Dear David;

This is a response to your recently published "A Paper on the Printing of Part IV." 

In this paper you set forth what you believe to be the purposes of the revelators--"to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception."  You then attempt to provide a set of arguments whose purpose appears to be that of convincing us that the separate publication of Part IV somehow mitigates against the achievement of these objectives.

In the first argument offered, you state you believe we are wrong when we choose to do "something the revelators chose not to do: fragmenting it into smaller parts to enable apparently easier digestion by our fellows."  The fallacy here is the implication that, if the revelators did not do a particular thing, it was because they specifically chose not to.  There is no evidence that such an exclusionary choice was made by the revelators. For your reasoning to be consistent you would also have to agree that the fact the revelators chose not to publish the book in electronic form mandates that neither should we.  With its pointers to the rest of the text of "The Urantia Book," "Jesus: A New Revelation" does not "fragment" the text any more than do the isolated quotes which Urantia Foundation displays on the home page of its website. 

Your second set of arguments do not take us beyond rhetoric; they provide no basis from which useful conclusions might be derived.  For example, you fail to show how the separate publication of Part IV does such things as "deprive our children of the opportunity to grow both the qualitative and quantitative sides of their souls."  At 110:6.18 the revelators equate "quantitative" soul growth with the comprehension of supreme meanings.

They equate "qualitative" soul growth with the faith-grasp of sonship with God.  I would contend that, in "The Urantia Book," these aspects of personal growth are most clearly delineated in Part IV.  It is in Part IV that the revelators are able to most clearly describe the functional development of these soul dynamics in those sections where they relate how these processes evolved within the inner life of the growing Jesus.

I once met a woman who had gotten a small scroll containing "The Inevitabilities" from a bard at a Renaissance Faire.  She took this small scroll home and put it up on her wall.  She said it nourished her spiritual growth for three years, after which time she returned to the Renaissance Faire, looked this fellow up, and discovered The Urantia Book when she inquired as to the source of "The Inevitabilites."  Would you argue that providing this woman with a tiny fragment of the text had deprived her of "the opportunity to grow both the qualitative and quantitative sides" of

her soul?

Although you clearly set forth the purpose of the revelators as the endeavor "to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception," by the time you reach item number three in your presentation you have shifted the meaning of this phrase to designate methodology rather than purpose.  You do not provide any basis for your strongly expressed assertion that the revelators wanted believers to follow a particular method of revelation propagation.  In fact, if we look more closely at this matter we might come to the opposite conclusion; the revelators deplore the fact that the missionaries of Melchizedek took his instructions so literally; Jesus turned the work of the kingdom on Urantia over to resident mortals, and our own apocrypha indicates that one of the parting comments made by the revelators to the contact commissioners was, "You are on your own."  I see absolutely no basis for claiming the existence of a mandated methodology for spreading the revelation.

But your least defendable arguments appear in the second paragraph of your section 3.  You argue that, "Part IV does not provide a conceptual basis for comprehension of the Supreme and our duty to the Supreme." This is simply not true.  Jesus' teaching about the kingdom *is* the foundation for our understanding of Supremacy.  In fact, an argument could be made that Jesus' concept of the kingdom is the essence of the fourth epochal revelation and that The Urantia Book's philosophic expansion of Jesus' message in the discussion of Supremacy is the essence of the fifth epochal revelation.

You argue that "Part IV does not provide insight into personality reality, qualitative and quantitative soul growth, self-conscious, moral decision-making, cosmic consciousnes."  I have personally found the life and teachings of Jesus to be the most comprehensive revelation of the nature of these realities that I have ever encountered.

I believe that a study of the methods used by Jesus should serve us well in formulating approaches to the propagation of the revelation.  We find Jesus teaching Ganid "in language best suited to the Lad's comprehension."  Jesus taught his apostles to "select a story best suited to the illustration of the one central and vital truth which he wished to teach..."  The parable of the sower is said to be "a hint as to what the apostles and other messengers of the kingdom might expect in their ministry from generation to generation as time passed."  There is nothing in a study of Jesus' methods which would lead me to conclude that if I am unable to give someone a complete dissertation on the final nature of the cosmos, I should refrain from discussing the nature of the Father's love with them.  And yet a logical extension of the arguments you present in your paper would lead to such a conclusion.

The unfaithful steward in the parable of the talents, who saves and protects the money which has been given to him by his master so that it can be returned in exactly the same state as that in which it was entrusted, is rebuked; his talent is taken away and given to those who were creative in finding ways of more profitably investing their master's resources.

In my view, the essence of the revelation has to do with the relationship between man and God.  This is the "first principle" from which everything else flows.  It is this "first principle" which currently needs to be established on our planet in order that our unseen friends and the spirits of our creators might more effectively work.  It is this "first principle" which was undermined by the assertions of Lucifer, and its re-establishment appears to me to be the primary focus of the last three epochal revelations. 

I would argue that The Urantia Book is so fully focused on this objective that the revelators have articulated it from three different perspectives. There is the life of Jesus--how he lived it, what he taught about the kingdom.  There is the development of the concept of the Supreme and our relationship to this Deity.  There is also the description of a Trinitarian universe architecture.  Each of these three approaches points to the nature of cosmic relationship--the meaning and value of personality integration in the cosmos--from a different perspective.  These three perspectives

correspond in turn to religious, philosophical and scientific modes of understanding and hence appear designed to appeal to different types of minds. 

The fact that the crowning achievement of personal growth would involve an integration of all three does not negate the utility of a small portion of the revelation when it comes to the task of attracting a mind, helping it orient itself, and then leading it onto a pathway of growth which will someday result in the achievement of this desired integration.  Hence my belief that we most effectively serve the purposes of the revelators when we creatively devise ways of presenting truth to our fellows in a manner which facilitates this process. For me, this is summed up in 141:6.4 where Jesus tells the apostles, "You cannot teach the deep things of the spirit to those who have been born only of the flesh; first see that men are born of the spirit before you seek to instruct them in the advanced ways of the spirit.  Do not undertake to show men the beauties of the temple until you have first taken them into the temple.  Introduce men to God and as the sons of God before you discourse on the doctrines of the father hood of God and the sonship of men....It is not your kingdom; you are only ambassadors.  Simply go forth proclaiming: This is the kingdom of heaven--God is your Father and you are his sons, and this good news, if you wholeheartedly believe it, is your eternal salvation."

I believe that "Jesus: A New Revelation" is a vital new tool for those teachers, those new leaders, those "spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings;"  those new teachers of Jesus' religion "who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men," and whose work will result in the appearance of "those spirit-born souls who will quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world."  Given the developmental disparity on our world outlined in Paper 52, I believe that future kingdom workers will creatively develop a kalideoscopic array of approaches to presenting the truths of epochal revelation to the widely varied minds who inhabit the broad range of cultural expressions characteristic of our world. 

In short, Dave, while I appreciate your expressed opinions about the publication of Part IV, I fail to see how your arguments and conclusions have been rationally derived from a thoughtful study of The Urantia Book. I think there are far more compelling reasons for believing that the publication of "Jesus: A New Revelation" may be an important forward step in helping the revelators achieve their objective of expanding cosmic consciousness and enhancing spiritual perception.

In friendship,

David Kantor