© 1999 Meredith Sprunger
© 1999 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Theology is the discipline of explaining faith. It often results in the intellectualization of faith. When theology masters religion, religion becomes more of a form than a force. The force and power of religion is its spirituality — its communication and mediation of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Interest in spirituality is at an all time high in our society. “Spirituality in the U.S. is a mile wide and an inch deep,” says David Kinnaman of the Barna Research Group. “But”, he comments, “people are beginning to develop a hybrid personal faith that integrates different perspectives from different religions that may even be contradictory.” People today hunger for a fresh and dynamic infusion of spirituality. The power of the Urantia Papers is their ability to communicate a fresh vision of spirituality along with a new paradigm of reality that has superior rational credibility.
I was recently impressed with the ability of an individual holding a deficient and outmoded theology to present a powerful vision of spirituality. Philip D. Yancey in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan, 1997) imparts a remarkably effective vision of spirituality in our day. Philip Yancey serves as Editor-at-large for Christianity Today. He was raised as a racist in a Southern fundamentalist church. Today Yancey’s theology is that of an evangelical Christian which most mainline Christians and students of The Urantia Book would find wanting.
In spite of his obsolete theology, Yancey gives an insightful and courageous picture of truth, beauty, goodness, and love applied to contemporary religion and society. He speaks more from the religion of Jesus than from the religion about Jesus. Readers of The Urantia Book will find many parallel concepts in his writing — such as the separation of religious organizations from secularalliances. “Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.” (p. 211) Yancey shows that the church is often a major obstacle to spirituality. It is refreshing of find such insights in evangelical Christianity.