© 1986 William Wentworth
© 1986 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
by William Wentworth
I very much enjoyed the article by Dr. P. Jensen in the June issue. I can well understand his frustration with the growing secularism of Australians; and I share his view that the “new wowsers” are a secular version of the old variety, propagating feminism, environmentalism, pacifism etc. in place of Sunday observance and temperance.
I was particularly pleased to notice his clear distinction between Christianity on the one hand, and Christian morality on the other, together with his observation that sometimes morality stands in the way of Christianity.
But I believe he errs in blaming “decency” as the real problem for Christianity.
It is, after all, from bitter experience that people fear the wowser in Christian teachers. It was not so long ago that such teachers would make blatant use of the notion of respectability to frighten nervous sinners into the pews on Sundays. When God was owned by Christians, and morality was something they enforced on His behalf, many were intimidated into feigning belief. The URANTIA Book points out that “Secularism can never bring peace to mankind.” (UB 195:8.6) but goes on to warm “But mark you well: do not be quick to surrender the beneficient gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism.” Narrow Christian morality attempted to dominate Christianity itself, and thoughtful people finally began to pluck up their courage and refuse to be blackmailed by the wowser element in the churches. It was probably inevitable that, in the absence of a more tolerant religious attitude, many of them would bog down in secular humanism.
Dr. Jensen, however, highlights a real opportunity for Christianity to recover some of this lost ground. The crux of the matter is his opinion that: “The Christian ethic of unconditional love and the pagan ethic of self-fulfillment are fundamentally incompatible.” Christians have fostered this notion over the centuries through reasoning which seems valid to them. But they overlook that the Christian ethic can absorb and upstep the pagan ethic by regarding self-fulfillment as that experience which results from attempting to do the will of God. Christians tend to view loving God as a duty, the discharge of which requires the sacrifice of personal will. But as the URANTIA Book points out: “It is loyalty, not sacrifice, that Jesus demands. The consciousness of sacrifice implies the absence of that wholehearted affection which would have made such a loving service a supreme joy. The idea of duty signifies that you are servant-minded and hence are missing the mighty thrili of doing your service as a friend and for a friend.” (UB 180:1.6)
If Christians could bring themselves to accept real sonship with God, their spiritual Father, they would find that loving Him and trying to do His will constitutes the acme of self-fulfillment, and in this discovery they absorb the pagan ethic into their own higher one. Instead of regarding personal will as something to be surrendered and sacrificed, they could view it as something to be focused and mobilised in the service of God, and in this consists true spiritual liberty when “It is my will that your will be done.” (UB 118:8.11)
When Christians make this transition from “servant mindedness” to “son mindedness”, the ideational scaffolding of sacrifice and atonement becomes unnecessary, and thus much of the self-righteousness which lurks in the baser aspects of Christianity ceases to trap its followers.
The great truth of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, which shines like a beacon out of the best of Christianity, then just might attract some of those secular minded Australians who unknowingly yearn to discover it.