© 1997 Meredith Sprunger
© 1997 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Dr. Paul H. Sherry, president of the United Church of Christ, in his Pastoral Letter of October, 1996 says, “As we prepare for a new century, we must confess that there is a cynicism and weariness in ourselves and in others. We need to be revived. Our churches need to be renewed. We need, once again, to receive the power of the Holy Spirit that we may be joyful witnesses to the crucified and risen Christ in our communities and to the ends of the earth.”
Indeed, our entire culture needs a revival. The philosophers of history for the last half century have been documenting the deterioration of Western Civilization. The spiritual stimulus released by the renaissance and the reformation has run its course. Our culture is in critical need of a relevant and cogent vision of reality — a new Age of the Spirit. I believe the only adequate source of spiritual renewal for our jaded civilization and equally depleted Christian Church is a fresh revelatory breakthrough that will establish an enlarged spiritual paradigm which speaks to our day and age.
As impossible as it may seem to present day religious leaders, this new and enlarged vision of spiritual reality has been given to us in The Urantia Book. Thousands of people with critical and balanced minds have heralded its arrival. How long will it be before the leaders of the church “discover” this redemptive revelation of which they are so deeply in need? If we take our clue from history, it will be some time. Religious leaders of the old dispensations are among the last to recognize a new vision of reality. The priests characteristically stone the prophets, and their descendants marvel at how long it took their forbears to recognize the enlarged presentation of truth.
The supermortal authors of The Urantia Book are well aware of our human difficulties in recognizing a new spiritual paradigm:
The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! (UB 196:1.2)
Christianity has indeed done a great service for this world, but what is now most needed is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men. It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity; you must go forward from where you find yourselves. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself. Jesus’ disciples should be more than conquerors, even overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all men. Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of the presence of God in personal experience. (UB 195:10.1)
But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master’s life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. Urantia is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment. (UB 195:9.2)
Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus’ religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men. And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world. (UB 195:9.4)