What is A History of God about?

A History of God is Karen Armstrong's account of how the idea of God has changed over four thousand years across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with excursions into Hinduism and Buddhism. The organizing thesis is that the human conception of God is not static and never has been. The God of Abraham, the God of the philosophers, the personal God of mystics, and the God of modern fundamentalism are genuinely different constructions — responses to different historical circumstances and human needs.

Armstrong begins in ancient Mesopotamia and early Israel, where the God of the Hebrews emerged from a polytheistic environment and gradually became identified as the sole deity of the universe. She traces the development of Jewish theology through the Babylonian exile and the rabbinic period, then follows Christianity's encounter with Greek philosophy, which transformed the Hebrew God into the abstract, timeless being of Neoplatonism. Islamic theology from Muhammad through the Sufi mystical tradition forms the third major thread, and Armstrong argues repeatedly that the three Abrahamic traditions have more in common with each other — especially in their mystical strands — than popular understanding suggests.

A recurring theme is the tension between two modes of religious experience: the God of the philosophers, reached through reason and contemplation, and the God of personal encounter, who speaks to prophets and answers prayers. The mystical traditions in all three religions — Kabbalah, Sufism, Christian apophatic theology — consistently dissolved this personal God into something more like ground of being or ineffable mystery.

The final chapters examine the twentieth century, where fundamentalism in all three traditions responded to the pressures of modernism by insisting on literal reading and factual claims. Armstrong sees fundamentalism as an anxious reaction to the collapse of traditional societies rather than a return to original religion. The book ends on an ambiguous note: the God of traditional theology may be philosophically untenable for many modern people, yet the human need that religion addresses has not disappeared.