This is a good sample of how Ms. Armstrong approaches the very idea of God:
In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
I would say that anyone who understand God in that way cannot truly call themselves a Christian except in the most vague, religious and cultural way. If Christianity is about anything that distinguishes itself from the other monotheistic world faiths, it is that God is both transcendent and immanent, that in the person of Jesus Christ, Immanuel, “God with us”, God who was infinitely transcendent intruded upon human history. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. What “we call God” is not a mere unverifiable symbol that points to something else, but a personal God who has spoken to His creatures through the revelation of Creation and more specifically the revelation of His Word.
I am really not sure how someone can be so well educated in matters of theology and yet be so ignorant of basic tenets of Christianity. The “fossil record”, the pain of the existence of this world does not shake my faith because my faith is based on an understanding of sinful man in light of a transcendent and holy Creator God and the redemption of an undeserving remnant of mankind through the incarnate Son of God and His sacrifice for sin. I expect such ignorance from Richard Dawkins, a man who has no use for God except to say that He doesn’t exist to sell books. Karen Armstrong is considered something of an expert on matters of comparative religion but apparently her beliefs boil down to living out life as painlessly as possible before you die. I guess that makes as much sense as any other worldview that denies God.
One of her most telling statements if a malleable God comes here:
There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance.
Ms. Armstrong’s view of God is one of a comforting myth. When one myth stops working, you just create a new one. There are simply some things that “science” and reason cannot explain, so for those areas and for general comfort among the misery of mankind we have created a mythology of a God who will set things right. Because she sees God as unknowable, she feels free to recreate the Creator in self-pleasing shape and encourages others to do the same. God is not who He has declared Himself to be, He is whatever we want or need Him to be. That is true with much of Western civilization, which may be why Ms. Armstrong has such a large audience. God is something to be used to make us feel better at funerals even if the deceased wanted nothing to do with God, to give a religious patina over a pagan wedding between two unbelievers, a figure spoken of in vague assurance of prayer by people who don’t really believe in God as He has revealed Himself to be, somewhere to turn to in buildings with stained glass when tragedy strikes to make us feel better. That is not the God I worship and it is not the God who is revealed in the Bible.
It is a little disappointing that the Wall Street Journal elected Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins for this essay. Granted, both of them get a lot of play in the media and have a large audience but if you are going to talk about God, where is the voice of someone who actually believes in God, at least believing in God as understood by the vast majority of believers in the monotheistic faiths of the world?
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