The Case for God by Karen Armstrong (good book review)

THE CASE FOR GOD
By Karen Armstrong
406 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95
http://bit.ly/2fdbMl

…………..

The Bush era was a difficult time for liberal religion in America. The
events of 9/11 were not exactly an advertisement for the compatibility of
faith and reason, faith and modernity, or faith and left-of-center politics.
Nor was the domestic culture war that blazed up in their wake, which lent a
“with us or against us” quality to nearly every God-related controversy. For
many liberals, the only choices seemed to be secularism or fundamentalism,
the new atheism or the old-time religion, Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush.

But now the wheel has turned, and liberal believers can breathe easier. Bush
has retired to Texas, and his successor in the White House is the very model
of a modern liberal Christian. Religious conservatism seems diminished and
dispirited. The polarizing issues of the moment are health care and
deficits, not abstinence education or intelligent design. And the new
atheists seem to have temporarily run out of ways to call believers stupid.

The time, in other words, is ripe for a book like “The Case for God,” which
wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of
Western religious thought. Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific
popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured
despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. To that end, she
doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion — which
emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for
theological correctness — is compatible with a liberal, scientific,
technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the
ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is
much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect
of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many
Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to
understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or
a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human
life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern
religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from
the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a
practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought
but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a
proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through
myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and
principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we
can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather
than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it,
for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

It’s a knack, Armstrong argues, that the Christian West has largely lost,
and the rise of modern science is to blame. Not because science and religion
are unalterably opposed, but because religious thinkers succumbed to a fatal
case of science envy.

Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over
superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers
were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William
Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator
God. Convinced that “the natural laws that scientists had discovered in the
universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care,” Western
Christians abandoned the apophatic, mythic approach to faith in favor of a
pseudo scientific rigor — and then had nowhere to turn when Darwin’s theory
of evolution arrived on the scene.

An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution.
But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth
was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent
of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the
natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own
day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis
with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for
its failure to resemble a science textbook.

To escape this pointless debate, Armstrong counsels atheists to recognize
that theism isn’t a rival scientific theory, and that it is “no use
magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or
falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover
their truth — or lack of it — only if you translate these doctrines into
ritual or ethical action.” Believers, meanwhile, are urged to recover the
wisdom of their forebears, who understood that “revealed truth was symbolic,
that Scripture could not be interpreted literally” and that “revelation was
not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing,
creative process that required human ingenuity.”

This is an eloquent case for the ancient roots of the liberal approach to
faith, and my summary does not do justice to its subtleties. But it deserves
to be heavily qualified. Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s
telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The
casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading
lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians
avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern
standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture
literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and
confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was
grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their
theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but
very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that
Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis
literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’
resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if
he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows
to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from
practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and
vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion
without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually
inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass
without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of
Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not
exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery
O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But
the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery
O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs.

This explains why liberal religion tends to be parasitic on more dogmatic
forms of faith, which create and sustain the practices that the liberal
believer picks and chooses from, reads symbolically and reinterprets for a
more enlightened age. Such spiritual dilettant ism has its charms, but it
lacks the sturdy appeal of Western monotheism, which has always offered not
only myth and ritual and symbolism (the pagans had those bases covered), but
also scandalously literal claims — that the Jews really are God’s chosen
people; that Christ really did rise from the dead; and that however much the
author of the universe may surpass our understanding, we can live in hope
that he loves the world enough to save it, and us, from the annihilating
power of death.

Such literalism can be taken too far, and “The Case for God” argues,
convincingly, that it needs to coexist with more mythic, mystic and
philosophical forms of faith. Most people, though, are not mystics and
philosophers, and they are hungry for myths that are not only resonant but
true. Apophatic religion may be the most rigorous way to go in search of an
elusive God. But for most believers, it will remain a poor substitute for
the idea that God has come in search of us.