Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 2
THE NATURE OF GOD
1. The nature of God can best be understood by the revelation of the Father which [Jesus] Michael of Nebadon unfolded in his manifold teachings and in his superb mortal life in the flesh .... the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth.
2. In all our efforts to enlarge and spiritualize the human concept of God, we are tremendously handicapped by the limited capacity of the mortal mind. We are also seriously handicapped in the execution of our assignment by the limitations of language and by the poverty of material which can be utilized for purposes of illustration or comparison .... All our efforts to enlarge the human concept of God would be well‑nigh futile except for the fact that the mortal mind is indwelt by the bestowed Adjuster of the Universal Father and is pervaded by the Truth Spirit of the Creator Son.
3. He [God] is the only being in the universe, aside from his divine co‑ordinates, whoexperiences a perfect, proper, and complete appraisal of himself .... No thing is new to God, and no cosmic event ever comes as a surprise; ...To God there is no past, present, or future; all time is present at any given moment. He is the great and only I AM. The Universal Father is absolutely and without qualification infinite in all his attributes; and this fact, in and of itself, automatically shuts him off from all direct personal communication with finite material beings and other lowly created intelligences.
4. And all this necessitates such arrangements for contact and communication with his manifold creatures as have been ordained .... In these ways and in many others, in ways unknown to you and utterly beyond finite comprehension, does the Paradise Father lovingly and willingly downstep and otherwise modify, dilute, and attenuate his infinity in order that he may be able to draw nearer the finite minds of his creature children.
5. Mortal man can glimpse the Father's purposes only now and then, here and there, as they are revealed in relation to the outworking of the plan of creature ascension on its successive levels of universe progression.
6. The Universal Father does not repent of his original purposes of wisdom and perfection .... The reactions of a changeless God... may seem to vary in accordance with the changing attitude and the shifting minds of his created intelligences... but underneath the surface and beneath all outward manifestations, there is still present the changeless purpose, the everlasting plan, of the eternal God.
7. God is eternally and infinitely perfect, he cannot personally know imperfection as his own experience, but he does share the consciousness of all the experience of imperfectness of all the struggling creatures of the evolutionary universes of all the Paradise Creator Sons.
8. The justice of the Universal Father cannot be influenced by the acts and performances of his creatures .... How futile to make puerile appeals to such a God to modify his changeless decrees so that we can avoid the just consequences of the operation of his wise natural laws and righteous spiritual mandates!
9. The greatest punishment (in reality an inevitable consequence) for wrongdoing and deliberate rebellion against the government of God is loss of existence as an individual subject to that government. The final result of whole‑hearted sin is annihilation. In the last analysis, such sin‑identified individuals have destroyed themselves by becoming wholly unreal through their embrace of iniquity.
10. Mercy is simply justice tempered by that wisdom which grows out of perfection of knowledge and the full recognition of the natural weakness and environmental handicaps of finite creatures .... God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful. And never is it necessary that any influence be brought to bear upon the Father to call forth his loving‑kindness. The creature's need is wholly sufficient to insure the full flow of the Father's tender mercies and his saving grace.
11. Only the discernment of infinite wisdom enables a righteous God to minister justice and mercy at the same time and in any given universe situation .... Divine mercy represents a fairness technique of adjustment between the universe levels of perfection and imperfection.
12. It is wrong to think of God as being coaxed into loving his children because of the sacrifice of his Sons or the intercession of his subordinate creatures, "for the Father himself loves you. After all, the greatest evidence of the goodness of God and the supreme reason for loving him is the indwelling gift of the Father‑the Adjuster who so patiently awaits the hour when you both shall be eternally made one. Though you cannot find God by searching, if you will submit to the leading of the indwelling spirit, you will be unerringly guided, step by step, life by life, through universe upon universe, and age by age, until you finally stand in the presence of the Paradise personality of the Universal Father.
13. After all, I think we all, including the mortals of the realms, love the Universal Father and all other beings, divine or human, because we discern that these personalities truly love us. The experience of loving is very much a direct response to the experience of being loved.
14. But the love of God is an intelligent and farseeing parental affection .... At times I am almost pained to be compelled to portray the divine affection of the heavenly Father for his universe children by the employment of the human word symbol love .... How unfortunate that I cannot make use of some supernal and exclusive term which would convey to the mind of man the true nature and exquisitely beautiful significance of the divine affection of the Paradise Father .... love is the dominant characteristic of all God's personal dealings with his creatures.
15. The goodness of God is found only in the spiritual world of personal religious experience .... The entire mortal concept of God is transcendently illuminated by the life of Jesus. Selflessness is inherent in parental love. God loves not like a father, but as a father. He is the Paradise Father of every universe personality.
16. The erroneous supposition that the righteousness of God was irreconcilable with the selfless love of the heavenly Father, presupposed absence of unity in the nature of Deity and led directly to the elaboration of the atonement doctrine .... God as a father transcends God as a judge.
17. God is never wrathful, vengeful, or angry .... God loves the sinner because he is a personality reality (potentially eternal), while towards sin God strikes no personal attitude, for sin is not a spiritual reality; it is not personal; therefore does only the justice of God take cognizance of its existence. The love of God saves the sinner; the law of God destroys the sin .... The goodness of God rests at the bottom of the divine free‑willness‑‑the universal tendency to love, show mercy, manifest patience, and minister forgiveness.
18. All finite knowledge and creature understanding are relative. Information and intelligence, gleaned from even high sources, is only relatively complete, locally accurate, and personally true.
19. The false science of materialism would sentence mortal man to become an outcast in the universe. Such partial knowledge is potentially evil; it is knowledge composed of both good and evil .... Philosophers commit their gravest error when they are misled into the fallacy of abstraction, the practice of focusing the attention upon one aspect of reality and then pronouncing such an isolated aspect to be the whole truth.
20. Happiness ensues from the recognition of truth because it can be acted out; it can be lived. Disappointment and sorrow attend upon error because, not being a reality, it cannot be realized in experience. Divine truth is best known by its spiritual flavor.
21. The eternal quest is for unification, for divine coherence .... Man's Adjuster is a fragment of God and everlastingly seeks for divine unification .... The discernment of supreme beauty is the discovery and integration of reality .... The overstressed and isolated morality of modern religion, which fails to hold the devotion and loyalty of many twentieth‑century men, would rehabilitate itself, if, in addition to its moral mandates, it would give equal consideration to the truths of science, philosophy, and spiritual experience, and to the beauties of the physical creation, the charm of intellectual art, and the grandeur of genuine character achievement.
22. The challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward‑looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness.
23. Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experience. Such levels of efficient living come about through the unification of energy systems, idea systems, and spirit systems .... The real purpose of all universe education is to effect the better co‑ordination of the isolated child of the worlds with the larger realities of his expanding experience.
Discussion Questions
1. Can we imagine a being who perceives the past, present, and future at once? What is the fallacy of abstraction?
2. Why do people plead for mercy when they know that God is merciful and loving beyond human comprehension?
3. Why did Biblical writers talk of God "repenting and changing his mind?"
4. Why do people try to bargain with God and ask him to change universe laws for their benefit?
5. How does the atonement doctrine view God's basic nature?
6. Is the self‑destruction of iniquity a more reasonable result of dedicated sinfulness than an eternal hell?
7. Does contemporary religion overstress morality at the expense of other aspects of truth?
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