Book reviews
The Case For God; What Religion Really Means
THE CASE FOR GOD – KAREN ARMSTRONG
Karen Armstrong became a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s. After seven years she left the order to lecture and write about the meaning of religion. Now, after publishing fifteen books and delivering addresses to the United States Congress and Senate she is recognised as a world authority.
In her latest book The Case for God, she takes us on a journey of faith through some 30,000 years of searching for the true meaning of religion.
In her introduction she states that she will explore what has gone before and then reconstruct it, using faith as a thoughtful stroll forward, in the light of the past. The following twelve chapters call on the radical thinking of a large number of philosophers, theologians and scientists. But it is at the end of the book, in the Epilogue, that she shows us the way in which her own thinking has led her. It is toward the theology of Paul Tillich and the use of the word GOD as a symbol.
On page 274, she reminds us that Gabriel Marcel, a French philosopher, distinguishes between a problem and a mystery. We can throw our minds at a problem which bars our way so that we cannot proceed until we have solved it. But a mystery cannot be solved by simply using our minds. We enter into the mystery and participate in its action. On page 307 she quotes Tillich who points out that it is difficult to speak about God these days because people immediately ask if God exists. This, she claims, means that the symbol of God is no longer working. She sees religious teaching as essentially and crucially a programme for action, quoting Tillich “You have to engage with the symbol imaginatively, and become ritually and ethically involved with it and allow it to effect a profound change in you”.
It would seem that Karen, like Tillich, thinks of God as ineffable (indescribable) but unless we worship (give value to) the God who is unknowable we find ourselves worshipping lesser gods in the form of superstition, addiction or obsession. These lesser gods have the power to take over our lives and reduce us to what Bultmann called a “decisionless capacity” where we find ourselves unable to make decisions. We begin to grow old without growing towards maturity. This maturity according to Paul is the measure of the fullness of Christ.
John Wood