A History of God

Armstrong's argument is that monotheism is not a single, stable belief handed down intact from Abraham to the present, but a continuously reworked human idea, remade every time it stopped functioning for the people holding it. She traces this from the pagan storm-and-fertility gods of the ancient Near East, through the Israelites' gradual, contested move to worship Yahweh alone during and after the Babylonian exile, into the very different Gods that Christianity and Islam each built on that same monotheistic foundation to answer their own questions. Running underneath the history is her recurring claim that whenever a concept of God grows too literal, too much like an ordinary object among other objects, thoughtful believers in all three traditions have turned instead to mystical and apophatic approaches — insisting God can only be approached through what cannot be said, not through confident description. Fundamentalism, in her account, is not a return to ancient purity but a distinctly modern, comparatively shallow reaction against secular modernity that mistakes old myths for literal history.

The book became one of the best-selling works of popular religious history ever published, remarkable for a dense synthesis of theology, philosophy, and history that made figures like the Cappadocian Fathers, Maimonides, Ibn Rushd, and the Kabbalists legible to general readers across all three faiths at once. It helped establish Armstrong, a former Catholic nun turned religious historian, as one of the most widely read English-language writers on comparative religion for the following three decades. Specialists have pushed back on parts of it — noting oversimplifications, a tilt toward the mystical and liberal wings of each tradition over the orthodox and evangelical ones, and selective treatment of areas like Kabbalah — while broadly crediting it with introducing millions of lay readers to serious comparative theology.