Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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place of encounter in the tiny details of mundane life and, like a work of art, the world of the mitzvot has its own logic and
rhythm. Above all, we should be aware that God needs human beings. He is not the remote God of the philosophers but the
God of pathos described by the prophets.
Atheistic philosophers have also been attracted by the idea of God during the second half of the twentieth century. In Being
and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) saw Being in rather the same way as Tillich, though he would have denied
that it was 'God' in the Christian sense: it was distinct from particular beings and quite separate from the normal categories
of thought. Some Christians have been inspired by Heidegger's work, even though its moral value is called in to question by
his association with the Nazi regime. In What is Metaphysics'? his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger developed a
number of ideas that had already surfaced in the work of Plotinus, Denys and Erigena. Since Being is 'Wholly Other', it is in
fact Nothing _ no thing, neither an object nor a particular being. Yet it is what makes all other existents possible. The
ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He
ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: 'Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?' It is a
question that evokes the shock of surprise and wonder that has been a constant in the human response to the world: why
should anything exist at all? In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger began by asking the same question.
Theology believed that it had the answer and traced everything back to Something Else, to God. But this God was just
another being rather than something that was wholly other.
Heidegger had a somewhat reductive idea of the God of religion - though one shared by many religious people - but he
often spoke in mystical terms about Being. He speaks of it as a great paradox; describes the thinking process as a waiting
or listening to Being and seems to experience a return and withdrawal of Being, rather as mystics feel the absence of God.
There is nothing that human beings can do to think Being into existence. Since the Greeks, people in the Western world
have tended to forget Being and have concentrated on beings instead, a process that has resulted in its modern technological
success. In the article written towards the end of his life entitled 'Only a God Can Save Us', Heidegger suggested that the
experience of God's absence in our time could liberate us from preoccupation with beings. But there was nothing we could
do to bring Being back into the present. We could only hope for a new advent in the future.
The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1884-1977) saw the idea of rod as natural to humanity. The whole of human life was
directed towards the future: we experience our lives as incomplete and rushed. Unlike animals, we are never satisfied but
always want more. It is this which has forced us to think and develop since at each point of our lives we have to transcend
ourselves and go on to the next stage: the baby has to become a toddler, the toddler has to overcome its disabilities and
become a child and so forth. All our dreams and aspirations look ahead to what is to come. Even philosophy begins with
wonder, which is the experience of the not-knowing, the not-yet. Socialism also looks forward to a utopia but, despite the
Marxist rejection of faith, where there is hope there is also religion. Like Feuerbach, Bloch saw God as the human ideal that
has not yet come to be but instead of seeing this as alienating he found it essential to the human condition.
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), the German social theorist of the Frankfurt school, also saw 'God' as an important ideal in a
way that was reminiscent of the prophets. Whether he existed or not or whether we 'believe in him' is superfluous. Without
the idea of God there is no absolute meaning, truth or morality: ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a
whim. Unless politics and morality somehow include the idea of 'God', they will remain pragmatic and shrewd rather than
wise. If there is no absolute, there is no reason why we should not hate or why war is worse than peace. Religion is
essentially an inner feeling that there is a God. One of our earliest dreams is a longing for justice (how frequently we hear
children complain: 'It's not fair!'). Religion records the aspirations and accusations of innumerable human beings in the face
of suffering and wrong. It makes us aware of our finite nature; we all hope that the injustice of the world will not be the last
word.
The fact that people who have no conventional religious beliefs should keep returning to central themes that we have
discovered in the history of God indicates that the idea is not as alien as many of us assume. Yet during the second half of
the twentieth century, there has been a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of us.
There is nothing new about this. As we have seen, the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call their 'Old' Testament, show a
similar process; the Koran saw al-Lah in less personal terms than the Judaeo-Christian tradition from the very beginning.
Doctrines such as the Trinity and the mythology and symbolism of the mystical systems all strove to suggest that God was
beyond personality. Yet this does not seem to have been made clear to many of the faithful. When John Robinson, Bishop
of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God 'out
there', there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has erected various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even
though these ideas are commonplace in academic circles. Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has also
been dubbed 'the atheist priest': he finds the traditional realistic God of theism unacceptable and proposes a form of