Abstract
This is a puzzling book from a renowned intellectual historian who has had a distinguished academic career at the universities of Adelaide and Queensland. I found it puzzling because it is a mix of populist deconstruction and philosophical analysis that doesn’t quite hang together. The not very original thesis is that there is something of a paradox, even a contradiction, between the God of Scripture and the God of philosophy, a contradiction that human beings brought up in scriptural traditions have failed to resolve. On the way to this conclusion there are some genuinely interesting explorations, and one of the merits of the book is the author’s even-handedness in dealing with Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity.
Part of the problem is the title. It invites comparison with Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which was less philosophically orientated but in many ways more insightful because it showed a literary and cultural sensitivity to texts that is rather lacking in God: a new biography. I found Almond’s approach to the Old Testament rather crass. He finds in ancient Hebrew Scripture a tyrannical and arbitrary God who is all too human in his mood changes and furies. There is an echo of Marcion here, of course, but also of the kind of dismissal one has become accustomed to from the new atheists, which wins a few cheap points but fails to engage with the way in which such texts have been received and interpreted. Jesus comes with a slightly improved vision of God, but even Jesus is fearfully judgemental. The core of Almond’s argument is that the transcendence of God is incompatible with any notion of divine immanence. A creator ‘ex nihilo’ cannot be genuinely within creation; and an immanent God is an emanationist God, one who creates out of his own substance. Yet Christian orthodoxy has never quite bought into this paradox. If the God who creates ex nihilo is, as Irenaeus taught, the ‘place’ of the world, everything in creation is both radically dependent on God and open to him in the present moment. Scripture and philosophy are different but they can work together. Even Karl Barth, who rejected natural theology, found delight in Anselm’s Proslogion with its thought experiment approach to the existence of God.
The best part of the book is the end, which commends an agnostic spirituality that is nonetheless open to the hope that our search for ultimate meaning might not be in vain. We can live in hope, and that is a good way to live. The book is handsomely produced and has 30 colour plates. These, however, though delightful, do not appear to form part of the argument, nor could I find them referred to in the text.