© 1977 Dick Schonberg
© 1977 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Unlike the many valiant souls who have promoted spiritual truth in past epochs, we, the mortal disseminators of the URANTIA revelation, have many advantages, some bestowed, such as the Spirit of Truth, and some acquired, such as mass communications, and the power to view history from hindsight. Because of our advantages, our responsibilities are, in a sense, greater, and it is for this reason that the writer feels the revelatory commission has purposely given us much historical background upon which to base our future decisions.
One of the most significant statements for evaluating what has been done and what ought and ought not to be done in advancing spiritual truth is: “Always must the religion of revelation be limited by man’s capacity for receptivity.” (UB 92:4.1)
Several thoughts may flash to our minds. Are we only to give what the traffic can bear? Compromise? Sell out? This is far from the intent of the Melchizedek author. Rather is he giving us a lesson derived from the long evolutionary struggle of uplifting the spiritual life of Urantian civilization. To illustrate, let us look at the experience of those who initiated or were teachers of an earlier epochal revelation.
Machiventa Melchizedek, incarnate as the sage of Salem, is credited with fostering, directly or indirectly, the highest truths of all major religions for the past four thousand years. He was successful as a spiritual teacher because he remained a spiritual teacher, and did not get involved as a social or political reformer. He would always try to upstep religious practices gradually. Never did he say to the people of 1950 B.C.: “The idea of sacrificing to God is barbarous!” Rather did he gradually try to improve the cult practice by offering bread and wine as a representative sacrament. The crucial point is that he respected the people, who, though primitive, were able to at least come to some understanding that God and man could communicate on some level, and have a personal relationship. His historical disciples illustrate several “do’s” and “don’ts” in teaching advanced truths to evolutionary mortals,
The Salem school at Kish, in Mesopotamia, when the teachers kept to their spiritual mission, were slowly, but surely, refining worship techniques of the culture. But when Nabodad, their leader, attacked the prevalent practice of temple prostitution, the Salem group was seen as setting themselves on a higher moral plane than the (then) evolutionary norm. Not only did they not accomplish their social reform, but lost their audience for the spiritual mission which was their real reason for being teachers.
In many ways, Moses bore an analagous relationship to Melchizedek as did Paul of Tarsus to Jesus. This may be seen by both teachers’ ability to adapt higher truths to the real mortal situation. While others, like Ikhnaton and Abner, may have taught a higher philosophy and more accurately reflect the letter of their inspirator’s teaching, it was the great compromisers, Moses and Paul, who worked tirelessly to fulfill the spirit of revealed religion by bringing man closer to God and God closer to man.
Today, as evolutionary mortals, we are heirs of all these teachers, as well as students of the URANTIA revelation. This new revelation has met each of us, in our own situation, in our culture, and as we are, otherwise we would neither be reading nor writing for this journal. Can we do any less than to learn from those before us and go on in sharing the Father’s love with our brothers and sisters in their situation, in their culture as they may see it, and as they are?
—Dick Schonberg