|
Red Alert
If one assumes that the Urantia Papers were the work of a group composed entirely of either Catholics or Protestants then, because of the many "Protestant-like" pronouncements to be found in the Papers, many students of religious history would most likely cast their vote in favor of the Papers having been the work of apostate Protestants.
The Catholic study edition of the Good News Bible (Thomas Nelson, N.Y.) contains introductory papers by Roman Catholic scholars that reject the so-called "divine dictation" theory. Also in them we can find, "none of the authors thought of themselves as composing divinely inspired literature," and the Gospel of John "seems to have been worked over and re-edited by John's community over a period of several years." This kind of viewpoint makes biblical fundamentalism impossible.
In contrast, in his book, The Religions of Man, Huston Smith writes:
"The chief Protestant idolatry has been Bibliolatry. Protestants do believe that God speaks to man through the Bible as in no other way. But to elevate it as a book to a point above criticism, to insist that every word and letter was dictated directly by God and so can contain no historical, scientific, or other inaccuracies, is again to forget that, in entering the world, God's word must speak through human minds. Another common instance of idolatry within Protestantism has been the deification of private religious experience. Protestant insistence that faith must be a living experience has often led her constituents to assume that any vital experience must be the working of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps so, but again it is never pure Spirit. The Spirit must work through man so that what is received is never uncompounded."
Question 1: When at some future time, students of religious history formulate their opinion about The Urantia Book and its adherents, are they going to conclude that because the same kind of idolatries had become entrenched about that book, the Papers must have been the work of disenchanted Protestants?
Question 2: By how much have attitudes among Urantia Book readers been influenced by the Protestant thinking of their forbears?
Question 3: What effect will some current attitudes have on acceptance of the book by future generations?
|
|
