Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 195-III
AFTER PENECOST -- GREEK AND ROMAN INFLUENCE
33. Modern secularism has been fostered by two world‑wide influences. The father of secularism was the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth and twentieth‑century so called science—atheistic science. The mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church. Secularism had its inception as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.
34. For three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are unwittingly actual secularists .... Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern man. The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophic secularism .... Secularism frees man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray him into the tyranny of political and economic slavery.
35. Twentieth‑century secularism tends to affirm that man does not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and world‑wide disaster ... Nothing can take the place of God in human society. But mark you well! do not be quick to surrender the beneficent gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism .... To the secularistic revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. And because the secularistic revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed the unlooked‑for harvest of world wars and international unsettledness.
36. Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co‑ordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace .... Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace. The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society can lead only to disaster. During the first third of the twentieth century Urantians killed more human beings than were killed during the whole of Christian dispensation up to that time. And this is only the beginning of the dire harvest of materialism and secularism; still more terrible destruction is yet to come.
37. In all your worthy efforts to rid yourselves of the superstitious creeds of past ages, make sure that you hold fast the eternal truth. But be patient! when the present superstition revolt is over, the truths of Jesus' gospel will persist gloriously to illuminate a new and better way.
38. But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the master's life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. Urantia is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment.
39. Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus' religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men. And then will these spirit‑born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world.
40. The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present‑day distorted and compromised Christianity—the real life and teachings of Jesus.
41. Thinking man has always feared to be held by a religion. When a strong and moving religion threatens to dominate him, he invariably tries to rationalize, traditionalize, and institutionalize it, thereby hoping to gain control of it. By such procedure, even a revealed religion becomes man‑made and man‑dominated. Modern men and women of intelligence evade the religion of Jesus because of their fears of what it will do to them and with them .... The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and transform its believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for a knowledge of the will of the Father in heaven and requiring that the energies of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of man.
42. The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity—the best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a religion about Jesus, but it is so largely one which men experience secondhand .... What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on earth and know, firsthand, his life‑giving teachings!
43. Christianity is threatened by slow death from formalism, over organization, intellectualism, and other nonspiritual trends. The modern Christian church is not such a brotherhood of dynamic believers as Jesus commissioned continuously to effect the spiritual transformation of successive generations of mankind .... The stream of modern Christianity drains many an ancient pagan swamp and many a barbarian morass; many olden cultural watersheds drain into this present‑day cultural stream as well as the high Galilean tablelands which are supposed to be its exclusive source.
44. It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity; you must go forward from where you find yourselves. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus' life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.
45. "The kingdom of God is within you" was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit.
46. In winning souls for the Master, it is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty‑loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love and sweep him on under spiritual guidance toward the higher and divine goal of mortal existence. Christianity even now willingly goes the first mile, but...there are so few second‑milers—so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.
47. Ecclesiasticism is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing spirit, and firsthand experience of the faith‑comrades of Jesus in the brotherhood of man in the spiritual association of the kingdom of heaven .... the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as great, but wholly unconscious, obstacles to the immediate advance of the real gospel—the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
48. The living Jesus is the only hope of a possible unification of Christianity. The true church—the Jesus brotherhood—is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by unity, not necessarily by uniformity .... And this brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization .... But Christianity of even the twentieth century must not be despised .... it has truly been one of the greatest powers for good on earth .... But there is no excuse for the involvement of the church in commerce and politics.… the genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this powerful institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox raiment.
49. Human evolution and spiritual progress are hardly sufficient to enable all men to dispense with religious authority. And the invisible brotherhood of the kingdom may well include these family groups of various social and temperamental classes if they are only willing to become truly spirit‑led sons of God. But in this brotherhood of Jesus there is no place for sectarian rivalry, group bitterness, nor assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility.
50. The great hope of Urantia lies in the possibility of a new revelation of Jesus with a new and enlarged presentation of his saving message which would spiritually unite in loving service the numerous families of his present‑day professed followers.
51. Even secular education could help in this great spiritual renaissance if it would pay more attention to the work of teaching youth how to engage in life planning and character progression. The purpose of all education should be to foster and further the supreme purpose of life, the development of a majestic and well‑balanced personality.
52. Christianity is an extemporized religion, and therefore must it operate in low gear. High‑gear spiritual performances must await the new revelation and the more general acceptance of the real religion of Jesus. But Christianity is a mighty religion .... Christianity contains enough of Jesus' teachings to immortalize it .... Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as a part of the social system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization; and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality.
53. The hope of modern Christianity is that it should cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly extols, there to learn anew from Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortal man can ever hear—the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
Discussion Questions
1. Are most Christians unwittingly secularists?
2. Is Christianity too involved in social and political action and neglecting the spiritual regeneration of humankind?
3. How do we distinguish between firsthand and secondhand religion? Who are the second-milers?
4. Are Christian churches serving, unconsciously, as barriers to the real religion of Jesus?
5. How do we prevent the “rationalizing, traditionalizing, and institutionalizing” of the religion of Jesus?
6. Do you think the Fifth Epochal Revelation will be able to correct the distortions of materialism and secularism in our culture?
7. Why have the leaders of Christianity largely ignored the Fifth Epochal Revelation?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship