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The Necessity for Going Forward--Backwardly.
But if revelation is to exalt and upstep the religions of evolution, then must such divine visitations portray teachings which are not too far removed from the thought and reactions of the age in which they are presented. Thus must and does revelation always keep in touch with evolution. Always must the religion of revelation be limited by man's capacity of receptivity. (1007)
But it has often been the error of the teachers of new truth to attempt too much, to attempt to supplant slow evolution by sudden revolution. The Melchizedek missionaries in Mesopotamia raised a moral standard too high for the people; they attempted too much, and their noble cause went down…(1043)
The whole principle of biologic evolution makes it impossible for primitive man to appear on the inhabited worlds with any large endowment of self-restraint...The slowness of evolution, of human cultural progress, testifies to the effectiveness of that brake--material inertia--which so efficiently operates to retard dangerous velocities of progress...For when culture advances overfast, when material achievement outruns the evolution of worship-wisdom, then does civilization contain within itself the seeds of retrogression; and unless buttressed by the swift augmentation of experiential wisdom, such human societies will recede from high but premature levels of attainment, and the "dark ages" of the interregnum of wisdom will bear witness to the inexorable restoration of the imbalance between self-liberty and self-control. (1302)
There are enough warnings in these quotations from the Papers to indicate reasons why they have been written in such a strange manner.
An example of this strangeness is that the restrictions placed upon the revelators proscribing the revelation of unearned knowledge, are not announced until the 1110th page! Further examples of this strangeness are the scattered announcements about the status of truth and revelation that were presented in the flow diagrams of the previous issue of this journal.
To get a real appreciation on why the Papers are as they are it may be helpful to think about the effects this revelation may have had if it carried absolute and indisputable proof of its authenticity in a way that no one could dispute.
Illustrating this possibility, the revelators provided much detail about Sepphoris, a city rebuilt by Herod only a few miles from Nazareth. This city is still the object of an archaeological dig that has already shown Sepphoris to have been a sophisticated city, dominantly Greek in character. The new knowledge is in stark contrast to the long held concept of Jesus having being brought up in an unsophisticated, peasant-style environment among Galileans known to have been held in contempt in Jerusalem. Questions now being asked are, could Jesus speak Greek, and did he attend the theater or see the plays that would have been part of everyday life in such a city?
Little was known of Sepphoris until recently. It would have been simple for the revelators to include exact distances from Nazareth to the amphitheater and other major buildings that could not possibly have been known at the time of receipt of the Papers. Given enough of such indisputable "proofs," it would have been impossible for academics and church leaders to ignore the revelation.
The revelators chose not to do this. Rather, they chose to apply the brakes in their own way. Who can argue that they were not so justified?
It is now apparent that these Urantia Papers cannot be appreciated adequately without long and intensive study. Once we strip them of what is really extraneous material, unnecessary for the real purposes of the revelation, then we find a core that is sheer brilliance, quite unlike anything else that has ever been available to mankind.
But even when we have found that core, we also discover that faith is essential before we can build our lives around its message. We also find among its messages that faith is an absolute necessity if we are to make a truly free will decision to tread the path that Jesus trod--one of total trust in the one he called "Father."
"The quickest way to realize the brotherhood of man on Urantia is to effect the spiritual transformation of present day humanity." (598)
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