|
Main Menu
PaLM Sites
|
PaLM Reviews
Category: Books
|
 Title: The Case For God  | views:96 |  Book Review John L Ng Dec 09
The Case For God
By Karen Armstrong, Alfred A. Knopf. 2009
Standing in his workshop, I entered into a delightful conversation with a Yeshiva teacher who moonlights as a furniture repairer (He was fixing my dining table chairs). I asked him to help me understand the illusive meaning of El Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God in the bible. He said one must begin by acknowledging that God is beyond human knowing. No one can know God; otherwise God is not God. We can only perceive God through our experiences within God’s creation. This brief encounter prepared me for Karen Armstrong”s The Case For God.
Ms Armstrong begins her monograph with the same premise as my Jewish friend. It is an eloquent and intelligent survey of Western religious thoughts. The book is divided into two parts, from The Unknown God prior to the Renaissance to The Modern God since then. She is no stranger to the subject. According to my count, she has written at least 15 books, including A History of God: the 4000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and The Bible: a biography, on similar subjects. In fact, if you have read any of her books, you will find that there is much recapitulation in this one.
Her approach is in contrast to Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Both seek to argue for the reality of God. Here they part company. Keller uses pseudo-rational methods to prove the God of the Christian traditions. Few of his arguments are circular reasoning. Armstrong argues that you cannot prove or disprove God through reasons (logos). Rather every religious tradition is embedded with stories (mythos). Its adherents experienced God through rituals, symbols and gestures in these stories. For example, the Christian tradition centers around two great narratives – the Exodus event in the older Testament and the Christ event in the newer Testament. Out of these grand narratives, every Christian in history finds faith, meaning and a sense of being.
The rise of science in the Age of Reason is the cause of this shift from the mythos to the logos. The mistake of the church was to succumb to rationalism in defending its historical faith. It tried to apply scientific methods in understanding Scripture. This rational approach to faith would be foreign to the great church fathers from Augustine to Aquinas. In many ways, the Western church has continued this rational approach to faith and has not recovered from this gross error.
Of particular interest is her critique on the recent atheistic movement in the West. These neo- atheists, Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, Hitchens God Is Not Great: how religion poisons everything, and Harris The End of Faith: religion, terror and the future of reason, make the same glaring error in their polemics as the religious fundamentalists. Both take a similar literal and rational approach to argue for or against faith. Armstrong rebukes both to lower their polemics by recognizing the balance and differences between mythos and logos.
Theism is not a rival theory to be tested. It is not primarily a set of propositions about God to be asserted and assented in a worldview. God is not a theory to be discussed but an ultimate reality in which people, individually and especially communally, find significant meaning through story living and story telling. Much of our Bible is narrative. It was given through history not to argue for God in rational sets but for us to encounter God in our ontology.
|
|
|
| Review submitted: 2010/1/20
|
|
|
|
| Tell a friend | Broken link
|
|
|
Home Page 
Love it! 
Recommend it! 
