© 1997 Dan Massey
© 1997 The Fellowship for readers of The Urantia Book
Slightly more than 40 years have passed since The Urantia Book first became available to the public. There are now more than a quarter million books in print, from three publishers, with interpretative and critical works from many more. In the last year there has been a burst of book sales unlike anything seen since the early 1970 s. As the readership and community of committed believers grows, we are led increasingly to consider the future of the revelation as it impinges more frequently on our world of everyday experience.
The reality, significance, and foundation of the Supreme may well be the truly central revelation of The Urantia Book, expanding the historical legacy of Jesus’ life, even as the Master himself expanded the mores devolved from Melchizedek. As our planet struggles with the modern agenda of social evolution and as our revelation is presented more frequently in the public eye, how are we, the mortal exponents of the book, to participate and support these epochal events? How do we define and comport ourselves, our organizations, and our associations to support the fellowship of believers, the brotherhood of humanity, and the revelatory truths of the book?
The Urantia Book confronts and challenges our everyday affairs in many ways and on many levels. As a revelation of the reality of personal religious experience, it challenges our vision of our relationship to God and our fellow man. As a revelation of the history, origin and destiny of evolution- ary human institutions, it challenges our presentation of ourselves in the marketplace of religion. As a revelation of the cosmic truth of the Supreme, it challenges us to see the revelation itself as just one factor supporting planetary evolution towards an unrevealed destiny.
Living experience of material and spiritual unification occurs in mind, the domain of relationship. Our central experience of the relationship between creature and Creator is sentimentally identified in terms of the relationship between a child and a father. We attain divine union by personality intercourse with the personal God, by the experience of the Father’s love in our hearts, leading us to wholehearted and intelligent conformity to the divine will.
This same child-father relationship is the origin of the morality of Jesus’ philosophy — the golden rule of active social contact. This experience of social relationship is the foundation of the survival of individuality, for while much of the life in the flesh has neither spiritual meaning nor morontia value, relationships between personalities have cosmic value and persist in the eternal consciousness of the Thought Adjuster.
The golden rule is itself subject to incomplete interpretation. To some, it is the wise center and circumference of all their philosophy. Yet Jesus disclosed higher levels of interpretation, requiring his mortal sons so to relate themselves to their fellows that they will receive the highest possible good as a result of the believer’s contact with them. But The Urantia Book shows us that the true cosmic meaning of this rule of universal relationship is revealed only in its spiritual realization, in the interpretation of the law of conduct by the spirit of the Son to the spirit of the Father that indwells the soul of mortal man.
Jesus touched on the final significance of the golden rule in giving his new commandment to the apostles, an application of this cosmic principle to the challenge of establishing a spiritual identity in a secular world: “love one another even as I have loved you. And by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you thus love one another.”
Jesus did not instruct his disciples in a system of fixed beliefs or rituals but in the expression of living faith. Belief fixates, faith liberates. Beliefs may become group possessions, but faith must be personal. The institutionalization of any religion curtails its power for good, while multiplying the possibilities for evil. Yet organized group function has ever been required for survival of a religion. True religionists must effect cooperation on the basis of unity of ideals and purposes, rather than on the basis of psychological opinions and theological beliefs. There is great hope for any church that worships the living God, validates the brotherhood of man, and dares to remove all creedal pressure from its members.
The Urantia Book identifies two major obstacles to the worldwide acceptance of Jesus’ teachings. First, because Jesus’ gospel is founded on the father-child relationship, it is unlikely to find acceptance until the home life of modern civilized peoples embraces more of love and wisdom. Second, the religion of Jesus can not be presented effectively to Oriental peoples as long as the community of Christendom is divided into conflicting systems of belief about Jesus, rather than being unified in dramatizing the religion of Jesus.
The true church — the Jesus brotherhood — is invisible, spiritual and is characterized by unity, not necessarily uniformity. Uniformity is the earmark of the physical world of mechanistic nature. Spiritual unity is the fruit of faith union with the living Jesus. The visible church should refuse longer to handicap the progress of the invisible and spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom of God. And this brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. It may well utilize such social organizations, but it must not be supplanted by them.
The fifth epochal revelation expands and supplements Jesus’ actual teachings, even as Jesus expanded on Melchizedek’s heritage. Because Jesus’ message is enlivened and personalized for each of us through the ministry of the Spirit of Truth, we easily lose sight of how the entire Urantia Book also augments our appreciation of this message. The book compensates for knowledge lost through the ages and adds new perspectives. Most importantly, the book gives us a foundation for spiritual planetary progress that doesn’t rely on beliefs about Jesus, but on believing as Jesus — the willingness to act upon one’s highest understanding of supreme realities.
True religion is a wholehearted de- votion to some reality which the religionist deems to be of supreme value to himself and for all mankind. And the outstanding characteristics of all religions are unquestioning loyalty and wholehearted devotion to supreme values. The Urantia Book introduces us to supreme values and shows us how spirit unity can be achieved, reconciling diverse attitudes of mind, allowing apostolic harmony to grow out of the fact that the spirit hope for each of us is identical in origin, nature and destiny. Experiencing spiritual communion leads us to true worship the practice of the presence of God which eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of man.
The book reveals the unity in the cosmic universe and helps us discern its actual workings. We are told that the quantitative fact and the qualitative value have a common cause in the Paradise Father. This is a concept of unity which can sense the unchanging background of a living universe of continually changing impersonal relations and evolving personal relationships. Mind can succeed in unifying the diversity of reality if it is firmly aware of material things, intellectual meanings and spiritual values. In the harmony of the triunity of functional reality there is unity and in unity there is the personality satisfaction of the realization of cosmic constancy and consistency.
Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science yields knowledge, religion happiness, philosophy unity, while revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to universal reality.
Next summer, in Vancouver, Urantia Book readers will consider these matters through study of the book, practical exploration of creative alternatives, heartfelt prayer and worship and through universal good fellowship. Join us in this celebration and exploration of our role in the new age dawning on our planet.