|
Functional unity
The consciousness of God's indwelling is based upon the intellectual reception of truth, the supermind perception of goodness, and the personality motivation to love.
Religion has to do with feeling, acting, and living, not merely with thinking. Thinking is more closely related to the material life and, in the main, should be dominated by reason and the facts of science except in its nonmaterial reaches toward the spirit realms when truth must dominate.
The ideal religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead mankind to unqualifiedly depend upon the absolute love of the Father.
Such a genuine religious experience far transcends all idealistic desire, takes salvation for granted, and is concerned only with doing the Father's will.
When theology masters religion, religion dies. It becomes a doctrine instead of a life.
When reason once recognizes right and wrong, it exhibits wisdom; when wisdom chooses between right and wrong, truth and error, it demonstrates spirit leading. And thus are the functions of mind, soul, and spirit united and functionally inter-associated.
The Teachings of Jesus
To understand the Urantia Papers it is vital to understand the role attributed to the Spirit of God that now indwells the minds of virtually all human beings born on this planet. It is referred to in the New Testament in about 25 of its verses, e.g. "Know you not that you are the temple of God, that the Spirit of God dwells in you" (1. Cor. 3:16), and, "If we love one another, God dwells in us." (1 John 4:12).
This indwelling Spirit is the source of all true meanings and values of a non-material nature. Thus it is the source of true morality, non-material truth, beauty and goodness, and all revealed truth. So, one way or another, all true revelation is from God regardless of the means of its origin. But the recognition of this truth is an individual function, crucially dependent upon the personal relation between the individual and the God-Spirit within. Empirical truths of science may appear to be different, but basically, they are not.
The Urantia Papers have been presented to the world as the Fifth Epochal Revelation and, as such, this has generated claims for infallibility by some. The reality is that the Papers themselves state that "nothing which human nature has touched can be regarded as infallible." And there is not a single statement in all the Papers that has not, at some stage, been open to the contaminating hand of man. Thus all decisions on the validity of revelatory truth in these Papers, or elsewhere, must forever be the personal responsibility of the individual.
Certainly there are many aspects of the Urantia Papers, particularly their history and cosmology that should definitely be described with the authors' term of 'a framework in which to think,' rather than being taken as factual truth. But there are also other sections, in fact a major portion of the Papers, about which many have said that if it is not revelation, then indeed, it surely ought to be.
What follows in our next issue comes from Part 4 of the Papers only--a much compressed summary of the spiritual life and spiritual teachings of the one many call, "Master." This is also totally consistent with the spirit of the word of Jesus from the New Testament. Familiarity with this word will certainly promote our familiarity with the mind of Jesus.
Jesus' purpose
The Urantia Papers confirm that the purpose of
Jesus' life on our planet included revealing God to man and man to God, and that his life was to exhibit "the transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing mortal being during the short career of mortal existence."
Having fully achieved his purpose, Jesus left us with this injunction: "Your mission to the world is founded on the fact that I lived a God-revealing life among you; on the truth that you and all other men and women are the sons and daughters of God; and it shall consist in the life which you will live among them--the actual and living experience of loving them and serving them--even as I have loved and served you."
Consequently the Papers tell us: "that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it."
To be continued in our next issue
|
|
