© 1995 Seppo Kanerva
© 1995 International Urantia Association (IUA)
By Seppo Kanerva
Helsinki, Finland
AS A description of the manifestations of human spirituality The URANTIA Book employs dozens of times the figure of speech the fruits of the spirit. As concerns our concepts of what the fruits of the spirit might be, we are oftentimes as much slaves to traditionalism as were the Pharisees and the early Christian church fathers, and as are the modern-day fundamentalists. The old things have not yet passed away; all things have not yet become new. Traditionalism, the old things, suggest that the fruits of the spirit would, among many others, include these:
1. Anxiety in face of the possibility of not yielding the fruits of the spirit. The fruits of the spirit are conceived to be some well-defined and clear—cut features of conduct and behaviour—“good works”; and this kind of “fruits” are seen as a passport to eternal life, as the price one has to pay for one’s ascension to Heaven. To feel anxiety because of the possible absence of such fruits, thus, is the same as to worry about one’s eternal life, about personal salvation. The more one yields these fruits, the surer one may be of salvation.
To fret over one’s salvation is no fruit of the spirit; it is rather a symptom of selfishness. The URANTIA Book instructs that, [s]alvation should be taken for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer’s chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one’s fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men. UB 188:4.9.
The God-conscious mortal is certain of salvation; he is unafraid of life; he is honest and consistent. He knows how bravely to endure unavoidable suffering; he is uncomplaining when faced by inescapable hardships. UB 156:5.20
2. Piety. The traditional approach regards piety as one of the fruits of the spirit, perhaps as the most visible fruit. In this thinking, the jealous and wrathful God has determined the criteria of piety, which include: church attendance, belief in certain secondhand dogmas and doctrines, adherence to certain rules of morality; observance of rituals; fear for God, and a sense and sentiment of sinfulness, which leads to repentance and supplications for forgiveness. Piety, which begins to resemble sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness, is thought of to mean abstinence from swearing and cursing, observance of the Ten Commandments. Sin is viewed as consisting of certain acts and censurable behaviour like boozing, smoking, and sex. This approach is predicated on fearfulness of both Godinflicted punishments and of social censure by one’s fellow men.
The URANTIA Book lesson is that dogmas and doctrines are always dead; authentic faith is always living, dynamic: Truth is living; the Spirit of Truth is ever leading the children of light into new realms of spiritual reality and divine service. You are not given truth to crystallize into settled, safe, and honored forms. Your revelation of truth must be so enhanced by passing through your personal experience that new beauty and actual spiritual gains will be disclosed to all who behold your spiritual fruits and in consequence thereof are led to glorify the Father who is in heaven. UB 176:3.7.
No acts, behaviour, or deeds as such must be viewed as sin; they may be symptoms, but not sin itself. Sin is redefined in The URANTIA Book as premeditated rebellion against the divine will, deliberate rejection of and opposition to, God’s will. In case someone thinks that certain rules of moral conduct are spiritual fruits, it would be helpful to recall what we are told about Jesus’ teachings: The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore unconscious. Jesus was never concerned with morals or ethics as such. He was wholly concerned with that inward and spiritual fellowship with God the Father which so certainly and directly manifests itself as outward and loving service for man. UB 170:3.9
The notion that spirituality manifests itself in some well-defined deeds and in a certain type behaviour may very well be revised and put in its rightful perspective if one recalls these words of the Master: Salvation is by the regeneration of the spirit and not by the self-righteous deeds of the flesh. you are justified by faith and fellowshipped by grace, not by fear and the self-denial of the flesh, albeit the Father’s children who have been born of the spirit are ever and always masters of the self and all that pertains to the desires of the flesh. When you know that you are saved by faith, you have real peace with God… Henceforth. it is not a duty but rather your exalted privilege to cleanse yourselves from all evils of mind and body while you seek for perfection in the love of God. UB 143:2.6
3. Craving for unambiguous, clear-cut, instructions and rules. Also a craving for detailled divine directives on how mankind ought to perform and what an individual should do in order to do the will of the Father is viewed as a fruit of the spirit. This craving means that one lives in expectation of “new messages”, “new channellings”, accurate articulation of God’s will by channellers, prophets, soothsayers, or diviners. It is, therefore, no wonder that there appears to be an endless profusion of prophets, diviners, messengers and channellers, who respond to these cravings, and sometimes even themselves believe in these “channelled messages.”
The resultant pseudo-revelations and “channelled” messages, even if they sometimes are supposedly channelled from personalities mentioned in The URANTIA Book and occasionally use the terminology of the book, however, never shine with the spiritual luminosity that is so characteristic for The URANTIA Book.
To fail to make the effort oneself, to refuse to put one’s trust in personal thinking, in the poivers of mind, assisted by the Thought Adjuster, the Spirit of Truth, and the other spirit helpers, but instead, to crave for unambiguous maxims, cleancut instructions, and to wait for someone to appear and tell us what God’s will is, or what the future has in reserve for us, is not what The URANTIA Book exhorts us to do.
Such an approach is hardly a fruit of the spirit. The Son of Man became to know the Father’s will only through much effort, through much internal struggle, through thinking, prayer, and communion. There was nobody to tell it to him; he found it out all by himself. We might ask, why is it that this must be so difficult. And the answer maybe is: It is a part of the process of human evolution; it is God’s will that we become like him: capable of solving problems on our own.
The URANTIA Book tells us about Jesus: The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship-unbroken communion with God - and not by leadings, voices, visions, or extraordinary religions practices. UB 196:0.10
4. To expect and aspire for the celestial powers to intervene. Sometimes even the whining about the wretchedness, insufficiency, unspirituality, and supposedly abject condition of mankind is seen as a fruit of the spirit. The situation is described as desperate, so much so that only an immediate intervention by heavenly powers, a visible and spectacular interference by the supermortals in human affairs is seen as capable of correcting it. Some channellers consequently speak about “a correcting time”, which, they say, we are currently, or will be soon, experiencing. Others wait for the second coming of Christ, only because he would then solve every problem of the world, and concurrently reward his faithfuls. Even though one would expect something much different upon having read that [T]he Spirit never drives, only leads UB 34:6.11, it is nevertheless believed to be spiritual to expect God to drive, to force his will upon mankind, forcefully to spiritualize us humans.
With relevance to this kind of attitude and approach, The URANTIA Book never grows weary in reiterating two truths and realities: 1) evolution, and 2) the fact that the Universal Father has endowed us with free will in our management of human affairs. Evolution is admittedly slow, but it is purposeful, it does have an aim and an objective. God willed evolution to be the keynote of the experiential, finite, universe age. Outright superhuman intervention would be comparable to revolution, upturning of divine laws, and therefore alien to evolution. Evolution is the will of God; it is grotesque to think of the all-powerful God to have willed something whereof he knew that it would fail, something that would need be rescued through a celestial intervention. The URANTIA Book instructs us that [e]volution may be slow, but it is terribly effective. UB 81:1.3. To aspire for and expect a celestial intervention in counteraction to evolution impinges upon distrustfulness of God’s plans and God’s will. Lucifer, Caligastia, and to a certain extent even Adam and Eve, succumbed not only to impatience, but also to counter-evolutionary acts. Caligastia ultimately would have deprived mankind of our evolutionary experience. The hardships and tribulations that we have to face and sort out will hammer us into firm, reliable, capable, loyal, and faithful universe citizens and servers. In short, what God had given men and angels Lucifer would have taken away from them, that is, the divine privilege of participating in the creation of their own destinies… UB 54:2.4
5. A sensation of bliss. Ecstasy, or bliss, as well as a static peace of mind, are viewed as indications of spirituality.
Even if emotions and feelings may have a temporary re-energizing influence, they are not, in my interpretation, something that one needs to be in quest for. Our existence is not one of blissful ease. The bottom current of existence is tension: dynamism, growth, progress, advancement, struggle, effort, and achievement of something superior, improved, nobler. Said Jesus: You see, my children, the appeal to human feelings is transitory and utterly disappointing… UB 152:6.3. And says a Melchizedek of Nebadon: Religion is not a technique for attaining a static and blissful peace of mind; it is an impulse for organizing the soul for dynamic service. UB 100:3.1
6. Concern about other people’s salvation. To concern oneself about and with other people’s salvation very easily turns out quite ugly. Such concerns are a highway to judgmentality, if the outset is that one’s notions about God’s will and God’s laws are traditional and dogmatic. Among the readers of The URANTIA Book this concern manifests itself in a notion that other people need the book for them to be saved. The logical consequence is that there appears much concern about the distribution of, and publicity for the book. The URANTIA Book, the fifth epochal revelation, is in this thinking indispensable to human well-being, and in consistency with this concept, every effort has to be made to put the book in the hands of every mortal on this planet. Every believer in Jesus’ gospel, the Fatherhood of God and in the sonship of man; in the free salvation of man—truths and teachings which are so exquisitely told on the pages of The URANTIA Book—is also an ambassador of these truths and this gospel. The URANTIA Book indeed reiterates these truths and this gospel, but the book reveals and reports on much more, almost indefinitely much morc. A call to go around and spread the good tidings of the gospel and of the free salvation should not be seen as a call to go around and sow copies of The URANTIA Book.
The URANTIA Book truly has much to say about salvation. What is says is basically very simple, but it is not what a traditionalist would expect. Neither does it support the assertion, or the implicit attitude, that to read and to master the fifth epochal revelation would be the prerequisites of the salvation of any man. I shall quote only some of the many passages that deal with this issue of requirements of salvation, the fact that it is God’s gift, and that it is the work of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth:
Salvation is the free gift of God. UB 193:2.2
You shall not doubt that faith is the only requirement for eternal salvation. UB 93:4.8
Know you not that the mystery of eternal salvation dwells within your own soul? Do you not know that the God of heaven has sent his spirit to live within you, and that this spirit will lead all truth-loving and God-serving mortals out of this life and through the portals of death up to the eternal heights of light where God waits to receive his children. UB 133:4.4
Jesus laid great emphasis upon what he called the two truths of first import in the teachings of the kingdom, and they are: the attainment of salvation by faith, and faith alone, associated with the revolutionary teaching of the attainment of human liberty through the sincere recognition of truth, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Jesus was the truth made manifest in the flesh. and he promised to send his Spirit of Truth into the hearts of all his children after his return to the Father in heaven. UB 141:7.6
All the while was the Master explaining to his bewildered apostles that the salvation which he had come to bring to the world was to be had only by believing, by simple and sincere faith. UB 140:10.1
And Jesus answered: “The kingdom of heaven consists in these three essentials: first, recognition of the fact of the sovereignty of God; second belief in the truth of sonship with God; and third. faith in the effectiveness of supreme human desire to do the will of God-to be like God. And this is the good news of the gospel: that by faith every mortal may have all these essentials of salvation.” UB 140:10.9
And the gospel you are going forth to preach has to do with a salvation growing out of the faith-realization of this very and eternal childfather relationship. UB 140:10.4
7. Love for one’s fellow men, spiritual brothers. Genuine brotherly love truly is fruits of the spirit. Faith in the Fatherhood of God and in the brotherhood of man gives rise to an urge to love one’s fellow men, or at least a desire to learn to love them. But consciousness of this truth may also be conducive to ostensible, imaginary, and pretended love. Brotherly love is false, affected and untrue—no love at all—if its motivation can be worded like this, “I desire to appear as spiritual; I know that one of the manifestations of spirit is brotherly love; hence, I must at least act as if I loved my fellow men.”
Love is unbelievably often confused with the absence of disagreement. This thinking runs on these lines: “You let me understand that you are a believer, that you are spiritual; consequently you should be showing forth the signs of spirituality, the foremost of which is love; you are supposed to love me; and if you love me you must not disagree with me; you must stop arguing with me, you have to adopt and embrace my point of view.” Our beloved brother or friend may be in error, and we surely have the freedom to call error error, and still love the erring one. If love or friendship does not withstand disagreements, it is not genuine love. Jesus was in disagreement with a great number of his fellow men, yet this did not mean that he failed to love them. It would be foolish to assert that love does not prevail among the celestial beings and permeate their relationships, and still there are, as we are told, some one hundred million conciliating commissions operating in the local universe of Nebadon alone, working full-time to settle disagreements between celestial beings.
This leads me to the next cluster of supposed fruits of the spirit:
8. Abhorrence of differences and disagreements; craving for “unity”. The traditional view and ideal of the life after death is that it is a state of replete harmony, consummate concord; all resonances of disagreement, indications of evil as they are, belong to the past. The next step along these lines of thinking is to consider this same state of concord the ideal of the community of believers, the kingdom of heaven. Since the readers of The URANTIA Book are viewed as constituting a religious community, a spiritual movement, it is felt that this ideal should obtain also in the ranks of the movement. Harmony, concord, absence of disagreements and differences are the good ideal; the current situation, with much disagreement glaringly visible, is evil and must be corrected (the road to such a situation preferably, and actually exclusively, being that “you stop disagreeing with me”). “Deity is unity” is one of the arguments that I have heard voiced in justification of this view.
God is spirit, is an oft-repeated statement in the teachings of The URANTIA Book; we are not spirit; we are largely material beings, endowed with a mind and a spirit fragment, the Adjuster. It is the Father’s will that we evolve. through an enormously long process of training and education, into spirit beings, and finally become like him: unified existences. The craving for harmony is inherent in us; but harmony certainly is not our present state. As humans we are the children of a common Father, and spiritual unity is fully attainable and feasible. But as soon as we step outside the realm of the spirit, into the domains of mind and matter, we find ourselves in a situation where unity, or unanimity, will never prevail. The originality of each human will take care of that. There will always be material disagreements (with regard, for example, to the various organizations of the “movement”); there will perpetually be divergent interpretations and accentuations of the teachings of The URANTIA Book. We need only to read what Jesus replied to the apostle James who had asked, “how shall we learn to see alike and thereby enjoy more harmony among ourselves?” Jesus, stirred within his spirit because of this question, replied:
James, James. when did I teach you that you should all see alike? I have come into the world to proclaim spiritual liberty to the end that mortals may be empowered to live individual lives of originality and freedom before God. I do not desire that social harmony and fraternal peace shall be purchased by the sacrifice of free personality and spiritual originality. What I require of you, my apostles, is spirit unity-and that you can experience in the joy of your united dedication to the wholehearted doing of the will of my Father in heaven. You do not have to see alike or feel alike or even think alike in order spiritually to be alike. UB 141:5.1
Just like love, also this noble ideal of unity can be and is used as a weapon with which to beat the other party in a disagreement. The argumentation may follow these lines: “You and me, we find ourselves in a disagreement, we even belong to separate organizations of the same ‘movement’, but because the doctrine requires that we should stand united, you must, in the name of unity and for the sake of restoring unity between ourselves, relinquish your views and adopt mine.”
We should never presume to make an assessment of someone’s spirituality. Advancement is determined purely by the spirituality of the individual, and no one but the Gods presumes to pass upon this possession. UB 26:8.3. Yet, it is repeated three times in The URANTIA Book that by their fruits you shall know them. [UB 5:2.4; UB 140:3.19; UB 140:4.7]. With us willing and consenting, the ministry of divine love will transform us, make us ever more like the spirit core of our being, which will ultimately culminate in our fusing with that very fragment of spirit, the Thought Adjuster. During this process we shall be pulting out ever more fruits of the spirit, outward manifestations of our progress.
It would perhaps be justified to view a refutation of the traditional ideas about the fruits of the spirit as a fruit of the spirit. It is literally true: “If any man has Christ Jesus within him, he is a new creature; old things are passing away; behold. all things are becoming new.” UB 100:7.18
Service to one’s fellows is, even traditionally, considered a manifestation of brotherly love, a fruit of the spirit. But nowhere is this notion so much the core and essence of the teachings as in The URANTIA Book, and in the restatement of Jesus’ teachings:
To “follow Jesus” means to personally share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the Master’s life of unselfish service for man. UB 196:1.3. Jesus lived a religion of service UB 5:4.7. Jesus himself characterized the kingdom of heaven in these words: My kingdom is founded on love, proclaimed in mercy, and established by unselfish service. UB 155:1.2. The fruits of the spirit, your sincere and loving service. UB 178:1.6. The essence of his [Jesus’] teaching was love and service UB 92:4.8.
One of the most moring passages in The URANTIA Book is the morontia Jesus’ statement of May I6, A.D. 30 at Tyre. Said Jesus:
… those who are born of the spirit will immediately begin to show forth the fruits of the spirit in loving service to their fellow creatures. And the fruits of the divine spirit which are yielded in the lives of spirit-born and God-knowing mortals are: loving service, unselfish devotion, courageous loyalty, sincere fairness, enlightened honesty, undying hope, confiding trust. merciful ministry, unfailing goodness, forgiving tolerance, and enduring peace. If professed believers bear not these fruits of the divine spirit in their lives, they are dead; they are useless branches on the living vine, and they soon will be taken away. My Father requires of the children of faith that they bear much spirit fruit… Increasingly, must you yield the fruits of the spirit as you progress heavenward in the kingdom of God… UB 193:2.2