Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 196
THE FAITH OF JESUS
1. Jesus enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God. He experienced the ordinary ups and. downs of mortal existence, but he never religiously doubted the certainty of God's watchcare and. guidance. His faith was the outgrowth of the insight born of the activity of the divine presence, his indwelling Adjuster. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was wholly personal and. purely spiritual.
2. Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one mortal, did God. ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
3. In the Master’s life on Urantia, this and all other worlds of the local creation discover a new and higher type of religion, religion based. on personal spiritual relations with the Universal Father and wholly validated by the supreme authority of genuine personal experience. This living faith of Jesus was more than an intellectual reflection, and it was not a mystic meditation. Theology may fix, formulate, define, and. dogmatize faith, but in the human life of Jesus faith was personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely spiritual.
4. The all‑consuming and. indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never attempted to run away with his well‑balanced intellectual judgments concerning the proportional values of practical and commonplace social, economic, and. moral life situations. The Son of Man was a splendidly unified human personality; he was a perfectly endowed divine being; he was also magnificently co-ordinated as a combined human and. divine being functioning on earth as a single personality.
5. The faith of Jesus visualized all spirit values as being found in the kingdom of God; therefore he said, "Seek first the kingdom of heaven."...Having thus conceived. of the kingdom as comprising the will of God, he devoted himself to the cause of its realization with amazing self‑forgetfulness and. unbounded enthusiasm.
6. Jesus brought to God., as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings: the consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing the divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion wholly in terms of the Father's will.
7. To him prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, and avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of thought, an invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental surrender of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage, the proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty mobilization of the combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies toward selfishness, evil, and sin...The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by intelligent prayer and. sincere worship—unbroken communion with God—and not by leadings, voices, visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
8. The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child's trust...His sense of dependence on the divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance of absolute personal security ...In this giant intellect of the full‑grown man the faith of the child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness.
9. Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father...Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also to believe as he believed...It required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.
10. No matter how great the fact of the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus away from men...The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries...Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and. the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
11. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
12. The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to the world. The people heard him gladly because he was one of them, an unpretentious layman; the world's greatest religious teacher was indeed a layman.
13. Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus.
14. The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul ...The New Testament is a superb Christian document, but it is only meagerly Jesusonian.
15. The great mistake that has been made by those who have studied the Master's life is that some have conceived of him as entirely human, while others have thought of him as only divine. Throughout his entire experience he was truly both human and divine, even as he yet is. But the greatest mistake was made in that, while the human Jesus was recognized as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a religion.
16. Jesus founded the religion of personal experience in doing the will of God and serving the human brotherhood; Paul founded a religion in which the glorified Jesus became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of fellow believers in the divine Christ.
17. Many of his declarations should be considered as a confession of what be demanded of himself rather than what he required of all his followers. In his devotion to the cause of the kingdom, Jesus burned all bridges behind him; he sacrificed all hindrances to the doing of his Father's will.
18. Jesus did not share Paul's pessimistic view of humankind.. The Master looked. upon men as the sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and. eternal future for those who chose survival ...He saw most men as weak rather than wicked, more distraught than depraved .... He taught men to place a high value upon themselves in time and in eternity.
19. Personal, spiritual religious experience is an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties; it is an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all human problems. Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them. True religion unifies the personality for effective adjustment to all mortal requirements.
20. There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation. The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy, and truth. Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason, wisdom, and. faith—physical reality, intellectual reality, and. spiritual reality. We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning, and value.
21. The progressive comprehension of reality is the equivalent of approaching God. The finding of God., the consciousness of identity with reality, is the equivalent of the experiencing of self‑completion—self‑entirety, self‑totality ...The full summation of human life is the knowledge that man is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved—justified—by religious faith.
22. There is a spirit nucleus in the mind of man—the Adjuster of the divine presence. There are three separate evidences of this spirit indwelling of the human mind:
1. Humanitarian fellowship —love...
2. Interpretation of the universe—wisdom...
3. Spiritual evaluation of life—worship ...Thus it appears that all human progress is effected by a technique of conjoint revelational evolution.
Unless a divine lover lived in man, he could not unselfishly and spiritually love. Unless an interpreter lived in the mind, man could not truly realize the unity of the universe. Unless an evaluator dwelt with man, he could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings.
23. Personal religious experience consists in two phases: discovery in the human mind and. revelation by the indwelling divine spirit. Through oversophistication or as a result of the irreligious conduct of professed religionists, a man, or even a generation of men, may elect to suspend their efforts to discover the God who indwells them; they may fail to progress in and attain the divine revelation.
24. The exquisite and transcendent experience of loving and being loved is not just a psychic illusion because it is so purely subjective. The only truly divine and objective reality that is associated with mortal beings, the Thought Adjuster, functions to human observation apparently as an exclusively subjective phenomenon. Man's contact with the highest objective reality, Cod, is only through the purely subjective experience of knowing him, or worshiping him, of realizing sonship with him.
25. God is not the mere invention of man's idealism; he is the very source of all such super‑animal insights and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to unify the human concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality of love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived..
26. Morality is the essential pre‑existent soil of personal God-consciousness...The moral nature is superanimal but subspiritnal...Religion provides for the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival of everything morality recognizes and approves.
27. Religion stands above science, art, philosophy, ethics, and morals, but not independent of them. They are all indissolubly interrelated in human experience, personal and social… Religious insight possesses the power of turning defeat into higher desires and new determinations. Love is the highest motivation which man may utilize in his universe ascent. But love, divested of truth, beauty, and goodness, is only a sentiment, a philosophic distortion, a psychic illusion, a spiritual deception. Love must always be redefined on successive levels of morontia and spirit progression.
28. Art results from man's attempt to escape from the lack of beauty in his material environment; it is a gesture toward the morontia level. Science is man's effort to solve the apparent riddles of the material universe. Philosophy is man's attempt at the unification of human experience. Religion is man's supreme gesture, his magnificent reach for final reality, his determination to find God and to be like him.
29. Some men’s lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful ...This concept of love generates in the soul of man that superanimal effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find. them, he is glorified in their embrace: he is consumed with the desire to live them, to do righteousness. Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of God to the world., in and through Jesus, shall not fail.
30. The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind.. Man's greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well‑balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self‑consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul‑consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit‑consciousness—contact with the divine presence.
31. And. God‑consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality ...The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his Sons. And the spirit of the Father is in his Son's sons—mortal men. When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God.
Discussion Questions
1. What is the value of theology in contrast to personal living faith?
2. What does Jesus’ use of prayer suggest to us?
3. How does one determine when an act is truly loving?
4. Why is it important to know that Jesus’ life was devoid of leadings, voices, visions, or channeling?
5. Why, in the main, have most of the advanced spiritual paradigms been presented by lay people rather than priests or religious professionals?
6. Why is the progressive comprehension of reality the equivalent of approaching God?
7. What does it mean that morality is superanimal but subspiritual?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship