Does God Have a Future?

¶ … God have a future?

The historian of religion Karen Armstrong asks this question in her essay of the same name, as she addresses God from the perspective of the monotheistic religious traditions. For Armstrong, God is a methodology or a paradigm by which human beings have attempted to understand their world, humanity's place in the world, and humanity's location in a cosmos that is larger than any one individual. Armstrong's analysis suggests that she believes there is a God, if for no other reason that the concept of the divine has had such a crucial and significant role in the evolution of human history. Although she may no longer locate her own religious world view within the confines of one specific theological framework or faith, clearly the author's personal and intellectual grappling with the concept of the divine over the complex course of her own life, in the lives of others, and the traditions of the world has formed the teleological justification for her own study as an academic and also as a human being.

Armstrong's understanding of religion as a social practice of ritual, community, and shared ideals, as well as personal faith may seem to deviate from the common, Western, American tradition that holds religion to be a purely personal and private affair, split off from the social and presumably secular activities of the day. For Armstrong, religion and cultural understanding are indisputably joined. One cannot understand religion without understanding the culture that produced such an understanding of God, and vice versa -- one cannot understand a culture without comprehending the limits of its philosophical and theological underpinnings.