GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
190. The Life Wisdom Project | Faith and Identity | Special Guest: Dr. Mikhail Sergeev
What happens when a former journalist from Soviet Russia grapples with a crisis of faith and transitions to a pluralistic worldview in America?
Join this thought-provoking episode of The Life Wisdom Project as Dr. Mikhail Sergeev shares his personal journey from growing up under Soviet communism to seeking a new worldview in America. Mikhail and Jerry explore faith, reason, and the evolving journey of self-discovery. They discuss the impact of cultural backgrounds, historical contexts, and personal experiences on spirituality, religious identity, and the quest for meaning in life. Discover how these elements shape our understanding of the divine and the reconciliation of diverse religious traditions.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev, a distinguished scholar specializing in the history of religion, philosophy, and modern art, teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. With over fifteen books and 200+ scholarly works, Dr. Sergeev brings deep insights into our discussion on religious cycles and modernity.
Dr. Sergeev opens up about his strong Jewish roots and his exploration of various religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. He discusses the intricate process of embracing dual identities and integrating diverse spiritual paths. Discover the importance of integrating past beliefs and experiences to maintain a cohesive identity, illustrating that one can be both Russian and American, Jewish and Christian, without rejecting any part of oneself.
Relevant Episodes:
- [Dramatic Adaptation] God Explains How All Religions Exist
- [The Life Wisdom Project] Faith and Reason: Special Guest: Dr. Mikhail Sergeev
Other Series:
- From God To Jerry To You- A series calling for the attention of spiritual seekers everywhere, featuring breakthroughs, pathways, and illuminations.
- Two Philosophers Wrestle With God- Sit in on a dialogue between philosophers about God and the questions we all have.
- What's On Our Mind- Connect the dots with Jerry and Scott over the most recent series of episodes.
- What's On Your Mind- What are readers and listeners saying? What is God saying?
Resources:
Hashtags: #lifewisdomproject #godanautobiography #experiencegod #rationalspirituality
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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 187. Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast.
Scott Langdon 01:14: I'm Scott Langdon and we return this week to our Life Wisdom Project series, as Jerry welcomes back Professor of World Religions and dear friend of the podcast, Dr. Mikhail Sergeev. Mikhail began his career as a journalist in the former Soviet Union and, after its fall, found himself in a crisis of faith. He came to America in his quest to find a new worldview that made sense to him and found that the struggle for such a thing can lead down many different paths and is different for everybody. That's why Dr Sergeyev is the perfect person to talk with about episode 19. God Explains How All Religions Exist. Here's Jerry getting the discussion started. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:05: Well, I'm very pleased today to have as my guest Dr. Mikhail Sergeev, a Russian, whom I met through American Academy of Religion, and at that occasion we exchanged books and so forth, as people like us often do, and have kept in touch ever since, for very important reasons. We look at this fascinating, to my mind, episode 19, which begins with the so-called problem of the diversity of revelations. You know, one revelation is a blessing, a dozen revelations is a kind of embarrassment. Oh well, mine isn't the only one, there are others? And what am I now to make of that? Does that–
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:56: The 17th-century philosopher, thinker, Jean Bodin, said each religion refutes all the others because each one claims they've got absolute certainty in the whole thing. And we all live in this world, now, right? I mean, this, is I was praying, not paying much attention at the time to what had been going on in religions, because I was a lifelong agnostic when God first spoke to me, and so I thought, huh, this is interesting. And then I was told in prayer, go read the foundational text of the world's religions and basically to ask the question of God: God, what were You up to with these people? All the way to the ancient Egyptians, the Zoroaster, you know, the Chinese, the people of Israel and so forth around the globe, and we all now and as I started looking around, oh, this is not so surprising. We now live in a world of multiple religions. A dozen can be in our, the same neighborhood these days, especially in America, where everybody comes here from somewhere else, and not just religions, but worldviews, competing political ideologies, competing social ideas, competing theories of how best to live life, and people get very committed to these things, as in a sense, they should. If you're going to take, whatever you decide is the way to think and live, you take it seriously, you try to follow through on it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:43: Now, in this context, with that background, I'm thinking of your story. As I understand it, Mikhail is, you started off in Soviet Russia. You were a kind of journalist.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Kind of.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: And when I first met you said in a regime like that it's not altogether clear what the job of a journalist is. You're supposed to report the news. But maybe you could just start your story then, because at that point you have a worldview right, everybody is a communist and even though the regime is suspect, communism, Marxism, does provide a kind of meaningful frame, a kind of you know, of utopian political vision of workers of the world and so forth.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 05:30: Yes, when I was growing up, we were taught communist ideology from the kindergarten. That is true, not even from school, from the kindergarten. Now I look at my pictures when I'm like five or six years old, or my son's pictures when he's three years old, and the first thing I notice is the portrait of Lenin above. Right above the faces of the children. So, communism was not simply an ideology it was all-encompassing, comprehensive, a worldview, and in this way we can safely say that communism replaced religion in the Soviet Union. So, it was not simply a system of ideas. It was something that gave the meaning to your life. And that's how I grew up. But somewhere in my early 20s, when my education came into a conflict with the real life. The real life turned out to be very far from what I was taught, and that already created….
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:55: In what way? Can you make that more specific?
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 06:58: Well, communist ideology that was taught to us was an idealist kind of philosophy and it assumed that people have good nature and this good nature should be given the chance to flourish. And when I encountered people, to my surprise I realized that is just the opposite.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:24: Well, I wouldn't go that far, but maybe that was your experience. I mean, I've always understood human nature as kind of mixed. You know, we have on one shoulder, the pictures we have on one shoulder an angel, and on one shoulder a little devil.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Yeah, we didn't have a devil. We didn't have a devil.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: That's one reason you can trust the regime is that eventually, human nature will just flourish once you can stamp out capitalism and so forth. Then human nature will just automatically flourish. And that didn't fit your….
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 07:59: I saw that on the human level, it was not true and I also saw that on the institutional level, it is not quite true. And you know, after that I started questioning, bit by bit, certain points within the ideology, and in four years I came to challenging the whole ideology. So when I was 24, I rejected the whole communist ideology. And that created a tremendous hole in my soul, in my worldview, because I had this quasi-spiritual backbone and suddenly it disappeared.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:41: Was that something like what we call a crisis of faith?
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Yeah, it was.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: It all disappears. All the structures of meaning are no longer credible for a person. And then where are you? You're in a vacuum or something, but you don't live in a vacuum, so you can't sustain yourself there.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 09:00: The problem for me was that, unlike the previous generations of Russian people, I couldn't come back to a single tradition because I didn't have any tradition. So I was belonging to the third generation of the Soviet people and therefore, when I looked back, I saw the abyss you know, the 70 years of the Soviet experience and I couldn't just jump and pretend that this abyss was not there. So, unlike the first generation of Russians who emigrated and could come back to their Orthodox Christianity, I found myself really in a vacuum. I think our generation of Soviet people is unique in the whole world history because we are the only people who actually experienced complete lack of any tradition whatsoever.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:59: Because the Russian Orthodox tradition had been suppressed quite successfully. I've read stories of turning churches into pigsties and stuff like that. I don't know if that's literally true, but in effect that was censored, erased.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 10:15: It was suppressed, and when I was in the Soviet Union, it was not as suppressed as it was in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s. But still, when my wife was baptized, it should have been done in secret. Actually, it was done in secret from her father, because if her father knew, he would have been against it, because baptizing your children may actually worsen your career and your position, whatever your work. So therefore, all those things were done secretly, but my second problem, which was even maybe worse than the first one…
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 11:00: Was that I'm not sure how Americans say it, but in Russian it is said I'm a half-blood person- I'm half-Jewish, half-Russian. So my mother is Jewish and according to the Jewish tradition, according to the Jewish Halakha, law, I'm a Jewish person, as once a rabbi told me well, your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish, whether you want this or not. And then he added especially if you don't. So typically Jewish humor. And at the same time, my father came from the Russian Orthodox tradition and it was also close to me. I felt myself at home both in the synagogue and in the church, but in both places I did not feel myself completely at home. And that is the problem with people who come from different traditions. And it was no way for me to reconcile them, because you are either a Jew or a Christian.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:15: Yeah, they're very different, right, they're very different. Right.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 12:19: So, therefore, from the beginning of my spiritual crisis, if you may call it this way, I was put in a position that was apparently without any solution, and that's why I came to the United States to study religion. Because I took this very seriously.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:40: Because you had an irreconcilable situation.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:45: Okay, I have my own thoughts about that, but I want to hear how you took that next story. For that reason, you come to the US and you go to Temple University, right, you go to the graduate program and study, they have a famous PhD program in religion there. So you study that with your own personal problematic much in your mind. And then you're studying all the religions and so forth, but that's in your mind. How did you wrestle with it in light of what you were studying?
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 13:21: Well, look, it was a long journey. I do not believe when people tell me that they convert to religion in one day. I think it's quite a journey. You cannot just switch from communism to Orthodox Christianity, like many of my friends have done in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because, yes, artificially you can, superficially you can, but if you really want to resolve your personal problems, then you have to study seriously and you have to build a new worldview, basically out of nothing. And an additional difficulty was that I'm a rational person. That's how I was taught to approach everything rationally. And yet, from the rational standpoint, I had to choose a religion which is a priori irrational or super-rational. So how can you choose something rationally which is beyond rationality?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:30: Yes, yes, a wonderful way to put that problem.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 14:35: That is already a philosophical problem. Yeah. It took me 25, 30 years first to get a thorough knowledge of world religions, and my personal situation helped me in my teaching, because I was not simply teaching world religions but I was telling students about my situation and how I approach it. We, together were trying to discover Hinduism and Buddhism and Judaism, etc.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:11: And if they're typical Americans, or at least like many Americans, especially younger Americans, they had their own situations of divided traditions, divided thoughts being pulled one way, pulled another way, either by family ties or by other associations or things they had read or come upon that struck them as maybe deeply moving. And yet there's something else also deeply moving, and they seem very different, they seem incompatible in fact. So you and the students were all in this journey, you might say together, each one pursuing your own problematic, but all doing it together.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 15:52: That's true. I tried not only theoretical studies but I visited different churches and temples and Buddhist meditation and Hindu temples etc., etc., and kind of trying to see, maybe something will fit.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 16:46: I soon discovered many things about myself that I did not realize back in the Soviet Union. For example, I did not realize how strong is my Jewish identity. I mean not even identity, but I have Jewish roots and those Jewish roots turned out to be very strong, much stronger than I anticipated.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:17: Give an example of that, or how it manifests itself.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 17:21: Because when I was studying, I love Hinduism, and I love Buddhism. I love India. I love Indian thought. And you know Hinduism, I've read Bhagavad Gita before I've read the Bible. I had a great Hindu teacher who inspired me, but when I, you know, try to think of myself being part of, not Hinduism, Hinduism is a national religion, but Buddhism is an international religion. You can be a Russian Buddhist, an American Buddhist, still I realized that this is simply not part of my roots.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 18:01: No matter how hard I try to run from my roots and from my heritage, from my Jewish roots and from my Christian heritage, I cannot do it. And I realized that I have to narrow my spiritual search to the monotheistic traditions. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, when I went into different Christian churches, I realized that my Jewish roots are even stronger, because I totally accept Jesus as the Messiah. I totally accept Jesus as the, of course, founder of Christianity, the Jewish messianic figure and almost everything, including resurrection, but I cannot accept the divinity of Jesus.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: The divinity?
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Yeah, and I realized that this is part of my Jewish roots.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:10: Is it a violation of monotheism?
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev: Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:14: Now you suddenly have a second God, as it were, a second person of the Trinity.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 19:21: That was a big surprise to me, but no matter how I struggled with it, I cannot overcome that. And the way I overcame that is that I kept visiting different churches and I found one Christian denomination, in fact an American Christian denomination, which is called the Disciples of Jesus of Christ. And when I came to their service, I asked them, as I always kept asking, so when you are converted to your version of Christianity or to your denomination, what kind of belief system, what kind of creed do you have? What should I believe in order to be part of you? Because I could not sacrifice certain things that were in me. And they told me well, do you believe that Jesus is the Messiah? I said yes, I have no problems with that. And they said that's it. I said what about the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus? And they said it's a personal belief. If you believe that, you believe that. If you don't believe that, we are not about to intervene.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 20:48: And I got baptized. So I got baptized into this denomination and I was Christian. And I think I am Christian, because it is not in my character, when I do the next step, to reject the previous steps. I always take everything with me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:12: I think that's an important principle. So let me just underscore that. For a lot of life, for belief systems in particular, when I talk about some of these views, when I talk on a college campus, I first mentioned one that I think are inadequate, but I said, look, the inadequate views are telling us something that is true. And so as you go forward, you don't want to lose the first truth. I often talk about exclusivism. You know my religion's the only religion. Well, I don't think that's at all adequate. But there's something to that that you start with one that maybe you're born into. It's giving you a lot, a lot of your formation, a lot of your spiritual understanding, a lot of your rituals, your music, your art, everything else, your friends, your neighborhoods, the funerals and births and so forth. All of that come with it. So as you move on in understanding, you don't want to just scuttle that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:09: I often call it the conservation principle of truth, and it happens in the history of science as well. Einstein supersedes Newton but does not throw it out. There's the whole Newtonian physics still resting in the core. You might say of Einsteinian physics, which still rests within the core, you might say of the kind of quantum mechanics revolution. That came after. So you always keep what you've learned before. You keep Greek drama, even if modern theater goes somewhere else, and you keep it all.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 22:41: Yes, and I would say, I would add that this is a very good psychological principle, because if you move from one thing to another and you do kind of a split between what you thought before what you think now, then psychologically you will not feel like an integral person.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:05: Yeah, so part of it is you're integrating these together as you go. You're holding the past, but not in amber, not freezing it, freeze-framing it, but you're now seeing it somewhat differently. So you're Russian and you're American? Y
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 23:22: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:24: But you're Russian and somewhat different.
Dr. Mikhail Sergeev 23:27: And that's what my Russian friends do not understand. They think that I'm either Russian or American. They ask me are you an American? I said yes, I'm an American. So you are not Russian any longer? No, I said no, I'm still Russian. I'm still Russian, but in different circumstances. I am both Russian and American. I am both Jewish and Christian. So I do not reject any of my identities. I cherish them because they give me a unique blend of who I am.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:01: I am. Well, I feel the advice for people, you know we're always, the point of this Life Wisdom series is think, okay, what lessons can we learn about our lives? And right at the beginning I was thinking well, there are all these religions. And then you can take that down to the personal level. God says I come to people in their particularities, not to mankind as such, and the particularities go all the way down to the individual. So you know, you're one person, I'm one person, so God is not going to necessarily going to give you the same mission in life that I have, that God gives me, the same set of challenges, the same set of overcoming challenges. You know, and I guess a conclusion I draw from that part of what you've already stated, since there's some truth in these different elements of oneself, the stages of one's own life, hang on to the truth in them, and then you work them together so that they have some kind of ongoing coherence. The other, I guess, I would think, and maybe you would agree, Mikhail, is hold your identity somewhat lightly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:19: You can stay a communist maybe some of your friends still are back in, but hold it more lightly than you did in the old days. You can become orthodox than you did, than they did in the old days, hold it more lightly than you did and so on for these other elements, in part because you'll get along better and understand others better, but mainly because it's more spiritually true that you aren't just one thing and your relation to the divine, however that's conceptualized theistically or non-theistically, is yours.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:00: It's yours and you've got to be true to that because that's also real. That's not just made-up fantasies floating in and out of your head. But if you're living seriously and attentively, then you want to hold the identity elements lightly so you can take in as much truth as possible and keep evolving, keep growing, because life doesn't end at whatever day you decide, oh, I'm Russian Orthodox, or I decide I'm disciples of Christ or something, the curtain doesn't come down. You continue growing and having new experiences and in a sense relating to the divine or the ultimate, in new ways as you go along and hopefully deepen, but maybe just vary on different aspects of life or of how the spiritual aspect of life manifests itself in different ways.
Scott Langdon 27:08: 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.