God Archives -

A Purified Theology Tended to Empty Out the Concept of God

January 8, 2026

My experiences with God were personal and intimate. Philosophers drain the life out of Him. God the Person becomes God the Abstraction—the Unmoved Mover, the One, the Absolute, infinite substance, the perfect being, the being whose essence is to exist. The poet William Butler Yeats describes the result: “High on some mountain shelf/ Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck.”

The great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, explains the phenomenon.

“The philosophers and theologians were concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements. But this determination to … reinterpret the recklessly anthropomorphic statements of the biblical text and the popular forms of religious expression in terms of a purified theology tended to empty out the concept of God …. The price of God’s purity is the loss of his living reality. What makes Him a living God … is precisely what makes it possible for man to see Him face to face.”

“No, animals are not cruel …”

January 1, 2026

I had been asking God about the early stages of life.

Personality develops (think of your own pets) and intelligence, problem-solving, lives with continuous purpose and plans, individual recognition of one animal by another, life-long mates. Now I have not just a playpen, but a menagerie, a zoo, of my own, a private jungle where I can be Tarzan.

There is nothing wrong in this world.

“Aren’t animals sometimes vicious, sometimes cruel?”

No, animals are not cruel—their personalities have not developed to that point. Nothing (is) wrong. It is delightful, a joy. I love all the animals, and bear their suffering.

Things that Seem Reckless to You Are Not Reckless

December 4, 2025

I do not want to rush you or make you do something that feels reckless, but I have to push you. Things that seem reckless to you are not reckless. They are safe. What is reckless is wasting your time, wasting your life away. Life is short. You must make the most of it now. It is now time to move on.

Start reading and studying. Start doing some writing. Start talking to people on a careful, gentle basis. Find out who your friends and allies are. Do not hold back. Seek support. Not everyone walks so closely with God. Can’t you tell that I am already blessing you, already keeping My covenant with you?

I have prepared you to be a risk-taker. I have always rewarded you for it. Now I am asking you to take another risk.

“With life, spirit comes into play.”

October 30, 2025

With life, comes spirit:

For millions of years, before there was life, there was just God and a barren universe.

“You felt all alone?”

Yes, I wanted more. In retrospect, the inanimate years feel very lonely. The emergence of life is a delight. With life, spirit comes into play.

Wonderful to see amoeba, moss, and so forth. The frogs (and other creatures), each with a soul and personality, each in a sense in tune with God. I can play with the animals, “walk among them.” I love their myriad forms. I am not alone anymore.

The creatures that began to stir on the earth are amazing, more amazing than anything that had yet occurred in creation.

They move on their own, they have “internal principles of motion” as Aristotle said, have dramatic lives—even the worms and fishes.

There is birth, growth, death, mating, offspring, colonies and flocks, emergent social orders—ideality as well. There is telos and purpose, success and failure, standards of perfection and imperfection.

And, over time, further developments in the species, a most amazing, creative ramifying of the evolutionary ladder.

New species emerge that could not have been imagined before. Your paleontology tells the story: the first horses could easily fit into the palm of a hand, and so forth. Can you imagine the spectacle?

“Yes, I think I can.”

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.

Einstein’s theory is child’s play.

October 2, 2025

Einstein’s theory is child’s play.

My nature, the true nature of the universe, of Being, and My relation to human beings, to their role and destiny, is complex. Einstein’s theory of relativity is child’s play by comparison. An adequate understanding cuts across some of the categories human beings find most natural, though they are really profoundly “unnatural” (and I mean that in the eerie sense). They are warped; they often represent disorders of the soul, distortions of Being.

There Can Be No Love Without Difference

September 17, 2025

“Lord, Pherecydes also says the world was composed of opposites.”

There can be no love without difference, no harmony or balance without opposing items or forces, no magnetism without the magnet and its object, and so on.

Mystic merging is not quite right. You (people) need to live out your lives in relation to, in concert with Me, but it would serve no purpose, karmic or otherwise, for you to get lost in Me, like a drop of water in the sea.

I knew that I wanted to love Abigail, not to merge into her, or to have her merge into me. There is not just unity, but creative tension as well.

I am the medium through which man understands the world.

September 11, 2025

I understood what the point of interaction meant in the context of physical causation, of one billiard ball striking another, but here God seemed to be saying that He was the point of interaction—almost like the portal—through which we understood the world.

“Lord, what do You mean by point of interaction?”

I am the medium through which man understands the world.

“Is mind the medium?”

Yes.

“Lord, are You saying that, in addition to the human mind and the natural world, there is divine mind somehow essential to the act of understanding?”

The answer I received addresses, though in an unusual way, one of the deep mysteries of philosophy. How is it that consciousness relates to or “intends” an object such as the Liberty Bell? For example, what is it about a thought that makes it the thought of the Liberty Bell? The thought is “in your head” and the Liberty Bell is in Philadelphia. What “connects” them?

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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.

“The Eternal Already had the Potential to be a Person.”

September 4, 2025

“Lord, what was there before? What motivates the act of creation?”

I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.

“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person. Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces. ‘Who am I? What am I? Am I an I? What is an I?’ A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”

“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way? Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”

I received the sense: “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete. The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”

And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.

Mano-a-mano with Nurse Ratched

August 12, 2025

The procedure went smoothly and I was able to watch the monitor as the surgeon snaked a catheter up from my groin to a major coronary artery. The blocked place was easy to spot, and he inserted a stent to keep it open.

Opening an artery is a very serious matter. If it starts bleeding, it can be life-threatening. The patient has to lie flat on his back and absolutely still for twenty-four hours. Nurses at my first hospital had been wonderful, but here I was attended by a woman who was Nurse Ratched without the charm. She seemed to resent the fact that patients needed her help. Finding it difficult to manage the bedpan flat on my back, I asked for her help. She acted as if it were a dirty-minded request and responded by threatening me, “If you can’t manage the bedpan, we will catheterize you.” Finally, I did manage, and the twenty-four hours were up.

Another patient had told me that closing up the artery can be painful as well as dangerous.

“Who is to perform this delicate operation?”

Nurse Ratched gave me the grim news: young Mr. Sizzorhands, the very technician whose previous efforts to hurt me had been foiled, would now have a really good shot at it. I told her I wanted someone else to do it. She made it a battle of wills. “He is the only technician available.”

“I am not going to let that guy lay another hand on me.”

We went back and forth. Finally I said, “Let me speak to the doctor.”

She said she would see what she could do and, after a time, she returned with a young Asian-American attendant. He had the hands of an angel. I didn’t feel a thing.

“Consciousness is Quite a Miracle”

June 5, 2025

Life is at first of a very low level—something like bacteria and viruses—tiny bits of life—moss and slime.

I asked, with some edge, “Lord, did You interact in a personal way with moss and slime?”

It is better if you don’t interrupt with questions. Just listen. Questions can come later.

Remember that I am learning all the way. I do not know what the final product may be. Man, as he now exists, is not the final product—only the future will tell us, including Me, that. I feel My way, pulled forward by a felt telos or goal emergent in each step, the way an intellectual project often develops from one insight to another. I am pulling life forward, eliciting the development of its potential, drawing it to more complex forms.

In this process, consciousness is quite a miracle, even from My point of view. I had consciousness before, but I didn’t think of it that way. I just was, and matter was. It was quite startling to see other consciousness develop. Previously (all) consciousness had been coextensive with and hence identical with Me. It did not make sense to think of there being others as well.