© 2000 Ken Glasziou
© 2000 The Brotherhood of Man Library
When visits to our web site, which has the above title, commenced to exceed five hundred per day, compared to the fifty visits per week of its sister site, “An Introduction to The Urantia Book,” we were forced to the realization that here, at last, is a way to introduce academically-minded Christians to the Urantia Papers.
Not that we should have been so surprised, for the now deceased reader, Dr Jim Mills, had dedicated the last years of his life to conveying that very message to Urantia Book readers—and had tirelessly presented his ideas on process theology to study groups over a long period. But for Jim, the medium of the internet and the world wide web were unavailable, and books published at great expense were the only unrealistic alternative.
It is the pure power of this new medium that now presents to Urantia Book readers a golden opportunity to share the teachings of the Papers with those modern day Christians who, unknowingly, have almost identical basic concepts about deity and the meaning of the Fourth Epochal revelation as are presented in the Fifth.
The virtue of this newly discovered fact is that “those far seeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight” who also possess a God-given gift enabling them to master both the obscure language and ideas of traditional philosophy and theology, and the more esoteric ideas about deity and reality as presented in the Urantia Papers, now have a remarkable, unique, and unexpected opportunity.
Through the medium of the internet and the web, it is now possible to take the content of the Urantia Papers directly to the heartland of the Christianity of the future—those academic colleges, universities, and theological institutions where the true meaning of Jesus’ revelation of the Father will be thrashed out, revised, and revealed anew, just as it is foretold in the Papers:
“Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of God to the world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail.” (UB 196:3.33)
What follows has been abstracted from review articles to try to convey to readers common points for contact between the Fifth Epochal Revelation and modern process theology, with the hope that some may be inspired into undertaking the necessary in-depth studies required to build bridges between The Urantia Book and the new theology of the Christian church that will be.
Perhaps it was the intention of the revelators to signify their approval of process theology when they used, word for word, a quotation from the works of Charles Hartshorne, a former student and associate of the creator of modern process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead. Almost alone, Hartshorne kept the thought of Whitehead alive during the worst days of materialistic determinism until new scientific discoveries destroyed such concepts and re-opened twentieth century minds to indeterminism, uncertainty, free will, consciousness, self-awareness, and God.
At a time when it had come to be believed that what cannot be weighed does not exist, this new thought of Whitehead was virtually “off the planet.”
Whitehead proposed that the basic units of reality were not bricks and mortar but momentary “occasions of experience” that flashed into existence, possibly influenced other such moments, and disappeared into from whence they had come.
How could such an outrageous proposal expect other than a label of “rubbish” at the height of an age of deterministic materialism?
But not long after Whitehead published his work, Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir published his proposal that the vacuum of space seethes with virtual particles that pop into existence for a moment of time, enjoy their moment of reality, then disappear forever. Casimir also published proposals on how to demonstrate such particles and how to make them become real. Both objectives have since been achieved.
For the materialist, reality is matter and virtually all else is illusion. For the physicist, the matter of the materialist dissolves reversibly into structure-less energy but in a manner consistent with a precise and quantitative balance sheet. For Whitehead, reality is God and all else is flux—process.
From God comes Whitehead’s basic unit of reality, the “actual occasion” or “actual entity.” Both God and this basic unit are dipolar, each having a “mental” pole and a “physical pole.”
God’s “physical pole” is that by which he “feels” and takes in “actual occasions” as complete entities and in so doing, gives them “objective immortality” by his valuation of what they are. God then “gives back” to the world the data for these objectified entities enabling the world process to continue and be enriched by what is past. God’s “physical pole” belongs with his “consequent nature.”
God’s mental pole is that by which he exerts a supreme influence upon all “actual entities,” setting the limits of their creativity and their “subjective aims” with which each is supplied at its moment of creation. God’s “mental pole” is also that in which he envisions all “eternal objects” and their values as they relate to the world. God’s mental pole belongs with his transcendental “primordial nature.”
“Eternal objects” are the abstract possibilities of the universe. “Actual entities” utilize the available abstract possibilities to become “real” during their moment of being. In that moment, they feel or “prehend” the reality of other “actual entities” and, in so doing, become internally related to them. “Prehension” or “feeling” is associated with the “physical pole.” It is not a conscious or intelligent act except with the higher forms of life.
The “mental pole” of an actual entity is that by which it senses the “subjective aim” given it by God at its moment of creation.
All things can be explained as processes of “actual occasions,” interrelated and varying in degree of complexity, with each occasion being partially self-created and partially influenced by other actual occasions.
For Whitehead, God is the supreme, single, eternal actual entity who perfectly exhibits all the functions of all actual entities. By prehending and being prehended, God interacts with every being in the world during all those momentary events, the succession of occasions that constitute the “life” of any particular being.
God is never coercive, always leading through sympathetic persuasion. In this way, God is radically immanent in the world, leading it on toward greater value and aesthetic intensity.
In his primordial nature, God transcends the world. But as primary actual entity, the source and creator of all things, God includes the world within himself, experiencing with it, suffering with it, and growing with it through the creativity that he and the world possess.
From the times of the Greeks until half way through the twentieth century, the notion persisted that if only man could hone the tools of logic sufficiently sharply then, through rational thought alone, all problems could be solved and man could know all things.
From 1929 onwards, the work of mathematicians and logicians such as Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Paul Cohen and men like them has since shown us that about the only thing we can know with absolute certainty is that there is nothing we can know with absolute certainty.
At least some of Hartshorne’s deviations from Whitehead appear to have come about because of his desire to avoid or solve mistakes or difficulties generated in classical theism that may never have come about if mankind had meekly accepted that there are things that are simply unknowable or unprovable.
For example, is it not extraordinary that the creature should presume to define what its creator can be, know, or do?
There are things we can know only through revelation, but even then we have the impossibility of maintaining revelation free from the polluting clasp of men.
However, relative to views on deity expressed in the Urantia Papers, particularly the role of the Supreme Being, Hartshorne has come much closer than did Whitehead to separating the transcendent God of infinity and eternity from a God who is fully operative in the finite world.
For Hartshorne’s God we have a new term, “panentheism” which means “all-in-God-ism.” Hartshorne’s God is more than the world in its totality, having his own transcendent self-identity, yet is a God who includes the world within himself by his knowledge and his love.
Along with his “panentheistic” view of God, Hartshorne also became one of the chief protagonists in a twentieth century reassertion of the ontological argument in which, according to Hartshorne, Anselm really discovered something which was fundamental to the theistic “proofs.” Unfortunately, it appears Hartshorne had not caught up with Gödel and the newer notions of what constitutes rigorous proof.
There appears to be a profitable field of activity in using internet resources to foster discussion of views held in common by Urantia Book adherents and by those interested in process theology on both the nature of deity and the nature of Jesus’ revelation of God.
The enormous potential of this activity could come in the distant future when concepts discussed and conclusions reached in theological seminaries gradually permeate through Christianity as a whole.
Very little of this literature is available in Australia but appears to be freely available in the USA. Some of these authors are John Cobb, David Griffin, Schubert Ogden, Daniel Williams, Norman Pittenger, Lewis Ford, plus many others. Among these Lewis Ford may come closest to The Urantia Book concepts of deity.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate’er it touches.
Shelley