GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
265. Radically Personal – William James on Religious Experience
In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry L. Martin turns to the work of American philosopher and psychologist William James to explore how divine reality is encountered in lived experience. Drawing from The Varieties of Religious Experience, Jerry reflects on James’s influence on the philosophy of religion and his claim that religion begins not with doctrines or institutions, but with personal experience—with what happens in the depths of a human life.
This conversation examines how experience functions as a window onto reality, why feelings and intuitions matter for discernment, and how religious and spiritual experience may reveal divine presence not as an object we perceive, but as a reality we participate in. Jerry explores prayer as relationship, the limits of abstract theory, and the importance of remaining open to fleeting, partial, and even unsystematic glimpses of meaning.
Radically Personal invites listeners into a seeker-centered approach to spirituality—one that trusts experience, honors personal vocation, and explores how God may still speak within the drama of everyday life.
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Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
- Radically Personal – Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
- From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
- Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
- What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
- What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
- Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
- The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
- What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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- Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age
- God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher
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Scott Langdon [00:00:17]: 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.
Scott Langdon [00:00:58]: Episode 265: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, your host, and today, Jerry brings you his third installment from our limited series, Radically Personal. In this episode, Jerry leans into the work of William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, whose classic work, The Variety of a Religious Experience, takes in the divine reality as it's made manifest in the very experience of human existence. The question then becomes, “What will we do with this gift of our awareness? How will we choose to live our lives?” Here's Jerry Martin. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:03]: Hi, thanks for joining me.] Here we take our lead from William James, the quintessentially American philosopher and psychologist. William James understands the vital function of theological thinking for all of us, not just seminarians. I'm using theology in the non-sectarian sense. It's been nicely defined by Paul Knitter as spiritual experience trying to make sense of itself.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:40]: I call it more broadly: Life Seeking Understanding. In this context, I'm calling on William James as an expert witness drawing from his classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Here James takes in the divine reality through a sensitive appreciation of its manifestations in human experience. From him we can learn much about how to do that in our own lives.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:14]: Religion is, one might say, what religion does, or what a person does with it. We start with life experiences. Whether anointed as religious or not. If we follow James' example, we'll let our thoughts and experience range widely. When larger ranges of truth open, he says, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception. I'm fettered by our previous pretensions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:48]: All religions, he believes, start with someone's actual personal experience. That is Revelation's epistemic foundation. Institutions, creeds, and so forth arise to transmit and interpret this experiential beginning. In what James calls the more personal branch of religion, and here I'm quoting him. The religion goes direct from heart to heart. From soul to soul. Between man and his Maker.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:04:25]: The purpose of the open soul is not so much to critique institutional religion as to probe and explore beyond the official precincts, beyond the walls. Multiple sources of insight And to discover what they might tell us about divine or ultimate reality. When James speaks of experience, it is not sensations of the sort Hume called impressions, and others have called sense data, little pictures the mind collects and organizes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:02]: He's talking about a lived experience, life lived by a whole embodied person embedded in a stubborn world, inheriting and sustaining a human community. In light of a range of needs and concerns, desires and ideals. It is participation in reality. Our inquiry will take us... beyond the meager understandings of experience central to the empiricist tradition, the existentialist project, and the scientific reduction.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:36]: For us experience is a window upon reality. Not merely a subjective or expressive or self-defining experience. It is reality that we encounter. In its many dimensions. As we will find in subsequent presentations. William James is pointing, you might say, toward a theology of divine presence.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:03]: The divine reality and the human experience of it are in reciprocity. If the tree or God is real, it is their presence to experience. That manifests the reality. That is where we will find them. That is where we will discover their role and meaning. In and for our lives. As James observes, there were, in the human consciousness, a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we might call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:52]: We sense, he says, that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. In those cases, he says, it is belief in an object we cannot see. We encounter the divine reality and experience, but not as an object perceived. Perhaps not to be understood as an object, at all. There are subliminal and soft hues to experiences, intimations that do not declare themselves loudly. Music, one can sense but barely hear.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:07:36]: Philosophy, James notes, lives in words but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is, in the living act of perception, always something that glimmers and twinkles, and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. The clue for our project is that we should let the experience reveal what it reveals Even if that comes in soft hues and indistinct auras of meaning Abstract standards are not sovereign And do not rightly override Reality as we take it in.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:08:19]: Most of us. have a habit of immediately sorting things to objective facts, subjective feelings, emphasizing the distance between them. James challenges this dichotomy. Feeling is itself. Essential to discerning the reality encountered. There is always a plus. Oh, this and thisness. He says. Which feeling alone can answer for Concepts do not outrank feelings. Feelings are concrete responses to things. Concepts are abstractions. Conceptual processes can, he says, class facts, define them, interpret them, but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. So it is not concepts that disclose reality. Experiences, including feelings, are the locus of encounter. Later, we will visit this issue with regard to the intelligence of emotions.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:04]: Do we just gaze at the something there? Whereas the relationship an interaction. James reminds us, that what religion reports always purports to be a fact of experience. The divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves. Relations of give and take are actual. Among these relations is prayer. The movement of the soul, as James puts it, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence. We and God Have business together.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:50]: The Aim of Theology in the Broad Sense is not to construct a correct theory of the Divine Reality, but to live in engagement with it, with all one's heart and mind and body. James cites the Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali, whom I quote here. If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it— however narrowly— is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:11:30]: Knowledge about life is one thing. Effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another. Well, as if expounding a radically personal theology without walls, James notes, “The Divine meets us on the basis of our personal concerns.”
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:11:56]: Indeed, by being religious, by trusting the divine encounter, James says, we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given to us to guard. This, we might add, may be the truth vouchsafed to us, even designed for us. That does not mean that it is merely subjective. God has met us where we are, and responding to the way reality has presented itself shapes, James says, our private destiny or personal calling behooves us. respond and accept the call.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:12:39]: An important point about theological method without walls is that one must be willing to take in all truth-bearing experiences. even if they seem to be no more than passing glimpses of the divine.and even if one has no idea, how to fit them all together. Unlike thinkers who lay out systems, and trim the corners of experience to make it fit their theories. James willing to be unsystematic even to advance a jumble of views. For a radically personal theology without walls, accepting passing glimpses of life's meaning, does not require fitting them into an overall account.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:13:25]: Even extreme experiences may reveal levels or aspects of reality otherwise difficult to notice. We will learn more. by taking them seriously and probing them for whatever they reveal than by dismissing them out of hand. This is the open epistemic strategy I recommended in the last talk. Now James introduces... A further standard.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:13:54]: One which comes from what he calls a deeper level of your nature. Whatever is deepest. is truest. The depths of the soul are, in some fundamental way, oriented to, or even connected with the Divine. It is an intuitive sensibility that takes in the meanings just beneath the surface or at the edges of consciousness. We must develop the sensibility that enables us to distinguish better from worse. appropriate from inappropriate. What is important in life? from what is trivial.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:14:37]: This is the sensibility needed for discernment. and for the epistemic virtues we will discuss later. This is the sensibility. That offers. Wisdom. Real experiences come to us. In the midst of a vibrant, pulsating life that includes agency, action within the world, with its goals and ideals, experience is replete with feelings, intimations, norms, the tragic and the comic. As we actually live it. The world is rich in meaning, overflowing with significance.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:17]: The meanings are not found elsewhere, pulled down from the sky or invented in the hollows of our head and then pasted onto experience. Meanings are found within the world. World as we encounter it. Proliferating purposes and ideals arise within this dynamic context in a world full of contingencies and challenges.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:40]: Consequently, Given our myriad interactions with the natural surround and with others who matter to us as family and friends or as potentially dangerous adversaries, life is a drama. Its meanings are not just static properties but arise and are played out in the dramatic field of life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:16:04]: And if we're well attuned, There is a divine dimension. to this drama, even a divine partnership. These are the empowering conditions. within real action and real experience for a radically personal Theology Without Walls. Not just life seeking understanding, but your life seeking understanding. That is the task we will be discussing here.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:16:33]: Thanks for joining me. Look forward to next time.
Scott Langdon [00:16:50]: 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 1 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.