© 2001 Ken Glasziou
© 2001 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| Life on Planet Earth | Volume 8 - No. 6 — Index | Part 4 of The Urantia Book is the “real and ideal revelation” mentioned in Paper 1 |
“The rule of the Most Highs. . . is a rule designed to foster the greatest good to the greatest number.” (UB 134:5.4)
There appears to be no good reason to conclude that the Urantia Papers were provided to us other than in complete accordance with this rule. And since almost one third of the content of these Papers is a detailed life of Jesus of Nazareth, surely a major target for the revelators’ message must be the two billion Christians who now inhabit the planet.
The Urantia Papers foster a religion of the spirit in contrast to religions of authority. (UB 155:5.5-11) However a revelation deriving virtually infallible authority from its celestial authorship and attempting to foster a religion of the spirit is incongruous and paradoxical—and has about as much chance of influencing religions of authority as Jesus’ teachings did of converting the Pharisees.
Religion of the spirit is religion that “is not a religion in the present day meaning of the word, making its chief appeal to the divine spirit of my Father which resides in the mind of man.” (UB 155:5.12) It derives its authority, not from celestial sources, but from the fruits of its acceptance that appear in the personal experience of believers. And these fruits are the product of spiritual communion of the individual and the indwelling Father-Spirit. (UB 101:1.3) Sometimes called “the kingdom,” entry is exclusively through a faith decision.
There are at least eight repetitions in the Papers that “only faith” or “faith alone” ensures salvation and entry into “the kingdom.” Hence entry cannot depend upon a confidence that is based upon the Papers having celestial authorship. It must be by a personal faith based upon the perception of the Papers’ spiritual values and spiritual communion with the indwelling Father-Spirit.
It is interesting that there is a parallel process occurring in the Christian Church to demythologise those biblical passages from which the early church derived authority for the priesthood. Led by students of a theological movement in Germany that commenced in the 19th century, it gathered strength among English-speaking Christians when Paul Tillich fled from Nazi influence and established the movement in New York. There, “Tillich and his fellow academicians trained a generation of clergy, but they themselves remained in the theological centres of learning where they talked about this theological revolution only to one another.”
Prominent amongst those who have spoken out in this movement is the English Bishop, John T. Robinson, whose book Honest to God both shocked and enlightened the generations of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In present times, authors like Bishop Spong with books such as Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and Why Christianity Must Change or Die continue the struggle.
These authors all seek to surmount both ancient and medieval concepts about a theistic God as a be-whiskered book keeper enthroned in a heaven just above the clouds where he keeps the score that decides whether, when we die, we make it to heaven and eternal bliss or are consigned to the everlasting fires.
Spong traces an interesting chronology that points out that Jesus, his disciples, and the early Christians of the first century were almost all Jews well versed in both Jewish tribal expectations as the chosen people, and in the Jewish custom of recalling ancient traditions in new settings as a means of retaining continuity in their concepts of tribal history.
Called Haggadah midrash, it attempts to illuminate the future by appealing to the past. Thus we have the power of God over the waters being demonstrated when God parts the waters of the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape then calls them back to drown the Egyptians, thus preventing the pursuit.
God’s power over water is repeated for Joshua to cross the Jordan, again when Elijah smites its waters with his mantle so as Elisha and himself could gain passage to the other side, and Elisha repeats the performance to get his return. Spong suggests the stories of Jesus walking on water and calming the storm are midrash ways of illustrating the Christian belief that God, and the power of God, is somehow in and with Jesus.
Using this kind of approach he puts the New Testament stories of Jesus’ birth, baptism, trial, crucifixion and resurrection into chronological order as these events are related in the New Testament. In doing so, Spong shows how the concepts of different phases expand as time goes by, starting from the first records of Paul whose writing commenced about 18 years after the death of Jesus, and 10-15 years before the first gospel was written by Mark in about 66-76 AD. Matthew followed in about 80 AD, Luke and Acts, 85 to 95 AD, and John later than 90 AD.
Spong traces the expansion of the resurrection story so that by the time Luke describes it, it has become an actual bodily resurrection. However Spong sees this as a natural progression of Jewish story telling with the reality being buried within the stories, his point being that we must seek to discover why the stories grew as they did, and what their authors were really trying to convey.
For Spong, Christian theology was born to try to make sense of Jesus’ death. However to the Jews who first invented the stories, the meaning was vastly different from that of gentiles who inherited them in Greek, and interpreted them literally. That is the hurdle Christianity must overcome in this post modern age now that the literal interpretation no longer makes sense.
Somewhat remarkably, this new interpretation is not far from what we read in the Urantia Book. God is seen, not as the theistic God of old, but as the Ground of our Being, a transcending reality present in the very heart of life—which roughly corresponds to The Urantia Book’s existential Universal Father in Paradise and the indwelling Father-Spirit in the hearts and minds of finite individuals. And Spong sees Jesus as the human portrait of the meaning of God, understood as the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. Again there is a close relationship with views expressed in the Papers.
Spong describes himself as a Christian in exile, but he is not alone. There are vast numbers of Christians sharing that exile, seeking release from the manacles that bind them to an outdated Christology and an outdated theistic God of reward and punishment.
Surely it was always the purpose of the Urantia revelation to help these exiles to find their way. So what have we done that is wrong? Where have we failed? For one, very few of us have learned to present “the living Jesus to the church that bears his name.” And fewer still have fulfilled the task of presenting in our own lives for the world to see, Jesus living again in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men.
In some ways Urantia Book readers have treated the Papers in the same way as Christians treated the Bible. They interpreted them literally. These Papers were never meant to be interpreted literally. If we look inside their wording we find all the signs of similarity to the Jewish midrash methodology. We need to look beneath the surface to find the meaning within the meaning. But our problem is far simpler than that facing outdated Christianity. The authors of the Urantia Papers told us where and how to look—and where their story would soon be outdated.
He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
William Blake
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
Anon.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
“As you like it.”
| Life on Planet Earth | Volume 8 - No. 6 — Index | Part 4 of The Urantia Book is the “real and ideal revelation” mentioned in Paper 1 |