Rating: 
Summary: For freethinkers only
Review: If you already have a perception of God as a humanoid, male, bearded figure sitting in a throne in the clouds, then this book isn't for you. If, however you have always been curious as to the "invention" of God, when and where, then you will probably enjoy this read. It gets a bit long winded and sluggish, but if you skim over the sleepy parts it's quite interesting. Another book fundamentalists shouldn't read. Too much fact, not enough hype.
Rating: 
Summary: Writing a history of God without believing in God
Review: Karen Armstrong has prodigious learning and prodigious industry. However she does not have faith or belief in God. Because of this her history of God lacks the kind of inner depth and understanding which can come only out of ' real connection' with God. As to the presentation on the whole I feel myself capable of commenting only on her presentation of Judaism. She knows so much and yet here too my feeling is that she just does not somehow ' get it'.
So I would say to any reader for whom their own connection with God is most important this is not a very recommended work.
Rating: 
Summary: A great survey
Review: Karen Armstrong is in a unique position to discuss matters of interfaith history and connection. A former Roman Catholic nun, she also has a background as a teacher at a Rabbinical college, and is also an honourary member of the Association of Muslim Social Sciences. Her background interest in matters religious goes back to her childhood, which she shares in the introduction to this volume, when she first experienced religion as being about fear, and then later learned the more wonderful sides. She freely confesses her difficulties with matters of faith and belief, often made deeper and more troubling the more she studied the history of religion (one reason some denominations do not trust seminary training is that they feel it brings about a crisis of faith). Despite her initial misgivings, she believed that humankind was a spiritual race; she thought that God was merely a construct, and she found much more. God is in many ways a construct, done by rabbis, priests, sufis, wise people of all faiths. There is a real sense in which God is new for each new person, and yet there are commonalities, particularly between and among the three great monotheistic religions born of the Abrahamic tradition. This book represents not a history of God per se, but rather a history of humanity's perceptions of God over the past 4000 years, from the earliest days of Abraham to the present in its grand and often dangerous diversity. Norris takes a look at different constructions of God. The first chapter looks specifically at the world at the time of Abraham, not specifically any set of years during which the figure Abraham might have lived (we do not know this date with any degree of certainty), but rather prehistory to the Axial Age, a time of reinterpretation of prehistoric carry-forwards into a time of greater civilisation. The beginnings of many concepts of God began here; later chapters develop these more fully. The second chapter develops a 'typical' view of early Jewish doctrines of God; the third and fourth introduce Christian doctrines, including the often-problematic trinitarian doctrine; the fifth chapter looks at the Muslim perception of God as overarching unity. These chapters look at liturgical, scriptural and historical developments. The succeeding chapters look at different ideas of God that influence all three religions (albeit in different ways) as well as non-believer images of God. Philosophy has always played a pivotal role in theology, with an uneasy relationship sometimes in support of and sometimes opposed to dominant views of God. God viewed through the rational lens of philosophy is very different from the ecstatic experience of God by the mystics - kabbalism, sufism, monasticism, solitary mystics and divines all have left writings that sound remarkably similar, and look past the surface trappings of religions to get to what is held to be a deeper unity and truth. The period of the Reformation marked significant changes in the perception of God in the West, but it also had serious changes for the Orthodox, the Muslims and the Jews of the same period. The long-impregnable city of Constantinople was captured by the Turks, who made political strides against the Christians in the East only to be turned back by them in the West. The Muslim culture was in fact more powerful than the Christian culture of the time, and far more unified, but failed to capitalise upon this position, or foresee the shifting situation in Europe, which seemed to be fragmenting rather than moving forward. During this time also, it seemed a dark age for Jews, who were regularly expelled or subjected to inquisitions in Christendom; and Jews desired a need for more direct experience of God - mystical practices, particularly among Sephardic Jews, arose to fill a very present need. The Enlightenment touched Judaism, Christianity and Islam in important ways also. The beginnings of secularlism are to be found in the Enlightenment, a doctrine that continues to exist in diverse ways with each of the three major religions. The immutability of law and order, the ideas of divine rights of rulers and cultures and destinies ordained (or preordained) by God gave way to ideas of change, progress, and egalitarianism in societies where each of the three religions was dominant. The changes were more pronounced in Christianity and Judaism than Islam, but changes did occur everywhere, and as new forms of government were founded (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, etc.), the role of religion ceased to have the central place in civic life that it had; this, however, sometimes only served to emphasise its importance in other directions, not always productive toward the rest of society. The extremists of all three religions can be traced back to influences from and reactions to situations and ideas formed in the Enlightenment. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are intensely problematic for organised religion in the world of all varieties. Again the idea of philosophy came into play, this time teamed with an ever-growing dominance of science and technology as 'objective' ways of perceiving and judging the world. Science had sometimes been the handmaiden of religion - for example, astronomy had flourished in Muslim cultures as being practical and useful for determining the direction to Mecca, among other uses. However, without state sanctioning power and overall intellectual support from academies, it became more possible for people to question not only the perceptions of God and practices appropriate toward God, but the very existence of God. Nietzsche was not the only one to declare God dead, but merely the most dramatic of such declarers. In her chapter on the future, Norris paints a conflicted picture of what is to come. Will we have faith? Will we remember the past? Ultimately, she does not know any more than any of us, the readers. Doing a quick survey of modern theological and philosophical trends (mostly Western), the future is left wide open.
Rating:
Summary: Enormous Amount Of Research But Still Highly Readable
Review: Karen Armstrong's book presents a history of how God has been viewed by the three great Abrahamic faiths from the time of the patriarchs and their pagan contemporaries to modern times. The author describes in particular the development of the personal God which differs significantly from the concepts of God held by many other religions. Above all Armstrong emphasizes how views of God are constantly changing and as a result there exists an incredible diversity of such ideas at any one time in the world.
Armstrong ends her work with the big question of how conceptions of God may change while we continue to live in an age marked by the popularity of fundamentalism and apocalyptism as well as numerous societal ills such as rising rates of crime and drug addiction. We can now of course add terrorism to this list.
A HISTORY OF GOD reflects an enormous amount of research but it still manages to remain highly readable. It will serve as a good introduction to the history of religions as well as an excellent companion study for the books by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King which explore the history of early Christianity.
Rating:
Summary: A+ read!
Review: There are some great reviews already posted, so I'll keep this short. This book is excruciatingly hard to read. Honestly, it is almost unreadable - mostly due to an abundance of names foreign to the English ear. That said, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the roots monotheism and the interconnections between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I suffered through this book because it is a wealth of knowledge excellently presented without bias (well, at least as much as any book on religion can be presented without bias). If you have the stamina, read this book. You'll be better for it.
Rating:
Summary: Very intelligent book
Review: This book reminds me of a Judeo-Christian-Muslim version of Edith Hamilton's classic work, "Mythology".
Destined to become a classic. I highly recommend it for the aspiring religion scholar.
Rating:
Summary: Eternal Themes
Review: This book takes on an impossible task--to summarize the history of the three monotheistic religions over a 4,000 year time span, and I agree with other reviewers who variously found it tough going at times, somewhat superficial in that the author tried to cover hundreds of theologians and scholars in an average of a couple of pages each, and perhaps very biased in favor of Islam (a theme that runs through many of Armstrong's books). Having said all that, however, my advice is to try to avoid getting bogged down in the details unless this is your textbook for a course, and let certain broad themes emerge. First, all cultures have struggled to give a name, form and substance to what all seem to intuitively believe--that there is a "something else." Second, concepts of God and religion evolve over time in response to changes in society and the world, and the notion that a Sacred Text contains immutable truths that have been part of a religion for 2,000 years is fanciful. Third, the debate between those who seek to understand God on a rational level vs. those who seek a more intuitive, mystical understanding has been going on since the beginning and will go on forever. Finally, God, in the sense that it is discussed in this book, will never be dead--as we have all learned so painfully in recent months.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Survey of the History of an Idea
Review: This book undertakes an examination of the growth of the God concept from its earliest days in the ancient, and pagan, Middle East, through the development of the idea of the Lord in early biblical Israel and later in the Judaism which grew from that, then on into the blossoming of Christianity (from the ground of Judaism in hellenistic/Roman times), and thence into Islam which arose in the shadow of these two older religions and somewhat off their more mainstream tracks. Along the way, the author, Karen Armstrong, offers us a glimpse of the parallel developments in the farther east where Buddhism and then Hinduism were arising out of a distinct, though perhaps not quite so different, pagan tradition. Nor does she scruple to look at the philosophical tradition evolving in the Greek world at around this same time as it progressed from a world view rooted in the concrete and the knowable to a system of inquiry fascinated with and focused on the metaphysical and the unknowable. All these strains, Ms. Armstrong asserts, went into the idea of God as it developed in the traditional western monotheistic religions and she takes her search right up through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and into our own modern times. Ms. Armstrong sees similarities throughout and ably articluates them, offering us a thorough analysis and then a synthesis of the God idea, in the process. For Ms. Armstrong, God is an unknowable and yet a real paradox in that mankind inevitably longs to know "him". The result is a spiralling of concepts over thousands of years with frequent circling back by various thinkers and the inevitable echoes of earlier ideas. Although she carefully disects the various God concepts she finds, in the end Ms. Armstrong is plainly an advocate for mysticism, with the understanding that God is not an objective being, merely greater than all other beings, but completely "other", finally a subjective experience of the transcendental "ground of being" which lies beneath and behind all that is. For Ms. Armstrong God is not known through language in the way things of this world are known, but rather through a highly subjective experience akin to the way we experience art, where language and the rituals of religion serve as a kind of symbolism designed to invoke and evoke the experience of the absolute. In this sense, religions fail Ms. Armstrong and only the spiritual experience of the mystic survives and sustains. And yet she does not denounce religion but rather treats it with full respect and intellectual civility, deeming it as worthy of inquiry as any other field of human endeavor. Where she differs from the straight religionists (those who believe in one dogma or another) is in her refusal to embrace any particular orthodoxy and her adamant insistence on offering intellectual sanctuary to them all. She is, however, rather hard on western Christianity, the tradition out of which she herself came, suggesting that it fell victim, early on in its history, to a naive confusion of the idea of God as a transcendent absolute (a numinous Being behind all beings) with God as a Supreme Being, first among all beings, "himself" knowable in human terms but infinitely greater than any mere human. She very convincingly shows the logical flaws inherent in this kind of thinking and takes western Christianity to task for losing the sense of mystery which Eastern Christianity managed to retain. She shows how the western world lost its sense of God's mystery for this mistake and how this opened the West up to a loss of the sense of the religious and a growth of atheism, the belief in the non-existence of God. But in the end she shows, as well, that true mysticism and true spirituality affirms God's non-existence no less than the atheist, for God cannot be subsumed under any concept, cannot be described or grasped, and is, in the end, no more than "Nothing" where this is defined not as the absence of something where something might be, but rather as the absence of anything since the true idea of God does not allow of any interpretation or discussion. In other words, this idea is not subject to any ordinary linguistic categories (a very Buddhist view, by the way) and so is not really anything at all since it cannot be spoken of. In the end what is it but just Nothing? Hers is a mystical view finally, and many who are strongly attached to their faiths may find what she has to say somewhat offensive. Still she makes sense if you give her the chance and what she offers does little damage to the God idea, a concept which does not lend itself to easy explication, to say the least, but rather genuinely enhances it. I did have a bone or two to pick with her in that I thought her overview rather more superficial as she advanced into modern times and, after awhile, I started to feel that her personal view was perilously close to pure subjectivity which, in the end, must undermine the more substantial metaphysical insight she seems to be saying religion offers us. But this is tough stuff to talk about and I think she did an admirable job of it, all things considered. An excellent book and well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Overview of the great variety of monotheistic God concepts
Review: This is a wonderful book especially for people disatisfied with conventional modern thinking about God as either the Big Stern Daddy in the White Robe or An Obsolete Escapist Fairy Tale. The hardcover edition I originally purchased showed favorable reviews from relatively iconoclastic authors like A.N. Wilson (Armstrong, btw, never, so far as I know, refers to the quest for God as a "Wild Goose Chase" as Wilson did) and from more traditional figures like Sister Wendy Beckett (the smiling English nun who always appears in full habit and writes about Art History). The book takes a historical approach to the development of God concepts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is especially good at explaining Islam, exploring mysticism and less personal concepts of God cross-culturally, reviewing how different things have been considered "traditional" at different times, and examining how and why God-concepts change according to a cultures needs and experiences. It also reviews the different Hebraic concepts of God in the Jewish scriptures in fascinating and provocative detail. Needless to say, the Bible offers several different ways of looking at God. (Armstrong offers very little, however, that I recall on different ways of looking at Christ- for that go to Yaroslav Pelikan's JESUS THROUGH THE CENTURIES or for more radical contemporay views New Testament commentators like John Dominic Crosson, Robert Funk or Marcus Borg. For a better and kinder treatment of the Deuteronomistic writings try Anthony R. Ceresko's INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT: A LIBERATION PERSPECTIVE). Armstrong has also edited an anthology of Medieval English mystical writers called VISIONS OF GOD. I found that there was so much to take in when reading A HISTORY OF GOD that I could only read the book about 5 pages at a time. The reason I am only awarding 4 stars is because, like many books of this ambitious scope, it can fall down occasionally on the details. However, it remains a good starting point for your own reseach and for identifying your own interests. This book can changes lives both by vastly expanding knowledge of the issues involved in this field and by offering alternatives to what we have come to think of as "traditional".
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