GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
237. Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue - How A Radically Personal God Works In Real Lives
In this deeply personal and spiritually rich episode, philosopher Jerry L. Martin is joined by Abigail L. Rosenthal for an intimate conversation about divine encounters, spiritual awakening, and what it means to experience a radically personal God.
Drawing from Jerry’s new book Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, the discussion explores how spiritual truth is not one-size-fits-all and why each individual’s connection to the divine can look entirely unique.
Jerry reflects on being called to tell God’s story across different cultures and religious traditions, while Abigail shares a powerful mystical experience that sustained her through a long and painful chapter in her life.
Together, they discuss Jewish philosophy, personal spirituality, the rejection of Original Sin, and how trusting one’s inner spiritual compass can lead to deep transformation.
This episode speaks directly to seekers, skeptics, and anyone exploring their own spiritual path. It is a thoughtful and emotional journey into faith and doubt, divine presence, mystical experience, and the call to live with spiritual purpose.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
Stay Connected
- Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godandautobiography.com
- 📖 Get the book
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him..
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 01:14: Well, hello, sweetheart. Thank you for joining me for another dialogue at Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 01:21: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
Scott Langdon 01:27: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and this week we bring you the latest edition of Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue. In this episode, Jerry and Abigail discuss Jerry's new book Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age. In this new book, Jerry, as philosophers do, probes his experience of his encounter with God for meaning and understanding. Abigail also shares her story of an encounter that in one sense prepared her to accept Jerry's experience not only as valid but very important. Here now are Jerry and Abigail. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:12: God: An Autobiography is about 90% God-talking. This has some God-talk because I quote a lot, but this is the book I've written, which is my effort at faith-seeking, understanding faith in the sense of the spiritual experience, the divine encounter, and now as a philosopher, how to understand it. And also I was given at some point the project of starting a Theology Without Walls, and I don't know that we've really talked about that on the podcast. I guess there's been references to it. But this book also explains that project in this radically personal mode and of this title, I think what we'll be emphasizing today, sweetheart, is the word personal.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:08: You know, shortly after my first encounter with the divine voice, I received the instruction: I want you to tell My story. Well, that was very puzzling what that could mean, how should I do that? But I was promptly guided to go read the foundational scriptures, the ancient sacred texts of the world's religions, including religions that don't survive to the current day, like ancient Egyptian religion. But they were also having a divine encounter and it turned out from that. If you ask what is God's story, God's story was, in effect, the story of God's interaction with various cultures and religions and prophets and so forth in those cultures, and that was the story to be told. And it was surprising, because most people who start thinking, oh well, there's some divine truth in multiple traditions, start wanting to say, yeah, and they all say the same thing, as if that followed almost automatically. If God is behind all of them, even the non-theistic religions, then somehow at bottom they must all say the same thing. But what I discovered what I would do is read the sacred text and then pray about them and what in the old days they called Lectio Divina, which was praying your way through the Bible. You would read some parts and then pray about them to seek understanding.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:50: Well, I was doing that with these ancient scriptures and in each case asking basically, God, what were You up to with these people at this time when You said such and such according to their scriptures, and they don't all say the same thing, because God didn't tell them the same thing, and so that's an interesting thing, and more is said about that, of course, elsewhere, but it kind of makes sense. You look at the religions they don't seem to be saying the same thing, and so it wasn't a big leap of understanding to think ah, they say different things and yet somehow God is behind them. It doesn't mean every word of each religion is true or accurate or valid, but God is somewhere behind that set of revelations, enlightenments, illuminations and so forth. And what struck me, and I guess was suggested by the way God was talking to me about these things, is that this carries all the way down to the individual level.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:03: God was doing something different with the ancient people of Israel and the ancient Chinese and the ancient this and that because He had different missions for them. In part there was something He wanted them to do. I use the word He. God is not very gendered, but He, She, It, whatever is most comfortable for you. But God had something God was seeking from each culture. Sometimes it was a response to the needs of the culture, sometimes to the culture's particular capabilities that God could make use of, and sometimes it's just here's your assignment, report for duty, here's your assignment. And that carries down to the personal level.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:55: That okay, Jerry, here's your assignment. Okay, Abigail, here's your assignment. Scott Langdon, Laura Buck, Amanda Horgan all working on my team. Each one was brought there not because we all have the same assignment, other than of course it's the same project but in each individual's life this has a different meaning. It's a different meaning for why Abigail is here? Why is Jerry here? Why each of those other people I name are here doing this work and in fact, they each have their own story. That's how this fits into their story.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:34: So, anyway, this radically personal means you have to carry it all the way down and the challenge for each individual is to figure out where is God most accessible to me? Where do I detect the divine? God made it easy for me by speaking in a voice. For most people it's not like that. So where do you go?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:00: You go to prayer, to meditation. It means you have to trust the intimations that come to you. Sometimes there is a sense of divine presence in a certain setting or scene or ritual, in a religious context or in some other context, or in nature, or in music or art or many other places you can look. If you detect the divine, then make the most of that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:26: I guess one of the messages of Radically Personal is what I call an epistemics of trust. Before you reject an experience, even if it seems odd, doesn't quite make sense with maybe secular worldview or naturalistic worldview or science or some other thing like that or some official doctrines, but before dismissing the experience, take it in and see what you can learn from it, and there may be hints of the divine. It may only be hints in the mix of a whirly-whirly of experience, hints of the divine. Well, sweetheart, you've lived with me and we each have our own journey, right? Does that make sense to you? I guess is the question.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 09:16: That made 105% sense to me. I had no, that I can recall, no inner qualms, or wait a minute, or I have to put in this parenthesis, no reservations. It seemed to make sense and to make acceptable in a way, if God thought it was respectable maybe it was respectable journeyings of mine to attaching myself at one point to a guru, until something occurred that made this seem like a risky spiritual course for reasons peculiar to that situation. But I've done Hatha yoga for many years and I didn't think that was betraying the cause of being Jewish and…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:24: I'm wondering how do you relate those things I thought at the beginning with God: An Autobiography, that this would be hardest for the Jews, because the Jews need to keep a tradition going. They were given the covenant and they're still under the covenant. And how do you keep that going? Because the kids go marry out and so forth, and this idea like a theology without walls, taking in the divine truth wherever you find it, not necessarily just in your own niche or even in your own divine assignment. You know, even if something's your assignment, there can be divine truth elsewhere. But anyway, I've not found that to be the case.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 11:34: No, the Jewish view, the Israelite view, as evidenced in the Hebrew Bible, is that you can be the justest man on earth, as Job is deemed to be by God and God's adversary, and not be Jewish at all. The righteous Gentile has been, at least since rabbinic times and in a number of instances in the Hebrew Bible, a quite theologically acceptable… Let me see there's a rabbinic saying something like the righteous Gentile has a status, spiritual status equivalent to the high priest of the Lord. So Jews don’t start with the notion that Christian theology reserves to itself, as part of its doctrine of Original Sin, a notion from which it follows that, unless a special act of saving God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus' expiation for the sin of Adam by dying on the cross, all that is absolutely outside Jewish thinking. Jews don't have a doctrine of Original Sin, they don't have a doctrine of only one path to acceptability with God and they don't have a history like that.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 13:59: The righteous Gentile is a figure in the Bible and a figure in rabbinic thought. So that was no theological shock to me and it seemed very welcoming and supportive of my interest in other so religions. It no longer appeared to be some kind of a under the table thing or off the record thing or something. Well, I might still not share it with my Jewish friends who feel that way, but the ones who felt that way are pretty much gone to glory, and the ones who remain don't feel that way. So it created zero theological moral, spiritual problem for me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:46: Isn't it also true you know the New Testament better than I do that in spite of Paul's doctrine of Original Sin that's why they call it Pauline Christianity, because he really laid out the fundamental doctrines. Jesus was preaching a way of life or something, and with resonances about the kingdom of God and so on. But isn't it true that in the Gospels there are significant non-Jews and, of course, non-Christians? Nobody's yet a Christian. I'm thinking of the Good Samaritan for example
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 15:23: Oh yeah, the Good Samaritan. Jesus was quite a universalist.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:33: Jesus doesn't say you're damned to the Good Samaritan.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 15:37: No nobody talks like that. I never heard anybody say to anybody for any reason, you're damned. It just is not a threat. I have Christian friends who tossed and turned about the question: am I damned, am I saved? That, you know I've had lots of troubles. My life has not been one long serenity, one long even flow of acceptance, sweetness and light. Not by any means. But among the fears that I didn't have and never had, was the fear that I was going to hell for any reason whatsoever.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:29: So you disagree with these Christian doctrines and yet you and I both like Christian gospel.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 16:38: Oh, I love it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:38: Fashion, totally old-fashioned Christian gospel. Will God plead your case when you go to heaven? You know these kind of songs, and how does that fit in to your own, you know, this is the unique Abigail blend, you might say, of religiosity.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 16:59: That's an interesting question. Well, my father was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and I guess he liked country music.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:12: He became a rabbi.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 17:13: He became a rabbi and then became an ex-rabbi and a philosopher teacher. But I think I always liked it and I'm just wondering where that fits, since country gospel has Christian doctrines that never appealed to me. Country gospel, I'm not good at long hair music, as I call it, and so the tunes are very easy for me, and the sentiments, what a friend we have in Jesus, that's easy too. You know, I didn't worry about my relationship to Jesus. It didn't strike me as discordant with my inner being, with my soul, with whatever is deep in me. Well, here's a telling example.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 18:38: There was a time in my life we won't go into the gory details but suddenly I was seized with a very strong impulse to kill myself. Maybe it was some romance that had not worked out, I don't remember why, but it was so strong that I felt it was almost out of my hands. I thought you know, not time to dial one one, not time to call anybody. I put on Red Foley. Brings tears to my eyes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: What was he singing?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal: “I know who holds tomorrow and I know who holds my hand.” and I'm just tearful when I think of it. Red, you saved my life. Now that's pretty close to the edge. You know that goes as deep as it goes. You know I didn't think about Emmanuel Kant, Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, a cast of thousands. I'm very, I'm relatively, well read in philosophy, the wisdom of western civilization. I've read the Bible. It was good old Red Foley, go figure.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:20: Yeah, okay, and I always put these things in terms of divine communications, but I don't know if that's necessary that you think oh God is directing you to put on Red Foley and that's a message direct from the divine. Life seems to have more serendipity and chaos than that, and yet there are moments perhaps, I mean I'm wondering I don't want to prejudice your answer here, at key moments in your life, here is one of them that you just recounted. In key moments in your life where there are difficult life decisions to make about how to go forward or what's the next stage or what should I do, and I sometimes you were a believer in God and sometimes not a believer in God. So anyway, if you could just describe two or three of those and how you went about finding your way, getting some kind of guidance, because I know you don't believe you just pull it out of your own brain.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 21:31: No no.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:33: The answers aren't all there. I'd say yeah.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 21:39: Well, there's a story I tell in the last chapter of my book, A Good Look At Evil, and the last two chapters are written from a standpoint different, distinct from the standpoint of what I wrote before. And the last chapter is titled God and the Care for One's Story, and I tell a couple of anecdotes which I guess are signs. I can think of a third one quite recent. So our answers to the question: how does God come into it at crucial decision points? I'm involved in a job struggle to regain my position as an assistant professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. I've been fired.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 23:03: The day after I voted for the guy who lost in a departmental election, and previous to that, the only action about me that the appointments committee had taken was to unanimously approve my promotion to the rank of associate professor, and then the next thing they did with regard to me was fire me. So I think it wouldn't take excessive smarts to see that the firing was political but to prove it in a bureaucratic setting took everything all I got and I had and all the advice I could muster, and still and still and still, this went on, and on.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 24:06: And so I was proceeding. It was 80th Street in Manhattan and it was a walk from the Board of Higher Education, and there's a concrete overhang, as I remember it, at the end of a long sloping block. And I'm all alone. I feel ridiculous, as everyone assures me I am. Give it up, Abigail, you're getting to be distorted, you're getting to be obsessive. Go, move along with your life, forget Brooklyn College. I felt I haven't seen this thing through and it has an internal dynamic which has not exhausted itself. I haven't seen demonstrated to myself that this is hopeless. I'll give it up if I feel it's hopeless, but I haven't had that feeling yet. And here I am, all alone, looking idiotic to everybody. And the satchel with which furnished with all the papers of my seven years of job struggle, is heavy. So I'm walking downhill.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 25:43: Hardly ever in my life felt so alone, and suddenly, I sense it was partly visual but partly imaginative, not seen, because much of this was behind me, I couldn't see it and I didn't have the impulse to turn around and look. It wasn't that kind of vision. Connected to me as if umbilically by a cord, was a long line of what I took to be rabbis. They didn't look like my grandfather. He had a white beard. Looked more like God in the Sistine Chapel or Santa Claus in Macy's. These were men with black beards and curly black beards, so I had never seen them. They weren't part of personal iconography for me. They had a silvery, shimmering garment. Their feet were not visible and they were some a foot or two off the pavement, on a path which was made of stuff that included them and that vibrated more quickly than we vibrate, and they, brings tears to my voice, they went all the way back, all the way back and back and back to the beginning of Jewish time, Ur of the Chaldees, and they said, “You have been on a long pilgrimage.’
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 27:51: “And it is over and you have completed it in some way. You have never been alone. You have been watched by us and whoever else counts in the unseen world, all along you have never been alone. And it is over.” And the path came to a close, right under the, as I recall, the overhang of the Board of Higher Education, and so entering the building and going up to my, another of my countless hearings, a sort of Domi-like hearings where everything seemed rigged and fixed and cynical. I didn't fight for myself, as I usually did at the hearings, and just slumped back and relied on the guarantee. Now, a month or two later, the word came from the union that I had been reinstated once again. But it wasn't over. It was for another year of these poisonous evaluations by enemies in the department who had a motive to find my teaching inadequate. So I said to my mother we were up in Maine, they lied to me- the occult figures.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 30:01: They lied to me. They told me it was over and I thought they were rabbis. I didn't know what they were. I said the rabbis lied to me. And yet what actually happened was that I returned to the college for another year of poisonous evaluation and all the rest of that and the following June a message came from the union, a call came. I had been reinstated with tenure retroactive to the previous year, which made their assurance that it is over true. I told the story to my friend, Arlene, who, despite her modernity, is better versed in Jewish lore than I am, and she said to me, angels, they were angels. And I said I thought angels were blonde and had wings, and Arlene replied not Jewish angels. So you know, maybe that's anecdote enough for now.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:31: Yeah, yeah, it's quite a story.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 31:35: It's a story, it's a story and a half and you know it breaks the routine, the pattern of what counts as normality, but for me it was authoritative.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:53: Yes, yes, yes.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 31:56: It proved to be authoritative. I kind of let the chips fall where they fell. I was prepared to think I'd been misinformed, as Humphrey Bogart would say, but no, I had not been misinformed.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:19: Yeah, and how did that affect your sensibility going forward from that day?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:11: I'm thinking in part. What was your takeaway? That might well be what we might take from the story, from that incident.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 33:19: Well, it confirmed a view I'd come to. No, I don't know if I had come to it at that point. I think I was a Spinozist or something you know, a rationalist in philosophy. It was evidence that there isn't just one level, the empirical level, to human experience. There's something else going on.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:55: Well, that may be the key, that may well be the key. I'm an epistemologist and so you think well, what does this tell us about knowledge and understanding and, of course, about the reality you're trying to understand? And if you just have the attitude of openness to there being more to the story, other levels of reality, other kinds of being, other kinds of information coming in than just sensory apparatus, then you can get somewhere.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 34:27: And it doesn't make everything you know. Fine and dandy.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:31: Right.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 34:32: You still have all the despair any existentialist could want for you and you know all the doubts you have. I don't go around with a simpering little smile on my face. You know I didn't become goody two shoes, or, you know, God will take care of it. Or everything is really all right, even when it's not. My general view of human life, human history, the way things unfold, remained on a commonsensical plane. You know I wasn't going to let theology obscure the view. You know I wanted to know what there was, what was going on, what was in it for me, what was being asked of me. You know, real life went on and on and it wasn't a magic open sesame that opened the door to, you know, heaven or anything like that. It was information.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:45: It was information and it remains the case and I was told this in God: An Autobiography, in those discussions, that the world almost is defined by guilty resistance was one phrase used. But it's a very rocky terrain. It's full of tension and friction and in fact I was told in God: An Autobiography and those prayers with God as I was asking about all this, it's in a way, it's friction that defines reality. You know, you can have ideality floating in your head or somewhere you know, but to be real you need materiality and materiality involves friction and on and on and on. And the human beings with complex emotional systems and often kind of wicked impulses or other times, without either being exactly wicked, fighting, contending with each other, undercutting each other, maybe competitors for the path forward forward. So I think you're right about that. You know that experience, if you take it seriously, shows there are other levels of reality, but those levels do not displace this level of reality.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 36:57: Not a bit. And I have, you know, one thing where I simply disagree, on spiritual, moral, psychological, theological grounds, with the doctrine of Original Sin, and that we were really well off before real life started. We were running around naked and very “innocent.” I was never taught that we are definable as sinners, that we have inherited Adam's sin, the so-called Original, with capital O, Sin, capital S, nothing like that. And I was always given to understand that the expulsion from Gan Eden, from the garden, was a way of telling that we live in history. We live in a rough world, we contend for our bread and butter. There's an implication. People, women, contend, compete for an eligible man who will stay by them. Men compete to be thought attractive or worthy of promotion. That's what it's like in real life and it's not a fall, it's not the result of somebody, our ancestor, that we have nothing to do with, having done something wrong. And then some atonement that doesn't seem even relevant to Adam's disobedience, coming to patch that up if you believe. Blah, blah, blah. And anyway, those superfluous, to my mind artificial theological condemnations such as the doctrine of Original Sin.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 39:58: I didn't have them. I knew it was not going to be a picnic to be Jewish. My parents did rescue work during the Holocaust. I knew what was going on. My parents thought we're going to beat Hitler and I thought, no, maybe we aren't going to beat Hitler, maybe Hitler's going to win. You know, I didn't have rosy beliefs about the historical condition. I thought it was dangerous, but not really the condition was not anybody's fault.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 40:42: Yes, well, so we make our way as best we can, but by a Jewish view, not condemned people, condemned from birth, you might say, but nevertheless we're not perfect people. We're flawed, we're flawed and that's a lot of history is generated by the interaction of flawed people in difficult circumstances, because sometimes the world itself, it's hard to find enough food. There are… volcanoes erupt and so on, and so history is that story of people contending both with the elements and with one another.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 41:30: Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 41:31: And in ways we might explore in a further session somehow God is a partner and one of the messages of Radically Personal is you need to figure out or see if you can get some sense through prayer or meditation or just what happens in your life. Tasks put in your path where you can best be a partner of the divine.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 42:03: Yeah, and I think that the desire, the longing for purity, which I certainly had as a young woman, is a kind of a mistake. One of the rabbinic sayings is mankind is thought to be compounded of a good impulse and an evil impulse. And the rabbinic saying I'm thinking of goes like this: without the evil impulse, nothing would get done. You're supposed to make it work for you. Make it into energy.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 42:51: These are things like energy and competitiveness and a lot of one's quest for getting something done, for getting ahead, you know, means that you go build a Brooklyn Bridge or something and then you're celebrated and so forth. And one of the things I've read is that there's a Jewish prayer where you pray for God to make good use of your evil impulse too.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 43:18: Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that one. But yeah, I think that's the prayer you know. Not make me pure, make me free of contemptible impulses. No, I'm probably a medley or have at times felt myself to be a medley of contemptible impulses. I don't know if that's literally the case, but anyway, certainly not a vessel of purity. No, no, God has got the evil impulse, like anybody.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 44:01: Yeah well, thank you, sweetheart. This has been a very interesting discussion and it's always good to talk with you. I talk with you at our morning seminar over breakfast. It's nice to do it in this more official mode too,so thank you.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal: I very much enjoyed it, as always.
Scott Langdon 44:37: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at Godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@Godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.