Wright tackles much of the same ground that Karen Armstrong covered in History of God, mainly the conception of god as it expands and grows--evolves--from the earliest hunter gatherer tribes through the three Abrahamic religions. And it pretty much comes down to this: "Cultural evolution was all along pushing divinity, and hence humanity, toward moral enlightenment." Man's conception of god has grown to include more and more peoples and ideas as he has come into "non zero sum relationships" with them. A win-win philosophy underlies our developing sense of humanity and the extension of our moral compass and compassion.
"the births of all three Abrahamic religions were exercises in large-scale social engineering. With ancient Israel, once-autonomous tribes drew together, first into a confederacy and then into a state. The birth of Christianity saw a second kind of social consolidation, not of tribes but of whole ethnicities.…With the birth of Islam both of these thresholds—the conglomeration of tribes and of national ethnicities—would be crossed in short order"
While Wright begins with chapters on hunter-gatherers, kingships, and early middle eastern states, the heart of the book really focuses on the development of god and moral compassion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps the best part of the book for me was the growth of Yahweh from a small-time Canaanite deity in the court of El (There is no evidence for the whole exodus story and the conquest of Canaan by Joshua et. al--The Israelites seemed to have coalesced as a people in the late Bronze age) and taking on more characteristics of the other gods in the court--especially Baal--as he grew in importance and influence. Josiah and his main man Hilkiah--he who miraculously found the Deuteronomic Code in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem--enforced monolatry on the people of Judah, forcibly destroying the temples and the priests of the other gods in the region, as reflected in the famous showdown between Elijah and the priests of Baal. This allowed Josiah to consolidate power in Jerusalem and consolidate the ethnic identity of the ancient Israelites. This monolatry was eventually pushed into monotheism by the time of the second Isaiah. Eventually, Philo pushed the idea of god to the intellectual conception of the logos, or as the creation and design of the universe.
Wright picks up with the story of Paul, here. He really doesn't have a lot to say about Jesus, for he maintains that there really isn't much to say. Jesus burst upon the scene proclaiming that the kingdom of god was coming very, very soon, but it was really up to his followers to establish a religion. Paul was the winner here, bringing the message to the gentiles and hence transcending ethnic boundaries and enlarging the conception of god again. Wright does a good job of deconstructing Paul's message, especially his message of brotherly love that appears in his letters to some of the churches he founded, primarily as a means of consolidating his control over those churches after he moves on. It is a message of how church members should treat one another, not for mankind in general. But the gospel of John picks up on this and extends the idea with Philo's logos.
Wright is less convincing in his treatment of Islam. He maintains that Mohammed pushed the idea of god further than Paul and John as his worship of Allah grew beyond a small sect worshipped in Medina into a multinational empire controlled by religion. Mohammed's treatment of non-believers then also vacillated between intolerance and tolerance depending on how much he needed alliances with other peoples.
Finally, Wright seems to speculate this this growth in the conception of god might even present a good argument of the existence of god. "The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.” And maybe the source of this higher purpose, the source of the moral order, is something that qualifies for the label “god” in at least some sense of that word." It seems a bit far fetched to me to jump from talking about win-win strategies between people based on "non zero sum" relationships to assuming some kind of moral order and higher order to the universe.
Author: Wright, Robert
Date Published: 2009
Length: 567 pp & 18hr 27 min
electronic print & audio
Narrator: Morey, Author
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