The Work
A History of God was published in 1993 by Knopf (New York) and William Heinemann (London). The book is approximately 460 pages and traces the concept of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the Bronze Age to the present, with particular attention to the philosophical and mystical traditions within each religion. It became one of the most successful works of popular religious history ever published, selling millions of copies worldwide and appearing on bestseller lists in multiple countries. It established Armstrong as one of the leading popular writers on religion for the following three decades.
Biblical Engagement
Armstrong's engagement with the Bible is extensive but filtered through the lens of comparative religious history. She is interested primarily in how the biblical God has been understood and reinterpreted across centuries, not in defending any particular interpretation as normative.
Exodus 3:14 ("I AM WHO I AM") -- the self-disclosure of God to Moses at the burning bush -- is for Armstrong the foundational biblical text for the theology of divine incomprehensibility. She traces how the mysterious "I AM" (Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh) was interpreted through Greek philosophy (particularly the Platonic notion of Being itself), through Philo of Alexandria, through patristic theology (particularly the Cappadocian fathers' doctrine of divine apophasis -- God known only through what God is not), and through the medieval mystical tradition. Armstrong's own sympathies lie with this apophatic tradition.
Isaiah 40:18 ("To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him?") provides the prophetic ground for Armstrong's argument that the most authentic biblical tradition has always resisted reducing God to a concept or a manageable object of knowledge. The Second Isaiah's insistence on divine incomparability and transcendence is, for Armstrong, a crucial corrective to the anthropomorphic tendencies in earlier biblical texts.
John 4:24 ("God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth") is the Johannine text that Armstrong uses to introduce the Greek-influenced philosophical theology of the Johannine prologue and Pauline epistles. She traces how the identification of the Logos with God in John 1:1 enabled early Christian theology to integrate Greek philosophical categories into the biblical narrative.
Acts 17:28 ("In him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring") is Paul's speech in Athens, which Armstrong treats as a model of the encounter between biblical theism and Greek philosophy. She notes that Paul quotes the Stoic poet Aratus to make his point -- an act of theological appropriation that has characterized the Christian intellectual tradition.
Author and Context
Armstrong's argument in the book is shaped by her own intellectual and spiritual trajectory. Having left the Catholic religious life disillusioned, she remained fascinated by religion as a human phenomenon and developed a position she describes as "practical religion": the value of religious practice lies in its capacity to produce compassion and a sense of transcendence, not in the literal truth of its doctrines. This position puts her at odds with both fundamentalism (which insists on doctrinal precision) and secular atheism (which dismisses religious experience altogether).
The book was written at a moment of growing conflict between religious fundamentalism and secular modernity. Armstrong argues throughout that fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic -- represents a historically recent and philosophically thin distortion of the richer, more intellectually honest traditions of religious mysticism and apophatic theology.
Critical Reception
The book received enormous popular attention and mixed scholarly reception. General readers found it a revelation: a readable, sympathetic account of religious history that took all three Abrahamic traditions seriously. Scholars noted imprecisions, oversimplifications, and Armstrong's tendency to favor mystical and liberal readings over evangelical and orthodox ones. Evangelical critics objected to her treatment of biblical accounts of God as mythological rather than historical. Jewish scholars noted that her treatment of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism was selective.
The book's influence on popular religious literacy in the English-speaking world has been substantial. It introduced millions of readers to the Cappadocian fathers, Maimonides, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Arabi, the Kabbalah, and the apophatic tradition.
Legacy
The book contributed significantly to the popularization of comparative religion as an academic field and helped establish the genre of accessible, sympathetic histories of religious ideas for general readers. It influenced subsequent work by Armstrong herself and by others including Reza Aslan, Stephen Prothero, and N.T. Wright's popular historical writings. Armstrong's argument that the "God of the philosophers" and the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" have been in productive if tense dialogue throughout Western history remains a useful framework for understanding the intellectual history of monotheism.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Exodus 3:1-15 (the burning bush and the divine name), Isaiah 40:12-31 (the incomparability of God), Psalm 104 (creation hymn), Job 38-42 (God's speech from the whirlwind), John 1:1-18 (the Logos and the Incarnation), and Romans 11:33-36 ("O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!").
Further Reading
- Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (1995) -- the scholarly companion to Armstrong's popular survey of the apophatic tradition. - Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (1992) -- a rigorous philosophical analysis of biblical and post-biblical monotheism. - Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000) -- a rigorous philosophical defense of Christian theism that engages the same tradition Armstrong describes from a very different perspective.