A crucial moment in my theological development occurred during a discussion with students over the problem of evil. A young woman in the middle of the class announced that she was undergoing a difficult battle with cancer. ‘I can’t help but feel that God just lost control’, she proclaimed to her astonished peers. What left the strongest impression on me from the episode and continues to resonate for me nearly two decades later was the glow of authority in her words, for they issued not from her head but from her bones, an intuition from the depth of her life circumstances rather than the conclusion of an argument fashioned to negotiate a philosophical conundrum.
In Radically Personal, Jerry Martin labels such moments as apercus: direct flashes of insight into the heart of things. Such insights may be collected from personal experiences whether happy or tragic. They may occur through a receptivity to the venerable narratives of our inherited faith, or from the other spiritual traditions and practices of the world, East and West. One of my favourite sections of Radically Personal features a vivid memory from the author’s childhood in which a single drop of water evokes a sense of metaphysical wonder.
Right at the beginning of Radically Personal, Martin offers what he calls The Ineluctable Syllogism: if the goal of theology is understanding the ultimate, and insights into the ultimate are found across different traditions as well as outside of religions entirely, then a true theology must be devoid of such boundaries – a theology without walls. Indeed, Theology Without Walls is the title of a group spearheaded by Martin, a collective of professional theologians, philosophers, and others that convenes at meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and whose members produce richly eclectic manuscripts and edited volumes.
Martin’s grounding in several academic disciplines gifts this text with a staggering lineup of names and academic subdisciplines. One will leave Radically Personal with a few years’ worth of new authors to explore, and from fields as varied as epistemology to the analytical philosophy of religion, biblical studies to phenomenology. Space permits me to mention only a fraction of these authors below, but the importance of one name towers far above the others. Chapter three of Radically Personal is devoted to the ongoing relevance of William James – a figure honoured by Martin as the first theologian without walls.
The author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, Martin explains, presents a far richer account of perception and concrete experience than so much previous Western philosophy. James grants truth-bearing capacities to feeling and emotion; inspires a model of theology as bringing us into a direct relationship with the divine rather than the construction of a system; champions insight and ‘passing glimpses’ of reality over the maintaining of consistency; and admonishes us to fear letting vital truths slip through our fingers more than risking the possibility of being wrong.
The stamp of James is present throughout the book cover to cover, and so much of Radically Personal pursues and unpacks these themes in greater detail. A striking set of chapters in the first half of Radically Personal continues James’s argument against the deracinated version of our experience assumed by the British empiricists and others – that of a passive reception of sense stimuli upon which the meanings of the common-sense world need to be projected. In addition to James, Martin draws upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, and others to restore not only the embodied and environmentally embedded texture of our actual perception but also the central role of empathy in our encounters with other human beings. The Epistemics of Trust, which stresses our living inherence in a world, is contrasted favourably to the Cartesian fetishising of certainty and scepticism, what Martin calls the Epistemology of Doubt.
Martin’s focus upon the entire person leads him to advocate for W. Jay Wood’s Virtue Epistemology, in which traits like open-mindedness and thoughtfulness are of greater importance for accessing truth than the thought experiments of traditional philosophy. Martin writes of the Clarified Soul: the refinement of our spiritual sensibilities and beautification of our character as a key to the old theological problem of discernment – the question of which religious experiences are to be trusted. A thrilling chapter is devoted to a close reading of the trials of Joan of Arc, a model of spiritual grace under pressure and an inspiring illustration of a Clarified Soul.
Roughly three-quarters of the way through the book, the lessons of a radically personal theology are condensed into nine principles. Rather than list these, it is enough for our purposes to appreciate them as a corrective to any theology that prefers the conceptual over the experiential, the consistency of a system over the apparent contradictions and tensions of raw intuition. A principle outlined much earlier in Radically Personal is the recognition of The Fallacy of A Priori Criteria: the error of granting novel experience a mere second place to our background assumptions. In one chapter several philosophers of religion – William J. Abraham, William P. Alston, and Alvin Plantinga – are appreciated for their epistemological rigour but criticised for loading their arguments with Christian dogma.
The final chapters of the book return to the revelations of God central to Martin’s earlier volume God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher, freshly unpacking these conversations to provide a picture of what a truly radically personal theology may look like. It is revealed to Martin that we are on the cusp of a new axial age – the label for that period in world history that witnessed, among other things, the rise of the Hebrew Prophets and the life of the Buddha.
God, as disclosed to Martin, is a thoroughly relational being who suffers and evolves with the world. And yet, this same deity possesses a transcendental aspect as well – that which stands out of time and surveys the cosmos in its completion. God sends something of this completion into the present, granting intimations of cosmic victory for those struggling in the here and now. In this way, the theology of Radically Personal can speak to both the realities of evil and suffering – refusing to trivialise the unfairness of a college student having to battle with cancer – while simultaneously vindicating the mood of eschatological joy and strength reported by so many even in the worst of circumstances.
It is impossible to highlight more than a portion of the treasures in Radically Personal. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, constructive theology, comparative religion, and even phenomenology and philosophies of embodiment. I was pleased to see the Ecological Psychology of James J. Gibson (influenced by William James) make a brief appearance in the chapters devoted to experience. Whether one is sympathetic to the main themes of Radically Personal or not, the sheer range of ideas on display, in addition to the beauty and clarity of Martin’s prose, invites numerous re-readings, each with ample reward.
