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an attitude of saving faith is centered on God alone, who is all of these personified and infinitely more." (1114)
If we are to accept, by faith, our sonship with the Father and to derive authority for that decision by virtue of the fruits of that faith appearing in our personal experience, then a corollary would be that deriving authority from a book is forbidden. Our celestial supervisors must leave us the room to operate by faith, without any trace of compulsion. Logically that would mean that The Urantia Book must be bathed in uncertainty both in respect to its origin and the authority of its written word. As individuals we will see these things in different ways. Some may be bothered by the apparent and real errors in its science, others by the uncertainty of its origins, by its apparent sexism and racism, or by the stand it appears to take concerning the now urgent necessity for selective breeding. It may not be important which of these contentious issues disturbs us, only that one or another should do so. Without such problems being present in the book, many of its followers would surely be headed in the direction of rabid fundamentalism and exclusivity. And if this happened, then the Fifth Epochal Revelation would suffer the same fate as the Fourth, it would become a static religion of authority--ultimately destined to become moribund.
If we portray this book as a totally divine revelation by taking the fundamentalist view that if any aspect of its science or cosmology conflicts with current opinions it is our human science and cosmology that is wrong and never the book, then we are arrogating authority unto ourselves. We would be presenting the book as infallible doctrine, we would be substituting a religion of authority for what Jesus told us should be an act of personal faith. And we would be denying what the book itself tells us about its science and cosmology not being inspired. (1109)
At the conclusion of this discourse of Jesus on true religion, Peter wanted more. Among other things, Jesus said: "I have called you to be born again, to be born of the spirit. I have called you out of the darkness of authority and the lethargy of tradition into the transcendent light of the realization of making the greatest discovery possible for the human soul to make--the supernal experience of finding God for yourself, in yourself, and of yourself, and of doing ad this as a fact in your oven personal experience." (1731)
Our introductory statement proposed four alternative opinions about the revelatory status of The Urantia Book. Of these, the first has to account for the fact that virtually all sincere seekers after truth will inevitably discover revelatory material of one sort or another within its pages. The third proposal regarding divine dictatorship is self-eliminating because of what the book itself declares to be true. The fourth proposal is also self-eliminating simply because the sheer beauty of the book's spiritual content is self- authenticating--it is far beyond the spiritual capacity of any human being, living or dead, to enunciate [see following article]. That leaves us with the second proposal of partial revelation--and with the personal urge to search for and discover truth wherever we may find it. By its fruits we shall know it.
But Jesus told us that the religion of the spirit does not demand uniformity of intellectual views, only unity of spirit feeling. Thus we are all entitled to hold our own viewpoint. What is forbidden is that we should attempt to force others to conform to our particular, personal mold.
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