Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 97
EVOLUTION OF THE GOD CONCEPT AMONG THE HEBREWS
1. The spiritual leaders of the Hebrews did what no others before them had ever succeeded in doing—they deanthropomorphize their God concept without converting it into an abstraction of Deity comprehensible only to philosophers,
2. From Moses to Malachi there occurred an almost unbroken ideational growth of the personality of God in the Hebrew mind, and this concept was eventually heightened and glorified by the teachings of Jesus about the Father in heaven.
3. Samuel sprang from a long line of the Salem teachers who had persisted in maintaining the truths of Melchizedek as a part of their worship forms. This teacher was a virile and resolute man ... The progress he made was by sheer force of compulsion; he did little preaching, less teaching, but he did act.
4. But the great contribution which Samuel made to the development, of the concept of Deity was his ringing pronouncement that Yahweh was changeless... Samuel reiterated the Melchizedek covenant with Abraham and declared that the Lord God of Israel was the source of all truth, stability, and constancy.
5. The keynote of this era was divine power; the prophets of this age preached a religion designed to foster the king upon the Hebrew throne.
6. In the tenth century before Christ the Hebrew nation became divided into two kingdoms... the Hebraic religion did not prosper until that determined and fearless warrior for righteousness, Elijah, began his teaching ... When Elijah was called away, Elisha, his faithful associate, took up his work... The era of Elijah and Elisha closed with the better classes returning to the worship of the supreme Yahweh and witnessed the restoration of the idea of the Universal Creator to about that place where Samuel had left it.
7. The long‑drawn‑out controversy between the believers in Yahweh and the followers of Baa! was a socioeconomic clash of ideologies rather than a difference in religious beliefs... The southern or wandering Arabian tribes (the Yahwehites) looked upon land as an inalienable as a gift of Deity to the clan. They held that land could not be sold or mortgaged... The northern and more settled Canaanites (the Baalites) freely bought, sold, and mortgaged their lands.
8. Elijah shifted the Yahweh‑Baal controversy from the land issue to the religious aspect of Hebrew and Canaanite ideologies ... The prophet began as an agrarian reformer and ended up by exalting Deity. Baals were many, Yahweh was one‑monotheism won over polytheism.
9. Amos was not merely a restorer or reformer; he was a discoverer of new concepts of Deity... For the first time since the days of Melchizedek the ears of man heard the denunciation of the double standard of national justice and morality. For the first time in their history Hebrew ears heard that their own God, Yahweh, would no more tolerate crime and sin in their lives than he would among any other people.
10. Hosea followed Amos and his doctrine of a universal God of justice by the resurrection of the Mosaic concept of a God of love. Hosea preached forgiveness through repentance, not by sacrifice.
11. Isaiah went on to preach the eternal nature of God, his infinite wisdom, his unchanging perfection of reliability ... Speaking to the fear‑ridden and soul‑hungry Hebrews, this prophet said: "Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you." "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound."
12. This Isaiah was followed by Micah and Obadiah, who confirmed and embellished his soul‑satisfying gospel. And these two brave messengers boldly denounced the priest‑ridden ritual of the Hebrews and fearlessly attacked the whole sacrificial system.
13. And it was a great age; these were indeed stirring times when mortal man heard, and some even believed, such emancipating messages more than two and a half millenniums ago. And but for the stubborn resistance of the priests, these teachers would have overthrown the whole bloody ceremonial of the Hebrew ritual of worship.
14. Jeremiah fearlessly declared that Yahweh was not on the side of the Hebrews in their military struggles with other nations. He asserted that Yahweh was God of all the earth, of all nations and of all peoples. Jeremiah's teaching was the crescendo of the rising wave of the internationalization of the God of Israel; finally and forever did this intrepid preacher proclaim that Yahweh was God of all nations.
15. The destruction of the Hebrew nation and their captivity in Mesopotamia would have proved of great benefit to their expanding theology had it not been for the determined action of their priesthood ... If there is resentment of the fact that these priests have fastened their erroneous ideas upon such a large part of the Occidental world, it should be remembered that they did not intentionally do this; they did not claim to be writing by inspiration; they made no profession to be writing a sacred book. They were merely preparing a textbook designed to bolster up the dwindling courage of their fellows in captivity.
16. No prophet or religious teacher from Machiventa to the time of Jesus attained the high concept of God that Isaiah the second proclaimed during these days of the captivity... He vied with Moses in the eloquence with which he portrayed the Lord God of Israel as the Universal Creator. He was poetic in his portrayal of the infinite attributes of the Universal Father. No more beautiful pronouncements about the heavenly Father have ever been made.
17. And this preacher of a supernal God never ceased to proclaim this God of love ... The farseeing and courageous Isaiah effectively eclipsed the nationalistic Yahweh by his sublime portraiture of the majesty and universal omnipotence of the supreme Yahweh, God of love, ruler of the universe, and affectionate Father of all mankind.
18. Had the priests not dedicated themselves to the work of building up a misconceived nationalism, the teachings of the two Isaiahs would have prepared the way for the recognition and reception of the promised Messiah.
19. The custom of looking upon the record of the experiences of the Hebrews as sacred history and upon the transactions of the rest of the world as profane history is responsible for much of the confusion existing in the human mind as to the interpretation of history.
20. They struggled with their original and Egyptian concept of divine rewards the righteousness coupled with dire punishments for sin. The drama of Job was something of a protest against this erroneous philosophy. The frank pessimism of Ecclesiastes was a worldly wise reaction to these overoptimistic beliefs in Providence.
21. All modern religions have seriously blundered in the attempt to put a miraculous interpretation on certain epochs of human history.
22. There never were twelve tribes of the Israelites‑only three or four tribes settled in Palestine. The Hebrews never drove the Canaanites out of Palestine, notwithstanding that the priests' record of these things unhesitatingly declared that they did.
23. Pretentious Hebrew history begins with Saul's rallying the northern clans to withstand an attack by the Ammonites. With an army of a little more than three thousand he defeated the enemy. Immediately following the defeat of the Ammonites, Saul was made king by popular election by his troops.
24. The greatest of all distortions of Jewish history had to do with David... David and Saul never could agree... David's army was a polyglot assortment of malcontents, being for the most part made up of social misfits and fugitives from justice ... David with his small army made his headquarters at the non‑Hebrew city of Hebron. Presently his compatriots proclaimed him king of the new kingdom of Judah. Judah was made up mostly of non‑Hebrew elements... They were nomads.
25. David's cosmopolitan tribe of Judah was more gentile than Jewish ...eighty per cent of David's soldiers were Baalites...David turned seven of Saul's descendants over to the Gibeonites to be hanged ... David's corrupt political machine began to get personal possession of land in the north in violation of the Hebrew mores and presently gained control of the caravan tariffs formerly collected by the Philistines. And then came a series of atrocities climaxed by the murder of Uriah... No wonder rebellion broke out.
26. After David's death Solomon purged the political machine of all northern influences but continued all of the tyranny and taxation of his father's regime. Solomon bankrupted the nation by his lavish court and by his elaborate building program... His harem numbered almost one thousand,
27. New life appeared as Jehoash and his son Jeroboam delivered Israel from its enemies. But by this time there ruled in Samaria a gangster‑nobility whose depredations rivaled those of the Davidic dynasty of olden days. State and church went along hand in hand. The attempt to suppress freedom of speech led Elijah, Amos, and Hosea to begin their secret writing, and this was the real beginning of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
28. But the northern kingdom did not vanish from history until the king of Israel conspired with the king of Egypt and refused to pay further tribute to Assyria. Then began the three years' siege followed by the total dispersion of the northern kingdom.
29. With the overthrow of Necho by Nebuchadnezzar, Judah fell under the rule of Babylon and was given ten years of grace, but soon rebelled... And so the end of Judah came suddenly. The city was destroyed, and the people were carried away into Babylon. The Yahweh‑Baal struggle ended with the captivity. And the captivity shocked the remnant of Israel into monotheism.
30. In Babylon the Jews arrived at the conclusion that they. could not exist as a small group in Palestine, having their own peculiar social and economic customs, and that, if their ideologies were to prevail, they must convert the gentiles. Thus originated their new concept of destiny‑the idea that the Jews must become the chosen servants of Yahweh. The Jewish religion of the Old Testament really evolved in Babylon during the captivity.
31. The doctrine of immortality also took form at Babylon. The Jews had thought that the idea of the future life detracted from the emphasis of their gospel of social justice. Now for the first time theology displaced sociology and economics. Religion was taking shape as a system of human thought and conduct more and more to be separated from politics, sociology, and economics.
32. When the Jews had been freed by the Persians, they returned to Palestine only to fall into bondage to their own priest‑ridden code of laws, sacrifices, and rituals.
33. From Moses to John the Baptist there extended an unbroken line of faithful teachers who passed the monotheistic torch of light from one generation to another while they unceasingly rebuked unscrupulous rulers, denounced commercializing priests, and ever exhorted the people to adhere to the worship of the supreme Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel.
34. The Jewish religion had many faults‑it was deficient in philosophy and almost devoid of aesthetic qualities‑but it did conserve moral values; therefore it persisted.
35. The Jews loved justice, wisdom, truth, and righteousness as have few peoples, but they contributed least of all peoples to the intellectual comprehension and to the spiritual understanding of these divine qualities.
36. The Jewish religion persisted also because of its institutions. It is difficult for religion to survive as the private practice of isolated individuals. This has ever been the error of the religious leaders: Seeing the evils of institutionalized religion, they seek to destroy the technique of group functioning. In place of destroying all ritual, they would do better to reform it.
37. And thus the successive teachers of Israel accomplished the greatest feat in the evolution of religion ever to be effected on Urantia the gradual but continuous transformation of the barbaric concept of the savage demon Yahweh ... to the later exalted and supernal concept of the supreme Yahweh, creator of all things and the loving and merciful Father of all mankind.
Discussion Questions
1. What kind of action would be appropriate in promoting the Urantia Synopsis of Papers?
2. In what sense do Christians regard themselves as a special or chosen people?.
3. What aspects of religion should we be trying to reform today?
4. Do Christians still regard the fictitious, politically inspired Jewish history as sacred history?
5. Why have the priests and professional religionists dominated and held back spiritual growth?
6. Why didn't Second Isaiah's concept of God become dominant in Judaism?
7. Is religion still dominated by social action and economics?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship