A History of God
A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong
I’m not a Christian. If anything, maybe I’m Buddhist, but only because that’s the religion my grandparents had. Most of the family funerals I attend are Japanese Buddhist, and that’s just about my only contact with any kind of religion. Well, and there were all those years of Wednesday chapel attendance at ʻIolani School; I guess they probably count for something too.
My first look at the Bible came in 6th grade religion class. Most of it was boring, but then there were the weird laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. What do you mean, you can’t eat shrimp? And of course Genesis and the Gospels were unavoidably familiar to anyone who’d grown up in the Western world. And there was the Book of Revelations. What the Hell was that, and what kind of dope had that guy John been smoking? It was fascinating stuff for a 10-year-old, and I took it in with indiscriminate enthusiasm, right along with Isaac Asimov and Star Wars and J.R.R. Tolkien. (It would be quite a few more years before the Song of Solomon gained any resonance with me.) But ʻIolani, while nominally a School of Christian Learning and Truth, didn’t bother to hammer God into us. They taught us the basics and that was about it. And after 7th grade religion class had come and gone, my formal exposure to religion was pretty minimal.
Of course it’s impossible to avoid religion in public life, especially in America. But if it’s not your religion, it’s not that hard to pay it little mind, either. I got through high school and college without giving God much thought, other than to take his name in vain regularly. My friends were a mostly nonreligious bunch. When Judy and I got married, we looked for a Christian church that wouldn’t mind marrying us even if we weren’t in their congregation. It wasn’t that hard; Nuʻuanu Congregational was happy to allow us to marry there, and only required a couple of premarital counseling sessions to make sure we wouldn’t embarrass them by immediately getting divorced or anything like that. (Thanks, Father Wally, for a great service.) And we’ve raised the kids without religion; to them, Christmas and Easter were always more about Santa and the Bunny than about Jesus’ birth and death.
So here I am, decades later, reading a book on God and trying to fill the gaps in my education. Why? It’s not because I’ve gotten religion in my old age. It’s because I realized somewhere along the way that I am profoundly ignorant about religion, and I can’t hope to understand why some people think the way they do unless I know where their ideas are coming from. And also because you really can’t study Western history without studying the three religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
It was a pretty good read. In less than 500 pages, Armstrong started with Yahweh, the tribal god of the pagan Hebrews, and followed the Hebrews’ transformation into monotheists, then kept on going to Jesus, the Roman Empire, Mohammed and Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and all the way through to the “death of God” in the 20th century. I particularly liked the parts about the early days of all three religions; got bored and skimmed through a lot of the medieval theology; and then perked up again when she hit the Enlightenment and the modern age.
Now my brain feels the same way my belly does after an evening at an all-you-can-eat yakiniku place: uncomfortably full of meaty stuff it’ll take a while to digest.
February 13th, 2006 at 8:38 am
Hmmm, I never thought about it much but it seems like Iolani never really got in your face about religion, for which I am extremely grateful. It seems like religion didn’t really take with any of us other than MRT.
FWIW, I do believe that Iolani presented religion in exactly the correct way – teach the kids the tenets of their beliefs but give them enough room to make up their own minds.
In my case, I ended up being a devout unbeliever. If you recall, I wouldn’t even get married in a church or by a man of the cloth.
February 13th, 2006 at 9:32 am
ʻIolani was pretty light on the religion. One time in college I thought I’d give churchgoing a try, and went to a Sunday service at an Episcopal church in Berkeley. I figured, I’d attended services at ʻIolani so it probably would be familiar. It really, really wasn’t. Sitting there I felt like such a fraud. I don’t belong here, I realized. When they got to the bit with the consecrated wafers, I panicked and got the hell out.
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:01 pm
Well put on the reasoning behind why you research religion; I read it and couldn’t agree more on the observation of just wanting to know the system. I googled Karen Armstrong’s name and got this post, weird. Anyway, I agree on the begining; the best chapter is the one on the Trinity and the Counsel of Niacia; made it an independent study, you really could see Christianity looking like Bhudism if they would have went the other route. But, then they wouldn’t have dominated history like have done. Science is putting the last touches on all of that, the moment we find another planet through science(liveable), you will see the human drive take over. I am hoping India becomes the next superpower, Ghandi was on the right trac. Anyway, good post.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Why thank you.