A HISTORY of GOD by Karen Armstrong

The common scholarly opinion is that the final text of the Bible was not written
until many years, sometimes centuries, after the events described.
The Final Text of Exodus was edited in 5th century.

CHAPTER 1 : IN THE BEGINNING

THE BEGINNING OF GOD
In the beginning, Gods abounded and took the form of super-humans,
though unbounded by time or space. They interacted with mankind as other men.
The death of a God and subsequent search of a goddess were repeated themes
Abraham left Ur to eventually settle in Canaan in the 20th or 19th century.
He was probably chieftain of a nomadic tribe, part of the Westward drift of population.
They served as mercenaries or employees of the more settled tribes as they went,
but there were frequent conflicts.

It seems that there were three main waves.
1. Associated with Abraham and Hebron about 1850
2. Associated with Jacob (Israel), which settled in Shechem but then emigrated to Egypt.
3. In about 1200BC, tribes arrived from Egypt, following A leader called Moses and a God called Jahweh

The biblical acoount was written centuries later in the 8th century, based on ancient legends.
It is thought that there are 4 different sources for the first 5 books which were later collated.
Two are J and E (calling God Jahweh and Elohim),
The other two were D (deuteronomist) and P (priestly)
P wrote the first chapter of Genesis in the 6th century, when such ideas became of interest.

Unlike most pagan Gods, Yahweh was involved in the everyday life of man, rather than only in ritual and myth.
It is dubious whether Jahweh, the God of Moses, was the same as the God of Abraham
(he was probably El, the high-god of Cannan), but, by the time of writing Yahweh was the God of Israel.
However, in those days, people did not believe in just one God, even if they only followed one.

Maybe the prime difference between Yahweh and El (and other gods) was that he created awe (as on Sinai).
Other gods might be met without a great fanfare (as Abraham meets the three strangers).
The closeness of God to man in such El encounters as Jacob's (eg wrestling with God)
would be seen as blasphemous in later Yahweh religion.

Yahweh, the God of Exodus, was cruel and violent - a tribal god of armies
and the inspration of narrow fundamentalist religions, yet also on the side of the oppressed.
The God who shared a meal with Abraham is clearly a very different from the one
who met Moses at the burning bush - or raged in fire and smoke on Sinai.

THE EXODUS
To help the escape from Egypt, God releases a horrible plague
and then drowns the pursuing Egyptian army, mercilessly.
This is not a God of love and compassion!
He later orders the annihilation of the Canaanites.

He is passionate and partisan, a tribal deity.
There is, however, little attempt at realism here.
It could be the report of a successful peasant's revolt.

The myth of a Chosen People and divine election
can still promote a narrow and tribal theology,
even amongst Christian denominations.

Yet he is a God of revolution and supporting the underdog
though most religious organisations are tempted
to promote Him as the God of the status quo.

MOUNT SINAI
Yahweh sets hinself apart. The people may not approach the mountain.
The people stood back and Yahweh descended in fire and cloud.
The Law is now handed down fromm on high and delivered to Moses.
This has become a written thing rather than the ways of nature.
The Law assumes the existence of other Gods,
but the Israelites promise to follow only Yahweh.
However Yahweh was a God of war and not attuned to fertility and a settled life.
The Israelites were often tempted towards Gods that seemed more attuned to to current needs.

CHAPTER 2: ONE GOD

The word commonly translated as "holy" really means "separated".
Isaiah's vision (Isaiah 6:3) is of a God who is radically separate from man.
Overcome by his vision of God, Isaiah was only aware of his own inadequacy and impurity.
Yet he describes a conversation with God, which would be seen as impossible in many religions.
He attempted to describe the indescribable.
In common with other prophets of the Axial age, Isaiah can see the enemies of Israel, as God's agents,
rather than perceiving Godly action as limited to Israel, and God as always on Israel's side.
The prophets tried to force Israel to look at current events and take corrective action.
This seems so similar to the situation today, when the prophets are pointing to environmental disaster,
the people continue with their present behaviour and the priests ignore the situation.
The prophets insisted that the test of religious authenticity
was that its experience was integrated with ordinary life.
The convert must return to the marketplace!
It was a message not welcomed by the priestly class.

In this view, to follow Yahweh is to be on the side of the oppressed, whoever they are.
However the people preferred a less demanding religion, that focussed on myth and cultic observance.
Is it not the same today, in most religions on earth, even in Christianity despite what Jesus taught?

Israel (maybe like the church?) had misunderstood God's message and His covenant,
which meant special responsibilities, not priviledges.
The prophets exhibited a superior attitude to, and contempt for, gentile Gods,
which did not match up to the glory and wonder of Yahweh.
Such an attitude is still prevalent, sadly, for we too have created a God in our own image,
made of silver and gold, without hearing ears or seeing eyes.

Yahweh managed to take over the functions of most of the pagan Gods,
but found this difficult with the Goddesses, whose role became sublimated
leading to a subjugation of females in the city cultures that followed the Axial age.

In the 620s during the reign of King Josiah, a scroll was "discovered",
during a time of reform, that purported to be the last sermon given by Moses.
It became the book of Deuteronomy and brought about a stricter adherence to the Law,
and a stricter adherence to the worship of Yahweh alone, amongst many other Gods.
The message was that,only if Israel obeyed God's Law, would they prosper.

In a time of extreme political insecurity, the fundamentalist message had a major impact.
The Temple was cleansed and the people repented. The ancient books were revised to fit the new theology.
As in more modern times, God was used to justify and endorse our hatreds and excesses,
rather than to challenge our shortcomings. (Other religions have followed a similar pattern.)

Even so, 30 years or so later, the Babylonian King destroyed The Temple and exiled its leaders.
One result of this was the realisation that the external trappings of religion were not crucial;
another was that Israel had only itself to blame for the tragedy;
a third was the widening of Jewish perspective from contact with the outside world.

When the Persians conquered the Babylonian empire in 539, there came a change of policy.
Conquered people were returned to their origins and local religions were permitted.
A proportion of the exiles returned home and imposed their revised religion
(the "Priestly tradition" (P) devise and documented during the exile).
This included new books (Numbers and Leviticus) and adjusted others.
The first chapter of Genesis was added as a new account of Creation.
The Sabbath became a holy day, rather than just a day of rest.

Wisdom literature surfaced in the second century BC,
and featured the main division between the Greek understanding of God
as separate from the world and revealed through reason
and the God of the Jews as involved in the world
and revealed through revelation.

By the first century AD, Jews had a favoured place in the Roman world,
despite the rebellious nature of the Palestinian zealots,
which led to reprisals and the destruction of the Temple.
However sects such as the Essenes did not favour Temple worship.
They believed in a Temple of the Spirit
and in self-purification rather than animal sacrifice.
They had already withdrawn to separate communitiesin the desert.

The Pharisees were the most progressive of the Palestinian Jews,
though they are given a bad name by the authors of the Gospels,
due to the conflict which caused Christians to be barred from the synagogue.
In fact, the ideas of Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common
and much of his teaching was based on that of Pharisaic masters.
It was the Pharisees who taught that the Temple was not essential to Jewish worship
and that God was not a Being as humans were beings; had no material form.
They taught that serving another human being was to serve God,
since we are all made in His image.
To humilitate, or hurt, another human was sacrilege.

CHAPTER 3: A LIGHT TO THE GENTILES

By the year 70, when Mark's Gospel was written, fact had been overlaid with myth.
We actually know very little about the life of Jesus.
Mark's Gospel presents Jesus as a normal man,
with brothers, sisters and a family.

He may, originally, been a disciple of his cousin, John,
and, from him, gleaned his foundational message of repentance,
though his proclamation of the Kingdom of God followed 30 days later.

We know little about the actual nature of the mission of Jesus.
His reported words have been affected by later developments in the church,
and the extensive letters written by St Paul.

Faith healers were familiar religious figures at the time.
Like Jesus, they attracted a lot of female followers.
Jesus may even have been a Pharises, in the Hillel tradition,
preaching "do unto others as you would have them do to you".
His violent diatribes against the Pharisees in Matthew's Gospel
are almost certainly inauthentic and a product of later sectarian division.

The growth of the belief that Jesus was divine is complex.
Throughout he did promise that, through faith, all could share his power,
but his divinity was only a late-comer, in common with the pattern of others religions,
which sought a being to worship through some anointed teacher.
Buddhism followed a similar pattern, over a longer Period,
as did Hinduism, even creating its own Trinity in
Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva.

People need a God to worship and that is more accessible
though a human, or semi-human, person.

The New Testament writers never attempted to explain what they experienced,
but felt that, somehow, they were "in Christ", who became a mediator between man and God.
It took four centuries for him to become God, in the eyes of the Christian church.

Roman society was firmly resistant to change,
but contact with a wider world had brought a religious restlessness.
Their home-oriented Gods seemed petty in a global context.
During the first century, there was a growth of interest
in the mystery religions of the East.
However, nobody expected religion to be a challenge
and to demand a complete change of life-style, commitment.
Such ideas were the province of the philosophers:
Plato, Pythagoras, Epictetus.

This is much the same today, where people attend church for a sense of security,
rather than expecting any new ideas or challenge - change.
New ideas are for university scholars,
Conformity is for the pulpit!

The Christians found the need to explain their faith
through both the eyes of philosophy and religion.
This resulted in a rash of fresh ideas
from the mystery religions of gnosis
to being a branch of Platoism.

Paul of SamosataBishop of Antioch from 260-272 proposed that Jesus was just a man,
in whom the presence and wisdom of God had dwelt as a temple,but this was condemned at a synod in 264.
The search for an acceptable doctrine continued with Origen who devised a form of Platonic Christianity.
Plotinus (205-270), another Platonist, was not a Christian, yet he influenced all of the monotheist religions.
He saw human beings as all aware of their own faults and disorder
but constantly trying to sort order out of the chaos of their lives.
To find the underlying truth of reality, the soul must reorganise
with a time of purification and contemplation, probing the deepest receses of the mind.
The ultimate reality was "the One" who could not be described and is distinct from all things.
The process of creation is likened to circles emanating from a single point.
The farther one drifts from the centre, the weaker is the centre's influence, but the stronger the desire to return.

A new prophet, Montanus, preached a fierce form of Christianity, demanding self-sacrifice as the route to heaven.
It swept through Western Christianity, particularly North Africa where it absorbed the theologian Tertullian.

CHAPTER 4: TRINITY, THE CHRISTIAN GOD

In about 320, common man seemed to take an intense interest in theology.
Arius taught that the Son was subordinate to the Father (as had Origen).
His Bishop, Alexander, and assistant, Athanasius saw this as heresy.
In the last hundred years, Christian ideas had changed. Arius was out of date.
The new ideas of creation had adopted the gnostic view of creation from nothing,
rather than the concept, in Genesis, that it was a stabilisation of primorial chaos.
There was no longer a line of intermediaries between God and man, but a great divide.
The question posed by Arius was on which side, of that divide, was Christ.
Was he a man like ourselves?

Arius pronounced that If Jesus was not man, if he was in fact God all the time,
his life had no point, was no example for us and produced no saving action.
Ananthasius, on the other hand, saw Man as inherently fragile
and unable to work out his own salvation.
Only by God becoming Man could man be elevated to divinity.
To resolve this dispute a church council was called at Nicea, Anathasius got his way,
and creation from nothing became official Christian doctrine for the first time.
Even so, the Arian controversy continued for another sixty years,
dividing and diverting the leaders of the churcgh.

Bishop Basil and the Cappadocians developed the idea of a secret dogma
that existed behind the liturigal symbols and lucid teachings of Christ.

CHAPTER 5: UNITY and THE GOD OF ISLAM

In about 610AD an Arab merchant, Muhammad had worrying insights into life,
as currently lived by the citizens of the prosperous city of Mecca,
who's old tribal values had been superceded by a rampant capitalism.
Money had become their new religion!

In the old nomadic days, the tribe came first, all depending on each other for surival.
Now individualism had become the norm and competition the ideal.

In the old nomadic days, manliness had been the watchword.
Religion and any thought of an afterlife had little place.
Obedience to their leader was instant and absolute.
Blood feud between tribes was the punitive system.
All possessions were shared within the tribe.
It bred constant brutal warfare;
was brutal but effective.

Ideas of individualism from the surrounding lands penetrated and undermined this ethos.
Muhammad was the man who managed to bring the tribes together as a nation.
and thereby founded a unique civilisation.

He came to see that Allah, the God of the Arab pantheon, was the same as the God of the Jews,
but the Arabs never had a their own prophet and so suffered from spiritual inferiority,
even though they had the holy Kabah, in Mecca.

Muhammad had an experience of divinity on Mount Hira.
Embraced by an angel he was forced to proclaim and recited the first words of the Quran.
Over the next 23 years, he received further verses, each given in pain and struggle to understand.
It can be seen as a divine commentary on the events and problems of the time.
Like all creativity,it was a difficult process.

Muhammad could neither read nor write.
the first official written version of the Quran was published twenty years after he had died.
Muhammad did not have to priove God's existence. It was generally assumed. As it says in the Quran:
If you ask them, "who is it that has made the heavens and the earth
and made the sun and the moon subservient to His laws?"
they will surely answer "Allah"
and they assumed that Allah was the same as the Jewish God.
Muhammad pointed out that they were not thinking through the implications.

God had created each of them from a drop of semen:
they depended on Him for their sustenance: yet they lived self-sufficient, individualistic, lives.
The early verses of the Quran encouraged the Arabs to be more aware of God's benevolence.
An unbeliever becomes someone who ignores the benevolence of God, not His existence.
It was seen as wrong to stockpile wealth, rather than share it with the poor.
(this was much the same message as the Axial age prophets of the Jews)

Speculation about the nature of divinity is discouraged in the Quran.
Christian trinitarian ideas are thus seen as blasphemous.
God is only seen through the signs of nature in the world.

The Quran itself is seen as holy
but that holiness can only be experienced when it is read in Arabic.
in translation, or even when written, it loses its force and power.
Reading th Quran is seen as a spiritual disciple.
Conversions can come just from reading the text, aloud.

To start with Muhammad attracted converts from disillusioned youth,
the women and the underpriviledged of the community.
Richer men were reluctant to surrender their privileges!

There was no split with the established religious establishment until Mohammad barred worship of other Gods.
When he condemned worship of other Gods than Allah as idolatry, he lost most of his followers.
Three Gods in particular had been worshipped since time immemorial.
The Koran called them "empty names which you have invented".
(is this not the same for all divinities?)
To give allegiance to any material goods or to put trust in any other being, was deemed as idolatry.
Mohammad knew that monotheism was the antidote to tribalism and the heart of nationhood.

Islam see God as the fount of all being. Its creator and sustainer,
but indefinable in human terms or any simplistic definition.

Muslims are tolerant of other revelations, such as Christianity
and look for the commonality between monotheist religions,
"for your God and our God are one and the same".
THey see each religion as God's revelation to a different set of people.
Islam is thus a tribal form of religion, contrasting with Christianity's globalism.
However the new Religion was severely persecuted and driven out of their tribal lands.

Mohammad attempted to build bridges with the Jews,
even making adaptions to match the same holy days and fasts.
After initially welcoming the new religion, the Jews tyurned against them,
mocking their pretensions and lack of scriptural knowledge.
This resulted in an anti-Jewish bias withn the Koran.
Muslims declared their independence of other religions in 624AD,
and turned to faced Medina in their prayers, rather than Jerusalem.
(Christians, with no tribal adherence, usually have no such focus.)

Muhammed died in 632AD shortly after initiating the HAJJ,
the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims must make at least once in their life.
. (In Mecca, the pilgrims, all in identical garb, walk round and round the grave (the "Kabah"),
as they move closer to the centre the crush becomes greater and they feel themselves become
part of the global system circulating around Allah. They melt into whole and disappear.
This is absolute love at its peak!
Peace and harmony are central. Not even an insect may be harmed.

The religion of Allah introduced a compassionate ethos, common to other advanced religions.
It was marked by a strong egalitarianism, even of the sexes.
The Koran gave women legal rights not available to Western women for another 300 years.
These ideas were hijacked by men and, as in the West, women became second class citizens.
Like other faiths, Islam can be interpreted in a number of differenet ways
and, as with Christianity, this has resulted in sects and divisions.
The first arose from the struggle for leadership after Muhamadd's death
and rseulted in the Sunnah and Siah division.

The creation of an integrating relgion aided the expansion of the medieval Arab Empire,
but Isllam was not insisted upon within the conquered lands.
In 700AD it was even forbidden to convert unbelievers form another religion.
Islam remained a primarily Arab tribal affair.

Empire removed Islam from the simplicity of Medina.
The opulence of the court was challenged by Muslim divines, who sought solutions.
This resulted in the development of a number of sects and the creation of Shariah Law
which derived a way that Muslims should live following the example of Muhammad,
and thereby becoming, as he did, closer to Allah.

The Traditionalist Muslims continued to focus on the original teaching of
equality, humility and care for the poor. God was in everyone. There is not need of priests. Shiah Muslims focussed on divinely ordained family headed by Ali, the cousingn of Muhammad.
These split into numerous sects following different traditions and leaders.
They developed a more exoteric version of Islam, seeing the Koran in symbolic terms.

Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam emerged from a Semitic experience,
but then collided with Greek rationalism.
However the three faiths would come to very different conclusions
about the value of philosophy and its relevance to the mystery of God>

CHAPTER 6: THE GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

During the ninth and tenth centuries an Arabic culture bloomed after meeting Grecian ideas.
A new type of Muslim emerged dedicated to "falsafah", usually translated as Philosophy.
They came to believe in the primacy of a rational approach as a truer explanation of divinity that the scriptural,
in contrast to the Christians who focussed on their Bible as the only trye explanation.
They had no doubt that God existed, but sought to explain that rationally.
They wanted to purify religion of its primitive and parochial elements.
They saw God as the very fount of reason.
This was a major step towards the rationalist view of the world that we hold today
and which has led to the scientific method and the great discoveries of recent times.
Perhaps a step towards the European Enlightenment.

However this approach to create a rational approach to religion hit Problems,
primarily through the variety of new ideas but also though the trap of elitism.
How did the "common unthinking herd" fit into the purposes of divinity?

By the tenth century, Islam was beginning to splinter into a multitude of sects.
These were allowed to proceed in their private domains,
unlike Christianity which persecuted any deviation from the common pathway.
The Shiahs, in particular, developed their own variant focussed on the Imam as uniquely receptive to divinity.

A particular philosopher realised that in snalysing anything we seek to break it down to its components.
These components then become the reality, which we then try to analysed further.
At the base-level there must be a component which is fundamental, has no components.
This same form of analysis must also be applicaable to divinity.
Is this where God resides, rather than being the super-organism containg all?
God was ths seen as the fundamental building block of everything,
the lowest common denominator, maybe.

The division of the chucrh into Western and Easter in 1054
had a politicla element but was largely over the concept of the Trinity.
The Western Bishops saw God and Christ as equal whilst the East saw Jesus as subordinate.
(Hence the line in "Oh come all ye faithful" - "begotten nt created") In fact the divide was over a basic view of God as to be contemplated (E) or assessed (W).
The East (Greeks) viewed a rational approach as inappropriate for any discussion of God.

Archbishop Anselm, in the 1000s AD, committed himself to trust in God, but to a rational explanation.
He devised his own truth as "something than which nothing greater can be thought",
but his arguments are not convincing.

Peter Abelard of Paris (1079-1147) followed a similar logical approach.
He saw Christ as saving us by awakening our compassion.
However the influential Abbot Bernard, founder of the second crusade and the Cisterian Order,
opposed the intellwctual approach to divinity as lacking any loving content.
He seemed afraid of the intellect and condemned Abelard leading to his early death.
Whilst Eastern thinkers attempted to integrate head and heart, Western put head aside.

In similar vein, whilst the Crusades tried to destroy Islam at one end of the Mediteranean,
Muslim scholars in Spain attempted to educate the backward West with translations of ancient philosophy.
The prime mover in this was Thomas Aquinas (1225-74),
who tried to integrate the new ideas into Western Christian tradition.
He saw God's ineffability as impenetrable to the human mind
and the experience of God as indescribable in human terms.
He defined God as "He who is" accepting the Biblical phrase "I am",
and produced 5 proof statements:
1. There must be a prime mover (from Aristotle).
2. There can be an infinite series of causes. There must have been a beginning.
3. This must have been the actions of some form of Being.
4. The hierarchies of worldly excellence implies some ultimate Perfection.
5. The order and purpose of the world can not be a matter of chance. A Designer was needed.
These proofs have little substance today, since they imply that God is just another Being.
Reason alone can not reach an understanding of God,
but religious experience needs to be informed by critical intelligence.

CHAPTER 7: GOD OF THE MYSTICS

Christianity, Judaism ansd Islam all have the idea of a personal God,
who exists and behaves much as we do.
Yet this can be a liability; an idol carved in our own image.
Instead of inspiring us to exceed our limitations, "he" can limit us to them.
Thus all three monotheist religions devloped a mystical tradition to exceed that trap.
Until recently (say 600AD), that was normative to most religions.

Originally faith was an active thing. God called us to do things through His word.
Under persecution, a less direct interface to God was needed and mysticism flourished.
The mystics performed set rituals to open their minds safely to divinity.

The path towards God is consistently described as a upward journey
and struggling through the pain and effort of the mind,
whilst leaving the realities and constraints of the world behind.
Even so the destination becomes indescribable in human terms.
Pope Gregory (540-604) descibed it as an impenetrable cloud.
Others by describing peripheral objects.

The pathway was seen differently in the East, where the aim was to go beyond rational ideas,
whoch only tie us down to the mundane world.
The mind must be stilled and wait in silence.
Inevitably this was turned by some into a ritual!
However the East did not focus on strain and pain in their search for God.
These were a focus for contemplation, rather than attempts to make images of God.

Others in the East sought God through Icons.
However this caused controversy over the natureof the painting.

Even though Muhammad had been primarliy concerned about a just society.
Muslims also had their mystical side and mystical love of God became the focus of Sufiism.
They added fasting, night vigils and rythmic chanting to the ways of opening oneself to divinity.
They also introduced the "whirling dervishes", a form of dance designed to concentrate the mind.

The Pietists came from a German branch of Judaism, seeking a God less remote than they had been taught.
They came to see God as a friend, addressing him by the familiar "Thou", through rigorous asceticism.
Silence was essential and a withdrawal from the distracting presence of worldly things.
Yet God, himself, was unknowable, impersonal and inconceivable.
To find this God, it is necessary to "unseal the soul", breaking theknots that bind it.

Mysticism of this nature was able to penetrate the mind more deeply that more legalistic conceptions.
Its God could address the hopes and fears before which the God of the philosophers was impotent.
However the God of the Reformation took a more rationalistic form
and Roman Catholic mystics were threatened by the Inquisition.

CHAPTER 8: GOD OF THE REFORMATION

The 15th and 16th centuries were a time of awakening in Western Europe.
The people, if not the priests, were dissatisfied with medieval religion.
The powerblocks of the world were rearranged by conquest and new lands discovered,
(Bysantium Empire fell to Turks in, 1453; Spain became Christian in 1492 and Columbus discovered America)
In Spain Jews and Arabs were offered Baptism, Expulsion or Death by the Christian conquerors!
However Muslims empires still dominated the larger part of the Western world,
even though they were locked in conflict between Sinni and Shiah,
a conflict which rebounded into a new intransigence towards their Christian subjects.

The foremost Muslim scholars saw knowledge as both information and transfornmation,
and thus that mysticism, rather than logic, as the appropriate tool to search for God.
God permeates all creation and unionwith God is not reserved for a future world.
God can not be found objectively, but is within the image-making faculty of each individual.
When the Koran speaks of the Throne of God, Heaven or Hell it refers to an inner reality.
Muslims were tolerant of other religions, indeed some saw all faiths as having a common deity.
Sikhism was founded by those who saw Islam and Hindu as one faith.

Whilst Muslims were developing a new tolerance, Christian anti-Semitism drove Jews from their homes,
driving them towards a new mystical spirituality, seeking to heal the wounds of dislocation.
They came to equate homelesness with Godliness, just as creation has been exiled from God's presence.

The Black Death(1348), the fall of Constantinople(1353), the Papal captivity(1334-42) and the Great Schism(1417),
left Christians with their own disasters to contend with and brought the church into disrepute.
Humans could not operate without the intervention of a sovereign divinity!
The "Imitation of Christ" became the most favoured Western classic.
Spirituality focussed on Jesus's pain and suffering, with little thought of Resurrection.
The cult of Mary and the saints grew. People focussed on anything but God!

The Renaissance saw theology as poetry that penetrated the heart, rather than the mind.
However the new reasoning approach could not address the deeper fears beyond the reach of reason.
This gave rise to the time of persecuting witches as a substitute for human fear of the unknown.
Satan became a figure of ungovernable evil and the Black Mass an inversion of Christianity.
Martin Luther believed in witchcraft and saw Christianity as a battle against Satan.
Reformation
Instead of expressing faith in collective ways, people began to explore an internal spirituality.
Luther's God was characterised by wrath against self-satisfied sinners.
Observance of the Law could not save us, indeed the Law merely exposed our inadequacy.
Luther's personal breakthrough was to see salvation through Godly action, not our own.
There was nothing new in this, but it met Luther's need.
He did not mean that we had to hold the right ideas about God, but had to surrender to Him.
In common with Pascal and Kierkegaard, he claimed that faith did not mean assent to a Creed,
but a leap in the dark towards a reality that had to be taken on trust.
(Luther's religion did not penetrate his daily life, as is the rule and practice for all true religions.
He remained centred on "self", with an outward rejection of peasants, Jews, women and sexuality.)

The ideas of Calvin were more in tune with the Renaissance and had a longer lasting effect.
Calvinism inspired the Protestant revolution in England (1645)and the colonisation of New England (1620s).
Unlike Catholics, Calvinists can continue to practice much of the teaching of their religion
even after they have lost any belief in God or religious doctrine.
It was especially attractive to the new city-dwellers, who wanted to cast off dominant hierarchical authority.
Like Zwingli, Calvin was not interested in dogma, but in the social, political and economic aspects of religion.
(maybe after the model of Jesus)
However he executed several of his opponents, including the Spaniard, Severetus.
This drove Socinus, who denied the Trinitarian and Atonement formulae as non-Biblical,
out of the country and thence to the formation of Socianism and the "Unitarian" branch of Christianity.

Both Calvin and Zwingli had experienced intense personal experiences of God, and this came to be seen as a Protestant norm.
Christians were being "Born again" to a new faith in God alone, without intermediaries, such as saints and angels.
This became expressed in a fear-filled smashing of all formsof idols, inanxious denial of their worth.
The problem of the conflict between freewill and God's omnisience did not surface until after Calvin's death,
when, under the leadership of Beza (1519-1605) predestination became the hallmark of Calvinism.
* Since God is all-powerful, man could contribute nothing to his own salvation.
* God had decided that some should be saved and some not. It was predestined.
It was, an abortive, attempt tp show Christianity as logical and reasoned.
Through such mechanisms, the God of the Bible ceases to be symbolic of transcendent goodness
and becomes a cruel and abusive tyrant. "Predestination" shows the limitations of such a personalised God.

The autoboiographies of Puritans exemplify the terror inspired by Predestination that a person would not be saved.
Depression and even, illogically, suicide became rife. This was then attributed to Satan, whom became a figure of awesome power.
The Puritan God inspired anxiety and harsh intolerance of those outside the chosen elect.

Catholics and Protestants were now enemies, but, in fcat, followed much the same path.
Reformers in both shared an emphasis on a direct experience of God.
The '30 day Retreat' of the Jesuits was similar to that of the Puritans.
They provided a course in mysticism similar to those used today in psychology.
Both could lead to being filled by God with a new confidence and energy.
In both the awareness of sin, of imperfection, dominated their lives.
The Reformation period was one of great fear and an obsession with Hell,
based on the chamges wrought by a new science-based society.

The end of the 1500s, the religious picture was complex with multiple sects based on slender differences.
Religion still dominated everyday life for every man and woman, punctuated by the summon sof church bells.
Nobody could, or did, question the existence of God, in the form that the church defined.
"Atheists" were those who behaved in a non-Christian manner, not those who denied Christ.

In 1530, the astronomer Copernicus published a book claiming that the sun was the centre of the universe.
In 1613, Galileo was imprisoned for claiming that his observations proved Copernicus was correct,
which was in direction contention with the Word of God in Scripture.
Change was still firmly resisted by the churches.
In support of this, both Catholics and Protestants affirmed an entirely literal reading of the Bible
which included multiple examples that contradicted the ideas of recent science.
Many of their arguments sound farcical today!
Instead of explaining God as a symbol of an unattainable reality, 'He' became seen as a fact of life.
By the end of 1500s, leading theologians were explaining God in entirely logical terms (as some do today),
which opened the way to disproving His existence using similar arguments - and thus to Atheism.

Post-Reformation Christians had abandoned the imaginative God of the mystics and sought enlightenment from the God of reason.

CHAPTER 9: ENLIGHTENMENT

The industrial age of the 1600s produced a new society and a new perception of divinity.
Until the 1700s, the Muslim world could ignore the backward West. Then everything changed.
By the end of the 1700s, Europe had gained world domination and the process of Westernisation had begun.
Civilsation and achievement was no longer the preserve of a small elite, but spread to every level of society.

Change became the watchword, changes unimaginable in the old agrarian society.
With this came dissemination of expertise. It was no longer possible to be knowledgeable in all fields.
The place of tradition in discovering truth was found to be unreliable.
Past ideas of God were no longer satisfactory. God could not be taken for granted.
God's absence became a terrifying theme of the spirituality of new Europe.
Pascal saw a world devoid of any ultimate meaning or significance.
He saw Faith as a gamble, not a rational assent based on common sense.
By taking that risk, the faithful an find themselves transformed and life would gain new meaning.

From the beginning religion had helped people relate to the world and others in it.
The deification of natural forces had expresed a person's repose of wonder and awe.
Descartes saw such wonder as a primitive state of mind which mankind had outgrown.
Rational explanations were found to explain supernatural biblical events, better explained as symbolism.
Mystery was seen as muddled ignornace. God had been tamed by reason.

Isaac Newton took the ideas of Descartes further
in analysing the concept of the Trinity as an Anasthasian invention in his bid for power and converts.
There was a move to get back to the earliest form of Christianity.
Rationality was seen as the root of religion. Truth could be found by reason, so revelation was not needed.
The New Testament and the dsevelopment of doctrine were analsysed from a historical perspective.
These studies looked at the Bible literally, ignoring the symbolic and allegorical.

God was seen as angry and embittered demanding retribution,
but this, and the bloodbath of the Reformation, contrasted with the mood of society.
People became intolerant of the church's intolerance and the unrealistic nature of its doctrines.
Their problem was not with God but with the fantasies that had been woven about "Him".
The free-thinker Spinozasaw God as the sum of all the fundamental laws of nature.
God's activity in the world welded evrything into unity and harmony.
God is not the object of our search, but the cause of it, lying deeply within every human being.
Enlightenment faith ignored the mystical and paradox in religious experience.

Emmanuel Kant (1780s) defined the Enlightenment as "man's exodus from self imposed tutelage".
The RC devotion to the Sacred Heart took an opposing and unhealthy path of emotional piety.
Both this and the conceps of the Enlightenment were anti-establishment and mistrusted external authority.
In England an outbreak of religious excitement followed the execution of King Charles.
God would pour His Spirit on His people , as promised, and establish Hos Kingdom.
The first Quakers, George Fox and James Naylor preached of an inner light.
Hope for liberty, equality and fraternity had surfaced in England.