The Challenges of Faith in
the Quest for Cosmic Citizenship

6. The Element of Religious Concern – The Content of Faith

Again, when I speak of the “content of faith” I am referring to the beliefs, stories, rituals of expression, and other factors which enable us to socialize our faith experience – to share it with other travelers on the journey.

Faith is never experienced in isolation from some form of content.  It is experienced in, with and through it's content -- the ideas, language, stories, and rituals of a faith community. An analytic mind can understand the content of faith as being something different from the the spiritual experience of faith.

The Urantia Book contains stories about reality which help us understand our experience of faith as it relates to a personal universe -- a universe structured around relationships between personalities and personality systems.  For most of us, these stories form a significant part of the content of our faith.  Many people in our world use stories from the Bible or some other sacred text to accomplish the same spiritual purpose -- the illumination of the values which enable us to progress in our moral and spiritual lives.  

What is important to appreciate is that the goal of our experience of faith is infinite, while the stories with which we attempt to understand and to socially express this experience of faith are finite.  Therefore we should be aware from the beginning that our stories, our understandings, our sacred texts, our revelations, are always going to fall short of fully expressing that to which they point.  It is a fact that, because of our extreme finitude as human beings, any way in which we attempt to symbolize the infinite is going to be very limited.

The Urantia Book refers to the paradigms within which we do our thinking and choosing as “universe frames and we find a brief overview of the topic on page 1260.  The revelators comment that,

1260:2  115:1.1 "Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree.

"Conceptual frames of the universe are only relatively true; they are serviceable scaffolding which must eventually give way before the expansions of enlarging cosmic comprehension. The understandings of truth, beauty, and goodness, morality, ethics, duty, love, divinity, origin, existence, purpose, destiny, time, space, even Deity, are only relatively true. . . . Man must think in a mortal universe frame, but that does not mean that he cannot envision other and higher frames within which thought can take place."

Farther on in this study, when we discuss the stages of faith, we will see that the ascent through the psychic circles involves moving through a series of universe frames.  We live within each one for a season, learning and growing.  These are paradigms, frames of reference constructed of meanings and values. But sooner or later there comes a breakdown of our conceptual scaffolding, our universe frame, and we must move on to a more expanded one within which we can experience further growth.

One of the great dangers of religious life is that we can easily mistake a particular “universe frame” for reality itself and become arrested in our development.  This is the basis of religious conflict and religious wars. When we have an experience of the presence of God, this experience may be made possible because of a relationship we have with a book, with a person, with a group, with a place, with an object, with a piece of music – almost anything is capable of mediating the presence of God to us.  The problems begin when we mistake the medium through which the presence of God is experienced for the experience itself. 

These concepts should help us understand the nature of doubt.  Once we have embarked upon the journey of faith, that which is at risk when we find ourselves doubting, is the content of our faith.  We might find ourselves asking, “Does The Urantia Book really contain the truth about reality?”  Or we might ask, “Does the Bible really contain the truth about reality?”  We may have doubts about whether or not a particular book is a faithful guide which can be trusted to lead us to our goal.  But the fact that such doubts disturb us is proof in itself that faith is operating in our lives – we are ultimately concerned even when we are experiencing doubt about the way in which we understand or express our involvement with that ultimate concern. 

If we understand this, and if we understand why The Urantia Book warns us about “the relativity of concept frames,” we can more easily appreciate why a ruthless quest for truth must ever be our guiding principle.  If we are truly growing in our faith experience, we will move through a number of “universe frames” during our mortal lives, each providing a conceptual environment within which we can experience growth, but each of which stands in danger of becoming an idolatrous substitute for the transcendent goal of faith -- an idolatrous substitute which can prevent further growth.

The remainder of my presentation will be devoted to sharing with you the road map of the faith journey which I mentioned earlier.    We’re going to review the various stages of faith through which we pass on our mortal journey.  We will also consider the psychological and spiritual crises which characterize the transitions between these stages.

1097:6  100:4.2 “Religious perplexities are inevitable; there can be no growth without psychic conflict and spiritual agitation. The organization of a philosophic standard of living entails considerable commotion in the philosophic realms of the mind. Loyalties are not exercised in behalf of the great, the good, the true, and the noble without a struggle. Effort is attendant upon clarification of spiritual vision and enhancement of cosmic insight. And the human intellect protests against being weaned from subsisting upon the nonspiritual energies of temporal existence. The slothful animal mind rebels at the effort required to wrestle with cosmic problem solving.”

We will find that meaningful growth demands a willingness to experience difficulty.