Jerry L Martin, Ph.D., D.H.L. is former Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder and Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a contributor to the Good Men Project and coordinator of the Theology Without Walls Project at the American Academy of Religion.
I had now accepted the assignment, but God wanted more. He wanted me to “purify” myself.
You need purification. Transformation is a good word. It is obedience, which at its fullest is transformation.
“What does that involve, Lord?”
Putting Me first rather than last. Living every moment, making every decision, in response to My call.
“How do I go about doing that?”
You know this—start every day with prayer and let prayer guide you through the day.
God continued telling me about the truth behind the Garden of Eden story.
I had also underestimated the power of love. First, I created Adam and I could see that he was alone, as I had once been, and this was not good. He did not see it because he did not know anything different. But, as he tried to befriend various animals, he would quickly reach the limit of those relationships and be frustrated and unfulfilled. So I created woman and made her lovely in his eyes. They were naked and knew no shame. And their sexuality was intense and profound.
And, frankly, I felt left out. I had no such consort. And, while obedient, man loved woman more than Me. Though understandable in light of the human nature I had given them, it was not right. And they knew it was not right and began to disobey Me. They hid their nakedness, which is to say, they hid their creativity and sexuality from Me, detached it from My purpose and used it solely for their own pleasure and intimacy—innocently enough, as children might do, but still wrong. And so, with regret, I expelled them to a life of hardship. Detached sexuality, hiding from God, has its own intrinsic price, the loss of the full bounty and blessing of God.
My second spiritual experience was more arresting and consequential. I can remember the place and time of day quite precisely, but not the year. My family was living in Riverside, California. It was probably my senior year in high school, and it was a balmy evening. We used to go downtown to one of those old-style elegant movie theatres. My friends and I were outside, waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. We were just standing around joking when, suddenly, I was in a world of my own, enveloped by a visual, visceral experience that was total and dramatic. I had a sense of concentric circles swirling around a center, whirling enough to make one dizzy though I was not at all off balance. Just as suddenly, the experience was over.
It would have been hard to describe even then, but its meaning was crystal clear to me. It was about time. In fact, it was as if Time itself had disclosed its essence to me. I did not mention it to my friends, who had not noticed my “absence.” I did not make much of the experience then or subsequently; it was just an odd moment. But, although I am not much of a reader of poetry, I did respond strongly to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which are a deep meditation on the nature of time, and particularly to the lines:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I developed an interest in philosophical questions regarding time and years later published a phenomenological analysis of the experienced “now” that provides a way of understanding Plato’s insight that “time is the moving image of eternity.”
I have not found it easy to live my life fully in tandem with God. Every day there are items on my personal radar, and I usually attend to them first, and then fit in God when I have a chance.
One morning Abigail called breakfast and I held off, due to one of God’s seemingly arbitrary commands. “Is my husband becoming a holy man?” she asked with more exasperation than reverence. “I already am,” I said, in the sense of having a divine call, “just a very bad one.”
“As You tell me things, am I supposed to ‘use my own intelligence,’ as Abigail urges, to interpret or reinterpret what You tell me?”
You have to use your intelligence, but you have a very direct line.
“Will we include the present age?”
No, the main goal is not to talk about some crisis or transformation in the current age. A new revelation about the past is relevant to current spiritual transformations.
God continued,
I breathe life into matter, and matter starts responding. As one translation of Genesis puts it, I “flutter over the waters” and nurture, incubate life. And I am filled with joy. It is like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming it makes beautiful sounds—and delightedly playing with it.
At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights. It was beautiful, dazzling. I could play it like a vast organ, but one attached to laser shows and fireworks.
“That still doesn’t mean you can do anything.”
Give Me an example.
I started to describe the case of a woman I know who has very strong convictions and great force of will, and yet often fails to achieve her goals.
No, (give Me an instance) from your own life.
“Just winning a tennis game, for example.”
Give me a break. (A) You always have mixed thoughts in those situations and (B) I said you can’t alter physical laws. If you completely wanted to win at tennis and believed you could, you would practice, exercise, and so forth. When I say you can do anything, I don’t mean that you don’t have to take the necessary steps. Napoleon was charismatic but he still had to train troops, plan logistics, and so on. Stop being simple-minded. You are fixating on a single meaning of “you can do anything” and trying to rebut it. Instead, think about what meaning could be true. It certainly does not mean wish-fulfillment. Think about it.
Organic flow:
“Lord, I know I should try to live each day in response to Your purposes.”
God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, and autobiography. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy. He has appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the 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.
I wanted to know whether the world is separate from God or, in some sense, is God.
Neither is an adequate formulation. It would be ridiculous to say that everything—the bruise on your toe—just is God. I am the principle of life, the telos and end of all activity in the universe. So I am neither removed as a thing apart nor simply identical with the things in the universe.
Later I learned that there is a theological view with a respected tradition called panentheism. This view holds that God is both in the world and more than the world, both immanent and transcendent. This is distinct from pantheism, which holds that God is entirely within the world.
But, if God was, in some sense, the world—the physical universe—how could He also be a Person? “But, Lord, You are also a Person.”
Yes and No. I come to you—but not to raindrops—as a Person, and therefore I am a Person. One cannot be a Person in some modes without being a Person.
But I am also much more than a Person. Just because I seem so familiar to you—we talk just as persons do—should not mislead you into thinking I am “just a guy.” It is true that I have many of the attributes of a person—desires and a history, for example. But again do not assume that desire and history mean just the same for Me as they do for human beings. Keep in mind that I am definitely not a human being.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the 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.
I read about the great scientific debate of the eighteenth century: is space absolute or relative? Today, the standard view is that science and religion are opposites. But it was his theology that led Newton to regard space, “the sensorium of God,” as absolute; and a different theology that led Leibniz to uphold relativity, two hundred years before Einstein.
“Lord, what does this reading have to do with my assignment?”
The history of science is My story.
“Do you mean the history of the physical world?”
No, the history of man’s efforts to understand the world is the history of man’s relation to Me.
“Then You are the world?”
No, I am the point of interaction between man and the world.