Former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has emerged as a recognized, popular voice on behalf of contemporary, postmodern religious sentiments. Her book The Case for God is the latest of nearly two dozen books she has written on religious subjects, in which she primarily focuses on the great monotheistic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).

Despite its title, The Case for God does not present a “case” for God in the sense that it discusses proofs for God’s existence. Rather, Armstrong offers a highly summarized chronological survey of ideas about God, with emphasis on Christian and Jewish thought. Many of the chapters consist of biographical snippets about prominent figures within these traditions, such as the apostle Paul, the philosopher Anselm (1033-1109), and Martin Luther (1483-1546). The book also highlights some prominent figures in Greek and Islamic thought.

Armstrong offers little that is original, primarily distilling the findings and assumptions of liberal religious and biblical scholarship for a popular audience. She takes for granted such positions as that the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses, but was rather composed by four independent authors (designated in modern times as J, E, D, and P) (p. 30f£.) who were generally inaccurate in their reports of history. She also takes for granted that the Gospels were written very late (83), and were not actually authored by the persons whose names are on them. There is no interaction with scholarship offering contrary viewpoints.

For the most part, The Case for God consists of stylized, yet simplified, narrative history and the reportage is generally fairminded. For example, in contrast to many popular treatments, which portray Galileo as a faultless victim of ecclesiastical tyranny and ignorance, he is admitted to have “also made mistakes” (183) and to have represented intolerance after his own fashion.

Factual matters are frequently vehicles through which Armstrong expresses three thematic concerns, and it is clear that she has selected her historical examples in the service of illustrating these concerns.

The Inaccessible Mystery. One such theme is summarized in the statement that it is “very difficult indeed to speak about God” (x). According to Armstrong, the application of reason and logic to religious experience is misguided, and has resulted in extremist understandings of religion, particularly fundamentalism on one hand, and the hostile expressions of the “new atheism” on the other. There is also no possibility of anyone having a “last word” (xvii) about God, because God is “infinite” and the ultimate truth God represents “lies beyond words and concepts” (320). Arguing over religious matters is “counterproductive and not conducive to enlightenment” (xvii).

Armstrong offers an illustrative anecdote in which Buddha refuses to answer questions about things like the existence of God, for he regarded the answers to such questions as “useless information” that did not “lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana” (23). It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the reason why concepts such as Nirvana (in Eastern religions, the state of being free from suffering) are “inexplicable” is because there is nothing to explain. One may be rightly suspicious that the designation of ideas as “inexplicable” is a ruse designed to put off those who seek rational explanations. In essence, Armstrong does not resolve the rational aspect of religious belief with this tactic; rather, she declares it off-limits to further discussion.

Armstrong is also insensate to the innate contradiction in her claim that God “lies beyond words and concepts.” Aside from the fact that she is using words to tell us that God is beyond words, in order for Armstrong to say with any authority that one cannot have a “last word” about God, she must presume to have exhaustive knowledge about God. Put another way, unless Armstrong herself has the “last word” on God, she has no grounds to declare that anyone else’s “last word” is inauthentic-and this does not even account for the possibility of God offering self-revelations about His character and purpose.

As noted, Armstrong’s historical examples are selected carefully in order to illustrate her chosen themes. An example of this is found in her decision to highlight the early church writer Origen (94-96). Though a formidable apologist for the Christian faith in his lifetime (AD 185-254), Origen frequently resorted to interpreting Scripture as allegorical, in order to explain apparent discrepancies. Armstrong apparently chooses to feature Origen rather than other commentators of his era with literalist exegetical practices in order to illustrate that Scripture is best interpreted in a nonliteral fashion.

The Nonfactual Experience. A second theme of the book is that religious expression does not require any factual basis; rather, it is to be grounded in experience. This follows naturally from the first theme, in which Armstrong has already discarded rational analysis as a tool for understanding religion.

For Armstrong, religious expression is more about acting than about believing: “It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of a religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover the truth-or lack of it-only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action” (xiii). Religion is created to help us find value in our life (8) and religious experience has the purpose of being therapeutic, such that religious rituals “lift us momentarily beyond ourselves” (10). Correspondingly, Jesus’ demand that people place their faith in Him has nothing to do with believing in His divinity, but rather with following Jesus’ ethical demands to feed the hungry, aid the poor, and “live compassionate lives” (87).

In saying this, Armstrong places the ethical cart before the epistemic horse. Our faith is in vain if Christ has not actually risen from the dead (1 Cor. 15). The historical occurrence of the Resurrection and God’s other actions in history provide us with the necessary substantiation for our own moral reactions. Armstrong’s epistemology provides no rational basis for ethical behavior.

Armstrong also reads “experience” into unwarranted contexts. For example, when she describes the christological controversies of the third century, she claims that the discussion was raised by people because “it touched the heart of their Christian experience” (107). There is little to suggest that “Christian experience,” as opposed to scriptural interpretation, had anything to do with the controversy between those who held to the heretical doctrine of Arius (who believed that Jesus was not eternal, but created at some point in time) and those who held to the orthodox position championed by Athanasius.

It is not surprising to see Armstrong profess that the Trinity “reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call ‘God’ was inaccessible to rational analysis. It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius” (115). The Trinity is hardly “inaccessible to rational analysis” as Armstrong claims, and there would be a number of expositors who would be quite surprised to hear this. Reducing the doctrine to a mere “meditative device” further implies that Trinitarianism was formulated in such a way as to distract people from considering whether the doctrine was rational.

A Tolerant Condescension. A third frequent theme of the book is that religious traditions are merely mythic expressions intended to aid people in expressing their spirituality. This theme also naturally follows from the first two. Armstrong is quite insistent that literal interpretations of certain religious texts are erroneous. She asserts that humanity has “lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously” (xv). Our own literal interpretations, she says, “would have been very surprising to our ancestors” (xv) and texts like the New Testament were “not primarily concerned with factual accuracy” (83).

But how does Armstrong know this? How does she know that the book of Exodus, or the Gospel narratives, or even pagan creation narratives such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, were not intended to be taken literally? Our primary clue to determine the intention of a document is genre, and in that respect, while we can recognize some biblical texts as nonhistorical in intention (e.g., Psalms and Proverbs), the texts that Armstrong alludes to here are not in this category: Exodus appears to be in the genre of historical narrative, while the Gospels-despite Armstrong’s claim that they are “not biographies in our sense” (83)-are quite definitely in the format of ancient biographies. The genre “package” of these texts indicates that they were generally meant to be taken as literal history. Armstrong’s claim that “our ancestors” would be surprised by such an understanding is not borne out by the evidence. For example, the Gospels, as ancient biographies, are very similar in structure to other ancient biographies such as the Agricola of Tacitus.

It appears that Armstrong’s attempt to reclassify the biblical documents is not based on any sort of serious genre study, but on a desire to place the biblical texts off-limits from historical scrutiny, in accordance with the first two themes that have already designated questions of historical fact irrelevant. It is also clearly intended to validate her contention that the Bible “gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation” (28). Armstrong firmly resists the idea of a single, indisputable truth in religious matters, which she dismisses as the product of a “fundamentalist mind-set” that holds “the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality” (308-9).

It must be admitted that Armstrong is equitable in her condemnations. She also decries the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for making blanket statements about religious people being deranged (306) and for “believ[ing] that they alone are in possession of the truth” (303). Nevertheless, in reading Armstrong, one is struck by the implicit irony in her approach. On the one hand, Armstrong would undoubtedly see herself as a model of tolerance, willing to give all religious views “equal time” and equal credence. At the same time, it is clear that this equanimity is grounded in a view that all religious traditions are equal in the sense that they are all substantially wrong, merely artificial creations designed as coping mechanisms for an insecure human race. Armstrong’s veneer of tolerance is thus, ironically, a highly condescending approach in which she places herself in a transcendent position, trying to rescue the rest of us from the grasp of debilitating religious literalism-a classic example of when “tolerance is intolerant.”

There is little question that Karen Armstrong speaks with clarity and passion for the postmodern religious establishment. It is unfortunate that in so doing, she ends up having so little of substance to say.

—James Patrick Holding

James Patrick Holding is president of Tekton Apologetics Ministries and author of Trusting the New Testament (Xulon Press, 2009).

John Dominic Crossan, who is virtually ubiquitous on television, radio, and documentaries, says that that Jesus Christ was never resurrected from the dead and that His body was thrown into shallow grave barely covered with dirt, and eaten by wild dogs who roamed the execution grounds.[1] He also says that when he hears Christian talk about resurrection, he hears hope but not history.[2]

Not only are the attacks on the historical Jesus coming from without, but the attacks are coming from within as well. Rob Bell, one of the liberal emergent church leaders, has said that if Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists found Larry’s tomb and did DNA samples and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing that we would not lose any significant part of our faith, because it is more about how we live.” [3]

Or think about Peter Jennings, he has passed on now, but he was famous in television documentaries for saying that Christians have faith, but reporters have facts. So he perpetuated the Enlightenment’s false dichotomy between faith and reason.[4]

I also recently mentioned James Watson, who is a Nobel Prize winner and also well known as co-discover of the structure of DNA. He said, “Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more significant figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed.[5]

You also have Richard Dawkins who said just last week in The Wall Street Journal, “Evolution is the creator of life… the greatest show on earth, the only game in town…Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip…God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.”[6]  He had previously said, “If you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[7]

You also have Karen Armstrong, who fully buys into Darwinian evolution, which by the way is not based on equality but inequality. She asks, “But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled?” What of the “death and racial extinction”? Her answer is that the notion of God like any “good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity”[8] In an arbitrary world controlled by natural selection, even though Darwin was right and we evolved from the primordial slime, and that everything is brain-based chemistry and genetics and is fatalistically determined, for Armstrong it doesn’t matter the Bible is a myth, for it helps you cope with the reality that Darwin unearthed. In her opinion, the Bible is a good psychology book, not true, but it’s a helpful myth.

Now I’ve just scratched the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is a mass of ice looming under the water. If this is all true, that gives us all the more reason to learn how to defend our faith. A great new product we have is Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ, Case for Faith, and Case for a Creator DVDs all in one package. This is absolutely crucial for the modern Christian. It deals with the Historical Jesus, Questions About Our Faith, and the Case for the Intelligent Design of the Universe. I encourage you to get this brand new resource at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-7000-0274.

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I thought it was a particularly poignant because James Watson, who is a Nobel Prize winner and also well known as co-discover of the structure of DNA, made a statement that shows us that we are in a war of ideas. He said, “Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more significant figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed.” This isn’t by some wild eyed liberal that everyone writes off as crazy, this is someone who has won the prestigious Nobel Prize and was co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

It shouldn’t surprise us that pagan intellectuals write or think like this, they’re pagans exercising their job descriptions. The problem is that their message is heard by multitudes because we as Christians haven’t given a reasonable answer. In other words, we haven’t exercised our job description, which is to be ambassadors for Christ. Some Christians are secret agents who have never blown their cover before the unregenerate world.

In the article in the Wall Street Journal, on one side you have Richard Dawkins, and if Thomas Huxley was Darwin’s “bulldog,” Richard Dawkins has been aptly described by some as Darwin’s “rottweiler.” Dawkins makes various statements that are of great concern. He says, “Evolution is the creator of life… the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.” “Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip.” “God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.” This is the Darwinian evolutionary point of view.

This is set up as a Pro/Con, on the one side, you have the Darwinian evolutionists and on the other hand you have someone who supports the notion of a creator. In that particular corner stands Karen Armstrong. What does she say? She asks, “But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled?” What of the “death and racial extinction”? What of the callous cruelty and evolutionary waste? Her answer is that the notion of God like any “good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity” in an arbitrary world controlled by natural selection. Her point is not that God is real; the idea is that a belief in God can help you deal with the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled. In this view, the Bible is no more than psychology book that can help you cope with the evolutionary process.

All of this is being said in an age of scientific enlightenment in which the fossil record is saying no to evolution. It’s being communicated in an epoch of time, in which ape-men, fiction, fraud, and fantasy abound. It’s being communicated in a time when design without a designer is ever more untenable. In an epoch of time in which empirical science explodes the myth of Darwinian evolution. If you’ll notice I’m very careful with my words because we as Christians certainly believe in microevolution or changes within kinds, but the notion that a lizard becomes a bird is singularly untenable in an age of scientific enlightenment.

My point in saying all this is to note that we are in a war, a battle, and it is crucial that you as a believer are equipped to give a reason for the hope that lies within you with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). We somehow have this notion that science is the child of secularism, that is false. Science could have only arisen within a Christian worldview. A secularist could have come up with alchemy but not chemistry, with astrology but not astronomy. The notion that secularism birthed science is completely false and as Christians we are commanded to know how to answer those who are leading our children and our children’s children astray. This should not be done by bolviating but with gentleness and respect, using our well reasoned answers as springboards or opportunities to share the grace, truth and love of the one who spoke and the universe leapt into existence.

We have many resources on this topic ranging from a brand new DVD called Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record to a classic DVD we have recommend in the past entitled The Privileged Planet and much, much more. You can check these out at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.

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