From Mark:

A HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong “A History of God” (Vintage:1999)

Part 1: GOD

p.4 The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another.

p.5 … there isn’t not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a wide spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. … When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. … if we look at our three religions *[Judaism, Christianity, Islam] there is no objective view of ‘God’: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. … it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound.

p.6 … the reality that we call ‘God’ exceeds all human expression.

p.7 … the {Babylonian] myth of Marduk and Tiamat seems to have influenced the people of Canaan, who told a very similar story about Baal-Habad, the god of storm and fertility … Baal and yam both lived with El, the Canaanite High God. … Asherah (El’s wife and mother of the gods) … Baal slays the seven-headed dragon Lotan, who is called Leviathan in the Bible.

p. 22 It is highly likely that Abraham’s god was El, the High God of Canaan. The deity introduces himself to Abraham as el Shaddai (El of the Mountain), which was one of El’s traditional titles. Elsewhere he is called El Elyon (The Most High God) or El of Bethel. the name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El.

p.26 … in the pagan world .. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur.

p.35 Paganism did not usually seek to impose itself on other people – Jezebel is an interesting exception – since there was always room for another god in the pantheon alongside the others. … from the first Yahwism demanded a violent repression and denial of other faiths.

p.37 The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own.

p.53 The Psalms often describe Yahweh enthroned in his temple as king, just as Baal, Marduk and Dagon, the gods of their neighbours, presided as monarchs in their rather similar temples.

p.63 … in Psalm Eighty-two we see him making a play for the leadership of the Divine Assembly, which had played an important role in both Babylonian and Canaanite myth …

pp. 65-66 Listen (shema), Israel! Tahweh is our Elohim, Yahweh alone (ehad)! You shall love Yahweh with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge upon you today be written on your hearts. … ‘Yahweh ehad’ did not mean God is One but that Yahweh was the only deity whom it was permitted to worship.

p.73 Pagan gods had always been territorial and for some it seemed impossible to sing the songs of Yahweh in a foreign country.

pp.76-77 P had introduced an idea that would become extremely important in the history of God. Men and women can only see an afterglow of the divine presence, which he calls ‘the glory (kavod) of Yahweh’, a manifestation of his presence, which is not to be confused with God himself.

p. 80 … some Greeks came to know the God of Israel and decided to worship Yahweh) or Iao, as they called him) alongside Zeus and Dionysius.

p.81 During the fourth century BCE, there were isolated instances of Jews and Greeks merging Yahweh with one of the Greek gods.

p.82 The author of Proverbs, who was writing in the third century BCE … suggested that Wisdom was the masterplan that God had devised when he created the world and, as such, was the first of his creatures. *[8:22, 23, 30, 31] … Wisdom was not a divine being, however, but is specifically said to be created by God. She is similar to the ‘gl;ory’ of God described by the priestly authors, representing the plan of God that human beings could glimpse in creation and in human affairs ….In the second century BCE, Jesus ben Sira, a devout Jew of Jerusalem, painted a similar portrait of Wisdom. he makes her stand up in the Divine Council and sing her own praises: she had come forth from the mouth of the most High as the divine Word by which God had created the world; she is present everywhere in creation but has taken up permanent residence among the people of Israel. Like the ‘glory’ of Yahweh, the figure of Wisdom was a symbol of God’s activity in the world.

p.82-83 In the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jew of Alexandria, where there was an important Jewish community …. Writing in Greek, he also personified Wisdom (Sophia) and argued that it could not be separated from the Jewish God:

[Sophia] is the breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; hence nothing impure can find a way into her. She is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power, image of his goodness.

This passage would also be extremely important to Christians when they came to discuss the status of Jesus. The Jewish author, however, simply saw Sophia as an aspect of the unknowable God who has adapted himself to human understanding. She is a God-as-he-has-revealed-himself-to-man, the human perception of God, which was mysteriously distinct from the full reality of God which would always elude our understanding.

p.83 The Greek God could be discovered by human reason, whereas the God of the Bible only made himself known by means of revelation.

p.83 Philo of Alexandria (c.30BCE – 45 CE) .. a Platonist …as a practising Jew, Philo did believe that God had revealed himself to the prophets. ..[ he made] an important distinction between God’s essence (ousia), which is entirely incomprehensible, and his activities in the world, which he called his ‘powers’ (dynameis) or ‘energies’ (energeiai). … Philo sees them emanating from God, rather as Plato and Aristotle had seen the cosmos emanating eternally from the First cause. Two of these powers were especially important. Philo called them the kingl;y power, which reveals God in the order of the universe, and the Creative power, whereby God reveals himself in the blessings he bestows upon humanity. … Sometimes Philo speaks of God’s essential being (ousia) flanked by the kingly and Creative powers in a kind of trinity. When he interprets the story of Yahweh’s visit to Abraham at Mamre with the two angels, for example, he argues that this is an allegorical presentation of God’s ousia – He Who Is – with the two senior powers. … [Christians] would also be influenced by his theory of divine Logos. Like The Wisdom writers, Philo imagined that God had formed a masterplan (logos) of creation, which corresponded to Plato’s realm of the forms. These were then incarnated in the physical universe. Again, Philo is not always consistent. Sometimes he suggests that Logos is one of the powers; at other times he seems to think it is higher than the powers, the highest idea of God that human beings can attain. When we contemplate the Logos, however, we form no positive knowledge of God; we are taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to an intuitive apprehension which is ‘higher that a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought’. It was an activity similar to Plato’s contemplation (theoria). Philo insisted that we will never reach God as he is in himself: the highest truth that we can comprehend is the rapturous recognition that God utter transcends the human mind.

p.89 To this day, theological ideas about God are private matters in Judaism and are not enforced by the establishment.

p.90 Like the divine ‘glory’ or the Holy Spirit, the Shekinah was not conceived as a separate divine being but as the presence of God on earth.

p.91 Rabbis told them that when a group of Jews studied the Torah together, the Shekinah sat among them.

p.93 [Rabbis] insisted that Jews had a duty to keep well and happy. They frequently depict the Holy Spirit ‘leaving’ or ‘abandoning’ such biblical characters as Jacob, David or Esther when they were sick or unhappy. Sometimes they made them quote Psalm Twenty-two when they felt the Spirit leave them: ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’

p.438 Karl Barth (1886-1968) … [stated] …because humanity has been corrupted by the fall. Any natural idea we form about God is bound to be flawed, therefore, and to worship such a God was idolatry. The only valid source of God-knowledge was the bible. This seems to have been the worst of all worlds: experience is out; natural reason is out; the human mind is corrupt and untrustworthy; and there is no possibility of learning from other faiths, since the Bible is the only valid revelation. It seems unhealthy to combine such radical scepticism in the powers of the intellect with such an uncritical acceptance of the truths of scripture.

p.450 Ever since Moses brought the tablets of the law from Mount Sinai, the majority have preferred the worship of the Golden calf, a traditional, unthreatening image of a deity they have constructed for themselves, with its consoling, time-honoured rituals. Aaron, the high priest, presided over the manufacture of the golden effigy. the religious establishment itself is so often deaf to the inspiration of prophets and mystics who bring news of a much more demanding God. God can also be used as an unworthy panacea, an alternative to mundane life and as the object of indulgent fantasy. The idea of God has frequently been used as the opium of the people.

p.451 … assumed that God was a sort of Big Brother in the sky. This idea of the Divine Tyrant imp[osing an alien law on his unwilling human servants has to go. Terrorising the populace into civic obedience with threats is no longer acceptable or even practicable … The anthropomorphic idea of God as Lawgiver and Ruler is not adequate to the temper of post-modernity.

p.452 … if feelings are not to degenerate into indulgent, aggressive or unhealthy emotionalism, they need to be informed by the critical intelligence. The experience of God must keepabreast of other current enthusiams, including those of the mind.

p. 457 The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God

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Part 2: JESUS

p.2 Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about ‘God’

p.95 At the same time as Philo was expounding his Platonised Judaism in Alexandria … We know very little about Jesus. Thew first full length account of his life, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements, which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers more accurately than a straight biography would ever have done. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel.

p.95 His disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the messianic Kingdom of God and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel, an one of the greatest of the tannaim. His followers worshipped in the temple every day as full;y observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the new Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God. by the time of Jesus’ death in about 30 CE, the Jews were passionate monotheists so nobody expected the messiah to be a divine figure: he would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being. Some of the Rabbis suggested that his name and identity were known to God from all eternity. in that sense, therefore, the messiah could be said to have been ‘with God’ from the beginning of time in the same symbolic way as the figure of the divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus. … The psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah ‘the Son of God’ but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return from Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim.

p.97 Jesus’ Teaching was in accord with major tenets of the Pharisees, since he also believed that charity and loving-kindness were the most important of the mitzvot. … he also taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule, when he argued that the whole of the law could be summed up in the maxim: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

p.98 After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalised until the fourth century. … Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God. At his baptism he had been cal;led the Son of God by a voice from heaven but this was probably simply a confirmation that he was the beloved Messiah. … Jesus used to call himself ‘the Son of Man’ … (bar nasha) simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition. … The Gospels tell us that God had given Jesus certain divine ‘powers’ (dunamis), however, which enabled him, mere mortal though he was, to perform God-like tasks of healing the sick and forgiving sins.

p.99 Like the Rabbis, Jesus did not believe that the Spirit was just for a privileged elite but for all men of good will …

p.99 After his death, the disciples could not abandon their faith that Jesus had somehow presented an image of God. From a very early date, they had begun to pray to him.

pp.99-100 Paul never called Jesus ‘God’. He called him ‘the Son of God’ in its Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God himself: he had simply possessed God’s ‘powers’ and ‘Spirit’, which manifested God’s activity on earth and were not to be identified with the inaccessible divine essence. Not surprisingly, in the Gentile world the new Christians did not always retain the sense of these subtle distinctions so that eventually a man who had stressed his weak, mortal humanity was believed to have been divine. The doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Jesus has always scandalised Jews and, later, Muslims would also find it blasphemous.

p.100 All religions change and develop. If they do not, they will become obsolete.

p.103 St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world. … he certainly believed that Jesus had been the Messiah; the word ‘Christ’ was a translation of the Jewish Massiach: the Anointed One. … as a Jew, Paul did not believe that he had been God incarnate. He constantly used the phrase ‘in Christ’ to describe his experience of Jesus … he took a dim view of Greek rationalism, which he described as ‘mere foolishness’. It was a subjective and mystical experience that made him describe Jesus as a sort of atmosphere in which ‘we live and move and have our being’.

p.104 There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some ‘original sin’ of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West. Paul and the other new testament writers never attempted a precise, definitive explanation of the salvation they had experienced.

p.105-106 … a very early Christian hymn [Philippians 2:6-11] …. The hymn shows that after his [Jesus] exaltation he is still distinct and inferior to God, who raises him and confers the title kyrios upon him. He cannot assume it himself but is given this title only ‘to the glory of God the Father’. Some forty years later, the author of St John’s Gospel (written c100 CE) made a similar suggestion. … The author was not using logos in the same way as Philo: he appears to have been more in tune with Palestinian Judaism than Hellenised Judaism. In the Aramaic translations of the Jewish scriptures known as the targums, which were being composed at this time, the term Memre (word) is used to describe God’s activity in the world. It performs the same function as other technical terms like ‘glory’, ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘Shekinah’ which emphasised the distinction between God’s presence in the world and the incomprehensible reality of God itself. Like the divine Wisdom, the ‘Word’ symbolised God’s original plan for creation. When Paul and John speak about Jesus as though he had some kind of pre-existent life, they were not suggesting he was a second divine ‘person’ in the later Trinitarian sense. They were indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of existence. because the ‘power’ and ‘wisdom’ that he re-presented were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed ‘what was there from the beginning’. These ideas were comprehensible in a strictly Jewish context, though later Christians with a Greek background would interpret them differently. In the acts of the Apostles we can see that the first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of God.

p.107 Peter [in Acts] did not claim that Jesus was God. He ‘was a man, condemned you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you.’ After his cruel death, God had raised him to life and had exalted him to a specially high status ‘by God’s right hand’. The prophets and psalmists had all foretold these events; thus the ‘whole house of Israel’ could be certain that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. This speech appears to have been the message (kerygma) of the earliest Christians.

p.108 In the Roman empire, Christianity was first seen as a branch of Judaism but when Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, they were regarded with contempt as a religion of fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the parent faith. The Roman ethos was strictly conservative: it valued the authority of the paterfamilias and ancestral custom.

p.109 Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment. … Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion not on ideology or consciously adopted theory. This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and disl;ike the idea of change. They find that the traditional rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security. They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are disturbed by changes in the liturgy.

p.110 Educated pagans looked to philosophy not religion fro enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato, Pythagorus or Epictetus. they even saw them as ‘sons of God’: Plato, for example, was held to have been the son of Apollo.

p.111 When they [Christians] recited their ‘creeds’, they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said ‘credo!’ (or pisterno in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. … there was no official orthodoxy in Judaism but … ideas about God were essential private matters. The early Christians would have shared this attitude.