Tag: God’s story

God Michaelangelo

“I am a Person, but I am also much more.”

June 5, 2026

“Lord, you have taken me through a story that is completely unorthodox and embarrassingly anthropomorphic.  What am I to make of that?”

I am not interested in what you make of it (or) in conforming My account to your prior, fixed beliefs.  Be more specific in your future questions.

I am using literal language because that is the only way to explain the experience of being God.

“But ‘experience’ is also anthropomorphic.”

Not really.  I am a Person, but I am not only a Person.  I am also much more.  There is something you might call “what it is like” to be God.  That is what “experience” refers to.

“But, Lord, You are admitting serious limitations as You scramble to create order out of chaos.  This is not our idea of God.”

Limitations only from My perspective.  Don’t be misled.  By your standards I already had unimaginable power and knowledge.

“But You say you knew nothing.”

There is another side to the story.  In one sense I knew nothing.  But, in another sense, I was viewing everything from another level—as when your senses are confused but your mind is clear and is noting with precision and even analysis the nature and contours of the confusion.  Think of waking from a dream while analyzing the fact that you just had a dream.

Or, I suppose, like a researcher taking an hallucinogenic and carefully noting its effects.

 

“Pray and I Will Tell You”

May 14, 2026

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

Cave painting, hands

I Draw Man Forward . . .

August 21, 2025

 

What I had been told about Creation still bothered me and I was relieved when God started talking about the process of evolution.

“Lord, do You have to will creatures to evolve into homo sapiens or does it just happen by natural processes?”

That’s not a well-conceived question.  It rests on a false dichotomy.  Remember that nature is itself teleological, except it is much more complicated than that apparently simple statement.  I provide—I am—the telos or purpose, and I follow the telos as well.  However, I draw man forward to greater development in the very process of interacting with men (people).  At the time of early man, I am not yet sure what is missing.  I am not fully developed Myself yet, since I have not encountered beings who can call forth My full latent nature.  For the moment, call it a dialectical evolution responding to My need for development.

Here and elsewhere, “man” has the older sense inclusive of both women and men.

Tell My Story As I Tell It To You

August 14, 2025

 

“So I should read the scriptures of the major religions?”

Yes, I want you to read the early spiritual history of mankind.  I will lead you to which readings.  I would like you to pray as you read them and take notes as directed.

I grew up at a time when “man” and “mankind” referred to both men and women, and God spoke to me in my own vernacular.

“Lord, You said I was to tell Your story ‘from the inside out.’  But reading the scriptures is ‘from the outside in.’”

Yes, tell My story as I tell it to you.  The only purpose for reading is to give you reference points for understanding My story.

 

“Think in a Different Way”

March 27, 2025

“Lord, I have the feeling that you want me to read and think less, and to listen more and just write down your story.”

Don’t stop thinking, but think in a different way. Don’t work so hard to figure everything out, to make it rational, to make it fit your categories. Just listen and think through the implications of what I tell you.

“But, Lord, some of what I learn from You comes from worrying over what you say.”

Sometimes yes, but often no. Sometimes your questioning just gets in the way. The main point is to open your mind, to try to understand what I am saying on its own terms, and to see ways it might be true or understandable to you.

If something doesn’t make sense to me, how can I supposed to “see ways” to make it understandable? How do you get to that vantage point?

 

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.

________

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 Am Pulling Life Forward.”

January 16, 2025

Go back to My loneliness.  Feel it along with Me.  The universe has exploded into being, and I scramble to order it.  Then there are long eons, though remember that “long” doesn’t mean exactly the same to Me.

The following came to me as God’s experience:  “I am dwelling in the vast loneliness.  It is the loneliness of a huge figure who does not know He is alone, since the idea of others has not yet appeared, so it is just this huge unexplained emptiness.”

I was beside myself.  I had reluctantly given up my happy agnosticism—and for this?  I had higher expectations.  “Lord, that doesn’t sound like much of a god.”

You are diverting yourself from the task of describing My life because of fears that you will say something wrong and embarrassing.  Don’t let your fears guide you.  Just listen to Me and dwell within My heart and tell My story from that vantage point.

However disappointing, the voice was still authoritative.  I relaxed and, once again, was taken back to the Creation, in (for me) uncomfortably anthropomorphic language.

I am awake.  I rise and shrug off the cramps of night.  I stretch my arms, move my feet.  It is good to be alive.  I look at the world, matter, around me.  Dead.  Nothing there.  I am ready for action, for interaction, but there is nothing.  Just whirls and splashes and explosions.

Matter has a subjective side, a “within,” that subliminally experiences its surroundings, but that is too limited to interact with, too limited to be satisfying.  It is like the story of the tar baby—you can poke it but you do not get much of a response.  The Mayan myth of making men out of clay and wood is not far off.

In Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation story, God aims to make men who can “walk and talk and pray articulately.”  He first tries making them of wood and then of clay, and finds those don’t work very well.

So I infuse My spirit into matter, as if trying to blow life into it.  (Like blowing bubbles) I blow and blow molecules, complex molecules, the building blocks of life.

This was a meaningful image even if anthropomorphic.  Even for scientists, the origins of life—even the answer to “what is life?”—is a profound mystery.  If there is a God, then surely He would be part of that story, and “blowing life into it” might be about as precise as anything.

“But why did it take God so long—millions of years—to develop life?”

Long?  It was the twinkling of an eye.  Time is much more relative than you imagine.  Those millions of years were no longer than the first six milliseconds of the universe.

puzzle piece

“Neither of us is completer or perfect in ourselves.”

January 9, 2025

“Do you need the world for completion or does the world need You?”

Both.  Neither of us is complete or perfect in ourselves.  I can only develop a self-consciousness and hence become a Person by interacting with the world and hence with people.

For the first time, the dim outline of an overall story was emerging.  If we and God develop together, in interaction with one another, then the drama of history and of individual lives begins to make sense.  We are not standing still; we are moving forward together. 

Mother and Child Sleeping

A Self Requires Another Self

September 27, 2024

Early man I can communicate with.  So it seemed to Me at first that I could communicate with them directly, that I would not be so alone.  Hegel was right:  A self requires another self in order to define itself.  Early man I can communicate with.

Rene Descartes had based his philosophy on the cogito, the thinking I, an isolated pin-point self.  Two hundred years later, German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued, in The Phenomenology of Mind, that a sense of self is possible only through an encounter with another self.

With man, I can send dreams, give intuitions, stir love, frighten if necessary.  I began to develop My arsenal of ways to deal with man.  But I too am primitive and undeveloped.  I know little about how to be effective in bringing man forward. 

storytelling

“It Leaves Out the Most Interesting Part of the Story.”

September 12, 2024

“Lord, is the theory of evolution correct?”

It is not a bad theory.  It is a short-hand that works, but it leaves out the most interesting part of the story.  It is like behavioral psychology in this respect.

While Pavlov’s dog salivating tells you something about animal and human behavior, seeing people solely through the lens of stimulus-and-response conditioning leaves out what is really interesting about them.  Similarly, the theory of evolution is okay as far as it goes, but leaves out the best part of the story.