Scott Langdon 00:17: 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. Episode 178.
Scott Langdon 1:08: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and in this week's episode, Jerry answers a very important question: Does God really love us? At first, it might seem a very odd question. Many of us were raised to believe that God certainly does love us, but between many religious traditions that often hold God at too great a distance and modern scholarly talk that stresses God's ineffability, it doesn't take long before we start to wonder does God really love us? It's a question worthy of an answer. Here now is Jerry with his thoughts on what God told him about the subject. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:02: Hi, I'm Jerry Martin. Thanks for joining me here. I want to raise a question with you that will sound maybe puzzling and misleading at the beginning. The question is does God really, really, really, love us? And you might wonder, why would I ask such a question. You hear God is love- isn't that answer itself? Well, I'm going to tell you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:29: This may be a little bit technical, it's certainly philosophical and it comes out of high theology. Think of what it means to love someone. Between whom does love happen? Love is, you might say, a relationship, and philosophers tend to ask well, who are the relata, in other words, who are the people on either side of the relationship? And well, if God loves us, then God is one partner in that transaction. We're the recipient of that love and, of course, we love God. If the relationship is reversed, that God is the recipient of our love. Now, why is this problematic? And we're not talking about whether we're worthy of love. That's a different kind of question, and everybody's worthy of love, just by being here, thank goodness. And so that's not the question we're raising. The question really has to do again with the relata.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:31: What kind of being can love? See, this is a deep philosophical question Can your computer love you? Well, some people think there'll be some kind of sophisticated computer program at some point that can love you. That doesn't seem plausible to me. But let's ratchet it down a few steps. Does the chair you're sitting on love you? Does the wall love somebody? Does this napkin love somebody? Well, those won't do. What do you need to love, to be a lover? What do you need to be a lover? What would this computer- if they're somehow going to make a super-duper computer, what characteristic would it have to have to love? Well, love is between persons. It's between persons. And for God to love, God's going to have to be very personal. Now, when I say God would have to be a person, that doesn't mean a human being walking around on two legs. That's not the essence of being a person, anyway. You know you can be paralyzed and so on and so forth and still be a person. It has to do with a sense of consciousness, an awareness and capacity to relate. It's these traits of mind and awareness and of heart and empathy. Those are, you might say, what personhood is. People become persons by relating to other people.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:13: The infant isn't yet quite a person, certainly doesn't yet realize he or she is a person. Because the world is just there's no differentiation, you might say, between the infant's experience of the infant's own body and the face of the mother and the background wall and the sounds and so forth, and it's all of a piece. It’s an amorphous field that's not yet differentiated. But through interacting with the mother, you know psychologists have written about this, that the child, oh, I'm a person, she's a person. And then only after that realization can the child start to love the mother. Of course, the mother has already been loving the child. Now, why is this puzzling? Why God's personal? Isn't that standard?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:11: Well, it's not quite standard. Because you also hear something else said that we shouldn't be anthropomorphic when we talk about God, and that some will say, for example, that it's better to say, not God loves us, but that God is love. Well, you know that sounds nice, God is love and you know I wouldn't fault it on its own as an expression of something. But if you think it through, it's not love that loves us. You know, that's kind of an abstract concept or something. Love, it's like saying beauty is beautiful. Well, not, the concept of beauty isn't what's beautiful and the concept of truth isn't what's truthful, the concept of honesty isn't what's honest. Honesty is honest- it just doesn't quite mean anything, right? So God, to love us, needs to be not just love but to be a person capable of love.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:15: And the theologians, the high theologians like, of the Middle Ages, had trouble with that, in part because of a doctrine that God is so transcendent that our ordinary human concepts couldn't possibly apply to God. God is so great, so unfathomably great, so infinite, that no concept, love is a finite concept, I suppose, they would say, and that can't apply to the infinite. Well, something from the book God: An Autobiography, and all that I was told as I questioned the God who spoke to me about all these things was that those are just big mistakes. God is not that transcendent. Where our concepts don't apply, you can't even talk about Him.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:07: Sometimes they say God is ineffable, you know, beyond all our languages and concepts, simply ineffable. I know a direct quote from one of the things God told me is that for God, this created a problem, and the quote is, “I don't feel ineffable,” God said, in other words, from His point of view He's not unknowable. It's not that he's so weird or something. He's extraordinary and I'm saying He, He, She, It. However you want to use it, He is natural language to me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:41: But God is not simply transcendent, God is accessible and God actually cares about you. I mean, that's what I'm told, that it's not that God is off in outer space somewhere in some realm of pure infinity and pure perfection and frictionless planes and whatever that perfection would be. No, God is relating right to us, in our lives, in our world. I'm told God suffers. Now, some believers I've known have trouble with that concept, others don't. Some theologians say God suffers, some say God doesn't suffer. But if you think, you know, if you love somebody and they have ups and downs in their life and we have lots of ups and downs, we have a lot of suffering. Well, if God loves us, God is going to suffer right along with us. And we have downs, God is going to suffer over that. And when we're bad, God is going to suffer over that, the way a parent suffers when a child goes bad. So if God loves us, God also suffers.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:48: And you can see the implications of God being personal here are very different from infinite, ineffable, beyond concepts, one of the high theologians, great, great, great theologian, St Anselm, the inventor of the ontological argument for the existence of God, and just one of the- the person who gave us the definition of theology as faith seeking understanding. So you have a kind of revelation, you have a faith you believe in and then you try to figure it out intellectually. What's the right way to understand this faith that you have? So it's a terrific definition of theology which applies beyond the boundaries of his particular tradition.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:35: But St Anselm had this ineffable, beyond all our language and concepts idea that God was just too perfect to be captured, you might say, or described accurately by any of our concepts. And so, he realizes and says straight out when we say God loves us, that doesn't mean God loves us in the way we think of His love, because God doesn't have emotions, God doesn't love, God doesn't care, God doesn't suffer. Because those sound like imperfections- not clear to me they're imperfections. They seem kind of good. I'd rather be loved by somebody who actually cares.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:14: But the way Anselm solves the problem is because he certainly doesn't want to throw out the idea of a loving God, yet he can't reconcile it with this infinite, ineffable God. He ends up saying God doesn't actually love us, but from our side, it feels like love. Well, if I thought I was married to a woman who doesn't actually love me but somehow brings it about that to me it feels like love. And as soon as I realize that's what was going on, I’d think, hey, this is no good. That's not love. That's simply not love.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:58: And so the shocking thing is and it's shocking only if you have a certain kind of philosophical sophistication or theological sophistication or just some other kind of urge to place God beyond anything we can directly relate to and understand. And there are other urges for that too that I don't think are theological or philosophical. For some people, I think that's just a more comfortable way to think about God. It almost puts God on the shelf spiritually and intellectually. But what I was told at one point when it was coming through to me, was that I'd never thought of God as so intensely personal as the God who was speaking to me. You know, the philosophers are always God is an infinite substance or something like that. This was intensely personal and I'm balking, I'm objecting to that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:47: In the early chapters of God: An Autobiography, and God said and I thought the words were kind of shocking, “Get more anthropomorphic.” Now I've thought about that since then. I mean it's kind of a shocking thing. That's the huge fallacy is supposed to be we think, because we have a pain in our joints, that God must have a pain in God's joints. You know the old man in the cloud with the beard or something like that, or the king, the throne, you know these kinds of very anthropomorphic images of God. But I was told- get more anthropomorphic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:26: And then, reflecting on it more recently, I mean what's one of the most famous things we're told? It's that we are made in the image of God. You know we are theomorphic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:38: You might say we're made in the image of God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:41: Well, what does that mean? Well, that means we really are in the image of God if we're persons. And you know, if God is a person, we're going to be persons if we're made in the image of God. And therefore you might say that's conceptually a two-way relationship, that if you have a mold that's stamping out little statuettes of a certain kind, what's the shape of the mold? It's the same shape as the statuettes, right? And so, just as you can say, well, these statuettes reflect the shape of the mold, you know God being the mold and us being the statuettes, but you can say equally well, backward, that the mold is the shape of the statuettes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:26: You know that inference is a valid inference and, moreover, more fundamentally, it's an inference that reflects the religious experience of very many of us which, in one way or another, moments of prayer, moments of death, moments where we sense the presence of God, moments where we pray for guidance and we feel we get it, those are moments when, for us, God is a person and God is loving us, and God is in an intense relationship with us that it behooves us to pay the carefullest attention to. Well, I do hope you read the God: An Autobiography. If you do, let me know what you think about it and how it relates to your life, and do you find God to be a person or not? I'd be very interested in hearing what your experience of the divine is. If this speaks to you, please subscribe and like and share it with your friends. It might be just what they need to hear today.
Scott Langdon 15:41: 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 one 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.