Author: Jerry L Martin

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.

“There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, at peace.”

October 3, 2024

“Lord, I don’t understand what existed at the Beginning.  It sounds as if you are describing Your own birth as well as the birth of the universe.  What were You before the explosion of Creation?  A pregnant nothingness?”

A passable description.  There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, still and at peace, like calm waters, lucid, not nothing, but not something either.  The universe contains many things, not just somethings and nothings.

What kind of Nothingness can explode into Being?  Ah, I thought, maybe a Nothingness that is not just nothing, but is the Plenum of Potentiality for All Things.  Perhaps the possibility of all things cannot fail to spill over into some actuality.

I could not settle any of these questions in my own mind.  All I could do was to continue to ask questions.  “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.

 

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. 

Listen to Your Body

September 19, 2024

There is another way to listen to God.  One day, when I was fatigued from travel, I was told to take a day to rest.

“But I have so much work to do, Lord.”

Always listen to your body—it is also My voice.

 

 

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.

Does God Still Speak to Us?

September 12, 2024

 

 

 

Did revelation end a long time ago?

Philosopher Jerry L. Martin explains that God continues to speak to us, with new messages that we need to hear now.

 

Watch my other Videos – HERE or on my YouTube Channel.

 

 

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.

“The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou”

September 5, 2024

I had read Martin Buber’s I and Thou when I was a college freshman and had not looked at it since then.  But, when I fell in love and realized that she loved me back, the opening words of Part Three came back to me:  “The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou.”  Love between human beings has a trajectory toward God.

These Have Been My Most Faithful Servants

August 29, 2024

It [a new divine message] will be most hard for two groups—the atheists, secularists, who have set their hearts against Me, against hearing, and (followers of) the old religions, who are set in their ways, very attached to specific forms and formulas.  The latter pains Me because, in many ways, these have been My most faithful servants.  Like a servant whose master has died and faithfully carries out his last wish—but misheard the wish. The old religions are mostly based on insights, revelations I gave them.  But they became rigidified.  Partial insights were mistaken for the whole. 

 

He Got Most of it Right

August 22, 2024

The brash display at the front of the bookstore announced Conversations with God—the first of three volumes in which God tells all … to somebody else!  I thought I was the one anointed to carry God’s message.  What’s going on here?

Before my own experience, I would not have thought for a minute that the author, Neale Donald Walsch, actually heard from God.  But, if God spoke to me, He could surely speak to someone else.  In fact, He had told me that He communicates with people all the time.  Walsch also reports God as saying, “I talk to everyone.  All the time.  The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens.”  Just what I had been told.

Has God appointed two messengers?  With different messages?  Or is this guy not on the up and up?  I have to admit I was skeptical.  My own prayers were herky-jerky and the voice I heard spoke in my own casual vernacular.  Walsch’s conversations are reported in polished prose.  That looked rigged.

Nor was I impressed with what Walsch reports having been told.  It sounded like pop Buddhism—feel-good stuff that sells books but is unlikely to be God’s authentic word.  Wasn’t Walsch just a charlatan?

When I asked, I didn’t like the answer.

The book of prayers [Conversations with God] is nice enough, but it will be dismissed by most as an oddity, not a revelation—even though he got most of it right—but I couldn’t write the blurb!