) sounds insistently through the Abraham stories.33 Although Abraham is presented to us as a man of vision, the Genesis narratives show how difficult it is to see or understand the divine as we struggle with life’s cruel dilemmas.

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. In the Bible, we see that the Israelites were deeply vexed by the idolatry of the “foreign nations” (goyim), whose gods were merely “gold and silver, products of human skill.”35 But Israel’s sensitivity to idolatry may have sprung from a buried anxiety. 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.

Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers’ program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult;39 a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen;40 and a centralized state with a single, national shrine.41 The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology.42 You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a sacred “center,” as of old, was merely a house of prayer.43 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 claimant, because there can...

The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion.

when Moses asked God who he was, Yahweh in effect replied: “Never mind who I am!”

Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code

P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement.

The foreigner was not to be shunned but loved. Impurity came only from yourself, not from your enemies.

This is the context in which we should read P’s most famous work, the creation hymn in the first chapter of Genesis. Like all ancient cosmogonies, its purpose was primarily therapeutic.

P’s cosmogony is, first, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion that would have been balm to the exiles’ bruised spirits.

This was a nonviolent cosmogony.

Second Isaiah imagined Yahweh marching aggressively through the world like the divine warrior of early Israelite tradition.

The servant’s task was to establish justice throughout the world, not by force but by a nonviolent, compassionate campaign: He does not cry out or shout aloud Or make his voice heard in the street. He does not break the crushed reed Nor quench the wavering flame.82 When attacked, the servant turns the other cheek and refuses to retaliate. 83 Despised and rejected, he will eventually be “lifted up, exalted, rise to great height,” and the people will realize that his serene resignation has healed them. 84 He will become, Yahweh promises, “the light to the nations, so that my salvation will reach to the ends of the earth.” 85

The Bible consists of many contradictory texts, so our

reading is always selective. Tragically, however, a selective reading of scripture to enforce a particular point of view or marginalize others would be a constant temptation for monotheists.

The Jews had discovered that religious discourse was essentially interpretive. Ezra had not swallowed the text gullibly but had “set his heart to investigate (li-drosh)” it. Jewish exegesis would be called midrash, which derives from the verb darash, “to search,” “investigate,” “to go in pursuit of something” as yet undiscovered. Midrash would become a new ritual evoking the divine and would always retain connotations of dedication, emotional involvement, and expectant inquiry.

the “naturalists,” because their thinking was based entirely on the material world.

They believed that they could find an answer by examining the arche, the “beginning” of the cosmos. If they could discover the raw material that had existed before the universe as we know it had emerged, they would understand the substance of the cosmos, and everything else would follow.

The Western pursuit of disinterested, scientific truth was rooted in a way of life that depended upon the institution of slavery and the subjugation of women. From the beginning, science, like religion, had its ambiguities and shadows.4

The cosmos must have emerged from a larger entity that contained all subsequent beings in embryo.

A rational person should not speak of things that did not exist, so we should never say that something had been born, because that implied that there had been a time when it did not exist; for the same reason, we must not say that something had died or moved or changed.

They agreed that the world consisted of a unitary, changeless substance but argued that it was not a single being, as Parmenides thought. Instead it took the form of an infinite number of tiny, invisible, and “indivisible” (atomos) particles that were ceaselessly in motion in the boundless void of empty space.

Philosophy was not a coldly rational discipline but an ardent spiritual quest that would transform the seeker. This was the kind of philosophy that would develop in Athens during the fourth century; the rationalism of classical Greece would not consist of abstract speculation for its own sake. It was rather rooted in a search for transcendence and a dedicated practical lifestyle.

Every year at the festival of Thesmophoria, for example, they reenacted the story of Demeter, goddess of the grain that provided the economic basis of civilization.8 She had borne Zeus a beautiful daughter called Persephone. Even though he knew that Demeter would never agree to the match, Zeus had betrothed the girl to his brother Hades, lord of the underworld, and helped him to abduct her. Distraught with rage, Demeter left Olympus and withdrew all her gifts from humanity. Without corn, the people began to starve, so the Olympians arranged for Persephone’s return on condition that she spend four months each year with her husband. When Persephone was reunited with her mother, the earth burst into flower, but when she returned to Hades during the winter, it seemed to die in sympathy. Thesmophoria compelled the Greeks to imagine what might have happened if Demeter’s favors had been permanently withdrawn. Married women left their husbands and, like the goddess, disappeared from the polis. Together they fasted, slept on the ground as people had done in primitive times, and ritually cursed the male sex. The festival forced the Greeks to contemplate the destruction of civilization, which depended upon the institution of marriage, and to appreciate the real antagonism that existed between the sexes. They also meditated on the catastrophe that would ensue if the crops ceased to grow. At the end of the festival, the women went home and life returned to normal, but everybody knew th...

Musterion was closely related to myesis, “initiation;” it was not something that you thought (or failed to think!) but something that you did.9 The Mysteries that developed during the sixth century were carefully constructed psychodramas in which mystai (“initiates”) had a direct and overwhelming experience of the sacred that, in many cases, entirely transformed their perception of life and death.

religion is not what I believe but what I do.

The Mystery would force initiates to face up to their own mortality, experience the terror of death, and learn to accept it as an integral part of life.

No secret doctrine was imparted in which the mystai had to “believe.” The “revelation” was significant only as the culmination of the intense ritual experience.

But people were looking for a deeper form of theism. For the tragedian Aeschylus (525–456) the ineluctable pain of human life was the path to wisdom. Zeus— “whoever Zeus may be”—had “taught men to think” and reflect on the sorrow of human experience. It was therefore ordained that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love.

Wisdom was about insight—not amassing information.

When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.”

it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between ignorance—that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.”

He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth.

the Socratic dialogue led people to the shocking realization of the profundity of their ignorance. Instead of achieving intellectual certainty, his rigorous logos had uncovered a transcendence that seemed an inescapable part of human experience. But Socrates did not see this unknowing as a handicap.

Socrates was a living summons to the paramount duty of stringent self-examination.

To philosophize was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself.

It was essential that at each stage of the debate, Socrates and his interlocutors maintain a disciplined, openhearted accord.

Like a mystes, he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher atopos, “unclassifiable.”

That was why Socrates was not like other people; he did not care about money or advancement and was not even concerned about his own security.

“The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”46

Before he drank the hemlock, he washed his body to spare the women, thanked his jailer courteously for his kindness, and made mild jokes about his predicament. Instead of destructive, consuming rage, there was a quiet, receptive peace as he looked death calmly in the face, forbade his friends to mourn, and lovingly accepted their companionship.

Plato regarded philosophy as an apprenticeship for death,52 and claimed that this had also been the goal of Socrates: “Those who practise philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.”53

Listen to Craddock's Sermon 'When the Clouds Return after the Rain": http://digitalpitts.pittsdev.org/items/show/79#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0.

But during their initiation, the mystai had all glimpsed their radiant beauty when, along with the glorious chorus … [we] saw that blessed and spectacular vision and were ushered into the mystery that we may rightly call the most blessed of all: And we who celebrated it were wholly perfect and free of all the troubles that awaited us in time to come, and we gazed in rapture at sacred revealed objects that were perfect, and simple, and unshakeable and blissful. That was the ultimate vision, and we saw it in pure light because we were pure ourselves, not buried in this thing we are carrying around now, which we call a body, locked in it like an oyster in its shell.59

his famous allegory of the cave.62 He imagined a group of men who had been chained up all their lives in a cave; turned away from the sunlight, they could see only shadows of objects in the outside world cast on the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition.

So they must be initiated gradually into this new mode of being. The sunlight was a symbol of the Good, the highest of the forms, source of knowledge and existence. The Good lay beyond anything we could experience in ordinary life. But at the end of a long apprenticeship, enlightened souls would be able to bask in its light.

They would want to linger in the upper world, but had a duty to go back to the cave and enlighten their companions.

They would be able to assess the problems of their shadowy world far more clearly now, but they would get no credit for it. Their former companions would probably laugh at them. They might even turn on their liberators and kill the...

Toward the end of Plato’s life, as the political situation in Athens deteriorated, his vision becam...

Plato had helped to lay the foundations of the important Western belief that human beings lived in a perfectly rational world and that the scientific exploration of the cosmos was a spiritual discipline.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human intelligence was divine and immortal. It linked human beings to the gods and gave them the ability to grasp ultimate truth.