Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

Jerry Martin's Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age argues for theological inquiry that is not limited to one religion but proceeds “without walls” to potentially synthesize disclosures from an indeterminate array of “truth-bearing experiences” (50). The work draws heavily on William James as well as the religious pluralism debates and recent work in comparative theology and interreligious studies.The book opens with what Martin calls the ineluctable syllogism: If the aim of theology is to understand the divine or ultimate Reality as fully as possible, And if insight into that Reality is not limited to a single tradition, Then what is needed is a Theology Without Walls, without confessional or religious boundaries. (5)Thus, Martin lays out a defense of theology from no particular ground and beholden to no particular tradition other than truth-bearing experiences wherever one may find them.The book is divided into three sections. In the first, “Encountering Reality,” Martin draws on religious pluralism debates to outline a “theology without walls,” which is less a theological method than a sensibility. Theology, according to Martin, should be existential over intellectual—oriented toward personal experience rather than doctrine. He also makes compelling arguments for the deconstruction of “religions” as distinct and impermeable traditions. There has always been cross-pollination between religions. One cannot participate in one religion without unwittingly sampling others. Thus, humans experience ultimate reality (or realities) in a piecemeal fashion and only later categorize those experiences as “Christian” or “Hindu.” Martin calls the reader to step back and collect these epiphanies on their own terms, resisting the urge to categorize them immediately—something he calls the “fallacy of a priori theological criteria” (35). Instead, the criteria for how to piece together truth-bearing experiences is through discernment, which is a process that can only be analyzed in relation to the existential situation of each discerner.The second section, “Persons and Circumstances,” expands on Martin's earlier discussion of the particularity and situatedness of theological discernment. Religious diversity is not just a sociological fact. Following William James, Martin argues that diversity of religions is the way the world ought to be, given the complexity and variegation of the divine object (133). On the other hand, it is not enough, Martin argues, to treat our lives “as a kind of tossed salad, accepting random ingredients as all splendid” (134). Distinctions must be made between better and worse and truer and less accurate ideas. Martin recommends James's criteria of immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness as the indicators of a truth-oriented experience (145). He then fleshes out how these indicators appear in experiences of salvation, vocation, and community.In the book's final section, “Toward a Radically Personal Theology,” Martin unpacks how each individual person might begin to construct a theology based on their own partial affordances from a complex divine object(s). Martin lays down six guiding principles: capaciousness, selectivity, connectivity, interrogation, conceptual effectiveness, and open texture (251–252). Together, these principles act as guard rails to prevent theologies that suffer from excessive narrowness, incoherence, siloing, irrelevance, uselessness, and resistance to change, respectively. Martin believes that increasing interest in multiple religious belonging, interfaith dialogue, spiritual-but-not-religious identity, religious pluralism, and comparative theological inquiry all indicate that humans may be on the cusp of a “new axial age,” in which the world's religions, e.g., the labels “Hindu” and “Christian,” are left behind as abstractions in favor of a theology that is limited only by the combined experiential data that are “humankind's common spiritual heritage” (266). The last few chapters document the author's own revelatory experiences hearing the voice of God and Martin's own theological views, which are comprehensive in scope.The result is ambitious, and the claims are bold. Martin's view of the theologian's situation maximizes theological agency, i.e., the ability to freely choose and combine views, while minimizing the cultural-linguistic belonging that may obscure or distort the theologian's understanding of other religions. Martin does not deny that such distortions occur but counters that “the epistemics of trust” (in the veridicality of our experiences) precedes “the epistemics of doubt.” This has been a perennial criticism of religious pluralism—that the cultural horizons of the theologian interfere with the otherness of religions to be synthesized. Some critical scholars of religion and theologians may then find themselves at odds with Martin's project from the get-go.Martin admits that some readers might shift uncomfortably in their chairs at the final chapters of the book. Here, Martin steps out of an academic discourse and records the content of his own revelatory experience vis-à-vis a very anthropomorphic dialogue with God. God's explanations of sin, guilt, afterlife, meaning, and evil (according to Martin's experience) are made available in simple and even terse declarative sentences. Combining personal revelation with academic theology arguably runs against the grain of critical theological methods. But these later revelatory chapters keep with the Jamesian empiricism endorsed earlier in the book. These are Martin's experiences of divine voice, and they are presented with the authority with which he felt them. The theological conclusions are not presented as absolute truth. Instead, these are presented as one person's experiential data, and readers with differing perspectives will and should have different responses to them.This book is recommended for philosophers, theologians, and students—from advanced undergraduates to professionals. The later revelatory chapters would be compelling to laypersons who may get lost in the earlier chapters’ more academic discussions. Overall, the book is a boldfaced stand against the dominant cultural determinisms that fixate on particularity and have insisted that humans are alienated from the world and that societies are not mutually intelligible to each other. Martin dares the reader to trust that their experiences of the divine really do obtain.