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"Process Theology and the Urantia Papers."
When visits to our web site, which has the above title, commenced to exceed five hundred per day, compared to the fifty visits per week of its sister site, "An Introduction to The Urantia Book," we were forced to the realization that here, at last, is a way to introduce academically-minded Christians to the Urantia Papers.
Not that we should have been so surprised, for the now deceased reader, Dr Jim Mills, had dedicated the last years of his life to conveying that very message to Urantia Book readers--and had tirelessly presented his ideas on process theology to study groups over a long period. But for Jim, the medium of the internet and the world wide web were unavailable, and books published at great expense were the only unrealistic alternative.
It is the pure power of this new medium that now presents to Urantia Book readers a golden opportunity to share the teachings of the Papers with those modern day Christians who, unknowingly, have almost identical basic concepts about deity and the meaning of the Fourth Epochal revelation as are presented in the Fifth.
The virtue of this newly discovered fact is that "those far seeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight" who also possess a God-given gift enabling them to master both the obscure language and ideas of traditional philosophy and theology, and the more esoteric ideas about deity and reality as presented in the Urantia Papers, now have a remarkable, unique, and unexpected opportunity.
Through the medium of the internet and the web, it is now possible to take the content of the Urantia Papers directly to the heartland of the Christianity of the future--those academic colleges, universities, and theological institutions where the true meaning of Jesus' revelation of the Father will be thrashed out, revised, and revealed anew, just as it is foretold in the Papers:
"Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of God to the world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail." (2096)
What follows has been abstracted from review articles to try to convey to readers common points for contact between the Fifth Epochal Revelation and modern process theology, with the hope that some may be inspired into undertaking the necessary in-depth studies required to build bridges between The Urantia Book and the new theology of the Christian church that will be.
Perhaps it was the intention of the revelators to signify their approval of process theology when they used, word for word, a quotation from the works of Charles Hartshorne, a former student and associate of the creator of modern process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead. Almost alone, Hartshorne kept the thought of Whitehead alive during the worst days of materialistic determinism until new scientific discoveries destroyed such concepts and re-opened twentieth century minds to indeterminism, uncertainty, free will, consciousness, self-awareness, and God.
At a time when it had come to be believed that what cannot be weighed does not exist, this new thought of Whitehead was virtually "off the planet."
Whitehead proposed that the basic units of reality were not bricks and mortar but momentary "occasions of experience" that flashed into existence, possibly influenced other such moments, and disappeared into from whence they had come.
How could such an outrageous proposal expect other than a label of "rubbish" at the height of an age of deterministic materialism?
But not long after Whitehead published his work, Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir published his proposal that the vacuum of space seethes with virtual particles that pop into existence for a moment of time, enjoy their moment of reality, then disappear forever. Casimir also published proposals on how to demonstrate such particles and how to make them become real. Both objectives have since been achieved.
For the materialist, reality is matter and virtually all else is illusion. For the physicist, the matter of the materialist dissolves reversibly into structure-less energy but in a manner consistent with a precise and quantitative balance sheet. For Whitehead, reality is God and all else is flux--process.
From God comes Whitehead's basic unit of reality, the "actual occasion" or "actual entity." Both God and this basic unit are dipolar, each having a "mental" pole and a "physical pole."
God's "physical pole" is that by which he "feels" and takes in "actual occasions" as complete entities and in so doing, gives them "objective immortality" by his valuation of what they are. God then "gives back" to the world the data for these objectified entities enabling the world process to continue and be enriched by what is past. God's "physical pole" belongs with his "consequent nature."
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