© 2022 Sophie Malicot
© 2022 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| A Spiritual Quest: God in Question | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 98 — June 2022 | The Hazards of a Decimal Planet |
Sophie Malicot
The ever-innovative wind of the Spirit blows where it wills and no being on earth can divert its course. In this sense, it seems that certain founding foundations of our civilization are increasingly being called into question. At the forefront, the concept of original sin is cracking and disintegrating to the point of no longer being part of the pillars of reference present. Do we measure that this progressive dismissal completely changes the view on the place and evolution of man? In order to better understand this evolution, it is good to return to Genesis. The major part of this book was written in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Although its writing is attributed to Moses, whose dating of existence is not determined, this compilation is now recognized as coming from several authors, having inserted over time episodes relating to different eras, as evidenced by the anachronisms allowing us to affirm the plurality of these sources. This underlines on the one hand that the book is made by the hands of men linked to their time; on the other hand, the staggering of its writing made it possible to make the adjustments that were appropriate to respond to the questions of the times.
The approach is not the same as that of a revelation which, although taking into account the progress of humanity, poses itself as anterior to evolution, that is to say as an opening to a path not yet traveled. Part of the biblical story is developed as a posterior response to the mysteries of the world, whereas a revelation poses itself as anterior to the evolution that it provokes.
Genesis gives the story of the creation of the world with the sixth day, that of the first man Adam.
“God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Gen 1.27
Although without biological antecedent, this man does not emerge “ex nihilo” but from shaped clay. A man “ex argilo” drawn from matter who will come to life thanks to the divine breath.
“Yahweh God formed man from the clay of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” Gen 2.7.
The story thus emphasizes that, originally, man is created perfect in the image of divine perfection. This perfection is represented by shameless nudity:
“They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed before each other.” Gen 2.25.
However, an intermediate link was needed to explain human imperfections. Since God could not be responsible for this break in created perfection, the responsibility for imperfection could only fall on humans. The rest is down to two trees, a snake, an apple, Eve tempted and Adam following her. The tragedy is that this myth reduces humans for centuries to the rank of infidel, whose only saving grace is to take on the role of sinner and humbly confess their faults in order to obtain divine forgiveness and eternal life. This conception of an unfaithful child has built our societies, structured the system of hierarchies between the most sinful and the least sinful. The ecclesiastical authorities seized the vein to ensure their power and subjugate the infidels, as well as the faithful. Should we thank the abuses of the “less sinful” - abuses that vary according to the times, to which our era is no exception - who helped to detect the error? Yes, even if the price paid is high in humans and for humanity. But we move forward largely through our mistakes.
Today, the concept of original sin is becoming bloodless, although we still suffer its heavy legacy. No one can feel responsible for a fault committed that does not correspond to anything in reality. Especially since Christ taught the ineptitude of making the child responsible for a fault committed by his ancestors (cf. John 9.1 the blind man).
However, if the “original” of sin fades away, it is not the same for sin itself, which remains central, being the only explanation linking a human created perfect and living so imperfectly.
In a study by psychoanalyst Alice Miller, “The Future of the Drama of the Gifted Child,” she highlights that the fault is always taken back by the child upon himself. He cannot easily accuse his parent - even if this fault is proven - and ultimately prefers to tell himself that he is at the origin of the error committed rather than dismissing a figure from his archetypal world. History proceeds similarly: God the Father being perfect, it is the fault of his children if imperfection and evil slip into the world. We save our Father by condemning his children, a pattern repeated in the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.
But again, the child who rebels against his self-denial does not bend so easily to the relative conceptions of time. He has doubtless perceived for a long time that his right to dignity as a child of God does not fit well with an innate condition of sinner. So he seeks the light relentlessly, towards this God-Father whom he wants to love and whose vulgarization of an omnipotent wrath demanding a penance of redemption from his children ends up making people laugh or cry with misery.
Another explanation is necessary for this human being in the image of God and yet imperfect. The Urantia Book answers it.
“The Old Testament account of creation dates from long after the time of Moses; he never taught the Hebrews such a distorted story. But he did present a simple and condensed narrative of creation to the Israelites, hoping thereby to augment his appeal to worship the Creator, the Universal Father, whom he called the Lord God of Israel.” (UB 74:8.7)
The mystery does not lie between the perfect created human and the lived state of imperfection; the mystery lies in this stretching of God through the creation of His Creation in which resides this exclusivity of himself in human experience. Is God everything but not quite? Everything except this little bit of our human trajectory?
“Nothing in the entire universe can substitute for the fact of experience on nonexistential levels. The infinite God is, as always, replete and complete, infinitely inclusive of all things except evil and creature experience. God cannot do wrong; he is infallible. God cannot experientially know what he has never personally experienced; God’s preknowledge is existential. Therefore does the spirit of the Father descend from Paradise to participate with finite mortals in every bona fide experience of the ascending career; it is only by such a method that the existential God could become in truth and in fact man’s experiential Father. The infinity of the eternal God encompasses the potential for finite experience, which indeed becomes actual in the ministry of the Adjuster fragments that actually share the life vicissitude experiences of human beings.” (UB 108:0.2)
A divine incompleteness opening another position to the human? This is what the text says. The human adventure is then linked differently. God “I AM” created the eternal Son and became God-Father through the Son. Without doubt he loved this paternity deeply to the point of proposing to the Son:
“Though the Eternal Son cannot personally participate in the bestowal of the Thought Adjusters, he did sit in council with the Universal Father in the eternal past, approving the plan and pledging endless co-operation, when the Father, in projecting the bestowal of the Thought Adjusters, proposed to the Son, “Let us make mortal man in our own image.” And as the spirit fragment of the Father dwells within you, so does the spirit presence of the Son envelop you, while these two forever work as one for your spiritual advancement.” (UB 6:5.7)
This word was spoken to the Son in response to the Father’s proposal to grant Thought Adjusters. Here is the full quotation:
“Though the Eternal Son cannot personally participate in the bestowal of the Thought Adjusters, he did sit in council with the Universal Father in the eternal past, approving the plan and pledging endless co-operation, when the Father, in projecting the bestowal of the Thought Adjusters, proposed to the Son, “Let us make mortal man in our own image.” And as the spirit fragment of the Father dwells within you, so does the spirit presence of the Son envelop you, while these two forever work as one for your spiritual advancement.” (UB 6:5.7)
The following 3 points should be highlighted:
1. God did not create the perfect human being but in the mystery of His creative stretching, He seems on the contrary to distance perfection from Himself as much as possible. Thus, He creates matter, the universe and its cataclysms, subject to transformations that take so long before stabilizing. And in matter He inserts life, containing a principle of pre-programmed evolution of which the coming of humans is a part. Over the ages and the very numerous transformations, a being endowed with its own will emerges from this evolutionary process. This same being, being part of the plan of this stretching of God, is subject to the laws of global evolution. Imperfection no longer comes from a diversion of an original law, to be recovered, redeemed, reestablished. But it is intrinsic to the system of the evolution of matter. Perfection, the fruit of the marriage between matter and light, is situated as a goal, an objective aimed for without us knowing if the eternal ages will be enough to provide it.
2. Note the plural mark, “our image”, also indicated in the biblical story although God is alone: “God said:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Gen 1.26.
The Urantia Book inserts this divine project in booklet 6 concerning the eternal Son. God does not say “I create man in my image” nor “in your image” but in “our” image, that is to say not in the image of God-Father alone, nor in the image of God-Son alone, but in that of their interference, of their meeting, of this “in-between” which already presupposes the nature of the soul, also in-between in place of the human-divine meeting. The human is the fruit of a joint creation of the Father and the Son, reported in the joint procreation of the child by a man and a woman. The mark of the plural just like the creation of the human becomes the fruit of a union. Can we ask ourselves - although the divine times are concomitant and not successive - if the project of creating man is a consequence of the joy of the paternity of the Father vis-à-vis the Son - so happy with this paternity that he wanted to extend it - or was the thought of infinite paternity prior to the creation of the Son, which marks its beginning?
3. Even before man is created, the divine plan provides for its two components: on the one hand his materiality Jesus will also be the Son of man, that is to say the son of this human genealogy which originates in the evolution of matter since the insertion of life on our planet. On the other hand his divinity, given not in an original way as in the biblical story but in potential: the Thought Adjusters and the Spirit of Truth are in the human but are not human. The latter is therefore not created perfect, but endowed with a divine component placed at his disposal so that he can use it according to his free will. We are indeed in a being created not perfectly, but endowed with the possibility and the capacity to become so.
In this light, imperfection is a normal stage in the relativity of the evolutionary state. Humans are not intrinsically “sinful”; the imperfection of their approach to God is due to the stretching desired by God Himself, between Him and His Creation, implying a significant legitimate degree of human ignorance. From this ignorance is born evil, this lack of adjustment of our understanding of the divine plan. Evil is therefore inevitable, common, inseparable from our materiality but should not be assimilated to sin, which certainly exists but in a much more limited way than evil.
EVOUBTIONARY man finds it difficult fully to comprehend the significance and to grasp the meanings of evil, error, sin, and iniquity. Man is slow to perceive that contrastive perfection and imperfection produce potential evil; that conflicting truth and falsehood create confusing error; that the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the divergent realms of sin and righteousness; that the persistent pursuit of divinity leads to the kingdom of God as contrasted with its continuous rejection, which leads to the domains of iniquity. (UB 54:0.1)
Let us remember that it is a voluntary act of non-cooperation with the divine plan. So to be a sinner, one must first know the divine plan…
This upheaval of the myth of Genesis completely changes the conception of the human. A human no longer a sinner by voluntary act of disobedience, but an imperfect being by his level of progressive evolution. It is no longer a question of bowing one’s back, flagellating oneself and imploring the grace of forgiveness to find a lost Edenic state, but of raising one’s head, arms and heart to construct with the divinity what makes sense in the meaning of Life. No longer accusing the human of being unfaithful in the face of his numerous faults, but approaching them as the inevitable gropings of trial and error to move towards a better world that has never yet come about. This experiential divine incompleteness allows the human to become a co-creator of God by enriching his evolutionary experience.
The being no longer has to cultivate renunciation of the self that he identifies with - constant abnegation of what constitutes him - but to grow in mastery of the self, the most inestimable chalice for evolving towards his eternal destiny. The encounter between him and the divinity takes place in this self whose talents are not given to be bridled but developed as much as it can, to the glory of creation and in the service of the progress of humanity.
Our mentalities take a long time to change and the readjustment that the 5th revelation offers us will take time before gradually intruding into the minds of the peoples of Urantia. In fact, such a change affects all areas of our world, social and intimate: family, education, profession, social relations, societal structure, spirituality.
This new conception opens up to a liberation of the human from a yoke that weighs heavily and permits many abuses; but it also opens up to the responsibility of its future evolution. The revelation is given for this future which depends on the use made of the jewel offered: oneself.
“Peace on earth and good will among men”, that good will which advances humanity in righteousness and truth. And the earth is full of people of good will.
| A Spiritual Quest: God in Question | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 98 — June 2022 | The Hazards of a Decimal Planet |