GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
247. What's On Our Mind- The New Axial Age: God’s Story Told Again
In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, host Scott Langdon and philosopher Jerry L. Martin explore the meaning of the New Axial Age: a transformative era of spiritual development that God revealed to Jerry during their dialogues.
What does it mean that “the old religions are coming apart, yet there is a renewal of religious spirit”?
Together, Scott and Jerry reflect on how history’s first Axial Age, with figures like the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha, reshaped human consciousness, and why God says it’s time for His story to be told again, and not in the same way.
They discuss themes of religious renewal, the rise of “spiritual but not religious” seekers, the role of communication technology, and the invitation to live a radically personal faith in today’s world.
Join the conversation as they consider philosophy, theology, and the divine reality shaping our future.
Related Episodes:
244. From God to Jerry to You – Entering the New Axial Age: The Future of Spiritual Development
245. Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – The New Axial Age & The Future of Faith
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.
Scott Langdon 01:15: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and today Jerry Martin and I share what's on our mind about this new axial age and what God means when He tells Jerry that it's time God's story was told again and not in the same way. There is so much information available to us in every moment, and yet we can still feel so unprepared and unequipped when it comes to our desire to live a meaningful life. But God assures us that one of God's main desires for us is what it has always been, that we would get to know and understand God more fully and completely. Here now are Jerry and me. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon: Welcome back everyone to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, of course, and I'm here with Jerry Martin. Jerry, how are you doing this week?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:10: Well, pretty good, Scott, good to be with you again.
Scott Langdon 02:13: Yeah, it's good to be with you. I'm excited to talk this week with you on our What's On Our Mind episode about the New Axial Age. It is a topic that we spent this unit on in From God To Jerry To You. You talked about this– you talked about where it came from, how God presented it to you in your dialogues, when He mentions what this is and why it's important.
Scott Langdon 02:40: And I want to talk about first, before we sort of get into, what the New Axial Age is, because you're a philosopher and when you initially ask God, you know you sound like me speaking in my language and that: what? And God says, of course I'll come to you that way, how else would I? That's how we're going to communicate. And so an extension of that is He talks to you that way. How else would I? That's how we're going to communicate. And so an extension of that is He talks to you about philosophers and philosophical points of view and so forth, and so He brings up this idea and He refers to the axial age. Now can you talk a little bit about and you did in your From God to Jerry to You, and you and Abigail, your dialogue talked about it as well. But one more time who is Karl Jaspers and what was this about?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:35: You know, Karl Jaspers was the most famous philosopher in Germany. At the same time Martin Heidegger was the most famous philosopher, lived many years after the war than Jaspers did, and a kind of existentialist as he's usually called. But he was also a kind of philosopher of history and he wrote this arresting I think it's The Origin and Goal of History, was the book, and it goes back to what he dubbed the Axial Age, which was this period of BC, 500, 300, 800 years, and it's the period of the Hebrew prophets, of the Greek philosophers emerging, Socrates, of Confucius over in the East and Lao Tzu and the Hindu seers that produced the Upanishads, and of others as well, like Zoroaster and so forth. It is a tremendous leap forward in human consciousness and hence the world changed, moved on its axis, you might say, to a new level of reflexivity. Before you had religions and rituals and priests. Think of the Egyptian temples and so forth and you didn't have... It was rather ritualistic and reenacted, reenacted, reenacted, and suddenly all of these people started thinking at a whole new level of depth and insight and reflection and burst the seams of those rather cultures that probably had more or less been unchanged for a thousand, maybe two, three thousand years, burst the seams of them, and this is the beginning of the basic religions were founded most of the big religions in this period and the major philosophical streams of thinking. East and West were founded in this period, and the world's never been the same. And so that was the original Axial Age, and in fact the great religions that you study in a world religions course are often now referred to as the Axial Age religions, because they all started there.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:10: And I think, even apart from the God book, there's some feeling that, well, history may be coming to a kind of decline of those or something. You know there's been a period of dominance, you might say, of human mentality by these axial age religions, and maybe that's coming to an end or something, just a vague feeling in the air, so that people refer to the axial age religions as if you know the old-time religion or something that it might not be the latest thing anymore, though it was for a thousand, two thousand years the latest thing. And now we're entering a new era of spiritual development, a new axial age. We're entering a new one now, and so you know it's amazing.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:16: I ponder this question: Did people in the Renaissance know they were in the Renaissance? Because these world historical changes happen and yet you still do your grocery shopping and so forth. You don't notice it. And in the Renaissance, presumably, they still went to their market locally and lived day to day pretty much the same, and yet huge world historical events were taking place, a whole new era of human consciousness there, also in the Renaissance, and the Axial Age is even bigger than the Renaissance. But we're in the middle of it and, like the fish in the ocean, it's hard to see the water. You know, you don't notice that we're in the middle of it.
Scott Langdon 08:01: It's interesting because that five to six hundred year period there, that's a long time. Six hundred years, and compare that to what's going on now and how quickly developments happen. I mean, I already am old enough to remember living, of course, without the Internet, but even where, like a cell phone, the idea of talking to someone on a computer and seeing their face was Star Trek, science fiction. Even more so, I imagine all of these things that have happened in such a short period of time where, before the axial age or during the axial age, you know, things are slow. If you grew up as a farmer, your kids became a farmer, your kid, their kids, became farmers, and you farmed in exactly the same way. Now a generation. The way you farm changes within your own lifetime a few different times.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:08: You know the technological change, since it's hard for someone my age to keep up with it, so I keep having to relearn the language you know. The world changes and I find, oh, your computer's five years old. Oh well, that's like the Middle Ages or something.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:27: I mean every time you turn around the technology has jumped ahead again, and an awful lot of it, as you're alluding to, Scott, is communication technology, how we keep in touch with each other and how we know what's going on in the world. And it changes almost yearly you know when there's something new out every time you turn around.
Scott Langdon 09:56: Yeah, and in this axial age there was a shift from localized concerns toward more abstract, universal ideas about humanity and the world. That shift from these localized concerns to, more broadly, what does, so what… what is it that we're leaning into, do you think? Is it the way that we communicate? Is it the technology? Is it the desire to learn and be curious? And the reason I ask it that way is that you mentioned somebody, your age. It's hard to keep up with the new developments. It seems like the only way one can really do it is to do what you say, which is I have to learn it, I have to relearn, which means you have to be curious, which means you have to have a sense and a willingness to investigate what you could learn. So, in this same kind of way, with the religions and spirituality, it seems to be an invitation to be curious and relearn or learn anew.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:15: Well, that's the life of the open soul, in part, where you're talking about these fundamental issues. Not just learn what's the latest version of an iPhone, but what can I find that has spiritual depth. Am I curious about that? In fact, the context of my prayers I wasn't praying about the technology at all the context of when God's telling me about New Axial Age is that I prayed, He'd early on, told me to go read the foundational scriptures, the ancient scriptures of the various traditions, including ones that don't have a living air as much like the ancient Egyptians. Read them all, pray about them, ask God, what were You up to? Because God's never absent in any culture. So what were You up to in these? And I would read in them and about them, and pray and, of course, learn. Oh, God's doing something different with each one, and that's kind of interesting because each one is showing a different side of the divine reality, the theistic, the non-theistic. They're all different sides of the divine reality and we're now, and this is where the communications comes in, we're now in an age where we both can read that in a world religions textbook or take a course or an online course, but we also talk to people here, there and everywhere in the world and see what they're thinking, what they're up to, and because of increased mobility, which is another aspect of modern technology, especially in America, which is the land of immigrants, people come here from everywhere. I remember a guy, a social scientist, some years ago said this is the first international nation, because people are just here from everywhere, and so that means they bring their religions, their cultural traditions and so forth. So right in your own workplace and right in your known neighborhood there will be worship houses of the Muslims, of the Hindus, of the Christians Protestant, Catholic and maybe some Russian Orthodox. In this county where I am, there are a lot of Ukrainians who pass by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the kind of Eastern Catholic Church, and they're all here, and so this is part of our living reality and, combined with the fact that the hold of the traditional religions on us is weaker, and that was one of the things that happened in the first Axial Age.
Scott Langdon 14:08: It was a very disruptive Axial Age because these people overthrew, you might say, the old pieties, the practices people had had forever. And uh-oh, now you got somebody thinking at this whole new level, and sometimes they run out of town. The Buddha was rejected by the people, the other monks, or whatever you might call them, itinerant reflectors, because he gave up asceticism and called it the middle way and boo his you know. And this happened, Zoroaster was run out of town. Neighboring king and his wife took in Zoroaster. The people running him out of town of where he was somewhere in Persia followed and attacked that king, so got to squelch this.
Scott Langdon 15:01: And this happens to well, people who have new spiritual insights. And the problem is and we have this with our traditions now you appear to be rejecting the transcendent realities that the religions are representing, but that's not what you're actually doing. You're relating to the divine reality behind those religions, but doing so in a new way and maybe a better way, maybe a higher level of understanding, who knows? It's hard to make those judgments. We're all here in the playing field, you might say, living on the ground with each other. Hard to know who's got the deeper truth or higher truth, but certainly to the people protecting a tradition of the old-time religion, then these just appear to be disruptive and disintegrating voices.
Scott Langdon 16:32: When God gives you your assignment, He asks you to tell His story and of course you ask Him hasn't your story already been told? And God answers by saying it's time to be told again and not in the same way. We are entering an unusual time in the history of the world and I wanted to stop on those two lines for just a second. He says it's time to be told again. Again. To me, when I hear that word, I think okay, it's already been told and yet there's still a need for it. There's still a need for it, which is why we would do Hamlet still.
Scott Langdon 17:23: You know why wasn't there just one production of Hamlet when Shakespeare debuts at the old globe? It's done, gets great reviews, good night. But here we are doing it still because and even this year in the same season, at different theaters, different actors are playing Hamlet. It's still being done by different people because the idea of telling the story again is important. And then He says and not in the same way, which also is the same thing about Hamlet. Maybe I've seen Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet, which I have done, and it was fantastic, but I still want to see somebody else's go at it. I want to see the same story, but not in the same way, and I don't want to relate that too closely to the meaning of what that line might be. It's just sort of a way it hit me initially. But what do you make of that? Told again and not in the same way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:22: Well, the word again does suggest that these religions, in telling God's story, were telling God's story something else. You know, it's not that they got it all wrong or there was a bunch of nonsense which a secular person might tend to think. But no, they're telling God's story and you might say, for all we know, doing a bang-up job of it. What better could one do than what they've done? But here's the again, isn't the final thought needs to be told again, but not in the same way, which means you don't just replay that record. You might say, but now you're going to tell it differently, not just and here's the analogy with Hamlet but not just the same script differently, but there's something new, there's something new to impart.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:24: And then that's related, as I think you quoted, to the time in history which wasn't on my mind at all. This was right at the beginning of the book. We haven't had anything slightly like a new Axial Age. It wasn't on my mind and I wasn't thinking about where are we in history? But that's the context when I ask why is God telling me all this? And why does God want me to go read the founding scriptures, which was coming up at about that point in time, at the beginning of the book but directed my attention. You know, the actual explanation of why God is talking to Jerry is because of humanity's time in history, and so that's where that whole exchange, you know, ends. And I didn't puzzle about that more. I had a bunch of particular questions on my mind and I wasn't interested in trying to figure out the age and history, so I guess I never returned to that question myself. It's God at the end, said you're entering this new era of spiritual development, a new axial age.
Scott Langdon 20:34: Well, He goes on to say that the old religions are coming apart, yet there is a renewal of religious spirit. So He says we're entering this unusual time in the history of the world. When you and Abigail were having your intimate dialogue, you talked a little bit about this the new axial age, the implications, and you quoted here, but … you said, the old religions, God says I think they've lost their steam, something like that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: That was how I put it.
Scott Langdon: Yeah, yeah, that's how you had put it. And to make a different point going forward with that conversation when I heard that I thought I'm curious about what the actual word was. And so it turns out He says the old religions are coming apart. And I wanted to stop on that for a little bit and talk about that, because coming apart, that's an interesting way to put it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:36: What's the sentence? Do you have the sentence right after that?
Scott Langdon 21:40: Yes, He says, “The old religions are coming apart, yet there is a renewal of religious spirit.” So they're coming apart.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:48: Yeah, that's interesting to focus on. It's not just fading or something like that, losing steam, but coming apart. And I guess what I make of that in light of how everything develops, through the whole of my conversations with God and looking around since I've learned, you know, I started getting interested in religion, looked around, what's going on, what we have today is religion is more and more porous, you might say, and that's not exactly the same as coming apart. But it's full of holes. You might say each religious tradition is taking in a lot more. And the coming apart may just be, I don't know. It doesn't seem like the Reformation where the Catholic Church split off into various types of Protestants going different ways and so on. It's not like that, but it's maybe more a prelude to this radically personal notion. That's also you know, that's my term that God doesn't use that term to me, but He does, in explaining the new axial age, say it's an age in which religions will borrow from each other, and I see that in my work with religion scholars and theologians that I go to conferences with and individuals will be free to take in what strikes them as the most true and profound from each religion they encounter. It doesn't have to be a systematic project where you go oh I'm going to go collecting through the religions, but as you go along in life you encounter truths, insights, profundities, practices, spiritual disciplines from different religions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:42: Maybe yoga you can be in any tradition and you discover yoga. And yoga is both a physical activity and a kind of form of meditation and has a spiritual philosophy behind it and there are particular types of yoga or of meditation. I should say I'm switching my gears here, but Buddhist meditation, Hindu meditation, Tibetan Buddhist, a little different from other Buddhists, and so on. They're all of these and they're all ways of connecting spiritually and all the ones that I know of are really good. There are probably some ones I don't know much about, maybe in voodoo or something, but they're just terrific and various kinds of… there's more than one kind of prayer. You know there's prayer of praise, prayer of beseeching, contemplative prayer. So prayer also has many modes or types and these days, in the new axial age that's emerging, individuals are right now using from insights wherever they find them, and that's a tremendous change in human history. We have to remember..
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:06: It wasn't that long ago, like the grandparents of our grandparents may have been shooting each other over whether the Eucharist is the actual body and blood of Christ, as Catholics believe, or it's symbolic of the body and blood of Christ, as the Protestants said. And they were actually willing to kill each other over theological propositions like that. And that's not that long ago, and yet nobody would think of doing that today. We would turn over each of those options in our own minds and if we decided to sign with the Catholic, we would kind of try to go along with the Catholic team, though Catholics you know, I know a lot of Catholics and they pick and choose which parts of Vatican pronouncements to believe. And of course Protestants are always wide open. They can just form another sliver sect or something if they have a different point of view.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:07: But this is both an individual liberation, but even more it's a spiritual liberation because it enables us to get at a wider range of spiritual truth than we had before. Even if each religion was perfect, it's not the whole. It's not the whole and no individual is ever going to achieve the whole. That's not itself necessarily a goal, but you want to achieve the things sustaining for your soul and you're free now to take those in. And because of the communications you're talking about, Scott, it's all available to you. You can go on websites, you can see the Youtubes, you can see the spiritual masters of the world on YouTube and take them in.
Scott Langdon 26:53: You can hear the comment well, there's so many false teachers out there, you've got to be worried about them. And it sounds exactly like the language that Jesus had during his time. Beware of wolf in sheep's clothing. It's an age-old proposition that you need to use your discernment, which is something that God talks about very often. Listen, pay attention, use your discernment. You know you have this wide, vast array of information out there. Yeah, wonderful. Now let's get together, be in tune and sift through it. What's helpful, what isn't helpful?
Scott Langdon 27:33: God says the old religions are coming apart, yet there is a renewal of religious spirit. We talk a lot about that spiritual but not religious sort of demographic that's out there with other people that often they were either coming away from a religion that didn't make sense to them anymore or that they saw behavior didn't match up with what the behavior was supposed to be, any kind of any number of things. Yet the notion of loving and serving, and compassion and loving your neighbor, all of the sort of spiritual aspects of what religion can offer you how to behave spiritually in tune with God at the heart of most religions and the religious experience was not working for folks, but they still have this spiritual desire. I still feel spiritual... There is at least an intellectual connection with what this spiritual experience is.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:51: You know, when I first heard about the spiritual but not religious, I reacted as I think many people did, that oh, this is religion-lite. It's people who want the benefits of religion without the burdens of it, you might say, without carrying its weight, so they can just waltz around in an unserious way. But it's something I learned from talking to my colleagues who do study these things, that you know, many of the SBNRs, as we put it in acronyms spiritual but not religious, are deeply spiritual. They really are seekers. They're searching for something. They may have found some things that are meaningful to them, but they don't find them in the precincts of official religion. And I guess, as I thought about it, my second take on the whole phenomenon was well, you know, there are a lot of…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:52: There's another category of the religious who are not spiritual and people who go because that's what their parents did and everybody did and everybody in your town does or your neighborhood does. You go to church on Sunday and you're really not taking in much of anything, you're not reflecting on anything, you're going through your prayers themselves, or rote prayers. They're not heartfelt and you're really not getting the benefits that the religion is supposed to bring to you, which is to kind of break through your ordinary everyday ceiling and take in some more light. And that's one of the things the religions are all trying to get you to do officially is take in more of this higher spiritual truth and higher moral messages of love and compassion that you're talking about, Scott. Take them in, take them into your heart, your mind and heart.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:56: And the SBNR has presented a challenge, and for the churches it's often an attendance challenge. How are we going to keep people coming? And there's some question. I don't know the social dynamics of churchgoing, but they certainly need to make sure they're offering something spiritual, not just a doctrine, a creed, some churches I thought of visiting around here and I saw, oh, the first thing you encounter you go to their website here's the 10 things you have to believe if you're going to show up here.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:32: So they go creed first, you know, and creeds are really very limited and derivative part of the spiritual life, even of the religious life, but often that's just posted right on front and that's what people argue about. And now you've got to think what is spiritually important here and even what's the deeper reality behind these spiritual experiences and try to connect to that deeper reality. And part of radically personal is you need to find where do you best connect, you personally best connect, and it might be the church you grew up in. It might be something in faith's halfway around the world. It might be no particular religion, but a set of other spiritual guidances that you find that connect you with what's really ultimate in life, and that's what radically personal is about.
Scott Langdon 32:35: I also think it's important that I don't think God is saying that these religions need to go away. It's that the way they're being practiced or what we are that's coming apart. So I don't read that as it's coming apart and so we need something new as a, as a one world, new religion. In fact, God says to you there's, there's never going to be a situation where there's one unified world religion and we all got it. That's not the point.
Scott Langdon 33:08: At the same time, if something's coming apart, like my boxing glove, some of the stitching was coming apart on one of them, so I sewed it back together with a stronger thread. You know, re-examining what say Christianity at at large, what we would call the Church with the capital c? You know all these denominations, that what is centrally Christianity? What is Christian about Christianity? What is that so Christianity? What is that so?
Scott Langdon 33:46: Even within, say in America, the disparate versions of Christianity all seem to make a wash out of Christianity. So a non-Christian would go. Well, I don't want to be a part of that. They don't know what they stand for. One says this, but they do that, says the other. Maybe a way of bringing that coming apart back together is a re-examining from within, as maybe my brother is doing. He won't leave the church, he's working from within. I feel like I'm called to a different kind of work than that and I feel like both of our work is God-breathed and God-approved. I don't know how you would say it, but you know. I mean, I feel like we're both going in a direction that for us, in a radically personal way, as you mentioned, God has a plan for each of our lives.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:43: You know, there's more than one bit of good work to be done and God needs our help in doing it. I always remember it's a simplified form, I guess of this insight was the theologian Paul Tillich said every religion needs both priests and prophets. The priests keep the religion going. I've had students, I know, talking to them and said I was talking in my Theology Without Walls way, saying well, shouldn't we just get rid of these religions? Oh no, we wouldn't know anything without the religions. We wouldn't know anything about the divine reality, the transcendent dimensions of life, you might say the non-commercial values of life. They're preserved by the religions. At the same time, the priests represent that function they're preserving, and you might say that's the task given to them, assuming they're rightly called, and so forth. The minister is supposed to have a calling, I know, not just a job description and oh, I think I'd be good at that, but supposed to have a divine call to that mission. But you also need prophets and the prophets do challenge sometimes the quietness of, by quietness I mean, you know, stick in the mudness and routine and taking for granted and maybe that religions can fall into. Well, prophets shake those up. Prophets also are essential for a new Axel Age. You've got to have someone who's thinking beyond the boundaries.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:31: And Theology Without Walls is saying look, folks, you may be a theologian in whatever tradition you're in, if you really want to be adequate to the subject matter. What is the subject matter of theology? It's the divine reality. God is my preferred language, but there are non-theistic aspects of the divine reality. I'm told that too in my conversations with God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:54: And you've got to take it all in and otherwise your theology is going to be highly partial. You've excluded 90% of the data and you've merely looked at God's revelations via your tradition, when God's been busy all over the place. Well, why don't you see what else God has been saying and doing and take that in to your system and your thinking and your living? Why not?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 37:27: If you're going to be adequate, if you're going to produce theological thinking or a spiritual philosophy adequate to the subject matter it's supposed to be about divine reality you've got to take in all the data, all the relevant, I think of them as divine self-disclosures. I don't think of it merely as human you might say spiritual experience, but God showing God's self to different people historically and mainly in religious traditions, though not only there, and certainly in our times, through each of us, God is disclosing something to each of us if we learn how we often say this to listen, to pay attention and with spiritual openness, and then that crucial element of spiritual discernment, because not everything that pops into your consciousness has a divine origin, and so you have to be able to separate out the counterfeit from the real coin.
Scott Langdon 38:34: Well, Jerry, I'm so glad to talk with you every time we do this, so it was great to see you again and speak with you today.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:39: Okay.
Scott Langdon 38:39: Well, you be well. Okay, We'll talk soon.
Scott Langdon 38:39: 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.