GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
285. A New Axial Age? Religion and Spiritual Transformation- Radically Personal
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Jerry L. Martin explores the idea that humanity may be entering a New Axial Age: a new era of spiritual transformation shaped by globalization, interreligious encounter, and expanding spiritual consciousness.
Drawing from philosopher Karl Jaspers, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Robert Bellah, and Theology Without Walls, he reflects on whether the world’s religions represent competing systems of belief or different dimensions of divine revelation.
Beginning with the remarkable story of Saint Josaphat — a Christian saint whose story traces back to the Buddha — this episode explores “religion in the singular,” mystical experience, comparative religion, and the possibility that spiritual truth has always moved dynamically across cultures and traditions.
What happens when inherited religious boundaries begin to loosen? Could humanity be moving toward a more open and interconnected understanding of spiritual reality?
Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher
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We continue these spiritual and philosophical conversations through Ultimate Questions, a public discussion project of Theology Without Walls on Substack.
Join the conversation and share your perspective on life’s deepest questions:
https://ultimatequestions.substack.com
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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
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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
[ 00:00:58,489 ]Episode two eighty five. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, your host, and on this week's episode of the podcast, Jerry Martin is back for the seventh installment of our limited series, Radically Personal. The subtitle to Jerry's latest book, Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age. And this week, Jerry breaks down what this new axial age is about.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:31,689 ]He begins with a story that points to a kind of connection between us all and reinforces our essential connection with God. God tells Jerry that the personal is interpersonal and that at bottom, God is the source of all. This new axial age is a time of great hope and promise, but how can we be open to it and what God has in store? Here's Jerry Martin. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:11,639 ]Well, thanks for joining me. This is the seventh episode from my new book, Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:24,499 ]We'll talk about what's meant by an axial age in a moment. But first, there's an amazing story told by the great religious scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:39,179 ]We usually think of there being a number of religions, religions in the plural. But Smith prefers to speak of religion in the singular. By this he means a large complex cross-cultural phenomenon, the way religion spans the globe.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:58,529 ]And he gives the saga of Saint Josaphat as an example. Here's the background. Martin Luther King Jr. was influenced by a story Gandhi had gotten from Tolstoy. The great Russian novelist reports that his spiritual awakening was sparked by reading the lives of the saints, especially the story of Saint Josaphat.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:27,499 ]It's the story of a young prince who renounces power and wealth and wanders in the wilderness in ascetic piety.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:39,799 ]The Russian version of his life was taken from a Greek source. That source had been borrowed from a text that had been transformed into a Christian version from a an Islamic source.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:54,479 ]The Muslims had gotten the story in Central Asia from the Manicheans, who had adapted stories from several traditions, this one from the Buddhist. It was in fact the story of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:16,749 ]And the name Josaphat, derived by transpositions in several languages from the word bodhisattva, which designates a Buddhist who, having achieved enlightenment for himself, vows not to enter Nirvana, but to stay behind to help others achieve enlightenment.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:40,439 ]Thus Smith concludes, for a thousand years, the Buddha was a Christian saint.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:51,539 ]Smith is not debunking St. Josaphat. On the contrary, he's asserting the historical fact that the living truth of this story is woven into the texture of many religions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:09,479 ]Facts of this sort have normative implications.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:15,679 ]Smith's Religion in the Singular provides a vast repository of spiritual data and resources. Theologian John Thatamanil has likened religion to a highly diverse spice cabinet from which you can make either Indian or Italian dishes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:36,799 ]or create fusion recipes or experiment beyond the established cuisines. What he calls spices, we might think of as apperçus, revelations, enlightenments, epiphanies, inspired practices, iconic lives through which we glimpse the ultimate.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:00,299 ]The bias of theology without walls in my personal vision favors the experience, the encounter, the divine manifestation rather than fixed doctrine or banked tradition. We must each respond to reality as it discloses itself to us, and then theologize, make sense of life from there.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:30,039 ]A spiritual journey begins with an embodied person, an agent moving through the rough terrain of the world. The person has needs, purposes, and ideals. Since the personal is also interpersonal, many of these actions and intentions pertain to other persons present and past, defined in various ways by mutual participation in institutions, communities, and traditions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:01,219 ]The world's invitations and resistances provide the stage upon which the drama of life is played out. And it's a rich drama. The drama in which the meanings of our lives, including our lives with the divine, are discovered and enacted. They can be acted out either well or badly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:28,369 ]I take the experiences reported in God: An Autobiography to be a divine self-disclosure or revelation, though not in the sense of founding a religion. Perceptive reader commented, "the book is a revelation about revelations."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:47,309 ]God explains the divine role in the various religions and in other aspects of life. In my experience, God is so vibrantly real that I'm left cold by attempts to regard the divine as ineffable or as something less than quite real. I concluded one talk with the statement, God is not a metaphor.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:12,209 ]One day I was told in prayer, you stand on the threshold of a new spiritual era, a new axial age.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:26,279 ]So I was puzzled.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:28,639 ]What would a new axial age be? How would we recognize it? What would be its marks? The idea of a first axial age was originally suggested by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in his book The Origin and Goal of History.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:46,439 ]There was a period of a few hundred years, he noted, roughly from the eighth to the third century BCE.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:54,139 ]during which a stunning array of world-shaping figures appeared, spiritual leaders and teachers. They included Confucius and Lao Tzu in China; the seers of the Upanishads and Buddha in South Asia; Zoroaster in Persia; the great prophets in ancient Israel; and in Greece, Homer and Socrates.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:22,989 ]During the Axial Age, says Jaspers, the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:33,069 ]These were other foundations and these he says are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:44,289 ]It was, Jaspers says, an age in which men ask radical questions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:51,569 ]and becomes consciousness of being as a whole and of himself and his limitations.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:00,609 ]"This period creates an axis of world history," Jaspers said, "one which gave birth to everything which since then man has been able to be."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:11,769 ]In this age, priestly authorities are challenged by prophets and seers reporting immediate divine inspiration. Religion evolves from a ritual cult to something more like an inner mysticism, a heightened spiritual subjectivity.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:33,839 ]In the process, according to sociologist Robert Bellah, traditional beliefs are disembedded, and new leadership emerges in the form of what he calls moral upstarts and renouncers, not revolutionaries, but independent voices such as Gautama, Isaiah, Socrates.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:56,379 ]Familiar symbols are shaken loose from old moorings, transposed into new meanings that preserve the old, but add wider, more subtle, more penetrating understandings. The way is thereby cleared for what one scholar calls new models of reality. New models of reality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:51,399 ]What about our new axial age? Well, it starts with the realization of multiple revelations of divine truth in cultures across the world. Sociologist Richard Madsen calls the resulting cultural tensions conditions of axial creativity.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:13,039 ]Do such conditions exist today? He thinks they do. The conditions seem ripe, he says, for an explosion of spiritual creativity.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:25,359 ]Well, how so? There is, he says, first, a loosening of older affiliations. Second, anxiety about the meaning of life. Third, new means of communication. And fourth, a more multi-layered understanding of human rationality. Anthropologist Mary Douglas speaks of societies weak in grid. They're challenged by globalization, urbanization. Worldwide communications make a wide range of sources of wisdom instantly available.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:02,799 ]Individualism loosens people from inherited ties. Religions become chosen rather than inherited.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:13,299 ]At their origins, according to Madsen, the great axial traditions were open-ended.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:21,899 ]In various ways they contended against idolatry, he says. The notion of the ultimate truth could be definitively captured by symbols or institutions constructed by humans. Each tradition became mummified. Newly discovered truths became pieties and doctrines not to be questioned. New spiritual practices and rituals became official, not to be revised.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:52,189 ]They thereby lost their spiritual openness and their creative vitality. A new axial age would break through the mumifications. This will require not the philosophic manipulation of categories, he says, but leaps of consciousness.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:13,999 ]What I received in prayer about a new axial age had one more clause. God continued, for the first time spiritually attuned individuals will draw their understanding of spiritual reality not just from the scriptures of their own religious tradition, but from the plenitude of my communications to men and women.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:47,029 ]That plenitude of divine communications is roughly what Wilfrid Cantwell Smith meant by religion in the singular, illustrated by the story of St. Josaphat
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:58,999 ]Religion is a dynamic worldwide phenomenon, not just a series of separate histories. If the divine reality has manifested itself in multiple traditions, then theology, our own understanding of life, should take in the full available set of divine self-disclosures as best we can discern them. This should require, upon reflection, drawing on the sacred text and practices of all major traditions, as if there were a larger canon.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:33,109 ]a broader set of hermeneutical practices, a richer set of spiritual disciplines. We would for the first time take in the fullness of the divine presence and orient our souls not just to the god of our denomination, but to divine reality unrestricted.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:55,869 ]This may be the leap of consciousness that defines an axial age. It has been said that one revelation is a blessing, a multiplicity is an embarrassment. Why, I asked in prayer. Didn't God just send a single encompassing revelation?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:17,569 ]I was told the total revelation would be more than any single individual or culture could bear or well act on. So there is a kind of division of labor. For example, I told the ancient people of Israel to act in history and to keep my covenant and to abide by a set of religious and moral rules. That was task enough for them.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:51,899 ]I told the ancient people of India to develop the inner life and to get in touch with the transcendental Atman, the self beyond the self. Both were and remain valid tasks.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:11,439 ]God explained. The division of labor can still continue with people selecting the vocation that fits their talents or history or calling. But understanding it in a new way, not as the exclusive path, but as an essential path contributing to the whole.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:35,999 ]I thought this might mean mapping the various paths or or putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, but that conception was too static. God explained it's time for the world's religions to come together. Not merely putting the pieces together, but in a dynamic way, a way that lends itself to forward development.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:04,159 ]As people from different traditions take in elements from other traditions, they will make something of that. It won't just be a passive reception; it will be a creative, dynamic process.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:22,139 ]Well, I asked, well then will that once they do this back and forth of trading and taking in and and so forth, um, will that be the end?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:33,079 ]And God replied, "Of course it won't be the end. There will be new developments and events and consciousness from the world side. And new events"
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:50,649 ]and communications from my side. The cutting edge of spiritual transformation will continue. The cutting edge of spiritual transformation will continue.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:10,129 ]Well, thanks for joining me here as we are all on the cutting edge. Be well.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:19:34,219 ]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.