A classic of our time that made Karen Armstrong a world-renowned religious scholar!
The ultimate guide to understanding the meaning of God and the essence of religion!

“As soon as a human being realizes who he is,
“I began to seek God and worship Him.”
Why is the human spirit so drawn to God?

The history of mankind cannot be told without mentioning 'God'.
Augustine's confession that "every soul is restless until it finds rest in God" and Sartre's declaration that "if God exists, man is nothing" clearly show the position that God occupies in human life.
God was a being who provided comfort and solace in the midst of a painful life, but he was also a being who bound humans with oppressive ideas and blocked freedom and liberation.
Why does the human spirit turn to God? How has the meaning of God evolved over the four thousand years of turbulent history, from around 2000 BCE to the present, as countless civilizations and nations have vanished and emerged?

World-renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong's masterpiece, A Brief History of God, is a true classic of our time, having reigned as a bestseller in the field of religion for 30 years since its publication.
In this book, Armstrong explores how humans have thought about and imagined 'God' by focusing on three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Beginning with the fundamental question, “Why do humans seek God?”, it illuminates all the revolutionary thoughts on God that have shaken human history, from the creation myth of ancient Babylonia to the “atheism” of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud in the 19th century.

“Humans have never believed in the same God.”
The meaning of God has changed according to the needs of the times.

In this book, Karen Armstrong looks back on humanity's long history of searching for God and declares, "Humans have always created gods that are useful to their time."
Humans believed in God not because he was logically or scientifically sound, but because he was effective in solving the problems of life's pain, unhappiness, and death, which were impossible to understand.
From the Babylonian captivity to the Nazi Holocaust, Jews have constantly imagined a God who would save them from countless persecutions, exiles, and the threat of extinction. Christian church fathers, convinced that the human Jesus was God, created and developed a new concept of a "personal God."
Muslims have always longed for a God who would give them strength through the rise and fall of Islamic empires and through humiliating colonial experiences.


This book is not a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which exists beyond time and change.
It is a history of how people have perceived God from the time of Abraham to the present day.
The human concept of God has a history.
Because it always had a slightly different meaning for each group of people who used the concept at different times.
… … The word ‘God’ does not contain a single, unchanging concept, but rather contains a whole range of contradictory and even conflicting meanings.
If this flexibility had not existed, the idea of ​​God would never have survived as one of the great ideas of humanity.

---From “Preface, pages 24-25”

As always, the reason new theologies succeed is not because they can be rationally proven, but because they are effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope.
The Jews, exiled to a strange land and thrown into confusion, no longer found the isolation of Yahweh's worship alien and uncomfortable.
This clearly stated the situation they were in.

---From "Chapter 2: The Birth of the One God, pp. 128-129"

“A personal God can never be the ideal of religion.”
Beyond the personal God, to the transcendent God

According to Armstrong, the belief in a "personal God"—one who sees, hears, creates, and destroys like a human—is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The imagination of a god in human form was a crucial reason why the three religions were able to penetrate the masses and expand their influence, and it was also the foundation for the West's acceptance of humanistic values ​​during the Renaissance period from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
But great thinkers throughout history have always been wary that God would become a tool to justify human actions and a projection of human desires and fears.
They were constantly aware that the personal God was extremely vulnerable to these dangers, so they sought a 'transcendent God' who would transcend human limitations.
The 'God of Transcendence' became the driving force that enabled humans to overcome their prejudices and stubbornness, and became an inexhaustible source of compassion and mercy.


A personal God and a God who actively intervenes in human history can be subject to criticism.
It is all too easy to make such a 'god' into an absurd tyrant or judge, or into a being that meets human expectations.
We can each make 'God' a Tory, a socialist, a racist, or a revolutionary, depending on our personal views.

---From "Chapter 5: The God of Islam, p. 302"

Personality can be a serious problem.
Because a personal God could be nothing more than an idol in the form of ourselves, a projection of our limited human desires, fears, and desires.
We tend to assume that God loves what we love, hates what we hate, and tolerates rather than rejects our prejudices.
When God fails to prevent disaster or seems to wish for tragedy, he can appear cold and cruel.
The easy belief that disaster is God's will can lead us to accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable.

---From "Chapter 7 The Mystic's God, p. 376"

How can the evil in the world be explained?
The Good God and the God of War

If an omnipotent God created and governs all things, why does evil exist in this world? If God is the creator of evil, can he truly be good? How can a God who demands good and generous behavior from humanity be the same as a God who is the source of religious conflict and violence? Armstrong emphasizes that the suffering and unhappiness that pervade life has always been a central theme of religion, and highlights the remarkable thinking that has attempted to understand "evil."
Augustine believed that God had placed an eternal curse on all mankind because of the sin of the first human, Adam (original sin), and that because of this, humans would always groan in the swamp of evil.
Marcion, who had a large following within Christianity, abandoned the path of integrating the good and evil gods and advocated dualism, which strictly separated the two gods.
Jewish mystics uniquely sought to reflect on the unstable psychological state of human beings through the myth of the birth of 'evil'.

How could a benevolent God create a world so blatantly filled with evil and suffering? Marcion was also horrified when he read the Jewish scriptures, which portrayed a cruel and ferocious god who, in his zeal for justice, slaughtered entire nations.
Marcion concluded that this Jewish god, “a god who delights in war, who is inconsistent in his attitude, who is self-contradictory,” was the god who created this evil world.

---From "Chapter 3: Light for the Stranger, p. 190"

Augustine's later writings were also filled with deep sadness.
The fall of the Roman Empire had a profound impact on Augustine's formation of the doctrine of 'original sin,' which later became central to the Western worldview.
Augustine believed that God had placed an eternal curse on all humanity because of Adam's sin.

---From "Chapter 4 The Christian God, p. 236"

Two Paths to Faith
The God of Reason and the God of Mystery

How can humans discover God? Armstrong shows that throughout the millennia of religious history, there have traditionally been two paths to faith.
One is the rationalist tradition, which originated from ancient Greek philosophy and seeks to interpret God's will through reason, and the other is the mystical tradition, which seeks to experience divine power through exploring one's inner self.
Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, and Descartes attempted to rationally prove the existence of God through 'reason', a gift given to humans by God.
However, in Jewish mystical literature, the Zohar and Bahir, and in Islamic mysticism, Sufism, verbal expressions of God were always considered incomplete, and myths full of metaphors and symbols were created.
Eastern Christianity emphasized 'silence' regarding the truth of God beyond the clear teachings expressed in the Bible.

Religious scriptures contain spiritual meanings that are difficult to express in words, in addition to their literal meanings.
… … The attempt to describe reality in human language is as absurd as trying to explain verbally one of Beethoven's late string quartets.
As Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, a Cappadocian Father, said, the religious reality, which is difficult to define, can only be presented by the symbolic expression of the liturgy or (more appropriately) by silence.

---From "Chapter 4 The Christian God, p. 222"

Eastern Christians came to distrust rationalism, seeing it as inadequate as a tool for discussing a God who transcends concepts and logic.
Metaphysics may be useful for secular studies, but it can endanger faith.
They believed that philosophy was nothing more than a long-winded discourse representing the human mind, and that we should remain silent about God, who could only be understood through religious and mystical experience.

---From "Chapter 6: The Philosopher's God, p. 362"

The Islamic God, born from the failure of Christianity and growing from its triumph

Christianity and Islam, which have a long history of hostility, from the Crusades to the 13th and 14th century Reconquista to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, are actually brother religions that split from the same root, the 'Abrahamic religion.'
How did these two religions come to write a history of "blood-soaked" conflict? How different are their attitudes toward faith in God and religious practice? Armstrong notes that the two religions have distinct perspectives on human society.
Christianity was born from the humiliation and failure of Jesus, who was believed to be the 'Messiah', dying on the cross like a sinner.
As Christians developed the spirituality that Jesus died to save humanity, who was sinless but had the original sin of corruption from the beginning, the values ​​of this world became inferior and God came to be seen as a kind of 'burden'.
Islam, on the other hand, was born out of a glorious history of triumph, in which a divided Arab people, never before united, built a vast empire.
Allah was a god who especially brought victory.
For Muslims, secular politics was not inferior, but an active religious activity that carried out God's will.

Just as Jesus' failures and humiliation played a significant role in his development in Christianity, so did his successes in Islam.
Unlike Christianity, which distrusts worldly success, the religious life of individual Muslims has not been unrelated to politics.
Muslims believe they are dedicated to building a just society according to God's will.
The place of the political integrity of the Ummah in Muslim spirituality is roughly equivalent to the place of a particular theological choice (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in Christian life.
If Christians find Muslims' interest in politics odd, they should consider that their own passion for arcane theological debates seems equally odd to Jews and Muslims.

---From "Chapter 5: The God of Islam, p. 295"

In the West, Christianity was a religion that revealed the meaning of suffering and tribulation based on the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, but Islam was a success-oriented religion.
The Qur'an teaches that those who live according to God's will—justice, equality, and a fair distribution of wealth—cannot fail, and the history of Islam seems to bear this out.
Unlike Jesus, Muhammad was not a loser but a man of remarkable success.
His achievements were further strengthened by the remarkable development of the Islamic Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries.
This success seemed to naturally vindicate Muslims' faith in God.

---From "Chapter 10, The Death of God, p. 627"

Does God still have value in our time?
For the creation of a new god

Although Nietzsche declared the death of God over a century ago, 'God' still remains a burning issue for us.
Atheism, which has been accepted as a trend of the times and has been popular since the 19th century, paradoxically seems to only prove the reality that humans can never shake off God.
What does God mean to us today? Even in this age of widespread scientism and humanism, can it still serve as a value that elevates life and allows us to transcend our limitations? What path should religion take to create a God fit for the times?

The concept of a personal God seems increasingly unacceptable today for moral, intellectual, scientific, and spiritual reasons.
… … The metaphysical concept of God as a supreme being, which has long been popular in the West, is also unsatisfactory.
The philosophers' God is merely a product of banal rationalism, and the traditional proofs of God's existence are no longer convincing.
The widespread acceptance of the philosophers' god by the Enlightenment deists was the first step toward modern atheism.
Like the old gods, they have become so distant from humans and society that they have easily become 'inactive gods' and are now disappearing from our consciousness.

---From "Chapter 11: The Future of God, pp. 673-674"

If the concept of God today is no longer valid, it will be discarded.
But… …humans have always created beliefs for themselves to cultivate a sense of the wonder and inexpressible meaning of life.
The loss of purpose, alienation, cultural chaos, and violence that pervade today's society seem to indicate that modern people are failing to create a concept of God appropriate to their times and are falling into despair.

---From "Chapter 11, The Future of God, p. 676"