© 1995 Merlyn Cox
© 1995 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
The philosopher Descartes once said that any philosophy that does not affirm that God is hidden is not true. The Pentateuch declares that no one can look upon God and live. Both are affirmations of the distance between the finite and the infinite. It is, no doubt, the rationale for the Deist belief that God made the universe like a giant clock, an enormous self-contained mechanism bound by its own laws, and then retired in splendid isolation.
In more recent times it has served as a rationale for skepticism. To many scientists, God is at best a theoretical First Cause, isolated by his own perfection. For many laymen, God remains a philosophical principle, too distant to be relevant in their day to day lives.
The affirmation of God’s hiddenness thus often leads to the assumption that God is too removed by his nature to care, or is an invalid, impotent in the face of his perfection to communicate with his own creatures.
The affirmation of God’s hiddenness thus often leads to the assumption that God is too removed by his nature to care, or is an invalid, impotent in the face of his perfection to communicate with his own creatures.
While the affirmation that God is hidden seems self-evidently true, the implied consequences are not. For example, the idea that God is less than a person, and therefore less than his own creation, is surely an absurdity. The idea of God as an infinite person who does not love is likewise an absurdity, if not a contradiction. The necessary impulse of such divine love is surely to communicate with and to share with — to seek holy communion with — all other beings of his creation. This is the philosophical basis of the affirmation of the world’s major religions that God reveals himself and the Christian affirmation of the Incarnation as the ultimate unveiling of the hidden God. Thus also the “scandal of particularity,” the idea that the infinite God has uniquely revealed himself in one person.
It hardly seems fair or reasonable that God would reveal himself only in one person. But it is not unreasonable to believe that he might reveal himself most fully in one person.
It hardly seems fair or reasonable that God would deny access to himself to those who did not know or believe in that one person. But it is hardly unreasonable to believe he would choose one to reveal a better way, and ordain that through that person all would eventually come to know him.
It surely follows, also, that such a Divine Person, who has gone to such lengths to know and be known by his creatures, might choose other means to add to our knowledge — knowledge made increasingly essential for our understanding of the divine plan by the new times we live in.
This is why_The Urantia Book_ makes so much sense to so many who have taken the time to explore it. It is not only in keeping with the best insights of the world’s great religions, it is in supreme harmony with, and indeed affirms as central, the truth of the Incarnation.
Its rich cosmology and coordination of insights from major disciplines, together with a greatly enhanced description of the life and teachings of Jesus, offer a wellspring of insight and inspiration for this new age, indeed for ages to come — or at least until Divine wisdom reckons the world ready for yet another upstepping in a manner appropriate for that time and age.