The Case for God
by Karen Armstrong
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Book Summary Information
Author: Karen ArmstrongEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-09-22
ISBN: 0307269183
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Case for God
Book Review: A Harsh Scolding Softly Given to Fundamentalists - Believers and Non-Believers
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading other reviews, more conservative readers are simply missing the point of this book. Yes, the author is a liberal religionist, but she is not writing a book on theology or attempting to convert the Faithful to her liberalism, or to defend Christianity. She is writing to show the new, militant, atheists who seek to see all religions in fundamentalists (extremely literal) terms are simply and utterly wrong.
To dismiss her work as somehow a theological treatise or as a proof for the Divine is shows the lack of reading comprehension among many today. Her goal, as she restates several times, is
"As I explained at the outset, my aim is not to give an exhaustive account of religion in any given period, but to highlight a particular trend - the apophatic - that speaks strongly to our current religious perplexity." (p140)
In the history of religion, we find different strains. What Armstrong is doing is showing that in many of the world's religions, that while some have taken the more literal approach, many more have taken a mystical, philosophical approach which takes the scared texts of their particular religion into a more symbolic approach to God. While many of us disagree with this approach, our disagreement shouldn't be with the author, nor with history, which is what many see it as. If you take the book as anything but an attempt to highlight a less-than-literal approach to religion and sacred texts, including those of the Christianity religion, then you sorely miss the point. (Christians shouldn't see The Case for God in the same light as The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.)
This book was simply not written to me, for me or about me. Instead, the author has written a compelling argument to those unbelievers who see religion only through the eyes of fundamentalism. Currently, the most militant and loudest atheists, while they don't believe, see religion, especially Christianity, as one does who believes, and stands in 19th century rural America. Everything is extremely literal, with no room for progression in Scripture. No, we no longer kill unruly children. Why? Because in Scripture we have moved past that. Yet, believers and nonbelievers still will focus on the Levitical Law as something which should still be enforced, much to the detriment of the Christian message.
Starting with humanity's earliest attempts at looking to the Divine and traveling right through to the 15th century, the author produces histories of various religions, although she focuses on Christianity more than the rest. Her history of the Nicene Council leaves a lot out, but in the end, her book is not Church History nor a theological treatise, but a study showing that many have taken a different path towards God than which is taken today. She is merely showing that for a wide majority of religious people, sacred texts are a starting point towards God, just as spoken language is, to set the sights upon realizing that describing God is idolatrous. Indeed, what Calvin and the Reformers warred against was the mysticism of the Dark and Middle Ages of Western Christianity when they first started to elevate the Scriptures to the highest place.
There is much to be gained, for the believer, from some of her history on Christianity, but I will leave that to the reader. While she does have problems with her Christian history, her other problem is with Islamic history, completely ignoring Muhammad's propensity of marrying young girls among other actions of the sword. While this is offsetting, this is not the point of her book.
While her first part of the book dealt primarily with the inability of humanity to come to terms with a transcendent God, bumbling through the centuries with rituals and language barriers, the second part of her book deals with humanity's failed attempt to remove the transcendent God.
Starting with a brief overview of the Reformation, she almost proposes a new reason for the Reformation, and that of Rome's inability to accept new scientific analysis and the hardening of its own theology in regards to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. It was Calvin, returning to Augustinian Science, who opened the door for a merger of religion and science. Something which will be disconcerting to atheists will be the very real fact that it was the Protestants who first led the way into science and indeed, into biblical criticism, against the march and might of Rome.
She is doing this, to counter the extremely fundamentalist position of the atheists, and indeed, of religionist, who believe that Religion and Science have always, and will always, be at odds, at each others' throats.
One of her underlying points, perhaps unintentionally, is that with the Protestant Reformation came the loss of religious rituals in Europe. She has spent a lot of time developing the idea that 'faith' and 'belief' means more than an abstract hope, but a commitment. So, if some one has faith in Christ, it is not that they believe that He existed, but that they have a commitment to Him and His teachings. For Armstrong, the former nun, rituals were important, across the millennium, in connecting people to their cultural gods, and no less when it came to connecting Christians to God. With the loss of the 'real presence' in the Eucharist, it become a theological symbol, a mere memorial, which allowed people to become further disconnected from the theology of the Cross.
It might be said, from reading Armstrong, that in a round about way, she blames atheism on the Reformation. Whether right or wrong, the loss of rituals have added to the erosion of Christianity in the lives of many people. There is no longer a 'constant doing' in the Christian life, but a mere 'wait and see' attitude. There is no commitment, but an abstract hope.
Moving through the ages of the Enlightenment, which was led by at the very last, Deists, she shows the long strides that both Science and Religion have taken to continue hand in hand. Religionists where scientists and scientists where Religionists. The same fact which is found in Christianity (Jonathan Edwards) is the same fact found in other religions as well. While Science could provide cold, hard facts - the how - religion move to answer those things left unanswerable by science - the why. Yet, in the 19th century, when deism started to give way to pre-atheism, fundamentalism arose.
The author makes the point, as so many have recently, that fundamentalism arose as a reactionary measure against what many felt like attacks by pre-atheists. When many in the public square called for the separation of Science and Religion, leaving Religion behind as an antiquated method of, well, destruction human appetites and moral control, which left so many questions seemingly unanswered, their arose a rejection, complete rejection, of science. Suddenly, biblical inerrancy took on a new layer, in that - unlike Augustine and Calvin - every fact, whether astronomical, geological, or physical had to be true of the entire bible and scope of Christian history was false. No more did segments of Christianity see that it was human wisdom that was lacking in understanding the bible, but that it we knew full well what the bible said and regardless of scientific evidences, everyone else was wrong. Fundamentalism become the extreme reactionary backlash against the scientific communities insistence that it alone held the absolute truth to the workings of the universe.
However, moving through the modern era, when the Newtonian God has been debunked, and that there is no real unifying theory of science, the once absolute truths of science provide more questions than answers. Now, when science is becoming less sure of itself, a sort of fundamentalist atheism is arising which is ignorant of the whole of religious, and indeed, Christian history. What Armstrong has done, is to put the atheist on the same level as the fundamentalist - regardless of religion - and scolded them harshly, but in a manner that it might take a while to sink in.
Her theology and Church history is aberrant to me (why is it that everyone thinks Athanasius was the first to declare Christ God?). Her acceptance of the good in all religion stands squarely against my belief in the exclusivity of Christ. Her belief in a transcendent God does not sit well with my reading of a deeply personal God which I find in the bible. Further, the mere fact that she is a woman schooling some of us might not sit well with some.
However, Armstrong has created a masterful work showcasing the pitfalls of extremists views, and indeed, that the history of religion is nothing of the sort, but one which attempts to lifts humanity to the Creator, giving the answers of 'why' and generally ignoring the 'hows' as an idolatrous attempt and claiming God for our own.
Can conservative Christians gain from this book? Of course, but they must first know how to approach this book. This book will not cite examples or proofs of God, and doesn't attempt to in any way prove that God is, so don't expect that. Expect, instead, a discussion, harsh sometimes, on the history of human religion which at one time looked to God, and left Him Alone to Speak, but now, we demand what we want from Him, whether we believe or do not.
Summary of The Case for God
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is ?to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.? She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from ?dedicated intellectual endeavor? and a ?compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.?
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