Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 4
GOD'S RELATION TO THE UNIVERSE
1. The Universal Father has an eternal purpose pertaining to the material, intellectual, and spiritual phenomena of the universe of universes, which he is executing throughout all time.
2. The providence of God consists in the interlocking activities of the celestial beings and the divine spirits who, in accordance with cosmic law, unceasingly labor for the honor of God and for the spiritual advancement of his universe children…Can you not advance in your concept of God’s dealing with man to that level where you recognize that the watchword of the universe is progress?...Throughout all these millenniums Providence has been working out the plan of progressive evolution.
3. The Universal Father has not withdrawn from the management of the universes; he is not an inactive Deity. If God should retire as the present upholder of all creation, there would immediately occur a universal collapse....The universe is not wound up like a clock to run just so long and then cease to function; all things are constantly being renewed.
4. I am inclined to believe that it is this far-flung and generally unrecognizable control of the co-ordination and interassociation of all phases and forms of universe activity that causes such a variegated and apparently hopelessly confused medley of physical, mental, moral, and spiritual phenomena so unerringly to work out to the glory of God and for the good of men and angels....the apparent “accidents” of the cosmos are undoubtedly a part of the finite drama of the time-space adventure of the Infinite in his eternal manipulation of the Absolutes.
5. Nature is in a limited sense the physical habit of God. Nature is the perfection of Paradise divided by the incompletion, evil, and sin of the unfinished universes....Continuing evolution modifies nature by augmenting the content of Paradise perfection and by diminishing the content of the evil, error, and disharmony of relative reality....No, nature is not God. Nature is not an object of worship.
6. All too long has man thought of God as one like himself, God is not, never was, and never will be jealous of man or any other being in the universe of universes....The eternal God is incapable of wrath and anger in the sense of these human emotions and as man understands such reactions....God repents of nothing he has ever done, now does, or ever will do. He is all-wise as well as all-powerful....The infinite goodness of the Father is beyond the comprehension of the finite mind of time.
7. God is the only stationary, self-contained, and changeless being in the whole universe of universes, having no outside, no beyond, no past, and no future. God is purposive energy (creative spirit) and absolute will, and these are self-existent and universal.
8. God is immutable; but not until you achieve Paradise status can you even begin to understand how God can pass from simplicity to complexity, from identity to variation, from quiescence to motion, from infinity to finitude, from the divine to the human, and from unity to duality and triunity.
9. Of all of the possible titles by which he might appropriately be known, I have been instructed to portray the God of all creation as the Universal Father....He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that tender nature finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved.
10. The consciousness of a victorious human life on earth is born of that creature faith which dares to challenge each recurring episode of existence when confronted with the awful spectacle of human limitations, by the unfailing declaration: Even if I cannot do this, there lives in me one who can and will do it, a part of the Father-Absolute of the universe of universes. And this is “the victory which overcomes the world, even your faith.”
11. Religious tradition is the imperfectly preserved record of the experiences of the God-knowing men of past ages, but such records are untrustworthy as guides for religious living or as the source of true information about the Universal Father. Such ancient beliefs have been invariably altered by the fact that primitive man was a mythmaker.
12. One of the greatest sources of confusion on Urantia concerning the nature of God grows out of the failure of your sacred books clearly to distinguish between the personalities of the Paradise Trinity and between Paradise Deity and the local universe creators and administrators....Many of the messages of subordinate personalities, such as Life Carriers and various orders of angels, have been , in your records, presented as coming from God himself....so that all are included under one appellation.
13. The people of Urantia continue to suffer from the influence of primitive concepts of God....But mortal man is beginning to realize that he lives in a realm of comparative law and order as far as concerns the administrative policies and conduct of the Supreme Creators and Supreme Controllers.
14. The barbarous idea of appeasing an angry God, of propitiating an offended Lord, of winning the favor of Deity through sacrifices and penance and even by the shedding of blood, represents a religion wholly puerile and primitive, a philosophy unworthy of an enlightened age of science and truth....It is an affront to God to believe, hold, or teach that innocent blood must be shed in order to win his favor or to divert the fictitious divine wrath.
15. But the inhabitants of Urantia are to find deliverance from these ancient errors and pagan superstitions respecting the nature of the Universal Father. The revelation of the truth about God is appearing, and the human race is destined to know the Universal Father in all that beauty of character and loveliness of attributes so magnificently portrayed by the Creator Son [Christ] who sojourned on Urantia as the Son of Man and the Son of God.
Discussion Questions
1, From our limited human point of view, what are some of the possible purposes God is actualizing? How do we search for God’s purposes?
2. If the watchword of the universe is progress, what should be our attitude toward conservative minds who resist change? How do we distinguish progress from change?
3. Is the universe more like “a clock that is wound-up and running independently” described by Deism or like Gaia— “a living organism”?
4. Why does the Old Testament speak of an angry God and a God who regrets his actions?
5. How do we harmonize the changelessness of God with the many different manifestations of God?
6. In the face of obvious inconsistencies in scripture, why do some denominations believe in the literal inerrancy of the Bible?
7. Why has the atonement doctrine been so popular in Christianity?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship