“When we are speaking about God, we are speaking about a different kind of reality altogether,” former nun, author and religious historian Karen Armstrong told a rapt audience at St. John’s, Lafayette Square one recent Sunday.

Today, God is often thought of as a commodity, a set of tenets to be complied with or a compendium of specific statements about the nature of God, Armstrong believes. However, this was not always the case.

In making “the case for God,” which also is the title of her latest book, Armstrong asserts that before the modern era, all the major religious traditions, including Christianity, agreed that God is not a being in the literal sense of the word. “The ancients thought of God as being itself,” she says. “When we’re speaking about God, we’re speaking about a different kind of reality altogether.”

God cannot be tied down by a definition that is the same for everyone, because then we are beginning to create an idol, Armstrong says. Instead, God is experienced in transcendence—“that which climbs above what we know.”

According to Armstrong, Brahmin priests in the 10th century developed a competition to determine which priest could best describe the Brahman, the ultimate reality in the Hindu tradition. After spending time alone in the jungle, the priests would reconvene and share their insights about the Brahman. The winner was always “the priest who reduced the others to silences, and it was in that silence that the Brahman was present,” she says. “The Brahman was present … in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech.”

Armstrong’s point is that God cannot be discussed in the same way that we discuss ordinary day-to-day occurrences—business dealings or an argument among family members, for instance. To understand God, we must “put ourselves into the receptive frame of mind in which we listen to music or poetry,” she says.

Over time, she said, Christians’ perception of God began to shift and people began to think about God as a larger version of themselves, with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Around the 17th century, what Armstrong refers to as the start of the “modern era,” Christians began to interpret Genesis as a literal account of the origins of the universe.

This was not at all how the ancients viewed the creation story, Armstrong says, noting the author of Genesis was offering “one romantic idea” of how the world began. In fact, there are many biblical accounts of the creation, she pointed out. The early Christians “read their scriptures allegorically; they applied to every verse in the scriptures a whole different way of interpretation—plain sense, the allegorical sense, the mystical sense and the moral sense—often introducing ideas that were never referred to by the author, because the scripture is the word of God and, therefore, infinite,” Armstrong says.

That openness to different interpretations of God and the Bible persisted into the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Armstrong maintains. When the scientific revolution got underway in Europe, the French theologian and pastor John Calvin, in his Commentary on Genesis, took the people to task for interpreting the creation tale literally and told them that if they were interested in science, they should consult the astronomers and cosmologists, she said.

The modern image of God, according to Armstrong, came into being when the 18th century enlightenment philosophers, and then the church and evangelicals, embraced Isaac Newton’s insistence that science proves the existence of God. This, in turn, led to literal readings and a humanized depiction of God that Armstrong believes the ancient religious leaders never intended.

What believers and nonbelievers alike need to do is get back to living life in a just and meaningful way, Armstrong argues. Like becoming a skilled dancer, understanding the mysteries of God takes years and years of practice, she says. “Belief … is about behaving in a way that changes you at a profound level. You’ve got to do it to get it.” 

All the world’s great religious traditions agree on this, she says. “There’s very little about original sin in the gospels or the trinity, or about incarnation, things that Christians place so much value on today.” While conceding that these things have value, Armstrong says the key to knowing God is through commitment and practice.

“Jews say that on Mt. Sinai, God appeared in an entirely different way to every single one of the Israelites standing at the foot of the mountain,” Armstrong says. “The transcendence that we know in our lives, if we work towards it, that is the reality. It’s not a reality we can prove.”