© 1994 Meredith Sprunger
© 1994 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
We are living in a time of one of the greatest upsurges in spiritual interest and activity in history. People are searching for spiritual authenticity in many and diverse sources. Melton’s Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America only touches the surface of this movement. According to Wade C. Roof in A Generation of Seekers (Harper, San Francisco), there is a quiet revolution taking place which is changing the religious attitudes and practices of millions of Americans.
At the same time, an unprecedented decline in mainline Protestant Church membership and influence is taking place. There is a general recognition among the baby boomer generation that something is missing in our traditional religious institutions, and they have an enormous hunger for something more. Theologians are responding to this hunger largely with more of the same — an increasingly sterile intellectualism that fails to nourish our spiritually hungry society.
Every major historical upsurge in spiritual seeking has prepared the way for significant spiritual events on our planet. The present world-wide spiritual stirring and groping, in my judgment, is no exception. After thirty-five years of critical examination and evaluation, I believe The Urantia Book is a revelatory breakthrough. Thousands of people with capable minds and balanced personalities have come to the same conclusion.
Many ministers have discovered_The Urantia Book_ and consider it the most creative resource available in stimulating their teaching, preaching, and personal spiritual living. Various theologians have been introduced to the book, but none, to my knowledge, have made a serious attempt to read and evaluate the entire book. There have been comments like: “Much of the material strikes me as Gnostic.” or “I’ve taken several running jumps at the book, but don’t understand much of what I read.”
After years of attempting to understand why theologians are so reluctant to seriously examine The Urantia Book, I have come to a number of observations:
In spite of these understandable reservations, and because of the tremendous potential for good in the church-as well as the entire planet-I believe that a serious evaluation of The Urantia Book is the great theological challenge of our times. David Kantor’s article “The Urantia Book: Toward a Context for Theological Evaluation” in this issue of the Journal outlines some of the parameters of such a theological project.