Summary and Analysis of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

In the Muslim world, Ali Shariati promoted the notion of reinterpreting the old symbols of Islam and finding a way to unite them with modernity.

As secular thinking grew in popularity and possibility, reactionary groups (in all three of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim spheres) responded with fundamentalist and often millenarian sects that sought to “purify” religion and return it to its original grace.

The “Middle Ages,” or medieval times, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a period of great rupture, dissonance, and crisis for the major faiths. Scholars and thinkers of all kinds were asking the question: How could a divine God allow so much evil and agony in a world He created?

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were periods of great change and crisis for the three major monotheistic faiths. In Europe, Christians split into Catholics and Protestants. Columbus landed in the New World to impose Christianity there, and Islam turned toward the study of Shariah—or law—and away from its former philosophical and scientific preoccupations. Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.

The Sufis are a Muslim sect of mystics, and a minority of them can be found in any country where Islam is practiced.

The combination of a bedrock of preexisting Greek philosophy and the incoming Arab Muslim thinkers produced a period, after the ninth century, of philosophizing unmatched elsewhere in history.

The focus for Islam, as opposed to Christianity’s trinity, was unity, oneness. Since the faith emphasized the importance of knowledge, it produced countless advancements in philosophy, natural science, medical research, public welfare and ecumenicalism, and religious tolerance.

The First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and Emperor Constantine brought Christianity into global significance. However, the discussions of the nature of God, Christ, divinity, faith, and dogma continued for many centuries.

It was the Cappadocians who developed the idea of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as a resolution to the issue of God’s expression on earth.

lively cultural debate that eventually led to the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, wherein Christianity was accepted as the state religion and also defined, in detail, as a faith and dogma. Emperor Constantine had recently converted to Christianity