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

234. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Mark Groleau on God, Process, and Change

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon, Mark Groleau

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Welcome to What’s Your Spiritual Story: a new series from God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, featuring candid conversations with people whose spiritual lives have been reshaped by direct encounters with the divine. 

In this first installment, Jerry L. Martin speaks with pastor and podcaster Mark Groleau, who returns to the show exactly 100 episodes after his original appearance.

Mark’s story is one of radical transformation. Raised in a strict Oneness Pentecostal tradition, he was trained to preach, taught to defend doctrine, and discouraged from asking questions. But once he began studying literature and scripture through a critical lens, everything changed. What followed was a deconstruction of his inherited faith, a period of atheism, and an eventual reawakening through a more expansive vision of God.

This episode follows Mark’s evolving relationship with the divine, from the static, all-powerful deity of classical theism to a God who suffers, listens, and grows. Influenced by thinkers like John Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Greg Boyd, and Terence Fretheim, Mark now embraces process theology, which sees God not as removed from the world but as intimately involved in its unfolding.

Jerry and Mark reflect on what it means to believe in a God who changes. They discuss suffering, divine vulnerability, and the tension between doctrine and experience. Mark also shares why Jesus’ teachings have become central to his life, and why many Christians, ironically, ignore them. 

From Hebrew grammar to the Big Bang, from seminary classrooms to Buddhist temples in Korea, this is a conversation for anyone rethinking their faith and seeking something more relational, honest, and alive.

If you’ve ever wrestled with the question of who, or what, God really is, this conversation offers a starting point for something deeper.

Mentioned in this episode:
Creation Untamed by Terence Fretheim, Not Sure by John Suk, #JesusIsMyGuru, Process Theology, Open Theism, Wikigod Podcast, Bereshit, Patripassianism

Other Series:

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

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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 234.

Scott Langdon 01:11: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Langdon, and this week I'm thrilled to be able to share this conversation between Jerry Martin and Mark Groleau. You'll remember Mark from episode 134, exactly 100 episodes ago, when Jerry spoke with Mark as one of our early Life Wisdom Project series guests. This week, Jerry and Mark discuss Mark's spiritual story and his journey of discovery about a God who looks very different from the God of his belief system. Next week, join Jerry and me as we bring you an all-new edition of What's On Our Mind. Here now are Jerry and Mark. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:06: You know they kept saying I should interview some famous people, Deepak Chopra or someone. I'm not interested in Deepak Chopra, Okay. And they were suggesting this one and that one. No, no, I'm not interested in them. I want to interview someone. If you don't have questions, you want to ask them. And they said who would you like to interview? And I said, my readers. And what I have found dealing with you and others is everybody is coming from a different place. They have their own story. The book relates to them in accord with their own spiritual journey, not some idea that everybody's got to be a certain place, but rather everybody takes it up in their own way.

Mark Groleau 02:53: Well, if that's the only qualification, then I suppose I am qualified. Because I feel wholly unworthy. But if you put it like that, I did read your book, so check.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:07: In fact, Mark, I wanted to interview you in part because you were one of the first readers of the book outside my intimate friends, when I started doing media and you had the Wikigod podcast and somehow, something came across your desk or in your hands about God: An Autobiography. Do you have any sense now in thinking back? What struck you such that you thought, oh, this is somebody I'd like to interview? Because the Wikipod did interviews.

Mark Groleau 03:44:  you such that you thought, oh, this is somebody I'd like to interview Because the Wikipod you did interviews, yeah, when the podcast kind of got syndicated with the radio station and Faith Strong Today the president there, Matt Cain, I mean he gets a deluge of people kind of wanting their stuff out in the world and figuring that a large media outlet like that will give them exposure. It was kind of philosophical, intellectual, and so he punted it my way. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but well, I broke my rule which was always interview in person, right and in Toronto. So that was like groundbreaking for me when I called you from their studio. I had never done anything like that before, so that was a hugely intimidating factor. I didn't know what kind of person you would be, but I was really super nervous, not just to talk to you, not face to face, but in the studio. Usually I just hauled around my equipment, set it up across the table at a restaurant and talk to somebody in Toronto.

Mark Groleau 04:48: But I, honestly, when I started exploring your book, I thought I didn't even know if this was for real. Like I thought I was getting punked in a way because, yeah, because God. In a way, to be honest because the title God: An Autobiography. I looked it up online, like you said, and I just thought there was not much out there. Yet I've landed on your website, where you had been interviewed on other things, but I didn't know, honestly, is Jerry Martin a wingnut? And then, when I started reading the book, I love that this is where you pulled me in right away, because in the first few pages I think you're like you probably think I'm a wingnut.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:32: I was a lifelong non-believer right Philosopher, where we're trained to question.  And here God was. First challenge was am I going to believe this or am I not going to believe it.

Mark Groleau 05:46: So that was important to me, that if you have self-awareness that you might be a wingnut, you're probably not a wingnut. So, I think that pulled me in and allowed me to read further. But, your original question, I think, was, why did I give it consideration? And I mean, my podcast was about God. The kind of impetus for the podcast was people who are willing to explore God in a very open and honest and in a way that, even if it questions their own sense of belief or self or all of those bedrocks that we like to stand on, I want to talk to you about that, if that's happening to you. And so you know, you were that in spades. Whether or not, whether or not you were crazy, I got that sense of like God kind of rocked you off your feet, and so that's why I wanted to explore that with you. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:51: And what was your spiritual situation or journey up to that point? Mark Groleau: How far back do you want to start? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Well, you start at the beginning, that's always a great place to start.

Mark Groleau 06:54: Okay, okay, I'm going to try to, I don't want this to turn into a counseling session, right? So I grew up in a very fundamentalist Pentecostal church, a sect of a sect, the kind of church that's every Sunday. You heard that we are the only ones with the truth. Everybody else is going to hell in a handbasket, not just other faiths, other like the Methodist church. You know the block over, and especially the Catholics and the Wesleyan, whatever they're all going down, except our little group, the wrong kind of Pentecostals.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:30: Yeah, oh yeah.

Mark Groleau 07:31: Yeah, because we were one-ness Pentecostal, so anybody who believed in the Trinity was out. I mean, so many people were out, except us, fortunately. And that just became increasingly unpalatable throughout my teens. But I was getting groomed to be a preacher and I was already preaching and I was just coming to a point where, you know, I wasn't sure about this. I went to university and kind of very long story short, my degree was in English literature, so I was learning tools of how to read, how to read literature, and so form criticism, textual criticism, historical criticism, all that stuff. And I started applying what I'm, you know, applying to Shakespeare and Chaucer by day and coming home and reading the Bible because we went to church like three, four times a week, and starting to apply those new skills to scripture and starting to think that maybe we're not bringing enough to bear to the text, just kind of that surface literalist reading. Started to ask the leadership questions about why do we believe this thing but not this thing? You know why Paul but not Leviticus, when in essence we're saying, or why one verse of Leviticus and not another, even? It was that close because we would use, like, clothing rules from Leviticus but not food rules and why? So that kind of thing. I was told to stop asking questions. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: A dangerous sign.

Mark Groleau: And how can you, yeah, how can you stop asking questions? So I left and I kind of spun out into atheism. Because when you're raised in a church that says every other church is wrong, and you know why, we were raised to perform theological jujitsu on every other church. Like you'd go door knocking and hope a Trinitarian opened the door and try to just, you know, turn them into knots. So I wasn't about to adopt a system of theological thought that I'd been trained how to deconstruct, so I just had nowhere to go and turned into essentially an atheist for a few years. So, yeah, that kind of super black and white God who destined everything and controlled your destiny and right and wrong, and you would look at the world through a lens of that's right, that's wrong, that's right, that's wrong. And I'm the arbiter of that, I kind of speak for God. Once I didn't have to live that way anymore. Oh, it was so wonderful. I lived in Korea at the time. I remember I met a pastor and you know my first objection to Christianity was just like it's miserable going through life, seeing, evaluating everything through this, like that's good, that's bad, that's good, that's bad. I said I love that  that just kind of fell away and I could just enjoy culture. I could go to a Buddhist temple and enjoy the intricately painted ceilings without thinking it was demonic or having to feel bad about it. You know, I could enjoy human beings and culture and I loved that. So I think that's how I was wired. It's just that when I was raised in a certain system that was not allowed to flourish and the second it was pulled away, I could kind of be who I am.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:04: Yeah, yeah. And then when you, at the time, you encountered God: An Autobiography, where were you spiritually in your life? Was it a kind of up point or a down point, or more of a sideways point?

Mark Groleau 11:20: Yeah, I would love to hear the different experiences of your readers because for me, like I'm forever exploring, I graduated from seminary, became a pastor. Thankfully, I'm in kind of the Anabaptist tradition where it's a big tent, you're not slapped or censured if you believe a certain thing. So I feel like I have a lot of theological room to explore. So I mean, seminary graduation day was by no means the end. I feel like it was just the beginning. I got a certain kind of flavor of theology in seminary. It was a trans-denominational seminary so you know it was great that one prophet was Presbyterian and one prophet was Anglican and one prophet was Pentecostal, which rehabilitated Pentecostalism for me somewhat. But I have been exploring.

Mark Groleau 12:10: I had been exploring process theology, and so you know I don't want to give a quick primer on process for anybody who might be watching this and not sure but essentially I think at the core, process theology questions the ineffable God, kind of the omni-God of Greek theology that Christianity has kind of co-opted. Omni-present. God is absolutely everywhere. God is omniscient, God knows everything. God is omnipotent. God, you know, can do anything. Nothing is impossible for God. My daughter sings that after she comes home from Sunday school sometimes and I cringe a little bit, or add a little caveat. God is so big, so strong and so mighty. There's nothing that he cannot do. I'm like well, maybe...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:01: They’ve got these puzzles, can God create a rock heavier than He can lift.

Mark Groleau 13:04: Yeah, that was an issue, for maybe Aquinas.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:10: And we have free will, God only knows what you're going to have for lunch. Do you really get to pick your lunch?

Mark Groleau 13:13: Yeah, so I think around the same time I had been kind of playing with this idea In seminary. I went off campus and did a course with Jack Caputo, Jacques Derrida, kind of studies about the weakness of God. Caputo is all about the weakness of God and I… in seminary I was the raging liberal in the room, but then I went off campus to ICS downtown and I was the raging conservative in the room, which for me was just like literally, just the room was upside down and I couldn't go back to seminary and discuss this class because it's like the weakness of God. Maybe God can't do anything. So I started to explore. You know there's different categories. Is God self-limited. Is God inherently limited? Or is God unlimited, in what God can do? So that's kind of, I was really into process and rethinking the omni god when I picked up your book.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:21 Let me say this about the process in that view God is evolving. Can't do everything, isn't perfect yet. But God is evolving and we're evolving, and nature, we're all evolving as part of that story to something.

Mark Groleau 14:34: And ironically, in seminary I spent my first three years immersed in Hebrew. So I was learning Hebrew, Hebrew exegesis, I was taking extra courses in Genesis and things like that, and the Hebrew professors have no trouble with this. With an anthropomorphic God, this God, who is a basket case, sometimes changes God's mind. That's all in this rich tradition of the Hebrew scriptures. It's when we got into the New Testament classes and Greek like learning Greek, ironically or fittingly because of the Greek influence of God and Plato on Christianity that's where all that kind of disappeared and it's kind of my second, third, fourth year seminary. It seemed really at odds with Hebrew profs and the Hebrew texts. That would be like God sometimes doesn't seem to know what God's doing, or changes God's mind or wants to test things or see things. So I knew that it wasn't like total heresy. It always depends on who you talk to, right? Everybody is somebody's heretic, as the saying goes. So it depends on who you're talking to.

Mark Groleau 15:48: But your book came along at a time where I was genuinely shocked at how commensurate it was with what I was feeling and thinking. That's what I'm saying. I'd be interested to see somebody who picks up your book and is just so like, what do I do? What do I do with this? It's so crazy. Because I know plenty of people who would have that response. They haven't kind of had the journey that I've had and that was one of my questions to you when I interviewed you first is can somebody with the omni view of God even approach this? What has your experience been of somebody who kind of a typical Evangelical it's been, of somebody who kind of a typical evangelical? God is so big, so strong, so mighty, perfect, unchanging. You know there's always that one verse Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. So that means God doesn't change. I would love to know how somebody like that approaches this text.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:43: You know I had a conversation with a local Baptist minister, who's kind of a friend, about that, when I broke the news to him about God: An Autobiography and gave him a copy, but he cited exactly the verse of God being unchanged and the same today, tomorrow, forever. And I said, well, you know, this is true of some Evangelicals in the movement they call open theology. Then is there a point in praying and asking God to do something, because that sort of implies that if you pray God will do it, if you don't pray, he won't. And that means you know, you're part of the story. The story is evolving. God isn't changing, and we had an interesting discussion where he saw the point of that. God isn't unchanging in some simple-minded way. Therefore, as soon as you say that you have an open question of how He grew.

Mark Groleau 17:39: I think open theology from open theism was a bit of a gateway to process for me, where Greg Boyd, who kind of is the progenitor of that line of thought or made it popular. I had read his stuff for a number of reasons but then discovered that open theism way of describing the future where you know if the future is a chessboard, God can foresee every possible move right and and make a best guess or something like that. Process is even less determined than that. But you know, your book is exploring this and yeah, like I said, I was generally really surprised I was trying to do some research on you, like, are you a process guy or did this just literally drop out of the sky or because it was so? Yeah, it just so matched what I had come to understand about God at that point in my journey and I would say even now that's kind of where I'm at. I don't think I ever want to settle, but that's where I'm at now in my view of God, that God is evolving and changing with us, and I love that view. Some people say why would I want to ever serve a God like that? So that opens up all kinds of maybe psychological questions.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:03: Well, and we're living in adventure with God is the point that I get from what God told me. I didn't know process theology or any of that. I had no opinions about any of this stuff. Yeah, that I was always surprised when something contradicted what I took in order to follow the standard story, which included omniscience and so forth. I would be surprised and question where things just contradicted my preconceptions. But I didn't have beliefs and I wasn't reading theology.

Mark Groleau 20:05: Well, you see, I mean this might not make the conversation evergreen if I say this, but is it Stephen Fry, the comedian in Britain last week he's getting censured because he went on a rant about God on the air and you know what kind of sadistic sicko would have a kind of world where children are sold into prostitution. And he went on this rant and now he's facing charges, in the uk. But it's just, it's funny because I agree with him about that God. This is where the God of your book is sympathetic and lovely and, I think, worthy of awe and worship, and it's a camaraderie, it's a partnership. It's beautiful when you have the Stephen Frys of the world who are giving it a fair amount of thought, I think, in some ways perhaps more than theologians. What kind of God is causing, like literally ordaining and causing this to happen to the vulnerable people in the world, kind of smiling down on it and then saying it's all for a good reason. Yes, no, you know everything works out. For we don't understand that. You don't understand that little humans. But you know the reason why I had that car accident happen. Uh, it was for a good reason, but that doesn't sit well. I don't know if it ever did, but it certainly doesn't in this generation, that's for sure.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:34: Right. And the God who talks to me doesn't say everything is great. He says pain and suffering are just as bad as atheists say they are. There's no attempt to paper it over, so it ends up a more complex story, but with God suffering when we suffer, which is very odd from again the classical theist. God certainly suffers.

Mark Groleau 22:05: Which at a certain point in church history was a heresy right, I forget the name for it Patripassianism or something. But God the father certainly can't, you can't have that. You cannot have a God who is affected by emotion, or again, because that would implicate change. You had to uphold all these kind of a tower, like when my little two-year-old puts those cups of different sizes that if the one underneath is threatened the whole thing's going to come down. So you know you can't have God suffer, because that would imply that God can change. And if God can change, then everything is unbalanced. And I just kind of like the subtle way that your book says that's nothing to fear, God changing, God evolving, God being on a journey and a process that doesn't undo the universe or ethics or morality.

Mark Groleau 23:05: I read a book by I think it's Terence Fretheim, Creation Untamed, before I kind of got into process seriously. That was kind of one of my really kind of easy entrances in and he just talked about things as simple as being able to fall off a cliff. I mean, the world is not a risk-free zone, he called it. So that's true of tornadoes and hurricanes. God did not create this environment that is absolutely free of risk and danger. So when we get in a steel box and drive a hundred kilometers down a, I guess that would be like 70 miles for you, an hour, 70 miles an hour, you know, on pavement and you hit something and people die and we say, how can this thing be allowed to happen? You know, we took a huge risk by getting in a car or flying in a plane and God didn't create a world that is free of risk. Now, it's easy to understand that with cars and trains perhaps. But he says the same thing about tornadoes and hurricanes and floods.

Mark Groleau 24:12: There's something about this sphere we've been put on that is in process. There's still things going on, there's a creating happening, and he kind of jumps off of that into like nothing that we see in the world is static. So how come we put that on God? I just so much of the way the world is set up from having children and that whole thing seems to be kind of echoing or pointing to God. That's why I love the kind of the Big Bang stuff in the book, the way God was as much a part of the big bang. I just love that part. It was like watching a movie for me in my mind's eye, but just so, I could just feel it viscerally, God waking up when the bang happens and kind of luring, luring everything forward, like look at all this light and look at all this matter, and I just love that yeah,

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Yeah. I've got to orchestrate this somehow 

Mark Groleau 25:16: Which again in the Hebrew scriptures, like day one of class, because I grew up with the King James version. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and my pastor used to say see in the beginning, the beginning, in the beginning. That means there was a beginning. And my first day of Hebrew I read it in Hebrew, Bereshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית) and I put up my hand. I said this just says begin. And yeah, that's all, that's all it says. So beginning God, God could be fashioned the heaven, yeah, in up, like just in a beginning. It's not the beginning? And she said no, the scriptures don't seem to concern themselves with anything except chaotic water at the beginning. And I was just like what, that? You know that my church spent so much time making some kind of rational argument about the beginning when even the Hebrew scriptures don't concern themselves with that. So, this idea of God beginning I just love. I think you asked the question: what was before the bang? And it was just that's not a question you can possibly answer, because there's no before before. It was really neat, so that, I think, has informed me and how I view the whole world. It's like God was as much surprised by what God was suddenly a part of. And that continues to this day with the fashioning of the world and humans, and it's still happening. Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:48: I found that chapter profoundly embarrassing. I was worried about it because it had to come first.

Mark Groleau 26:57: Yeah, chronologically, I think that's why it pulled me in. Again. I keep saying I think that's why it pulled me in. There's clearly no one reason, but it just reminded me of Fredheim and what I'd written and my Hebrew class, and so it wasn't too out there. I understand that it would be for many people who need to hold white knuckled onto a certain doctrine, you know, and even the creation out of nothing, the ex nihilo, gets really, really debated, but at the end of the day it's not in scripture, God creating everything out of nothing. So, it's one of those, one of our pet doctrines, I suppose. Again, that tower of cups to preserve this other thing, but to me that it's a much more, a sympathetic view of God. You wouldn't have the steven fries of this world saying what kind of sadistic a hole is God? You wouldn't have that but B, it explains tragedy better. It explains things as random as a tornado ripping through a trailer park, or, you know, children being sold into human trafficking. But, um, this view of God helps explain those things a lot better, I feel.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:13: I also had, as you know, an encounter with Jesus, conversations with him. Now, when I had them, I had no interest in Jesus, just the way. At the beginning, when God first spoke to me, I had no interest in God and, in fact, like many people, a bit like your atheist. I was never quite an atheist, I just had no interest in the question of God. I had no interest in becoming a Christian. And now Jesus appears and talks to me and it's sort of like the Jesus of the New Testament. I don't know if it's like the Jesus of theology, you know. Anyway, did you have any reaction to that? Oh my gosh, here's Jesus?

Mark Groleau 28:54: Yeah, no, that's so funny because I was just rereading that bit to freshen my memory for this talk, because I remember how important that was for me. Obviously I have a huge interest in Jesus. Before I interviewed you as part of the podcast, I interviewed somebody called John Suk who wrote this. I remember the subtitle oh, Not Sure, is the book. Not Sure: A Pastor's Journey from Faith to Doubt. And he went from being kind of a Calvinist predestinarian with the Reformed Church in the US to a United Church minister here in Toronto. So he was one of kind of the first I sat down with him. He was my first ever Wikigod interview, so I had, you know, the sweaty palms and everything went to his church office, this author, but really a lovely guy and I couldn't believe what I was hearing because he talked about you know, the United Church gets so in Canada anyway, so stereotyped, as you know, weak theology, don't believe anything, you know. But he really challenged that idea saying the United Church, or him personally and his church, really take the ethics of Jesus seriously. He said we're actually quite moralistic, whereas and he compared it to kind of his previous life where, as long as you affirm the right things about Jesus, the rest was kind of your choice, whether or not you're into the teachings of Jesus or whatever. So he talked to me. He was saying on the podcast and I never forgot it, Jesus might be God, but he's, if you think Jesus is God, and he said I'm not even going to offer an opinion about that he was divine. Maybe he was God, maybe he wasn't, I don't get caught up in that. He was at least an ethic and an ethicist to follow, like if you believe he's God, then at least down here is like the ethicist. So somehow I don't know how the church has gone up to he's God, but the ethicist part I don't know. He talked really confusing parable. Anyway, Paul is really cool because he's so understandable. You know that seems to be what the church has done. So when Jesus kind of appears in your book, it reminded me of that and again just fell in line with that. I was so surprised that God was saying that God appeared kind of expressed God's self in Jesus, and even that little, the part where you talk about Jesus, where Jesus appears it didn't dwell too much on doctrinal, theological, intellectual brain pretzels, it was more it was affirming kind of what we might say doctrinally about Jesus, that Jesus was God’s pure revelation and someone to listen to and follow. One of my hobby horses now has become: how come don't we obsess over Jesus’ teachings the way other faiths and your book has really gotten me on this, the usefulness, the wisdom of the other traditions there's so much good and, like you know, the Tao Te Ching and all these other, your book is just kind of shot through with with texts from other faiths and other traditions.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:30: I was told to go read those and kind of what was God up to in the which I don't know what you just mentioned, the I Ching or the Tao Te Ching and so forth? What was he up to with the Chinese and the Hindus and so forth?

Mark Groleau 32:46: So Christianity spends so much time kind of using apologetics or what have you to explain why our texts are superior. But I love how you know your book kind of pushed back on that. God pushed back on that in the book and just said go read them and you will find a core, a nugget, and even parts that might be challenging, like the caste system gets built into, kind of, you know traditions around the sanskrit or hinduism or, but if you, if you strip away the cultural biases and things like that, that even christianity does not escape from, yeah, every tradition has the oh kind of missed the boat on on that one- endorsing slavery or whatever. You can see a core in each one. And so that was huge to me and Jesus appearing as uniquely divine, someone to follow, someone to listen to was really important for me. But then also just taking his teachings as seriously as other faiths take their great wisdom traditions. I grew up in the church, went to seminary and most of my time has been spent circling the wagons around doctrines and there's no classes in seminary about the parables of Jesus or the ethics of Jesus. Or why are ministers like myself being sent out into the world without necessarily needing to understand what you know, the parable of the talents or the 99 sheep, or the lost son, or we didn't really have to sit and wrestle with those. We better know our doctrine of the incarnation though, or atonement theory, you know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:47: But Jesus did not lay out the system of doctrines, did he? It’s all laid out in parables. So presumably that's where the gold is.

Mark Groleau 34:51: Yes. The divinely inspired Jesus presenting the way of life. Again, that's the wisdom tradition is, there's a life way and there's a death way, and that's not afterlife. Your book talks about that. The Kingdom of God is here. It's not an after thing, it's a now thing. And there's even a part that I dog-eared, because you go into a little debate about the Kingdom of God. Yeah, I just, I loved it. God, why did you put it as if they're not going to die? And look at the language. Yeah, but you say it'll happen during their lifetime. But it sounds like the Kingdom of God is a second coming or an apocalypse or something like that. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. You're reading that in the Kingdom of God is the reception into the soul of God's presence.” I mean, I think that made me like just yes, put the book down. And because that, I mean I think that made me like just yes, put the book down, because that's so true.

Mark Groleau 35:50: Jesus spent all this time talking and he wasn't just waiting around, for you know, one day I'm finally going to get arrested and then the show's going to start. He spent a lot of time going around trying to convince people. This way of life, this reception of the soul into the reign of God, and wanted it to happen right then and there for people. And so I've become really convicted of that through your book, but then also more interested in Christians taking the teachings of Jesus at least as seriously as Confucians take Confucius or even as Muslims take Muhammad. I don't know why the teachings of Jesus have become so optional to being a Christian. 

Mark Groleau 37:00: So through the process you're talking about, where were you in Wikigod? I went through two years of incredible interviews and talking to people like yourself and it came to a point where I just said it's time for the talk to end for me and time for something to start. So really, one thing that I discovered in that process was asset-based community development, creating the kind of neighborhood that we want to see, not just for neighborhoods sake, but this idea that neighborhoods are where lives are lived. And it's how cities are changed and countries are changed. You got to start somewhere. Start in your neighborhood, start people relating to each other. So all the kind of scourges of society, loneliness and vandalism and all that that's neighborhood stuff, that's family stuff. So I am focusing my efforts on asset-based community development.

Mark Groleau 37:56: I am continuing to just be a theology geek. Churches are asking me to speak and things like that, so I'm going to be teaching next month. I started a little hashtag on Facebook. You probably have seen it. #jesusismyguru, which a lot of people love. But paid salaried churchmen absolutely hate the things I'm saying. So it can be a bit polarizing this notion of taking Jesus seriously as a teacher, being troubled by his teachings and his ethic. But I blame you for that. You're a crucial part of why this has happened to me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:39:  I’m very grateful for that.

Mark Groleau 38:40: So thanks for putting that book into the world.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:45: Well, thank you. Thank you again for the interview. I look forward to seeing you again. Maybe we'll do a second round sometime.

Scott Langdon 39:02: 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.