© 1997 Meredith Sprunger
© 1997 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Our secular culture has been variously labeled as “the postChristian age,” “the postmodern age,” “the age of suspicion,” and “the carnival age” where everyone is trying to lure you into their sideshow, but no one attraction has a privileged position and everything is relativized. It is a world very much like the Greco-Roman civilization into which the apostles of Jesus went with their gospel message. Ours is an era that is lacking solid philosophical-religious foundations, a world that views all truth-claims as matters of opinion, and moral convictions as personal preferences.
Dr. Thomas G. Gillespie, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, in his farewell remarks to the class of 1996, told the graduates, “Do not look to the culture for support of your views or your visions. Do not be surprised if even the church resists your witness and is indifferent to your testimony, for the church today is an acculturated institution.” [1] Unfortunately, even within the leadership of traditional religious institutions there is a paucity of creative searching for enlarged truth.
Our world is clearly experiencing an age of transition. We are being prepared for a new spiritual paradigm — the Fifth Epochal Revelation. Religious leaders are not only confused and depressed about the future, with many experiencing “burn out,” but they are particularly afraid to seriously examine anything that purports to be new revelation. We have shared information about The Urantia Book with thousands of mainline ministers with little response, positive or negative. They consciously or unconsciously (and erroneously) assume it will undermine the authenticity of their faith and mission.
It may take generations for this new vision of spiritual reality to gain recognition by religious leaders, and centuries for it to transform culture throughout the world. But the creative minority among us, both inside and outside of religious institutions, are now discovering this enlarged presentation of truth to humankind and are the pioneers of the new Age of Faith evolving in the wings of history.
The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 282 ↩︎