Irreverent Reviews
A History of God
Karen Armstrong · 1993
An ex-nun with a rejected Oxford thesis sat down to write God's 4,000-year performance review—and it sold like absolution.
Buy on Amazon →By every visible metric, Karen Armstrong's first act was a catastrophe. She entered a convent at seventeen and left seven years later, half-broken, her fainting spells written off as hysteria until doctors finally found the temporal-lobe epilepsy. Oxford failed her doctoral thesis on the say-so of one external examiner. The teaching job ended; the television career sputtered. And then this—a fat, nervy history of the most powerful character in Western civilization, written by a woman the church, the academy, and British television had all returned to sender. A History of God treats the deity of Jews, Christians, and Muslims not as a fact to be proven or punctured but as humanity's longest-running collaborative project: four thousand years of drafts, forks, and hostile takeovers. It became a global bestseller, which is the closest thing publishing offers to vindication.
Yahweh's Long Climb
The early chapters are the gossip. The God of Israel starts out crowded—one deity elbowing for loyalty in a Near East lousy with rivals—and it takes catastrophe to make him cosmic: exile turns a national god into the God, portable, imageless, everywhere at once. Then come the franchise wars. The rabbis make him conversational; the Christians give him a family and spend centuries brawling in the streets over a single Greek iota's worth of difference about the Son; the Muslims arrive to streamline him back to radical Oneness. Armstrong's thesis hides in plain sight the whole way: each generation renovates God to survive its own particular disaster. Every age gets the God it can survive. The deity, in her telling, has a development arc, a supporting cast, and—here is the scandal—a payroll of human ghostwriters.
Her Money Is on the Mystics
Armstrong's sympathies are not balanced, and the book is better for it. Her heroes are the apophatic mystics—Kabbalists contemplating the En Sof, Sufis dissolved in love, Greek fathers insisting God exceeds every sentence about him—people for whom 'God exists' was almost an insult, language being the wrong tool for the job. Her villain arrives late: the modern literalist God, a quasi-scientific hypothesis bolted together in the Enlightenment's workshop and now defended by fundamentalists as if it were ancient. Specialists grumble, with some justice, that her millennia are compressed and that every tradition turns out, conveniently, to be really about compassion—the freelance monotheist, as she calls herself, finding her own face at the bottom of the well. In 2026, the loudest believers and the loudest atheists are still cage-fighting over precisely the propositional deity she carbon-dated to modernity—two armies defending a God younger than the steam engine.
“Every age gets the God it can survive.”
Verdict
A History of God pulled off something subversive disguised as something respectable: it gave theology a plot, and it broke the news to millions of readers that their God had a history—which is another way of saying a future. Quibble with the compression; you will not forget the arc. Raise a glass to the ex-nun who survived the convent, the examiners, and the television executives, and then gave the Almighty what every celebrity dreads: a biographer with receipts.
