GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

200. Celebrating 200 Episodes: A Journey of Spiritual Discovery

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Join us in celebrating a major milestone— the 200th episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast! Host Scott Langdon takes listeners on a reflective journey, starting from the dramatic adaptation of Jerry L. Martin’s life-changing conversations with God. 

Whether you’re a longtime listener or new to the series, this episode perfectly introduces the deeper spiritual themes explored in the podcast and the book.

Discover the fascinating history behind God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher, and uncover why this podcast has inspired countless listeners. Plus, get a glimpse of the exciting things ahead in this evolving spiritual journey.

This is more than just a podcast; it’s a spiritual experience that has touched lives around the world. Come along and find out how it all began—and where it’s headed.

Book Links: Two Philosophers Wrestle With God A Dialogue | God: An Autobiography, As told to a Philosopher

Referenced Episode: 1. I Pray To A God I Don’t Believe In | 44. God Tells Me About A New Age Of Spiritual Development

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

Resources:

Would you like to be featured on the show or have questions about spirituality or divine communication? Contact us!

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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 197. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, the Podcast.

Scott Langdon 01:17: Hello and welcome to the 200th weekly episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, your host, and since I'm also the creative director, I thought I might, if you'll indulge me, take this numerical milestone as an opportunity to reflect a bit on what this podcast has meant to me and why I'm so grateful to be able to continue to work on it. As many of you know, it began as an audio adaptation of Jerry Martin's book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. That took 44 episodes. So why the other 156 and counting? Well, I guess it's just because we like to talk about God's story and since God's story and our stories are so intertwined, so connected in the way they're developing, it only makes sense to continue to tell these stories in an effort to understand ourselves and God, maybe even just a little bit better each week. So this week, as we stop and look around for a moment, here at 200 weekly episodes gone, I invite you to join us for a joyful look back to how we started, a grateful exploration of how we got here and a hopeful thought or two about what lies ahead. We begin this week where it all began, with a love story. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:50: In February of 2020, I was hired by Jerry Martin and his wife, Abigail Rosenthal Martin, to help promote Jerry's book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher through social media. So naturally, the first thing I did was read it. What attracted me to the idea of turning this project into a podcast in the first place was the way the book read when I first read it. It read like dialogue, because that's exactly what it was. God and Jerry had these conversations and they'd been written down by Jerry. In the physical book, God's words are in bold-faced type and Jerry's are in italics. The narrator of the book is Jerry himself, guiding the reader through the story as it happened to him. After considering several different ideas, Jerry, Abigail, their wonderful executive assistant, Laura Buck, and I decided an audio adaptation of the book would work well and that a platform like a podcast might be the best way to offer it out to the world.

Scott Langdon 03:48: What followed was 44 individual episodes that comprised the audio adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. Jerry Martin, who heard the voice, speaks the voice of God. Abigail Rosenthal speaks her own voice, Sarah Lynn Dewey speaks the female voice of God and I speak the voice of Jerry Martin. God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, is a first-person account of Jerry Martin's unexpected conversations with God, and it begins with Jerry giving a bit of a backstory. Here's a clip from Episode 1. I Pray to a God I Don't Believe In.

Parts  from the Dramatic Adaptation Series are voiced by:

Scott Langdon as Jerry Martin

Dr. Jerry L. Martin (who heard the voice) as the Voice of God

Jerry Martin 04:28: It is said you don't have to believe in God in order to pray. That is what happened to me. I had been divorced for many years. I always thought I would be happier married, but as the decades rolled on without Miss Right showing up, I began to think she never would.

Jerry Martin 04:49: Then, one day, the phone rang. It was Abigail Rosenthal. She was a professor at Brooklyn College, a school with an outstanding liberal arts curriculum. The new college president had decided to replace core courses that opened students to the whole world of learning with telescope from wide vista to keyhole view, a focus on the borough of Brooklyn, the one thing the students knew already, in fact knew better than their professors. Rosenthal and a colleague in the history department were fighting the change.They had succeeded in rallying most of the faculty, but the administration was driving a steamroller. She called the higher education organization I ran in Washington DC. Could we help? Yes, that is what we do, I said Our only hope was to take the issue to the public, and we did.

Jerry Matin 05:49: The battle raged in the press through the spring and into the summer. Abigail and I talked almost daily, strategizing and getting the story out. None of the talk was personal and we never met. Yet I found myself thinking this is a very remarkable woman. In fact, I fell in love with her over the phone. Oh, and we won the fight. I was not just in love, I was completely overwhelmed. 

Scott Langdon 06:25: Jerry had literally answered the call to love when he picked up the phone for Abigail that first day. He didn't know it then, but he figured it out soon enough and, to his delight, so did Abigail. 

Jerry Martin 06:40: I would have been in sad shape had Abigail not had similar feelings, but she too responded to what she called the summons of love. 

Abigail Rosenthal: Dinner last night was disturbingly interesting.

Jerry Martin 07:05: That was, according to Abigail, her diary entry, the day after a lovely New York dinner we had following our victorious campaign against the administration of Brooklyn College.

Jerry Martin 07:10: Thinking to maintain her feminine elusiveness, she nevertheless warned in a stream of modals:

Abigail Rosenthal: If there may be, or might be, or possibly could be something personal at some point, perhaps between us, we should make sure it doesn’t interfere with our efforts for Brooklyn College.

Jerry Martin 07:37: My lips said, of course the college comes first, but my heart said, she loves me! 

Scott Langdon 07:57: Jerry and Abigail had both been open to and responded to the summons of love, as Abigail so beautifully put it. And that might have been it. But Jerry did something further, something that felt as natural as anything had ever felt. He had been changed by this love and he was grateful. Here's more from episode one.

Jerry Martin 08:34: One summer morning I felt an urge to express my thanks, to pray--to Whomever. I did not see any reason not to express what I genuinely felt. So, I fell to my knees, as I had been taught as a child, and thanked "the Lord." I now believed in love but not much else. I did not know if I was praying to the God of Israel, to Jesus of Nazareth, or, for all I knew, to the Lord Krishna worshiped by Hindus. Or simply to a benign universe. I didn't worry about that. I just poured out my heart in prayer. A few weeks later, I felt this same urge and said another prayer of thanks, still addressed to a Lord I did not actually believe in. This time, to my surprise, I offered to be of service. To a God I didn't believe existed. Inconsistent of course, but not insincere. 

Jerry Martin 09:41: Toward the end of a long summer day, Abigail and I were siting on a park bench along the Potomac, across from the Lincoln Memorial. She was writing in her journal, and I was pondering the challenge of making a future together. Without thinking much about it, much less expecting an answer, I prayed again, this time asking for guidance.Immediately a visual image appeared, like a hologram, a few feet in front of me--a rising, sparkling, multi-colored fountain. It radiated vitality and promise, an answer to my prayer. But there was more.A voice spoke...

The Voice of God: Listen. 

Jerry Martin: The voice did not sound particularly different from my own inner voice, but it wasn't me talking. I looked at Abigail to see if she heard it, but she continued writing, undisturbed. I asked, not out loud: What is this voice? Who are you?

The Voice of God 10:51: I am God.

Jerry  Martin 10:55: The God of Israel?

The Voice of God 11:01: I am the God of All.

Scott Langdon 11:06: The fact that Jerry and Abigail responded to the call of love the way they did changed their lives both individually and together as they became a couple. Love doesn't always show up in someone's life looking like romantic love, though it did in this case. Love is a calling from God and we all get that call constantly and consistently in our own ways. If we can be open to whatever form it might take in our lives, a natural feeling of wanting to participate more fully in that love will follow, and our response can alter everything about the lives we're living. It certainly did for Jerry and Abigail and it most definitely did for me. As our work on the audio adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher was coming to a close with episode 44, we felt the desire to keep going, so we decided to talk to one another about the whole thing. I interviewed Jerry, then Abigail, then Jerry and Abigail together as a couple. Then Jerry interviewed me. I even got to interview my wife, Sarah, who lent her voice to the production on two different occasions. That was a wonderful experience for me to talk about the project and reflect on what it meant to make it, but still we felt there was more to do. So we began to make episodes with content we thought was interesting and possibly helpful. Jerry and Dr Richard Oxenberg had sat down for a set of dialogues about God: An Autobiography and we decided to bring those into the mix of developing content. So I adapted them for the program. You can always hear those dialogues on this podcast and you can now also read them in the newly released book form titled Two Philosophers Wrestle With God A Dialogue. Have a look on Amazon for this new release. Readers and listeners began writing in with email questions and comments, so we started doing the What's On Your Mind series, which I really enjoy. Folks wanted to hear more from Jerry himself, so From God To Jerry To You was formed. Several experts in the field of religious studies and spiritual growth agreed to help share the profound message of a God who truly is with us in all things and in all situations. So Jerry sat down with them one at a time, and they each discussed with Jerry a particular episode of the podcast, combing it for little and sometimes huge gems of wisdom for how one might live a more God-centered life. And that's how the The Life Wisdom Project came to be. And, of course, we have offered regularly over these past four years, perhaps my favorite series of episodes we produce here, What's On Our Mind. This was an idea I had early on, and I relish the opportunity every time we make a new one. Being able to talk with Jerry about the difficult questions of life and then to be able to go back and listen to these conversations again and again, it's a fantastic blessing I had no idea I'd be able to take advantage of when I first took the job, and I'm so glad I did.

Scott Langdon 14:37: We started out this episode with a look at Jerry and Abigail's response to the call of love. I mentioned how it changed their lives and mine. As I also mentioned, I had been initially hired to work with social media. That changed, of course, as the podcast got underway. After a time, though, we realized we needed a special social media touch that none of us had. That's when God delivered Amanda Horgan to us. What a rock star she's been for us and for this podcast. I've been so blessed and honored to work for Jerry and Abigail. 

Scott Langdon 15:13: If you know much about me, then it's likely you know how much I love the story of Christmas Carol, and if you know a Christmas Carol, then you'll know what I mean when I say I work for the Fezziwigs. Jerry and Abigail are some of the most generous people I have ever encountered. Their conviction and desire to live a God-centered life is lived out daily in how they treat others, especially those of us in their employ, and it's that kind of atmosphere that keeps the soul lifted, even in the dark times. 

Scott Langdon 15:50: These past four and a half years have been an amazing growth experience for me. I see the world so much differently now, and I know God now in ways I have always known him but didn't fully understand and wasn't able to surrender to. God's message to Jerry is a timely one, and God has made that abundantly clear. Here's a clip from episode 44. God Tells Me About A New Age Of Spiritual Development.

The Voice of God 16:34: You stand on the threshold of a new spiritual era, a new Axial Age, in which, for the first time spiritually attuned individuals will draw their understanding of spiritual reality, not just from the scriptures of their own religious tradition, but from the plenitude of My communications to men and women. The upshot will not be a bland acceptance of all so-called scriptures and theological traditions, as if they all said the same thing. As you can see, they do not. But the more accurate of them can be fitted together in a meaningful way. This is not just a conceptual puzzle-solving, as if the challenge were purely intellectual- how to fit the largest number of pieces into a single coherent story. It is most fundamentally spiritual. How to sense which writings and experiences are truly sensitive to the divine reality and how to put them together in a way that is spiritually meaningful, whether or not it seems logical. 

Jerry Martin 17:46: Lord, are the world's religions converging on the cutting edge of spiritual development? 

The Voice of God 17:52: Yes, that's right. It's time for them to come together, not merely putting the pieces together, but in a dynamic way, a way that lends itself to forward development. 

Jerry Martin: What do you mean? 

The Voice of God: As people from different traditions take in elements from other traditions, they will make something of that. It won't just be a passive reception. It will be a creative, very dynamic process. For example, as a Christian takes in the "truth" of the Atman- truth in scare quotes, because the Hindu truth of the Atman is not the final truth. It leaves the Christian perspective out, for example. Understanding the Atman will be shaped, and expanded, and connected to other elements not present or not so fully present in the Hindu tradition. As the Hindus or Chinese fully take in the personal God of the Old Testament, as they take in the reality of Jesus, they will be transformed. 

Jerry Martin 18:57: Resulting in a single world religion?

The Voice of God 19:01: There is no way human beings will all subscribe to a single religion any more than all philosophers agree, but they will no longer be hermetically sealed, looking at one another over tall, thick walls, sending bullets, or, when you're lucky, flowers back and forth. It will be a creative ferment in which religions borrow freely from each other and individuals borrow from all religions and create their own creeds and rituals. 

Scott Langdon 19:31: Will this mean the end of the old religions?

The Voice of God 19:35: Of course not. The early Christians absorbed Greek philosophy and still remained Christians. There are many other examples of religious syncretism. Some resulted in new traditions, others were fully absorbed by an existing tradition.

Scott Langdon 19:50: Once religions and individuals take in truths and revelations from each other, will that be the end of the process? 

The Voice of God 20:01: Of course it won't be the end. There will be new developments and new communications from My side, and new developments, and events, and consciousness from the world side. The cutting edge of spiritual development will continue. 

Scott Langdon 20:41: As God made clear to Jerry. In God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, there is work to be done now and going forward. This podcast is just a small part of that work being done in our own little corner and we hope it inspires you to explore the divine calling within yourself. Thank you for joining us for 200 episodes. We hope you'll stick around for much more.

Scott Langdon 21:13: 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 Jerry Martin. I'll see you next time.