GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
290. The Right Track: Finding God Beyond Sin and Suffering- Radically Personal
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What if the goal of spiritual life is not to merge with God?
What if sin is not a debt to be paid, but a condition to be healed? And what if suffering is not an accident of existence, but part of what makes love, freedom, and relationship possible?
In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry Martin explores some of the most surprising insights from his dialogues with God. He reflects on what it means for God to be a person, why every individual may have a unique path to the divine, and why spiritual growth is less about escaping the world than learning to live in harmony with it.
Along the way, Jerry examines the nature of prayer, the meaning of personal relationship with God, the role of friction and struggle in human development, and a radically different understanding of sin, forgiveness, and spiritual transformation.
Perhaps most importantly, he considers what it means to get on "the right track"—the path God has in mind for each of us—and why that path may already be closer than we think.
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:
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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
[ 00:00:58,239 ] Episode 290. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Langdon, and today Jerry's reflections on radically personal God and ourselves in the new Axial Age continue with the next to final episode in our limited series, Radically Personal.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:27,869 ]In this episode, Jerry begins by talking specifically about two very important implications from his dialogues with God and explores more deeply the personal nature of the relationship between God and him. What does it mean for God to be a person and to be able to relate to each one of us individually, personally? Here's Jerry Martin. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:01:59,699 ]You know, most people who are spiritually open have either a meditative or prayerful or intuitive or some kind of felt connection with the ultimate reality that rightly orients their lives.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:18,739 ]We have divine nudges, epiphanies, insights. These might just seem like ethical impulses or expansive love or thoughtful reflection. They can come at it many ways, can seem like something we read or heard somewhere. I sometimes call these aprecus, glimpses of the divine reality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:40,839 ]When we reflect on these moments, we try to make sense of them and to draw out their implications. We try to connect them with the rest of our lives and understanding. This is each person's effort at faith or indeed spiritual experience or life itself seeking understanding. This is the extended sense in which I use the word theology. One's sense of the meaning of it all.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:16,549 ]There were two important implications from my dialogues with God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:22,369 ]First, about the various religious traditions, they do not all say the same thing because God did not tell them the same thing. This implication seemed to go all the way down to the individual level. That we are not all given the same glimpses of the divine or the same venue to connect with it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:44,469 ]Second, not exactly news one would think, but still rejected by many religious thinkers, is that God is a person. I put it with a capital P because we're talking about not Joe or Sally next door. We're talking about God, nevertheless God is a person, not just in a metaphorical sense, but in a vibrant sense. God really does love us, I received in prayer. And words shocking to a philosopher.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:15,939 ]”Get more anthropomorphic.” Get more anthropomorphic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:23,059 ]Of course, I was quite puzzled as to what to make of this divine instruction, what would that mean? Then it occurred to me, well, that if human beings are made in the image of God, there must be some crucial similarity between us and God. Human beings must in some sense be theomorphic, and by the same token, God must in some respect be anthropomorphic, that is, they must somehow share a form with human beings. And when I prayed about it, I was told, God, here to Jerry, I come to you as a person, and therefore I am a person. You cannot present yourself as a person without being a person.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:16,249 ]Well, I take this to mean that divine self-presentation is revelatory of divine reality. It is not merely our projection, not merely a metaphor. God presents God's self truly or veridically, as the epistemologists would say. If God presents God's self as a person, God is a person.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:43,209 ]But then God added, "I am also more than a person."
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:51,529 ]And I take this to mean that God is a person, but that this word or symbol does not exhaust the divine reality. Other quite different symbols may capture other aspects, and altogether they may not exhaust its depth and totality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:09,969 ]So when someone has an encounter in which the divine reality presents itself as a person, the symbol person is not simply a human invention. It is an expression of the divine reality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:27,679 ]But what are we to understand by this symbol? What does it mean for God to be a person? A third divine comment is relevant here, “I could not become a person without there being other persons. The personal is essentially interpersonal.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:54,799 ]I see.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:56,829 ]The personal is a relational reality. I suppose a thing such as a rock is not a relational reality in the same sense. A lone rock could actualize its full being in an otherwise empty universe, just out in a blank space. A lone person could not... A person, whether human or divine, must have a mirror, a suitable other, someone who can look back. The personal is interpersonal, and the interpersonal is particular. It is not a relation to the bare fact that other persons exist.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:35,259 ]It is a relationship with particular individuals, such as Abraham and Moses or Esther and Ramakrishna, you and me. And sometimes to groups, such as the Pandavas, the royal family befriended by Krishna, and the people of Israel. "I have called you by name, you are mine," as God says in Isaiah 43:1. The relation is not abstract. If it were, it would not be personal. God is not just in a distant, impersonal relationship with people. God cares about them.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:12,639 ]If you care about someone, you're affected by what they do and undergo. If we are free creatures and God cares about our decisions, God feels and responds differently depending on our actions. In answering prayer, God acts differently depending on what we ask. The great French personalist, Emmanuel Mounier, taught that to be a person is to be in the process of becoming a person. By relating to other human beings, not just as means to one's own satisfaction.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:51,199 ]But as autonomous centers of action and desire, as bearers of rights and members of a community, one becomes a person. To be a person is not just a fact but an achievement. Through our relationships, latent traits become actualized. Through loving and befriending, we become friends and lovers. Through relationships, including our relationship with the person who is God, we move toward our own fullness as persons.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:25,269 ]Moving toward fullness is true not just of human persons but of the divine person as well. As God told me in prayer, “It was not just them, it was My development as well.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:40,729 ]Just as we are becoming more fully human, the divine is becoming more fully divine. As I was told, “The development in God is a response to and conditioned by the development of human beings and their response to Me.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:03,519 ]Well, as the divine reality articulates itself as a person in relationship with specific human persons, God becomes a person. God's latent capacity to be a person and a lover, a ruler, a judge, a savior, an avatar, is thereby actualized. When Abraham persuades God to save Sodom, if there are ten good men there, God actually becomes more… just and lives up to the role of lawgiver and judge.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:38,859 ]With the advent of Jesus, God has a new relationship with human beings, adding a more intimate dimension to divine personhood. One might say the same about Krishna when he comes as a friend.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:55,089 ]Well, I was still puzzled.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:57,889 ]We are often told that the goal of the spiritual life is to unite with God, to merge with the divine. When I sought clarification, I was told the shallow seeking of union with me is a delusion. The goal is to be in tune with me. This is not just a matter of doing your duty. It is coming into alignment with me, like two singers doing a harmony.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:35,009 ]This was at the time in part a rebuke or correction. My way of relating to God is not so much devotion as obedience. Each day I pray for guidance. When I get a sense of what I am to do, I try to do it as best I can. But following orders is not the best way to live the relationship with God. We should live with God like two singers in a duet. So do not worry about the mystical pea soup or the ineffable oneness. Just live the life you're given.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:13,879 ]Tread the path in front of you. You will find God there, waiting to share the journey with you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:22,729 ]I was also told in prayer, “I am a suffering God. If you miss that, you miss everything.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:33,649 ]Suffering is at the heart of the universe. It is not incidental, an accident, something preventable. It is at the core of what it is to relate to another in a loving way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:51,219 ]Otherness requires separateness, distance, independence, freedom, a certain amount of friction.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:16,669 ]Well, it seems that to be real.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:19,909 ]God must enter or create an actual material world. Any world that is not material is not quite real. It would be a hologram world. Now I was told that God does not create the laws of nature. God cannot cancel gravity or entropy. Any real world that contains human beings and other organic life is subject to sensation and suffering, to aging and disease, to problems and challenges. God put it this way to me: “As you sense, there is a big story here, the sheer need for friction, for grit, for traction, for obstacles, in order for spirit to grow and develop. But also to fulfill goods that cannot be fulfilled only in the mind's eye.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:14,669 ]Why does the artist who may already have envisioned the final result have to make it in material? Why does the composer have to have an imperfect orchestra actually play the perfect symphony he hears in his head? Why does the mathematician want to write down his or her equations? There is a deep truth here about the nature of reality.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:14:47,239 ]Reality wants to be embodied. The material object does not fall beneath the personal form, it actualizes it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:00,479 ]Well, I found all this puzzling and continued to pray about it and in a subsequent prayer I was told again, and this is God to Jerry, “but we have already discussed the need for friction. Why is there a material world with its tendencies to decay and its resistance to purpose? Why don't I come into the world as perfect or make you perfect or create a world that is perfect or indeed not create a material hence imperfect world at all? But to be a world is to be a material object and to be material is to be flawed and resistant. And to be a person is to be an actual personality, an individual with a history and with particular characteristics. And to have a personality is to have strengths and weaknesses, and that is precisely the drama of life. Not just the drama, but the basic ontological process of the world. That is what it is all about.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:09,399 ]God went on, “So you need to relax your preconceptions on this subject. The fact that evil, including human evil-doing, has a place in the world is not the same as saying it does not matter or is an illusion or anything like that. In fact, in a sense, nothing else does matter.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:36,799 ]Well, I'm thinking, if there's all this evil, it sounds as if human beings by their very nature are sinful. Having been raised in a Christian home, I thought these sins would need to be redeemed in some way. But I was told some are addicted to the Crime and Punishment model of sin.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:02,059 ]Past sins do not have to be forgiven. They have to be released, lifted. Well, I asked, "What does that mean?" God explains
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:15,649 ]”Sins are not so much wrong actions to be forgiven as conditions of the soul that have to be healed or mended.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:26,969 ]If you used to be a drunk and aren't anymore, no one, not even God, has to forgive you for that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:37,389 ]But I think, aren't sins something like debts we have to pay for?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:43,439 ]God explained, “Sins are not debts to be paid. They are a condition to be healed, rectified. The solution is not for Me or someone else to suffer or sacrifice or otherwise pay for them. It is for each person to become more perfectly attuned to me. As soon as a person opens his soul, his past or her past is forgiven. It doesn't have to wait for an act of God.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:20,149 ]Well, I'm now wondering, how are we going to do that, you know? It's easy to say, but how do you become more perfectly attuned to God? And God gives me some directives here, some instruction manual, you might say. God explains to me there are many ways a person can do this. Living uprightly, lovingly, even more intuitively and appreciatively, even in a sense more quietly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:55,799 ]”Some hear my voice clearly. Some just walk with me through the travails of life. Others love their wives and husbands and children and neighbors. Still others have a meditative or even aesthetic understanding of what life is all about, of the nature of the world. I am present in all these modes of experience, and each one moves the individual and his or her community closer to me.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:30,499 ]Well, I guess I was stuck with this question because I asked yet again, but doesn't the world still need to be saved or something? Because it seems like something bigger is required. And God responds once again, no, the world does not need to be saved from sin, though people do a lot of sinning, falling away in different ways. And they need a lot of saving in the sense of getting on the right track.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:02,299 ]Well, when I thought about what I'd been told, those two words, the right track, carried surprising implications. We're sinners, okay, we know that, otherwise we wouldn't be so eager to deny it. But being a sinner is, we might say, not fatal. It's important to rectify, but it's not as if there's a wanted dead or alive poster on us. We're not so very wicked that we have to have some kind of blanket prosecutorial immunity. We just need to stop the sinning. We know what that involves.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:37,419 ]We need to stop wrongdoing others and make it up to those we've hurt and to get ourselves, well, on the right track.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:46,309 ]Thankfully, there are many ways, as God just explained, to get on the right track, which would be whatever track God has in mind for each of us. If we can get our own clutter out of the way and lean Godward, we may find that the right track is right under our feet. Try it and see.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:21:17,749 ]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.