Karen Armstrong’s A History of God is a sweeping, humane account of how the idea of God has been formed, fought over, refined, and reinvented across three great faith traditions and many centuries. Rather than treating “God” as a single fixed object, Armstrong reads the past as a long, sometimes jagged conversation — between prophets and philosophers, mystics and theologians, rulers and thinkers — in which each interlocutor reshaped what people meant by “God.” The book is both historical narration and a kind of intellectual anthropology: it traces changing answers to the same human questions about meaning, power, suffering, and the ultimate order of things.
Armstrong opens in the ancient Near East to show how Israel’s early understanding of the divine emerged in a world of many gods. The biblical God begins as a powerful, personal deity who intervenes in history — a warrior and lawgiver who chooses a people and issues commands through prophecy. But even within the Hebrew scriptures we watch that image transform. Prophets such as Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah deepen the divine character: God becomes not only enthroned power but also moral governor and creator, calling for justice and promising an end to exile. The biblical narrative contains tensions — between God as immanent actor in history and God as a transcendent source beyond the world — that later thinkers would try to reconcile.
Christianity inherits these tensions and intensifies them. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection present God as love whose nature is revealed in vulnerability and relationship; Paul and the early Church systematize a theological vocabulary that ties God to salvation history and to the idea of Christ as both human and divine. As the Roman Empire adopts Christianity and the faith spreads, theology becomes increasingly philosophical. The influence of Greek thought — especially Platonism and Neoplatonism — introduces a new language: God is not simply an agent in history but also the absolute One, the prime cause, the source of being. This philosophical turn produces more abstract, metaphysical conceptions of God: the perfect, necessary Being whose attributes (simplicity, immutability, omnipotence, omniscience) are argued about in minute detail.
Islam, appearing in the seventh century, reworks the monotheistic inheritance in its own context. The Qur’anic God is emphatically one, sovereign, and merciful; Islam’s legal and devotional practices make God the center of communal life. Philosophical debates in the Islamic world — between reason and revelation, between rationalist theologians, philosophers influenced by Greek thought, and mystical Sufis — mirror the conversations in Judaism and Christianity but develop distinctive answers (for instance in the work of al-Ghazali, Averroes, and the mutazilites versus the ash’arites). Armstrong highlights how those debates grapple with the same core problems: how to reconcile divine unity with the existence of change and plurality, how to understand divine justice, and how the transcendent divine may be known or loved.
A major strand across all three traditions is negative theology or apophatic thought: the conviction that God is ultimately beyond all words and concepts. Armstrong shows how mystical writers — from Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius to Jewish Kabbalists, Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, and Islamic Sufis — developed practices and doctrines that emphasize unknowing, interior transformation, and the experience of union or intimacy with the divine. For these writers, God is less a supercharged being among beings than the ground of being itself; the way to “know” God is through prayer, ascetic practice, and interior purification rather than through doctrinal definition.
Medieval scholasticism, by contrast, shows the other tendency: an attempt to put theology on philosophical, rational foundations. Thinkers such as Augustine and, later, Aquinas, used reason to probe revelation, producing systematic accounts of divine attributes and the relation between God and creation. In Judaism Maimonides produces a rigorous negative theology squeezed through Aristotelian lenses; in Islam, philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes pursue a similar synthesis. Armstrong observes that the scholastic impulse clarifies and defends faith, but it also makes God more abstract and remote for many people.
The book then follows the upheavals of modernity. The Reformation, with Luther and Calvin, shifts emphasis back toward a personal, powerful God who judges and saves; at the same time it makes individual conscience and scriptural authority central. The Enlightenment offers another major transformation: reason and scientific thinking challenge traditional metaphysics and miraculous claims. Deism emerges, positing a distant creator who sets the universe running but does not intervene — a God increasingly compatible with scientific order but stripped of the personal immediacy that sustained religious life for most believers.
Armstrong pays special attention to the responses to this loss of immediacy. Some modern thinkers sought to preserve God by reconceiving the divine altogether: Spinoza’s pantheism identifies God with Nature; Hegel gives God a dialectical, historical unfolding; Schleiermacher moves theology toward feeling and religious experience, focusing on the sense of absolute dependence rather than on claims about divine attributes. Meanwhile, critics such as Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche treat God as an illusion, a projection of social/psychological needs or a relic of human weakness. Armstrong treats these critiques seriously without triumphalism: she sees them as part of the long conversation, revealing what people demand of the divine idea and why.
A central claim in Armstrong’s narrative is that modern people have largely lost the “mythic” frameworks that gave earlier generations an integrated way to think about God. Science and secularization removed many traditional supports for the older images of God, but Armstrong argues this vacuum does not mean belief simply disappears; rather, God is reconceived in new philosophical or psychological terms. Some modern theologians respond by trying to repair the relationship between God and human experience: process theologians, for example, picture God as changing and suffering with creation; existential and liberal theologians emphasize encounter, experience, and ethics.
Throughout the book Armstrong is attentive to how social, political, and cultural forces shaped theology. Conquest, exile, empire, and persecution all altered how communities imagined God — as warrior, liberator, judge, or compassionate parent. She shows that theological disputes are rarely purely abstract; they often reflect social anxieties and needs. For instance, a theology stressing divine transcendence can support hierarchical, authoritarian structures, while a theology emphasizing immanence and compassion can fuel prophetic calls for social justice.
Armstrong’s tone is ecumenical and interpretive rather than polemical. She does not aim to prove or disprove God; instead she reconstructs the shifting human attempts to hold the divine in thought and practice. She highlights continuities as well as divergences: how Jewish prophetic ethics, Christian sacramental imagination, and Islamic devotion all contribute to a common reservoir of spiritual resources while also generating unique emphases.
The final sections ask what relevance this long history has today. Armstrong suggests that the old either/or choices — strict orthodoxy versus outright disbelief — are inadequate. She advocates a retrieval of contemplative traditions and a renewed humility about what language about God can accomplish. Her implicit recommendation is that modern people might regain a livable, ethical, and spiritually rich sense of the sacred by learning from the mystics and theologies that emphasize interior transformation, the limits of concepts, and the primacy of compassion.
In sum, A History of God is a panoramic narrative showing that the idea of God is not static but historically rooted, shaped by theology, philosophy, politics, and spiritual practice. Armstrong’s book helps readers see why Jews, Christians, and Muslims have sometimes talked past one another and why the same word — “God” — can carry such different meanings. It is both a map of Western religious thought and an invitation: to understand the past imaginatively and to consider what form the divine might take in a world transformed by modern knowledge and new moral challenges.