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Without or Within
Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Australia
Having attended the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church on a regular basis for more than sixty years, it came as a bit of a shock to my system when I fell out with the local minister over him labelling the airmen of Bomber Command in World War 2 as war criminals. As 75% of Australian airmen who served in Britain with Bomber Command were killed in ensuring that our minister had the right to free speech, and a goodly number were friends with whom I served, I felt some need to help him get his facts right. However, this gentleman was not interested and things went from bad to worse, culminating in me ceasing to be a church member. Five years later, this minister was moved elsewhere, and I felt able to return to the fold. I will not defend my attitudes and actions as, in retrospect, they were somewhat immature.
However, the five-year absence of contact with a Christian group on a regular basis seems to have presented me with the opportunity to make some kind of re-assessment of both the differences and the relative merits of mainline Christianity and various Urantia Book reader groups with whom I am reasonably familiar.
In the early days of Christianity, the Romans in particular were fond of vilifying Christians as being participants in disgusting rites and orgies, including the cannibalistic consumption of human flesh and the drinking of human blood. Most of this type of vilification emanated from political leaders in need of scape-goats to blame for some disaster for which they themselves were responsible. The origin of the rumor about eating human flesh and drinking human blood was, of course, the bread and wine ceremony given to the apostles as the Remembrance Supper.
The Urantia Book tells us that when passing around the wine cup, Jesus said, "Take this cup, all of you, and drink of it. This shall be the cup of my remembrance...This shall be to you the emblem of the bestowal..." Then he took some bread, broke it in pieces, and passed it around, saying, "Take this bread of remembrance and eat. I have told you that I am the bread of life. And this bread of life is the united life of the Father and the Son in one gift. The word of the Father, as revealed in the Son, is indeed the bread of life." He concluded by saying, "And as often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me...." (1942/3) The Biblical version runs that after handing out the bread, Jesus said: "Take, eat, this is my body." And after handing out the wine, he said, "This is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many."
The transubstantiation doctrine by which the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus came later, and is still current in Roman Catholicism, though rejected by most Protestants. And despite what they might say, I have yet to meet a Catholic who (in my opinion) truly believed the bread he ate or the wine he drank at mass was real flesh or real blood rather than symbolic flesh and blood.
My contact with church-going Christians also leads me to conclude that few delve deeply enough into dogmatic theology for them to give thought to any connection between a God who is both the Father-God of the "Our Father who is in heaven..." prayer and also a God who would not forgive the sins of men except that his son took those sins upon himself by dying on the cross. Many believe fervently that a ransom had to be paid in order for their sins to be forgiven and that Jesus paid that price on the cross, but they give no thought to the question of who received the ransom and why, nor what kind of a God would demand such a ransom. The Father-God in whom they believe really is the God that John describes as "love" in the well-known biblical verse, "God is love." And this God who is perfect love comes out totally unscathed in the forgiveness of sin transaction mainly because few Christians give any thought to the inconsistency in a blood sacrifice having to be offered to him.
The opinions of some Urantia Book readers about what Christians really believe (as contrasted with what they are said to believe, or what can be found in some theological doctrines, or even the Bible itself) seems often to be closer to what the Romans falsely believed about those early Christians whom, because of their nasty natures, they happily threw to the lions .
So what is it about mainline Christianity that many Urantia Book readers want to shun? Alternatively, what are the deficiencies in mainline (or even fundamentalist) Christian teaching that are such that we should, "refrain from all efforts to take something out of the hearts of those who seek salvation," but rather that we should be doing our best to, "labor only to put something into these hungry souls..." and so, "let the great and living truths of the kingdom...drive out all serious error." (1592)
In actuality, I can find very little that is wrong with mainline Christianity that has any need for reformation as it is practiced at the grass roots level. Speaking as a dedicated Urantia Book reader and believer, I find that the vast majority of people I associate with at my local church, or any of the many churches I have attended for communal worship over almost seventy years, are people whose fundamental beliefs are exactly the same as my own. Basically these are epitomised in the first and great commandment to love God above all else and, secondly, to love my neighbor as myself--both also fundamentals of the Jewish belief system. Christianity differs from Juda-ism in that Jesus modified both commandments, firstly by the revelation of his own life as illustrative of the real nature of God, and secondly
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