GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
280. What Has Your Name on It? Calling, Truth, and Discernment- Radically Personal
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if the most important decisions in your life don’t feel like choices at all?
In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry L. Martin explores calling not as something we choose, but something we recognize—something that can feel required—even when it is unclear or difficult.
Beginning with an epistemology of trust, he challenges the idea that knowledge starts with doubt. We rely on our experience from the start—but when it comes to calling, that raises a harder question: how do we know which inner promptings to trust?
Not every voice carries authority. And yet, the responsibility to discern cannot be handed off to anyone else.
Drawing on the idea of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, the episode turns to a more specific question: what is being asked of you—here, now, in the life you are actually living?
At the center is a question that resists abstraction: what task has your name on it?
One way to approach this question is through three others: what are you being called to do, who or what is doing the calling, and who is the one being called?
Each answer carries its own kind of authority—and its own risk of misreading. The challenge is not only to listen, but to discern.
Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
- Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
- From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
- 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.
- Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
- The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
- What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
Stay Connected
- Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
- Ultimate Questions Substack
- Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:17,229 ]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
[ 00:00:58,329 ]Episode two eighty
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:17,949 ]Welcome to God: An Autobiography, the Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and Jerry Martin's limited series Radically Personal returns this week for installment number six. Reflecting on his new book Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, Jerry delves into what it means to trust our experiences and how important it can be to take them in fully as they are. He explains right at the beginning what he means by an epistemics of trust and how trusting can help us discern our personal calling.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:52,259 ]But are we being mindful of what we're being called to and who it is that's doing the calling? After all, not all voices are from God. Here's Jerry Martin. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:21,169 ]Well, thanks for joining me. This is episode six based on Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, a book I've recently published.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:35,609 ]I'm an epistemologist. Well, what is an epistemologist? Well, we ask, what can we know? And how do we know it? It's a fundamental question. Then what I call epistemics looks at how knowledge actually works. Those philosophers like Descartes who start with doubting everything get it all wrong. They get it backward, in fact. If you doubt everything, you can't learn anything. Knowledge begins with trust. You have to trust your senses.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:19,209 ]You have to trust your memory, your records, your reasoning, and then you can get somewhere. When you make mistakes, they are discovered and corrected by these same capacities like experience and reason that we trust. An epistemic of trust requires critical reflection because you start by trusting your own cognitive capacities and you trust your ability to correct mistakes. That's where the reflection comes in.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:55,859 ]And then epistemic trust extends to other persons you have good reasons to trust, perhaps for their expertise or their sound judgment, not just on factual questions, but on aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual matters as well.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:16,669 ]Trust extends further to those if they have good reason to trust. In this way, the web of trust spreads outward to institutions and communities. However, communities, even when trustworthy, cannot take over responsibilities that remain, in the last analysis, personal.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:44,759 ]Even when we trust someone, notes philosopher Linda Zagzebski, we are still two different persons. Even when we defer to someone else's judgment or perhaps that of an institution or or authority, as she does as a Catholic. She says the ultimate authority over me is still myself. And what I take to be the authority to which I am deferring is an extension of myself.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:18,539 ]So Zagzebski’s not claiming that we can outsource our beliefs, hand them over to somebody else, since it would be we ourselves who are choosing whom to defer to.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:30,329 ]She writes, "When I adopt a belief from another person, I am still the one who has to add that belief to my total set of beliefs."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:42,779 ]Zagzebski distinguishes two kinds of reasons.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:47,189 ]Theoretical reasons, like estimations of the probabilities of an event, are relevant from anyone's point of view. They connect facts about the world to the truth of a particular belief. This is what we call evidence. You present evidence for a belief and that is evidence for everyone who wants to know these facts, like who done it, you know, who committed the murder in a detective mystery. They're looking for evidence. Deliberative, the second category, deliberative reasons, like judgments about whom to marry.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:23,269 ]Those reasons connect me to the truth of a certain belief. Not everybody, they aren't reasons for other people at all. They are irreducibly first-personal, she says. Others may draw conclusions from your experiences, but you and only you had the experience. Trust in the self. Trust in others are deliberative first-person reasons.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:50,519 ]In fact, the entire structure of trust in one another in community traditions, religious institutions rests finally on deliberative first-person reasons. They're reasons for the person making the decision, not for others. If a particular religion is the one I am called to, that does not imply that others should also be called to it. Even if I should become a philosophy professor or join the Rotary Club, that does not imply that anybody else should do so, not even if they have characteristics similar to mine.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:30,359 ]In the radically personal view I'm advancing, we're not mapping something impersonal like the surface of Mars. We're locating our relation to the divine and its implications for our lives in particular. We are living at X marks the spot and trying to discern which direction will provide the best route to divine reality for us. We are checking our own spiritual compass as best we can. And these are personal decisions, but not arbitrary ones. We can do it well or we can do it badly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:10,409 ]We can get it right or we can get it wrong. To live in truth, we have to get it right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:19,449 ]Every religious tradition offers a soteriology, a version of salvation, called by whatever name, such as Buddhist samadhi or the Hindu moksha. Each religion claims to have exclusive possession of the one true solution to the human predicament. It assumes that there is a single fundamental problem, such as sin or suffering or the wheel of karma. Nevertheless, the human predicament is not merely generic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:52,879 ]in the life of a particular person, there is no single human predicament and no single solution. Each of us has his or her own Pilgrim's Progress.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:06,249 ]Nuance requires paying attention to the details, the contours, the lights and shadows of our lives. The crucial task becomes spiritual discernment, which involves living in truth in one's own life. We must trace our own right path, what we are called to do, which may not have to do with solving any particular problem at all.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:36,479 ]Answering this question takes nuance because we have to learn to hear the divine whisper, sense an inner prompting, read signs written in invisible ink.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:51,539 ]Take my own case. Where did I begin the journey that leads to writing the book Radically Personal? I was a lifelong agnostic. I had spent decades developing a philosophy that was essentially naturalistic. There's no reality higher than this ceiling.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:12,209 ]Then I had the surprising experience of hearing a voice that announced itself as divine. It seemed better to let my experience shape my theory than let my theory discount the experience. If one studies the record of people who have heard a credible divine voice or had a credible divine vision, Socrates, George Fox, Joan of Arc, Ramakrishna, Saint Paul, Akhenaten, Zoroaster, and Moses, to name a few.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:47,959 ]It is striking that they did not all receive the same message. They were given remarkably diverse tasks.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:57,909 ]As the novelist George Eliot explains, our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws. They are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:16,069 ]We have different human predicaments, challenges, opportunities, and callings. There's not one solution, one salvation, a single soteriology for us all.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:29,969 ]Ask yourself what is the meaning of life, well not generically, but what is the meaning of one's own life. It begins with facing the truth in one's life, the truth about oneself and about one's situation, and supporting the truth and combating the untruth therein.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:53,069 ]It is engaging in those righteous actions that fall within one's purview as a parent, a neighbor, a citizen, a provider of goods and services, for we are each marked out for different roles and different tasks. It is in navigating a world with rough edges where ideals must be grounded, with actors both human and divine, and it is within that great drama that we enact the meaning of our lives.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:25,769 ]The challenge of personal soteriology is to do whatever it is that life requires of us to heed the divine call, which may come simply as the voice of conscience or an impulse from our inner ground or tasks put in our path or the sense that as my wife once put it, this fight has my name on it. Each of us must ask, what path, which task has my name on it? This is more discovery than decision.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:01,969 ]Similarly, my own intuition on the religious front is that the diversity of persons, cultures, situations outlined so beautifully by William James suggests that there may be numerous human predicaments and spiritual goals vibrantly related to the ultimate reality. And that the task for each of us is to identify correctly our own proper spiritual quest and to determine which religious or non-religious venue best fits it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:10,389 ]By the serendipity of life, a friends-off-hand remark led me to a rather neglected section of Bhagavad Gita. This is a work which, if we ever compile a world canon of the truest and deepest spiritual texts, will surely be included. That dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna explores the Hindu concept of dharma, the structure of duty that is ontologically grounded, divinely ordained, and socially effective.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:43,469 ]In the Indian tradition, dharma is structured around occupation or caste, with different duties for priests, warriors, merchants, and workers. And also for such stages of life as student, householder, elder, and renunciant.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:01,909 ]Thinking about Dharma outside the restrictive context of Indian social structure, I recalled an essay by the great British philosopher F.H. Bradley. Its title, My Station and Its Duties.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:18,219 ]My station and its duties sounds very much like the British version of the Dharma. And yet since different people have a diversity of stations or roles, it offers the possibility of a flexible and personal understanding.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:36,169 ]Bradley observes that an ethical standard like don't cheat or steal is one that he says realizes an end, an aim, an end which is above this or that person's, superior to them, capable of confronting them in the shape of a law or an ought.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:57,769 ]An ethical norm needs to stand over and against us as something to measure up to, but without putting us at war with ourselves.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:07,989 ]Dharma sets a very large framework since it sustains the universe and all existence. It also provides social definition in a way that meets Bradley's requirements.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:23,929 ]Historically, dharma has usually been interpreted through a fixed structure of social roles. But as Hindus say, dharma is subtle. When the prefix swa is added to dharma, the result is swadharma, self-dharma, one's own personal duty, which is the duty proper to one's own nature.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:48,449 ]One place the subtlety appears is a small section of the Bhagavad Gita. Section 35 declares, "It is better to do your own duty, however imperfectly, than to assume the duties of another person, however successfully. Prefer to die than to live your whole life doing your own duty."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:15,369 ]Instead of the proper traits of one's caste, swadharma was understood by the great 20th century Hindu philosopher Sri Aurobindo as reflecting what he calls the four fundamental types of the soul. He wrote, "The work and proper function of each human being corresponds to his type of nature or soul."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:42,419 ]Well, for my intuition, this conception of swadharma is still too impersonal. A more personal question would be: of all the problems, needs, and opportunities in my situation, which one or which ones summon me in particular? Not the generic me, a person, but the actual person I am. We always need to ask whether this particular task has my name on it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:13,949 ]A calling is quite personal. It applies to this particular person in this particular situation.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:24,629 ]It may be quite idiosyncratic in the sense that even in the same circumstances, two people with similar character, experience, and talents, similar personal profiles, you might say, might have two quite different callings. These are radically personal decisions. Within context understood differently inside than they may appear from the outside.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:54,259 ]Yet this is not merely subjective. I am not the measure of all things, as Greek sophists declared. I am not even the measure of myself. There can be an objective dimension to one's calling, however unique to oneself it may be.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:14,389 ]However, its being objective does not require that it be defined by a social role or niche within a culture or institution.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:25,469 ]Mark Berkson identifies three critical questions that arise pertaining to being called: What are we being called to do?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:40,199 ]Who or what is doing the calling?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:45,059 ]Who is the being who is called?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:50,059 ]the who or what that is the source of the call is crucial, since it determines the authority. of the call
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:58,399 ]Classic case would be God's call to Abraham. He is told to leave Ur and go to a place God will designate later.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:08,079 ]Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country, and your kindred, and your father's house, to the land that I will show you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:19,459 ]Abraham's response is the premier answer to a call. Here I am. The language of a soldier reporting for duty, something like aye aye sir.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:33,209 ]that the call comes from God is crucial. But the call is personal. It's not a call to everyone to leave Ur. It is a call to one and only one man and his family.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:47,989 ]Consider Socrates' situation.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:51,209 ]The Oracle at Delphi declares him to be the wisest, yet he's aware that he knows nothing. He takes it as a divine duty to test the oracle to determine what it can possibly mean. It is not just Socrates' nature that sets this duty for him as if anyone with a similar nature should do the same thing. The oracle names only him.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:21:22,259 ]Whatever duty follows from the oracle, it is not a duty for everyone. It is a duty that quite literally has his name on it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:21:34,179 ]a call from God or from a divine oracle has special authority, but there are other calls as well. There can be a felt duty to one's people or to one's ancestors or to one's group, to the Sioux nation or to one's grandparents who first came from the old country or to one's fellow firefighters, a duty to keep their memory and their traditions alive.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:04,289 ]There can be what a friend of mine calls in a romantic context the summons of love. When one's true love comes along, one must open one's heart, not blindly, but nevertheless unreservedly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:20,749 ]There's the summons of genius. Vincent van Gogh's talent was uniquely his. His art was compelling. He would have failed his true calling had he led what would appear to be a more sane life. Perhaps Marie Curie felt this way, or Cole Porter, or Lewis and Clark.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:43,669 ]Exploring ways in which secular people experience a sense of calling, Edward Langereck starts with gratitude. He asks, Is it possible to have a sense of thankfulness even when there is no one in particular to thank?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:23:04,859 ]He finds that we can have a sense of gratitude toward the sources of our lives, the beauties of nature, our cultural inheritance.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:23:17,009 ]come not only to people of talent and those who make history. A young woman of my acquaintance saw deaf people signing. She didn't know what they were doing. She had to ask, "What are they up to? But it came to her instantaneously. Helping those people is my life's work. She learned sign language, became an interpreter, sees this as her life's calling.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:23:44,799 ]Anyone with a certain calling is obligated to respond. But thoughtful discernment is necessary. Not every voice is divine. Not every oracle is authoritative. Sometimes love is just projection. And not every artist, whatever his or her fantasies, has the talent of Van Gogh.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:12,429 ]There's always a risk.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:15,349 ]But there's perhaps a greater risk in not responding to a summons, and a more profound possible gain, even a transformation, in taking up the challenge.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:32,249 ]Dag Hammarskjöld, the esteemed Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote in his journal published posthumously.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:43,499 ]I don't know who or what put the question. I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:56,839 ]But at some point I did answer yes to someone or something. And from that hour, I was certain that existence was meaningful and that therefore my life in self-surrender had a goal.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:25:18,109 ]He had it right, didn't he? I'll leave you with that question. Thank you for joining me.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:25:37,069 ]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 1 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.