The following letter is my humble attempt to recall, in honest detail, my
spiritual journey, including my immersion in a false New Age religion, and my
subsequent return to the Lord. I hope that my testimony will open the eyes of
pastors, church leaders, and Christian apologists, assisting them in their
efforts to minister to intellectually inclined seekers, as well as Christians
with sincere doubts and questions about their faith.
I wish to dispel the myth that “real Christians” don’t
doubt the Bible and never stray from the path of theological orthodoxy. In my
case, I not only doubted cardinal Christian doctrines like the virgin birth,
substitutionary atonement, and the physical resurrection of Christ, but I even
spoke out publicly against these truths.
But thank God, we are not saved by our theology, as important as that is.
It is Christ and Christ alone who saves. I am saved only by what Christ did
for me on the cross, not by my belief in His atoning sacrifice. It’s
about his faithfulness to me; not about my fidelity to Him or my adherence to
correct Christian doctrine.
The same is true of repentance from sin. While it’s true that
God’s kindness moves us to repentance (Romans 2:4), the Gospel does not
begin with my repentance, but with Christ’s work on my behalf. It is God
who took the initiative, for “we love because He first loved us”
(1 John 4:19). I know now that I never lost my salvation, I just lost my faith
for a while.
Yet in saying this, I don’t want people to think that belief is
irrelevant or unimportant. Believing in Jesus is essential to salvation, and
only believers will be saved. My point here is that God took the initiative in
saving us; He came to us before we ever came to Him. Because of His
unconditional love for us, He provided a way for us to be saved before we ever
chose to believe.
We are all "potentially" saved, in the sense that salvation is both
accomplished and offered as an unearned gift. It is up to us to receive that
gift, although the gift was there for us long before we ever chose to receive
it. I am not a universalist. There is a Hell, and many people end up there.
It’s a question of emphasis in our presentation of the Gospel.
So belief is essential to salvation, it is not the basis of our
salvation. That work belongs to Christ and Christ alone.
While it is ultimately true that God gets all the glory for my return home
to His fold, I could not have done it without the gracious assistance of
several Christian brothers and sisters. I would like to begin by thanking Dr.
Freddy Cardoza, chairman of the Christian Education Department at Biola
University, whose messages spoke to both my head and my heart. Freddy never
patronized me, and always answered my theological questions to the best of his
ability. He always made me feel like I didn’t have to check my
intelligence at the door before I entered a church service. Freddy,
you’re not only a great teacher, but a wonderful friend.
I would also like to thank Don Veinot of Midwest Christian Outreach, who
also answered my theological questions, particularly about specific biblical
passages, always clearly and in context. Many thanks also to Dale Essary,
whose site, http://www.ubhoax.org, is the best refutation of the UB I’ve
ever seen. And credit goes to Eric Pement, who has also done extensive work on
the UB from a Christian perspective. In addition, I’d like to thank Tom
Trento, who came into my life to remind me that things really were better in
my Father’s house. Thanks are also extended to Grant Swank, who modeled
the love of Christ to me, and is the very opposite of a self-righteous
legalist.
This list would not be complete without the inclusion of three men who I
have known for a long time through my background in Christian radio. The first
is talk-show host Dick Staub, who I interned with in the 1990s. Dick never
spoke Christianese, and showed me that it was perfectly possible to be a
Christian and still be a well-rounded, well-read intellectual. The second is
Rich Buhler, who validated my feelings and ministered to me in his kind and
gracious way. And of course, how can I forget my dear friend, brother, and
business partner Steve Carr, who continued to view me as my brother in Christ,
even as I was spreading false teaching.
For most of my life, I have been searching for a sense of community—for
an extended family that would love me unconditionally. For a while, I thought
I would find this family among Urantia Book readers. But the truth is, my
support group was sitting right under my nose. Three brothers in Christ stand
out in particular: Bob Brasher, whom I have known since 1993 (Bob, you are as
reliable as clockwork); Dan Lapinski, whose eagerness to love and serve others
puts me to shame; and Don Roberts, who is just an all-around good brother. And
how can I forget Jerry McGlothlin, who has provided employment for me for the
last 10 years, and has stayed loyal to me despite my inconsistent and sporadic
work habits.
Before I get accused of making this an all-men’s club, my heartfelt
gratitude goes out to Dani Chaffin, whose struggles have been so similar to my
own. Dani, you’re a kindred spirit, and trust me, that’s a huge
compliment. I would also like to thank Julie Osgood and Julie Canny, who both
showed me unconditional love.
And before I forget, I need to thank my good friend Roger Mansour, who led
me to the Lord when I was fifteen. Roger, you have been a great friend,
mentor, and father figure through the years. You even got me started as a
standup comedian. Roger has a mission in Haiti, and I would encourage everyone
who reads this letter to give what they can to his ministry. He can be reached
at "mission.helphaiti@yahoo.com".
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotes are taken from the New
American Standard translation of the Bible. In the body of this letter, the
term UB will be used to refer to the Urantia Book. The universal referencing
system introduced by the Uversa Press edition of The Urantia Book as
"(Paper:Section.Paragraph)" will be used to cite passages from the UB.
I was born in Chicago on January 16, 1970, the child of 1st-generation
immigrants. My mother, who is Ukrainian, escaped Communism with her family
shortly after WW II, spending her first few years in a displaced
persons’ camp. My father emigrated from Italy as a teenager. I grew up
in a nominally Catholic home. My mother and grandmother attended a Ukrainian
Catholic church. I went on occasion, but frankly, the whole experience bored
the hell out of me. The emphasis was on ethnic traditions; many of which were
beautiful, but I never heard the Gospel and never heard anyone speak of God in
a personal or intimate way.
The one notable exception was my grandmother. She was an orthodox Catholic
and believed in purgatory, but she knew the Lord intimately, despite some of
her unbiblical theology. I can fondly remember her kneeling by my bedside and
saying the Our Father in Ukrainian, along with the obligatory prayers to Mary
and my guardian angel. It was clear to me that for her, the Lord was a deeply
felt presence, not an abstract or distant deity. I never could tell what my
mother believed; I don’t think she knows to this day.
My father was basically an atheist. Though he never labeled himself as
such, he was strongly interested in artificial intelligence, and believed that
human brain patterns could be replicated in the laboratory. After all, he
reasoned, we’re just sophisticated machines, devoid of anything like a
soul or spirit.
While I like to tell people that I got saved 2,000 years ago when Jesus
died for me, I did have a few conversion experiences, where God made His
presence known to me and assured me that I was His child. I was five years
old, and riding the school bus home, when the driver turned to me and asked,
“Would you like to ask Jesus into your heart?” She was a sweet
Southern lady, and her son, a kid about my age, was sitting in the back seat.
It was obvious she was raising him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
“Yes,” I said, and responded in childlike faith. When I got home,
I told my Mom that I had just asked Jesus into my heart. I don’t recall
what she said, but it obviously didn’t make an impression on her.
Growing up as a blind child, I wasn’t as physical as other kids,
which gave me a lot of time for solitary reflection. I spent a lot of time
reading. I was a very precocious child, and was reading Greek mythology in 2nd
grade. I even tried reading Mark Twain a year earlier. My favorite books were
those that fed my imagination—fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, etc. My
mother hated reading me those stories; she preferred realistic books. As I
look back on it, those books paved the way for my later spiritual pursuits;
they gave me a glimpse of a possible world beyond this one.
I also spent a lot of time listening to the radio. While my sighted friends
spent much of their leisure time watching television, I was obsessing over the
AM signals I picked up from Canada, or my dream of one day sitting behind the
microphone and spinning the tunes. My childhood hero was Steve Dahl, a local
shock jock who made news with a stunt called Disco Demolition in 1979. I
wanted to be the next Steve Dahl. I was obsessed with radio formats, and I
would call up DJs and spend hours grilling them about the industry. I knew
more about radio than any kid should be allowed to know.
Well, during my trips up and down the dial, along with the rock and roll, I
discovered Christian radio. In particular, I found a program called
“Unshackled,” a radio drama series produced at the Pacific Garden
Mission in Chicago. The stories were about people whose lives had been changed
after they had received Jesus as their personal Savior. Honestly, the dramas
were pretty tacky, complete with melodramatic organ music and bad B movie
dialogue. But they still had an effect on me; I wanted what these people had.
I wanted a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. I wanted my heart to change.
I wanted Jesus as my best and closest friend. But I didn’t know how to
get it; I had no Christians I could go to for help, so I was left to my own
devices.
The summer before my freshman year in high school, I wrote a poem in a
creative writing class. I normally don’t write poetry, but this one was
an adolescent masterpiece.
I am the fish that swim in the ocean,
I am the catastrophe after the explosion.
I am the birds that sit in the trees,
I am the leaves that blow in the breeze.
I am the book you read before bed,
I am the thoughts you have in your head.
I am the past, the present, the future,
I am everywhere.
I am.
Pleased with my work, I read it to a friend of mine, who told his dad about
it. Apparently, he was impressed; he thought I was some enlightened soul or
something. So, next time I saw my friend, he introduced me to a book that
would chart my spiritual course for years to come.
It was June of 1984, and I had just graduated from the 8th grade. My friend
spent the night one evening, and after dinner, he told me about this book his
dad had been reading for years. Called the Urantia Book, it claimed to be a
revelation from angels and other superhuman beings. The term Urantia was a
name these celestial beings had apparently coined for our planet. Anyway, I
was scared and fascinated at the same time. Fascinated by the prospect of a
book that claimed to be a revelation from another world, and attracted by the
thrill of special knowledge. But scared because so much of what my friend had
told me was contrary to what I’d been taught, and so different from what
I’d been hearing on Christian radio. So, for those not in the loop,
here’s an overview.
The Urantia Book (UB) is a huge tome, 2097 pages long, that consists of 196
papers, each one claiming to be written by a different celestial being. The
alleged authors go by names like Perfector of Wisdom, Divine Counselor,
Brilliant Evening Star, and Melchizedek.
The UB community makes a big deal about the “unknown origin” of
the book, but there is a widely circulated urban legend about how it came to
be. The consensus account involves a man named Dr. William S. Sadler, a
student of Freud’s and a psychiatrist practicing in Chicago in the early
1900s. Apparently, a woman came to him concerned about her husband, who would
go into a deep sleep from which she was unable to waken him. While in this
trance-like state, this man was supposedly being used as a kind of
clearing-house for various celestial beings, who spoke through this person.
This man, whose anonymity has been protected, is known among the UB readership
as the “sleeping subject.”
The spin is that Dr. Sadler was a skeptic of the paranormal. He was on a
crusade to disprove the various mediums, psychics, and other occult
practitioners that made the lecture circuit at that time. Sadler claimed to
disprove every single case except the one involving the sleeping subject. So,
in the summer of 1911, shortly after he discovered this guy, he formed a group
of five people called the Contact Commission, designed to study the messages
that were coming from the subject’s mouth. The process began in 1911,
and went on for over 20 years. In 1929, Sadler wrote a book called The Mind at
Mischief, in which he tried to show that most paranormal claims were based on
self-deception, and could be explained away as either outright fraud or could
be chalked up to natural psychological processes. But in the appendix to the
book, Sadler mentions the case of the sleeping subject, and claims he has no
explanation for it.
During the 1930s, as rumor has it, the papers began to mysteriously appear
in Sadler’s drawer. By 1935, the Urantia Papers were completed. At the
time, the papers had not yet been published in the form of a book, but Sadler
gathered around him a group of close associates known as the Forum. The Forum
members would meet on Sunday afternoons at Dr. Sadler’s office building
at 533 Diversey Parkway to discuss and study the papers. Eventually, the
papers were published by the Urantia Foundation as a book in 1955.
The UB is divided into four parts plus a foreword. The parts are named as
follows: Part I, The Central and Superuniverses; Part II, The Local Universe;
Part III, The History of Urantia; and Part IV, The Life and Teachings of
Jesus. Like most good science fiction, the UB teaches that we are not alone in
the universe. The text claims that the universe is teeming with life of all
sorts and contains a veritable plethora of beings: human, animal, and
otherwise. Many of these beings, like humans, have the capacity to know God
and to strive to be like him.
Striving to be like God is a huge theme in the UB. The authors take quite
literally Jesus’ command to “be perfect, even as your Father in
Heaven is perfect” (cf. Matthew 5:48). This works out practically as a
command to _become_ perfect in the sense of self-perfection. Since this
perfection is obviously unattainable in this life, many lives are required to
achieve it. But the authors are quick to point out that they don’t
endorse reincarnation. Instead, we are offered a plan the UB calls the
Ascension Scheme.
The UB’s worldview is essentially evolutionary. Human beings evolve
from their animal origins and gradually evolve into godlike status as spirit
beings. The Ascension scheme primarily embraces life after death, as mortals
move through a series of worlds in various sectors of the universe designed to
instruct them in universe administration and spiritual progress.
In other words, when we die, the UB teaches that we will wake up on a world
where we will continue to learn and grow. Once we have finished learning our
“lessons” in that world, we go on to the next one, and the next
one, etc, until we become perfect and attain Paradise. Once entering Paradise,
we don’t stay there forever; instead, we become part of an eternal group
of volunteers called the Corps of the Finality. As a member of this corps, we
go back out into the universe and serve in some unrevealed capacity among
other evolutionary planets.
The UB claims to reveal an immense cosmic bureaucracy; a whole host of
angels and other celestial beings with various specialized functions. The
universe is said to operate on a three-branch system of government much like
the American Constitution. And speaking of life after death, the UB rejects
entirely any notion of Hell or eternal punishment. Rather than Hell, those who
deliberately reject God will simply be annihilated; they will cease to exist.
The vast universe described in the UB is made up of various divisions. Our
planet, Urantia, is part of a local system called Satania. Satania is part of
a constellation called Norlatiadek, which is part of a local universe called
Nebadon. Each local universe has 10 million inhabited worlds, and is part of a
superuniverse, of which there are seven. Ours is called Orvonton. Each local
universe has at its head a being called a Creator Son. A Creator Son is the
creator of each local universe and all its inhabited worlds. Each of the
Creator Sons is of the Order of Michael. Our Creator Son, Michael, incarnated
in the likeness of mortal flesh 2,000 years ago as Jesus of Nazareth.
According to the UB, a great gulf exists between God and human beings. But
unlike the Bible, which describes this gulf as caused by sin, the UB instead
says the gulf is just caused by distance. We are finite, and God is infinite;
therefore, God needs some way to communicate to our finite minds in a way that
we can comprehend. So, each Creator Son represents God to His local universe.
This means that Jesus is not literally God, but is God for “all
practical intents and purposes” (5:3.6). The UB tries to play both sides
of the fence when it comes to the deity of Christ. On the one hand, Jesus
loses His uniqueness as the second Person of the Trinity, but instead is
relegated to being one of 700,000 Creator Sons who presides over his local
universe of 10 million inhabited worlds. On the other hand, the UB makes
several references to Jesus as God, seemingly affirming the doctrine of the
Incarnation by referring to Jesus as fully God and fully man. The book even
calls Jesus the “father incarnate” (182:1.9). But this only means
that Jesus embodies God’s nature; not that He is actually God. The
UB’s take is that Jesus’ primary mission was to reveal the Father
to us. So, he is a revelation of God, but not in fact God.
And speaking of the Trinity, the UB teaches this doctrine, but Jesus is not
directly a part of it. The Paradise Trinity consists of the Universal Father,
the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit. Jesus is not the Eternal Son, but is
an offspring of the Paradise Trinity, as are all the Creator Sons. So, when we
pray to or worship Jesus, we are not addressing God directly, but only
addressing Him through Jesus, who is God’s personal representation in
our local universe.
Let me stop here and apologize to my readers, who may be confused by all
this convoluted gobbledygook. You see, I found the UB fascinating
intellectually. I had a very curious and speculative mind, so the UB appealed
to my intellect. Unfortunately, it did nothing for my heart, which is why I
eventually rejected it.
Part III of the UB is called the History of Urantia, and claims to reveal a
host of lost facts about our planetary evolution and ancient past. The UB
claims that planetary evolution is guided by revelation, and this revelation
occurs in periodic times or epochs, and is thus referred to as epochal
revelation. The UB claims to be the fifth Epochal Revelation, and is the only
one in book form. The other four revelations have come to us in the form of
various divine beings. Working backwards, the fourth Epochal Revelation was
Jesus, the third was Melchizedek, the second was Adam and Eve, and the first
was a being called the Planetary Prince. An Epochal Revelation’s purpose
is to guide evolution in a Godward direction, and sometimes to give it a big
boost, as in the case of Jesus.
According to the UB, the first Epochal Revelation occurred 500,000 years
ago, apparently half a million years after the first human beings came on the
scene. This aid to evolution came in the form of a being called the Planetary
Prince, who came here with a staff of 100. The Planetary Prince was a
superhuman being from another world whose mission was to uplift the primitive
tribes and give them some semblance of culture and civilization. But our
Prince, a fellow named Caligastia, decided to follow his bosses, Satan and
Lucifer, in their rebellion against the rule of Our Creator son Michael some
200,000 years ago. This rebellion set our evolution back a bit, but with the
aid of various spiritual influences, we can get back on track. And by the way,
just for your information, Lucifer and Satan are currently doing time on
detention worlds, a kind of universe holding pen, until their cases are
adjudicated and they can be wiped out once and for all. In the meantime,
Caligastia and his pal Daligastia are still free to roam the Earth, but they
don’t have much power unless you really want them to enter your mind.
The second Epochal Revelation was Adam and Eve. But, as should be obvious
by now, Adam and Eve were not the first people on Earth. That distinction
belongs to Andon and Fonta, a pair of twins born nearly one million years ago
to parents who were pre-human hominids. No, Adam and Eve, in the UB’s
telling, were a couple of beings called Material Sons and Daughters. They too,
came from another world (about 38,000 years ago), and their mission was
primarily biological. Get this, Adam and Eve were eight feet tall, had violet
skin, and had halos around their bodies. Their mission was to procreate; to
produce a million children, and these children were supposed to intermarry
with the native stock and produce a genetically superior hybrid. I kid you
not—it’s like the gods coming down from Mount Olympus.
And it gets even better. Some races got more of Adam’s blood than
others; in other words, the children of Adam and Eve preferred certain ethnic
groups to others. Yep, you guessed it—there are definitely racial undertones
to this thing. The Nordic white races received a considerable share of the
Adamic blood, whereas the African Negroid race received very little (if any)
of the Adamic stock.
But this, too, turned into an evolutionary setback. It seems that Adam and
Eve were getting frustrated with the progress they were making, so Eve decided
to take a shortcut and mate with a regular human. Well, that wasn’t part
of the plan. The UB authors make a big deal about evolution needing to take
its course, and oppose any attempts to circumvent the process. So because of
their “default,” Adam and Eve became mortal and were deprived of
the sustenance that came from the Tree of Life, a shrub that essentially gave
them immortality while they were here. In fact, they were supposed to stay
here indefinitely, and build a base of operations from the Garden of Eden,
which apparently was somewhere in the Middle East. So Adam and Eve did not get
to have as many children as they were supposed to, and the blending of the
violet race with the natives didn’t go as planned. So we didn’t
get the full benefit of the Adamic infusion, which is another reason why our
planet is backward and is apparently quarantined from the other planets in our
local system. We’re one of 37 such worlds that are isolated from the
rest.
The third Epochal Revelation was Melchizedek, another superhuman being who
essentially came to teach monotheism to a primitive, polytheistic world. Of
course, his first student was Abraham (cf. Genesis 14:18), but he also sent
missionaries out to other tribes to spread the Gospel of one God. But despite
his influence with Abraham, the teachings of Melchizedek became diluted by the
surrounding pagan cultures and were “lost” to history (cf.
93:7.3-4).
And finally, we get to Jesus, the fourth Epochal Revelation and the subject
of the last 800 pages of the UB.
And just who is Jesus, according to the UB, and just what is his Gospel?
Well, as indicated above, Jesus is our Creator Son, the sovereign ruler of 10
million worlds in our local universe. Apparently, before he came to Earth, he
was just Michael, and not Jesus. While he ruled in the name of God the Father
and perfectly represented God to the creatures of his domain, he needed some
additional experience. In other words, he needed to know what it was really
like to be one of his own creatures. This alone should dispel any claims that
the UB supports the deity of Christ. If Jesus is truly God, then He is
omniscient, and would already have direct insight into the minds of His
creatures. But the UB takes a more nuanced view of omniscience. The UB says,
“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” (196:0.6).
The book’s view is that there are two types of omniscience,
existential and experiential. The two levels of knowing might be analogous to
reading a novel and identifying with the characters, versus actually being one
of those characters and living in their skin. So, apparently Jesus had to gain
that second type of omniscience in order to earn the full sovereignty of his
universe. Jesus also came to reveal to us the true nature of God the Father.
Because you see, we’ve got God all wrong, say the UB authors. We think
God is wrathful, vengeful, or angry, which he never is; and apparently our
present-day Christian faith has been contaminated with erroneous concepts of
God, derived from the primitive religion of early backward peoples.
Our primitive ancestors just didn’t get it. They didn’t
understand science, or causality, so when they went through a thunderstorm or
an earthquake, they assumed it was God shaking the Earth in His wrath. And
this whole blood sacrifice thing has got to go. The UB rails against the
cardinal tenet of the Christian Gospel, that Jesus died as a substitutionary
sacrifice for our sins and shed His blood so that we could be saved. The UB
calls this doctrine “repulsive,” “barbarous,” and
“unworthy of an enlightened age of science and truth” (4:5.4). The
UB’s God is a loving Father, and only a loving Father; not a king or a
judge. While the UB does have a concept of God’s justice, God’s
love transcends that justice, because “The infinite love of God is not
secondary to anything in the divine nature” (188:4.8). In the UB, any
sense of God’s justice is basically impersonal. In other words, if we
break God’s laws, we may suffer the consequences, the same way a person
might break both legs by jumping out a window and thinking they can defy the
law of gravity. But God does not take a personal stand against injustice; he
may grieve over it, but he certainly doesn’t get angry about it or take
action against it. In fact, the authors go so far as to say that God
doesn’t hate sin. You see, “towards sin God strikes no personal
attitude (2:5.1),” for “sin is not a person” and
“persons can only love and hate other persons” (2:6.8). So Jesus
came to correct our understanding of God so we can grow up and get over our
childish views of Him. But before I get into the UB’s understanding of
the Gospel, I’ll just give a little more background on Jesus as he is
portrayed in the UB’s pages.
The UB claims to give us an extended and detailed biography of Jesus,
including the so-called “missing years,” the events of his life
between the ages of 12 and 30, which are absent from the Bible. The authors
tell us that Jesus was born naturally, and was not the product of a virgin
birth. He was also the eldest of nine children, and had to assume the headship
of his family after Joseph died in a construction accident when Jesus was 14.
Jesus was their brother, but also had to play the role of their father. I
assume the authors were trying to make a point with this story, stating that
Jesus is both our father and our brother; our brother because he assumed our
nature and likeness so he could identify with us, and our father because he
created us and serves as a surrogate God the Father for everyone in his local
universe.
And this reminds me of something else. According to the UB, God is not
actually personally present here on Earth or in time and space. He is only
present indirectly through Jesus and the other Creator Sons. He is personally
present only on Paradise and in a perfect universe of one billion worlds
called Havona. But God is present to us in the form of fragments of Himself
called Thought Adjusters. The Thought Adjuster, a central concept in the UB,
is a fragment of God that indwells the mind of every person who is capable of
making moral decisions. After our first moral decision, at about age 5 or 6, a
person is indwelled by a Thought Adjuster, a fragment of God that guides a
human being through life and in preparation for the next stage of the
Ascension Scheme. At some point in a person’s ascension career, usually
after death, they will fuse with their Adjuster, and the two will become one.
But the presence of this Thought Adjuster is not personal; it is pre-personal,
meaning that God does not personally indwell our minds. He indwells our minds
as a pre-personal fragment of Himself, meaning that when we fuse with Him,
each fragment of God will get our personality. As one UB reader put it, God is
becoming us.
Okay, back to Jesus. So after his daddy dies, Jesus works to support his
family in various occupations; not only as a carpenter, but as a boat-builder,
a caravan driver, and a tutor to the son of an Indian merchant. The book
recounts his alleged travels to Greece, Rome, India, etc. During this time,
Jesus grows increasingly conscious of his mission and his divinity. Then Jesus
begins his public ministry. While UB readers claim that the enhanced
“revelation” of Jesus only builds on, and does not contradict
Scripture, the truth is that it differs from Scripture in significant ways and
is essentially a re-write of the Gospels. While most of the miracles remain
intact, a couple of them are missing. In the UB’s account, Jesus
didn’t walk on water; this was just a dream that Peter had while he fell
asleep in the boat. Also missing is Jesus casting demons into a herd of swine.
While the book doesn’t deny the fact of the cross, it denies its
necessity for our salvation. Instead, the cross is simply an opportunity for
Jesus to overcome evil with good, and extend love and forgiveness to his
enemies. Jesus doesn’t rise in a physical body; instead, he is raised in
a form the authors call morontia, a form that we will supposedly take in the
next world after death. The biblical account of Thomas touching Jesus and
putting his hands in His sides is rewritten to conform to this alternate
narrative.
So, again, what is the Gospel according to the UB? Well, the UB claims that
the Gospel that is present-day Christianity is not the actual Gospel of Jesus,
but a distorted hybrid of truth and error that comes mostly from Peter and
Paul, and not from Jesus himself. You see, Jesus did not come to rescue us
from the consequences of sin, to bring us salvation or to make us God’s
children so we can join God’s family. No, Jesus came to teach us that we
are already God’s children. We don’t need salvation and certainly
not redemption, because salvation is basically a given; it’s built into
the mechanism of creation. We don’t have to become God’s children;
we already are God’s children.
In fact, the UB deliberately alters John 1:12. The biblical text says,
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become
children of God.” But the term “become” is replaced in the
UB. Instead, the passage reads as follows: “As many as received him, to
them gave he the power to recognize that they are the sons of God”
(40:6.2). So, all we need to do is wake up to our natural identity as
God’s children. No act of redemption, forgiveness or deliverance is
required to make us God’s children; we just need some corrective
education. While the UB authors say it’s okay to call Jesus our Savior,
the Jesus they portray is really more like a teacher than a Savior. In fact,
the UB says in at least two places that we should simply take our salvation
for granted (103:9.5; 188:4.9).
In reality, the UB is simply parroting a concept popular with liberal
Protestant theologians from the early 20th century. The acronym for this
concept is FOGBOM, which stands for the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man. In even simpler terms, the Gospel according to this paradigm is: God
is our Father, and we are all his Children. As the old song says, “With
God as our Father, brothers all are we.” If we all treated each other as
brothers and sisters, well then we would have peace on Earth. So, I know
it’s long-winded, but that is my summary of most of the teachings of the
UB; though I know I’ve left out quite a bit. I feel I have to give all
this background info so that readers of this letter have some idea where I
came from theologically, and the kinds of doubts and questions I struggled
with. While most people will not be directly influenced by the UB, these ideas
are by no means unique to the book. In fact, the UB plagiarizes many of its
concepts directly from external sources, and even admits to doing so. So, I
hope that what I say in the rest of this letter will help those who are
reaching out to people under the sway of these ideas.
After my friend told me about the UB, I started attending study-groups at
his house, which his dad led. Except for Christian radio, my only exposure to
religion at that point was the dry, ritualistic services I would occasionally
attend at my family’s Ukrainian Catholic church. But this was something
entirely different. I was a bright, analytical kid, and the discussions we had
at the study-group were a feast for my intellect. And people took my ideas and
questions seriously. It was like listening to a bunch of rabbis discuss the
Talmud. But there was still something missing for me in all of this
high-minded talk. I wanted the intimate, personal relationship with God that I
heard the preachers talk about on Christian radio. I wanted to feel
God’s presence, to know His warmth, and to experience His intimate
embrace. While the UB spoke of having a relationship with a loving Father God,
it didn’t tell me how to get this relationship.
Eventually, the study-groups felt more and more like an academic exercise,
and less and less like spiritual nourishment. I was living in Rockford,
Illinois, at the time, but my family ended up moving to Barrington, a Chicago
suburb. Though the UB originated in Chicago, I did not attend any more study
groups until a couple of years after I moved. In the meantime, I was still
listening to Christian radio, and I discovered a show called "Rock Talk." The
show was hosted by a couple of former rock musicians who had become
Christians. One of them, Roger Mansour, gave his home phone number out on the
air. I used to call him up and argue with him; he and his friend Ronnie would
quote the Bible, and I would quote the UB. I was a stubborn SOB, I tell you.
The discussions would go on for hours. But at one point, Roger and Ronnie
suggested that I look at a book called Seeds of Change by Kerry
Livgren.
Kerry was a member of the rock band Kansas and he, too, had been a student
of the UB, but had subsequently come to faith in Christ, the Christ of the
Bible. So I got the book from the library, and my mom read me the chapter on
the UB. I was very impressed with his testimony. Essentially, he articulated
what I had always known; the UB spoke to my intellect, but the Gospel as
presented in Scripture spoke directly to my heart. After hearing his
testimony, I called my friend Roger, in a place of humility and ready to
receive Christ. He led me in a prayer over the phone and I embraced Jesus as
my personal Lord and Savior. I felt wonderful, and I experienced a peace I had
never felt in my entire life. I remember that night very well; I was even
praising God in the shower. My mom even heard me, but she didn’t know
what I was yelling about. I didn’t feel I could share it with her; it
was something very personal, and something I didn’t think she would
understand.
I wish I could say that the road was smooth and free of rocks and thorns
after that, but I would be lying if I did. Quite often, I feel that we in the
body of Christ, in our public testimonies, are quick to present an image of a
quick and clean conversion, an image that gives the impression that all our
struggles are behind us and part of our past. We like to quote the verse that
says, “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things
passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). After
all, this was certainly the way it was presented on the Unshackled radio
dramas I listened to. I can only speak for myself and say that that image was
the farthest thing from my personal experience. Unfortunately, I had no
Christian fellowship in my life. My close friends weren’t Christians,
and I had no idea where I could go to church and get fed with good biblical
teaching. So I quickly reverted back to the Urantia Book. Of course, attending
a public school didn’t help much either. I was being exposed to Eastern
religion, humanistic psychology, and all kinds of other non-biblical or
unbiblical philosophies. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s vital
for Christians, even young Christians, to understand alternate worldviews, but
I had no biblical foundation from which to judge such teachings. I was
sixteen, young, idealistic and impressionable. And most of all, I was easily
led and vulnerable to all kinds of intellectual temptations. After all, the UB
was way more interesting than the Bible; at least at that time.
And the UB told me what I wanted to hear. It was much more appealing to
hear that God was loving and merciful, that there was no Hell, and that
God’s wrath was just a figment of primitive imagination. But the peace I
had felt after placing my faith in Christ, the peace that passes all
understanding, the peace that comes from being born again, was not with me
when I read the UB. It fed my mind, but left my heart cold.
As a junior in high school, I got involved with a program that was mostly
good, but that Satan used to reinforce my budding New Age views. It was called
Operation Snowball, and it was a drug and alcohol prevention program for
teenagers. We attended these retreats called Snowballs, where we basically got
a natural high for the weekend. We got a lot of hugs and warm fuzzies, and
bonded with kids our own age as well as some older staff members. Self-esteem
was a big theme of the program, and self-esteem was something I desperately
needed. I had grown up with a lot of verbal abuse, especially from my father.
I was called every name in the book, and frankly, I both hated and feared my
dad. Except for the wonderful peace I felt from being born again, I had very
little experience with real unconditional love. I needed to be told I was
special, and worthy of being loved; and I got plenty of that at Operation
Snowball.
While there actually were some great Christians on staff there, it was
still a secular program. And I mixed the positive strokes I got there with my
evolving UB-centered worldview. In the middle of my junior year, I did find
another UB study-group in my area, and started attending. Again, my experience
was the same; a great intellectual exercise, but nothing to feed my soul. I
remember asking the fellow who drove me to the meetings if he had a personal
relationship with God, and he really didn’t know how to answer me. But I
still craved the Father’s love, especially since my own father was so
lacking in that area.
For years I went back and forth between the UB and biblical Christianity.
This inner conflict intensified in college, where I came in regular contact
with some honest-to-goodness Christians, people who really loved me and wanted
to see me thrive in the Lord. They spent time with me, prayed with me, and
spoke openly about God’s work in their lives. It was a far cry from the
sterile intellectual fare I was getting at UB study groups. So, in January
1989, I rededicated my life to the Lord, and again felt His presence in a deep
and powerful way. In fact, for a couple of weeks I didn’t sleep much; I
was high on the Holy Spirit. I remember telling people that I had lost my mind
and given it to Jesus.
But this blissful honeymoon didn’t last. You see, I am a person with
a hard head and a soft heart. While my soft heart was being fed and nourished
on the love of God and the love of other Christians, my hard head was asking
challenging questions, questions that many of my Christian friends
couldn’t answer; at least, not to my satisfaction. Many of these
questions were objections to certain Christian doctrines, objections raised in
the Urantia Book. For example, how can God be both loving and wrathful?
Isn’t this a contradiction? Why did Jesus have to die in order for us to
be forgiven? Isn’t forgiveness an inherent part of God’s nature?
Isn’t the God revealed in Christ different from the angry, judgmental
God of the OT? Some Christians tried their best, God bless them, to answer my
questions, but they often gave me what I call cookie-cutter answers.
For example, when I raised questions about Christ’s death on the
cross for our sins, I was simply told that God was loving and forgiving, but
He was also holy and just, and that He could not look upon sin. So He needed a
solution that would reconcile both His love and His justice. Some people, like
British theologian John Stott, even went so far to suggest that God had a
problem with forgiveness. Wow, I thought, we were the ones that had problems
forgiving, not God. Besides, isn’t God perfect, does He really have
problems?
The standard defense for the atonement doctrine didn’t work for me. I
just shot back by raising the UB objection, which is that God is not a divided
personality, one of justice and one of mercy (cf. 2:6.6). The UB claims that
the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is based on the premise that
God’s love and His righteousness are incompatible, and need to be
reconciled. Frankly, the UB’s arguments seemed logical, compelling, and
persuasive; and no one seemed able to refute them. But as usual, they gave me
neither peace of mind nor assurance of salvation. I wanted desperately to
believe in the Urantia Book; I wanted to believe that God was loving and kind,
and not angry or wrathful. After all, I had grown up with an angry, verbally
abusive father, and frankly, some of the supposedly biblical teaching I was
getting in church didn’t help at all.
Going back to the Atonement, I was often told human beings were dirt; that
we were detestable in God’s sight, and if it wasn’t for
Jesus’ blood covering us, God would want nothing to do with us. While I
currently embrace the Gospel as it is revealed in Scripture, I must confess
that many of the presentations I heard were at best unsatisfying, and at
worst, just plain wrong. I will return to this point, because it is vitally
important.
I attended Northwestern University, a secular school with a decidedly
liberal bias, and I dabbled in anything and everything; everything that is,
except the Word of God. I read philosophy, theology, psychology, you name it;
all of which were interesting, but much of which I’ve had to unlearn.
But even amidst the smorgasbord of isms and ideologies, God was still forming
me into the person I am today. For one thing, I rebelled against the
politically correct atmosphere on campus and became a staunch conservative, or
more correctly a classical liberal, which by today’s standards, means
I’m about 90 degrees to the right of the average college professor. And
even while I was dabbling in Urantia, Carl Jung, humanistic psychology, etc,
my sympathies were still Christian. I would defend Christianity when it came
up in conversation, and still hung out at Intervarsity Christian Fellowship
meetings. I even tried to harmonize my Christian beliefs with the Urantia
Book, and led pro-Christian workshops at UB conferences.
And speaking of UB conferences, I attended my first one in the summer of
1987, and I was hooked. It seemed I had finally found UB readers who were not
just intellectual students of the book. In their defense, I have to concede
that the conference presenters really did their best to give us a truly
spiritual experience, as they understood it. We worshipped together, prayed
together, and shared our spiritual experiences.
For much of my life, I had been looking for a new family to make up for
what was lacking in my biological home. For the first time in my life, I
thought I had met people who I clicked with intellectually, but also bonded
with spiritually and emotionally. They seemed like the most loving people I
had ever met in my life. I really felt they loved me unconditionally.
I wish I could say the same was always true of my Christian friends, but I
can’t. For many years, I led a double life: I would hang out with my
Christian brothers and sisters, while secretly attending UB study groups. I
didn’t feel I could tell them about my involvement in Urantia, for fear
of being judged or rejected. I was afraid they would tell me I wasn’t
really a Christian, since I was rejecting the doctrine of Christ’s death
for our salvation which is, frankly, the heart of the Gospel. But I know now
that it was Christ’s death for my sins, and not my belief in it, that is
the basis of my salvation. I will continue to drive home this point, because I
think it makes all the difference in how we present the Gospel.
So for years I went back and forth like a seesaw, with my head in the
Urantia Book and my heart drawn strongly toward the Christ of Scripture. That
conflict finally came to a close in November of 1996, when I was 26 years old.
After graduating from college, I decided I’d had enough of school and
wanted nothing to do with it as long as I lived. I had recently discovered
talk-radio, which was a perfect fit for me. It combined my love of radio with
a rich life of the mind, which I’ve always enjoyed. I could talk to
authors, speakers, and politicians, all the while indulging my controversial,
obnoxious, adolescent side. I loved it, and I’ve been pursuing a career
in talk-radio ever since.
In 1993, I interned with a guy named Dick Staub, who hosted a local
Christian radio show called Chicago Talks, which eventually became syndicated
as the Dick Staub show. Dick was unlike any other Christian talk-show host
I’d ever heard. He interviewed secular as well as Christian guests, and
was deeply familiar with culture as a whole, not just the Christian
subculture.
I was a regular listener, and caller. One day I casually mentioned to him
that I wanted to go into radio, and he invited me to come have coffee with him
and talk about it. And that was the beginning of my internship, and my radio
career. Dick was one of the few Christians I felt safe enough to talk to about
my interest in the UB, and while he disagreed, he always welcomed my ideas and
never excluded me from fellowship.
After my internship, I got involved with a ministry called the Christian
Connection, run by my dear friend Steve Carr. He had a radio show of the same
name, and I eventually became co-host and producer. That lasted for two years,
though the ministry was taken over by someone else, and the show became a kind
of secular/Christian hybrid called Destiny, which was also the name of
Steve’s new company.
It was the mid-1990s, Newt Gingrich was House Speaker, and conservatives
were riding high. I started reading a lot of conservative publications, one of
my favorites being Bill Kristol’s new magazine, The Weekly
Standard. In November of 1996, I was reading an article in the Standard
by a budding young journalist named Tucker Carlson. Titled “Eugenics,
American Style,” the article described the pressure many doctors put on
women to abort their Downs Syndrome Children. I had always been pro-life, and
was involved in a lot of pro-life efforts, even to the point of being arrested
three times with Operation Rescue.
And for your information, the Urantia Book strongly advocates eugenics.
What exactly is eugenics? The term is similar to euthanasia, the latter
meaning “good death,” while eugenics means “good
birth.” In practice, eugenics was an ideology that advocated restricting
the reproduction of the “unfit,” with the goal of “race
improvement.” Its worst result was of course Hitler, but even the
so-called milder approaches took the form of coercive sterilization laws
implemented in several American states during the first half of the 20th
century, at least prior to WWII. Ironically, Hitler looked to America as
inspiration for his own very similar policies. It’s probably no surprise
that the UB supports eugenics, since the concept was fairly well-accepted
among intellectuals during the time of the UB’s writing. Here are
several examples of UB quotes that endorse eugenics.
“These six evolutionary races are destined to be blended and exalted
by amalgamation with the progeny of the Adamic uplifters. But before these
peoples are blended, the inferior and unfit are largely eliminated. The
Planetary Prince and the Material Son, with other suitable planetary
authorities, pass upon the fitness of the reproducing strains. The difficulty
of executing such a radical program on Urantia consists in the absence of
competent judges to pass upon the biologic fitness or unfitness of the
individuals of your world races. Notwithstanding this obstacle, it seems that
you ought to be able to agree upon the biologic disfellowshiping of your more
markedly unfit, defective, degenerate, and antisocial stocks.” (51:4.8)
“The early development of a normal world is greatly helped by the
plan of promoting the increase of the higher types of mortals with
proportionate curtailment of the lower. And it is the failure of your early
peoples to thus discriminate between these types that accounts for the
presence of so many defective and degenerate individuals among the present-day
Urantia races.” (52:2.9)
“… most worlds seriously address themselves to the tasks of
race purification, something which the Urantia peoples have not even yet
seriously undertaken. … It is the false sentiment of your partially
perfected civilizations that fosters, protects, and perpetuates the hopelessly
defective strains of evolutionary human stocks.” (52:2.10,11)
“It is neither tenderness nor altruism to bestow futile sympathy upon
degenerated human beings, unsalvable abnormal and inferior mortals. There
exist on even the most normal of the evolutionary worlds sufficient
differences between individuals and between numerous social groups to provide
for the full exercise of all those noble traits of altruistic sentiment and
unselfish mortal ministry without perpetuating the socially unfit and the
morally degenerate strains of evolving humanity.” (52:2.12)
There are many other similar passages, and I was never comfortable with
them. Essentially, I had to rationalize them, which I did for several years.
But Tucker Carlson’s article was a huge reality-check. I had a visceral
reaction to it. I could no longer pretend that there was a humane approach to
eugenics; I just couldn’t accept it in good conscience. And I could no
longer embrace a book that supported it. So I ditched the UB, for 10 years.
I had been reading a lot of Catholic material at the time, and was deeply
impressed by the Church’s blending of faith and reason. It was
refreshing to hear arguments backing up the doctrines of the faith, rather
than simply being told I had to believe something simply because it was in the
Bible. I wanted to know why the bible was true, and why the resurrection of
the body was important, etc.
Well, that was fulfilling for a while; I was attending a small, very loving
Catholic community at a retreat center about an hour from my house. They held
masses outside in the summer, and had a warm family atmosphere. I was happy
there, but I was not comfortable with the Catholic position on salvation.
While most objections to Catholicism involve the role of Mary or the function
of the priesthood, those did not concern me so much. I was more bothered by
the Church’s teaching that our works contribute to our salvation, and we
could lose it. Speaking about assurance was considered the sin of presumption.
While I realize that many Catholics are truly saved, it is in spite of these
Church teachings.
So I left Catholicism in 2000, and dabbled in various churches, including
an Anglican one. Finally, in 2005, I thought I had found a church home.
I’d rather not name the church, except to say that it was a
Bible-believing congregation, and its theology was essentially evangelical.
For a while, I was very happy there. The worship was great, the pastor was
bold, and they seemed to have a deep sense of community. But before I share my
church experience, let me backtrack just a bit.
A few years earlier, in 2003, I sought therapy with a Christian counselor
over some issues that came up from my childhood. The memories were deeply
painful, and I was kind of a basket case for about 18 months. In fact, I was
probably technically in a depression, though it was a functional depression. I
still worked and coped, but most of my friends knew I was struggling, because
I let them know all about my pain. Some of them didn’t get it, but most
were very supportive. The good news is that during that time I got very close
to the Lord. I practiced something called listening prayer, which involved
writing my prayers down on paper and listening to God’s responses as He
spoke to my heart. I still practice this prayer technique to this day.
I came to know God in a very intimate way. I always knew I could come to
God, but God also showed me that I could come to Him in my pain, and that He
would be there to comfort me. It is one thing to know that intellectually, but
it’s quite another to say, as I did to my friend Dan Lapinski,
“There comes a time when only the Lord can comfort you.” I mention
this because the God I experienced, whom the Bible calls the “God of all
comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3), was not always the God I was hearing about
in church. Let me explain.
I don’t want to turn this into a church-bashing session, but I need
to take a stand against many aspects of what is called “church
culture.” There are many good things about church culture, but there are
also many things that are shallow at best, and abusive at worst. And some of
church culture is just not biblical. I am not referring here to things like
false teaching or liberal theology, but more subtle things. For example, many
evangelical churches, while otherwise orthodox, will sometimes take Scripture
out of context to justify some aspect of church culture, or some man-made rule
they wish to apply to their members. Unfortunately, this was often the case at
the church I started attending in 2005.
But before I find fault, let me say one thing in the church’s
defense. Many of its members were former gang members, drug dealers, sex
addicts, etc, and it’s possible that the pastor may have felt he needed
to be a bit of a drill sergeant at times. This drill sergeant mentality also
extended to some small group meetings, where the concept of accountability was
sometimes wielded like a club. Don’t get me wrong; accountability is a
good thing, but like sponsorship in a 12-step program, it should be voluntary,
not imposed coercively.
I don’t mean to condemn the good Christian people at this church; in
most cases, they were probably just doing what they thought was best. But they
were bathed in a church culture that embraced certain assumptions, assumptions
that were for the most part unconscious, and left unexamined.
On the positive side, there was a great teaching pastor at this church, who
had this wonderful way of speaking to both my head and my heart. I fondly
remember our lunch meetings, where we discussed all kinds of theological
issues. Finally, here was a church leader who honored my questions and
appreciated my intellectual curiosity.
But I was still affected by the toxic elements of the church, and in a
pretty negative way. I don’t blame the church, I blame Satan, who used
my negative experience to tempt me away from Scripture and back toward the
seductive siren song of the Urantia Book.
While in college, and still on the fence about my faith, an honest
evangelist I know spoke the truth to me in love and said, “Jesus is your
wife, the Urantia Book is your mistress.” At the time I found this
statement offensive, obnoxious and patronizing, but I now realize it was 100
percent accurate. When I wasn’t getting my needs met in the body of
Christ, I would wander off to the other side of the fence to see if the grass
might be greener there. And I did it again in 2006. Here’s how it
happened.
I was sitting in church one Sunday morning, and the pastor was delivering a
sermon in his typically confrontational preaching style. In fact, he started
yelling at the congregation; at least that’s how it came across to me.
He was referring to the verse in Jeremiah 17, which reads, “The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (v. 9; KJV).
“Our hearts are wicked,” he screamed. I resisted his message,
for several reasons. First, he was talking to believers, and even if
it’s true that our hearts start out wicked, can’t Jesus change our
hearts? Isn’t that the whole point of our growth in Christ?
And secondly, it just didn’t make sense to me. After all, I know a
lot of people who don’t have wicked hearts; and I don’t think my
heart is wicked. But I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to
at the church who would hear my concerns and validate them. So I started
looking for a more reasonable view of human nature. And I got sucked right
back into the UB.
I started by re-reading the book’s last section on the life and
teachings of Jesus, and believe me, I got answers. They were the wrong
answers, but I still got answers. Note to pastors and church leaders: If
people don’t get satisfying answers in church, they’ll go
somewhere else to get them. If they don’t get their needs met in the
body of Christ, they’ll try anything: drugs, sex, worldly success or, in
my case, a cult. Again, I don’t mean to bash the church here, I’m
just expressing my frustration, and I know I’m not the only one
who’s frustrated. Countless millions of Americans are leaving church,
including Christians. See Julia Duin’s 2008 book, Quitting
Church.
Yes, the UB did give me what I thought was a more reasonable view of human
nature. One thing the UB does is rewrite various biblical passages to conform
to its worldview. At the time, I thought these revisions were necessary; I saw
them as corrections to the flawed biblical record. I’ll cite a few
examples.
Let’s go back to the verse that troubled me. In the UB, when Jesus
quotes the verse in Jeremiah, he says “the human heart is deceitful
above all things and sometimes even desperately wicked” (143:2.5). The
term “sometimes” seems to change the meaning of the passage,
implying that only some people are desperately wicked, but not all people. In
another spot (145:2.6), Jesus allegedly says “oftentimes,” but the
point is still the same; a wicked heart cannot be ascribed to all human
beings.
And this resonated with me; it didn’t make sense for me to view all
people, including my good friends, as having wicked hearts. And besides, I
rationalized, the Bible needs to be corrected and modified; it’s not the
word of God, but the word of men who recorded their particular understanding
of God.
Another verse that the UB rewrites is the one where Jesus says: “If
you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much
more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask
Him!” (Matthew 7:11) Again, the UB softens the tone of this passage by
saying “If you, then, being mortal and finite …” as opposed
to “being evil.” This kinder, gentler version appealed to me, and
smoothed my fragile ego, which didn’t want to be ruffled by such harsh
words.
I also saw these revisions as a justifiable attack on original sin, which
the UB flatly rejects. According to the UB, we are not born sinful, just
imperfect; it is our free will which makes some people more sinful than
others. In the UB’s worldview, there was no “fall of man,”
as described in Scripture; God simply created us imperfect on purpose so we
could grow. By the way, there are biblical answers to these concerns, which I
will provide later in the body of this letter.
Well, I was hooked, at least my intellect was. I went running into the arms
of Mistress Urantia and had a rather intense fling. And I really got involved;
I went back to study groups and started giving presentations again at UB
conferences. And In 2008, I even started an online UB-related radio show
called the Cosmic Citizen, which I hosted with another person who had a
prominent leadership position in the UB community. This went on for about two
years, until I discovered something in the UB that caused me to renounce it
forever, with no intention of ever going back.
Before I begin this section, I need to make a few points. Upon returning to
the UB for the second time, I wrote a letter, similar to this one, though much
shorter, intended for the UB community. In it I claimed that I had “come
home” to the UB after a 10-year hiatus. I point this out because some
people, especially UB readers, may view me as a kind of religious flake, a
person who lacks consistency and whose sincerity can’t be trusted. Well,
I may be a flake, but I know I’m God’s flake, and Jesus died for
all my inconsistencies. It’s not about my faithfulness; it’s about
His faithfulness to me. The Lord’s grace is what counts; and it counts a
lot more than my own fragile and weak faith. Praise God that He has never
strayed from me, even though I’ve strayed away numerous times.
I’m also glad I have Christian brothers and sisters I can go to when
I have doubts and struggles. If I ever get tempted to go back to the UB, I can
confess my doubts to them and they will provide me with real answers, or point
me to places where I can get them. But most of all, I treasure their prayers
and encouragement.
Secondly, even though I got intensely involved in the UB community, I was
still a Christian at heart. At the time, I thought I could have one foot in
each camp; many UB readers do just that. They read the UB, while attending
church, synagogue, mosque or temple, and try to inject UB teachings into the
mix. They call it bootlegging; they don’t mention the UB, they just
plant little seeds. I, too, was involved in this kind of stealth activity;
most of my friends didn’t know I was leading a double life. I called
myself a Christian, and in my heart, I really was. Some UB readers have an
angry and hostile attitude toward Christianity, and I was never comfortable
with this. I would defend Christianity and conservative Christians when the
topic came up in conversation. Of course, I now realize that Christianity is
completely incompatible with the UB, but my heart was loyal to Christianity,
even though my mind was embracing heresy.
As I said earlier, I was intensely involved in the Urantia movement, even
to the point of endorsing the UB publicly on Internet radio. But things
changed very suddenly in March of this year. At that time, Congress was
ramming Obama’s health-care bill down America’s throat, and I was
not happy about it. I was always politically conservative, and even joined an
online group for conservative UB readers.
Well, when the healthcare bill passed the House, I was very upset; I might
even say depressed. But the dry, sterile Urantia Book didn’t give me any
peace. What gave me peace was thinking about how Jesus had paid the price for
my sins and had given me eternal life. I needed something certain I could
cling to. The abstract ideas in the UB just didn’t cut it. But thinking
about Jesus, the real Jesus of Scripture, was the only comfort I could find.
I was very disheartened, and I talked to some UB readers about my concerns.
I really was afraid America was on the road to a totalitarian socialist Hell,
or at the very least, a soft European-style despotism. Ironically, one person
suggested that I read a UB paper that contained the smoking gun that would end
my love affair with this false teaching once and for all. The paper is called
“Sin, Sacrifice and Atonement,” and the gist of it is that
Christian teachings about original sin and substitutionary atonement are just
relics of ancient pagan superstitions which held that the gods could only be
appeased by the sight of blood. An obscure passage in this paper led me to an
obscure passage in Scripture, and I began to do some investigative work.
It should be noted that I had accepted, for a long time, that the UB
wasn’t perfect. It didn’t claim to be infallible, and even
admitted to using human sources. So I was willing to accept errors,
oversights, and a few mistakes here and there. But what I found here was more
than that; it was an overt misrepresentation of Scripture. In other words, it
was an act of deception, a lie. In order to understand the nature of this
deception, it is necessary to look at two passages of Scripture.
The first is 1 Kings 16:34. In this passage, we are told of a king who
rebuilt Jericho. “In his days Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho; he laid
its foundations with the loss of Abiram his first-born, and set up its gates
with the loss of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord,
which he spoke by Joshua the son of Nun.” Here we are told that King
Hiel built Jericho, and lost his two sons in the process. We are also told
that this was “according to the Word of the Lord which He spoke by
Joshua son of Nun.” And just what was this word of the Lord that Joshua
spoke?
The answer is in Joshua; specifically, Joshua 6:26. In this verse, Joshua
speaks prophetically saying, “Cursed before the Lord is the man who
rises up and builds this city Jericho; with the loss of his first-born he
shall lay its foundation, and with the loss of his youngest son he shall set
up its gates.” So, the curse of God upon the man who builds Jericho was
fulfilled in 1 Kings 16:34. Why would God curse a man who tries to rebuild
Jericho? Because God gave Jericho into the hands of the Israelites as a gift
when He brought down the walls. The Jews did not take Jericho from the
Canaanites by their own power; rather, God gave it to them by His power and
His grace, its ruins forever serving as evidence of God’s judgment on
the evil Canaanites. God had conquered the land of Canaan and had given it to
the Israelites as a gift. Rebuilding Jericho was a slap in the face to God.
Now let’s look at how the UB distorts this passage for its own
purposes. In Paper 89, titled “Sin, Sacrifice and Atonement,” the
UB rehashes a lot of 1930s anthropology in its review of the history of blood
sacrifice, both animal and human. In Section, 6, paragraphs 5 and 6, the UB
discusses an ancient practice called a foundation sacrifice. The UB rightly
points out that foundation sacrifices were commonly performed at the erection
of new buildings, and that these sacrifices were often human, and even
included putting slaves alive into city walls.
In Section 6, paragraph 6, the UB records the incident with King Hiel and
the loss of his two sons while rebuilding Jericho. The book claims that Hiel
deliberately sacrificed both his sons, one in the foundations, and the other
in the city gates:
“A petty king in Palestine, in building the walls of Jericho, ‘laid
the foundation thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and set up the gates thereof
in his youngest son, Segub.’ At that late date, not only did this father
put two of his sons alive in the foundation holes of the city’s gates,
but his action is also recorded as being ‘according to the word of the
Lord.’” (89:6.6)
The UB states that the Scripture record of this event indicated that this
was done “according to the Word of the Lord.” Note the glaring
omission in this passage. There is no mention of the “word of the Lord,
which he spoke by Joshua the son of Nun.” Here the UB is implying two
things. One, that the loss of Hiel’s two sons was actually an example of
a foundation sacrifice, and two, that the Hebrew Bible gives divine sanction
to this sacrifice, stating that it was done “according to the Word of
the Lord.” So, not only did Hiel offer his two sons as foundation
sacrifices, but according to the UB, the Old Testament writer has God
endorsing it.
As I’ve shown above, there is no evidence that this passage refers to
a human sacrifice—none at all. All the evidence points to Joshua’s
prophecy being fulfilled, and Hiel being cursed with the loss of his two sons.
Who knows how they died; they could have died in construction accidents, or
from some sort of plague or disease. But there is no evidence that this is a
human sacrifice. And note that the UB has to leave out the part which refers
to Joshua in order to mislead its readers.
Even while immersed in the UB, I used to complain about the plague of
biblical illiteracy among its readers. I would harp constantly that the UB
quoted the Bible more than any other book, and that in order to understand the
UB you need to understand the Bible. Well, interestingly, there is a book
called The Paramony, which gives UB readers all the relevant
Bible passages that parallel those in the UB. The problem is that most UB
readers are so ignorant of Scripture and so entranced by the UB that looking
up these passages alone won’t necessarily do them much good if they
don’t know the context. Thanks to my good friend Don Veinot of Midwest
Christian Outreach, I was able to discover the true meaning of this passage.
It was he who led me to Joshua 6:26, where I found the context of this
passage. At that point, I was already having second thoughts about the UB, and
I longed for the peace I knew as a born-again believer. I had gone back and
forth before, but this was the final nail in the coffin for the UB. To me,
this distortion of Scripture could only be deliberate, not just an oversight.
Of course, I asked some UB readers I respected for a response to my
concerns, but I got no satisfactory answers. To most of them, my objections
were just a quibble, and really didn’t mean anything. One person,
considered a foremost authority on the UB, reminded me that much of Scripture
was distorted. You see, the UB claims that the OT was rewritten during the
Babylonian captivity as a propaganda tool to encourage a demoralized Jewish
people. So, the Bible apparently idealizes Israel’s history, and
whitewashes Israel’s past, and might deny that the Jews practiced any
kind of human sacrifice. But there are two problems with this explanation.
First, where is the evidence that the priests in Babylon rewrote the OT? I
have yet to find any scholarly evidence to support this claim. Was I supposed
to just accept it at face value as “revelation,” just because it
was in the Urantia Book?
And secondly, the Bible doesn’t idealize Israel’s history at
all; the Scripture record is rife with accounts of Israel’s sin,
including the practice of human sacrifice. And by the way, this practice is
always condemned in Scripture, and occurs in Israel only when the Jews whore
after the pagan gods of the surrounding peoples; it is never condoned by the
God of Scripture. Even while a UB reader, I often had doubts about the
authenticity of the text, and was frequently drawn back to the Bible. In most
instances, I was able to go to other UB readers for reassurances, and my
doubts would be soothed for a while. But in this case, my fellow UB readers
couldn’t provide me with any credible answers. And with that, I finally
let go of the Urantia Book and came back home to the Lord.
I was overjoyed. I felt the same kind of peace that I felt at fifteen, when
my friend Roger led me in a prayer to receive Christ. I knew I had truly come
back home. I call this section the Prodigal Returns because that’s
really how I view myself, and it says something about my view of salvation. I
was still a child of God; I never stopped being a child of God; I had just
strayed off the path a bit. I never lost my salvation. To those who might
question the sincerity of my faith in Christ, I can only say that I know the
Father never let me go. I was always His, which is why I felt so much turmoil
as I tried to embrace a belief system I didn’t really accept. I tried
talking myself into believing it was true; I wanted it to be true, but deep
down, I knew it wasn’t. The joy I felt was indescribable. As one friend
of mine put it, I was flying through clean air.
One important thing I forgot to mention. I am totally blind and read
Braille very efficiently. I had even paid for my own personal Braille copy of
the Urantia Book. But when I realized that I could never embrace the book
again, it was like the veil had been removed from my eyes. I was not only
blind physically, I had been blinded spiritually. I knew then that the Urantia
Book was demonic, and I had to get rid of it. Its presence in my house was the
presence of evil. I was going to donate the book to a library for the blind in
California, but when my friend Dan boxed it up for me, the post office
wouldn’t take it. It weighed too much. Braille books are divided into
volumes, and we put all 38 volumes into one box. So, we took the Urantia Book
and threw it in the dumpster, where trash belongs.
I am so glad to be rid of it; the truth is the Urantia Book was an
albatross around my neck. I felt I had to read it in secret, and as I’ve
said numerous times, it did nothing for my peace of mind.
I think one of the biggest reasons the UB was so unsatisfying is its
failure to address a basic reality of the human condition; namely, our
fundamental chronic brokenness. As I’ve pointed out earlier, the UB
simply assumes that we are children of God; we don’t have to become
God’s children, we just need to recognize that we already are. It says
that our salvation should be taken for granted. There are a couple of problems
with this view. First, how do I know that I’m saved? Remember that the
UB rejects Christ’s death as necessary for our salvation. So, in the
absence of His sacrifice, where is the objective evidence that I’m
saved? All I can do is assume, or presume, that I’m saved. But what if
I’m wrong? And, more to the point, what am I depending on for my
salvation? I can’t depend on my own goodness, which of course is not
enough to save me, and I can’t even depend on my relationship with God,
which fluctuates like a roller-coaster. Yesterday I was full of gratitude and
immersing myself in God’s Word, but today I’ve been struggling
with resentment and frustration. But thank God for His liberating grace. Thank
God that I can look outside of myself, and outside my own human imperfections,
for my eternal security. When I look to the cross, this is the objective
evidence that I’m saved. I know I’m saved. Why? Because Jesus
saved me. How do I know? Because He died for me and paid for my sins so I can
be right with God. He made things right between me and God; he bridged the gap
that I could never bridge. Yes, it really is that simple. I also never got the
sense from the UB that I really need the Lord.
Back to brokenness again. Christianity teaches that there is something
fundamentally wrong with me that only Jesus can fix. I was born into the world
outside of a right relationship with God, and only Jesus can restore that
relationship. That’s why I need a Savior, not just a teacher, or a
spiritual counselor, but something much more radial. I need radical surgery. I
need a new heart—what the Bible calls a heart of flesh, as opposed to a heart
of stone. I am broken, bent, twisted, wounded, damaged goods. And those are
exactly the kind of people Jesus came to die for. He didn’t come to die
for a bunch of good people; as Romans 5 tells us, “Christ died for the
ungodly” (5:6). Who is ungodly? I am.
So, the good news of the Gospel is not just that I need more information,
or that our evolution got off track, but that Jesus came to fix the
fundamental human condition. If I’m already a child of God, then I
don’t really need a Savior. The truth is not that I’m okay; the
truth is that I’m not okay, but Jesus loves me in spite of my glaring
warts. I say all these things with no shame or self-condemnation. It is so
liberating to admit my brokenness before the Lord. I can stand with Paul and
boast in my weaknesses, knowing that my only real strength comes from the Lord
(2 Corinthians 12:9). In the same vein, there is not much in the UB to
encourage dependence on the Lord. I want to cling to Jesus like a drowning man
clings to a life-raft. Where is the sense of human desperation in the UB? It
just isn’t there. In my natural state, I am not a child of God, I am
only His creation. To become a child of God, I need to receive Christ, get a
new heart, and be changed from the inside out. That’s what it truly
means to be born again.
One more thing I forgot to mention. I tried desperately to reconcile my
interest in the UB with Christianity. At one time, I claimed that the UB
acknowledged the deity of Christ, and was compatible with Christianity. I even
wrote an essay called "The Urantia Book and My Christian Faith," which was
published in a UB-related journal. That’s how hard I was trying to have
my cake and eat it too; I was trying desperately to squeeze compatibility out
of two systems that are just not compatible.
And let me just say one more thing about my return home to the Lord. I was
so on fire when I came back to Christ. I wanted to share the Gospel from the
rooftops. I think I was so on fire because for the first time, the gap I had
felt between my mind and my heart was finally bridged. The UB was no longer
intellectually satisfying. And since I already knew that the Bible spoke to my
heart, where else could I go? The Bible finally became intellectually
satisfying as well. When I read the Bible, it speaks to my whole being, not
just one part of me.
For those who have never read it, it is important to realize that though
the UB may sound on the surface like a bunch of far-out science-fiction, it is
actually a deeply persuasive, compelling, logical, and internally consistent
work. The problem is that a theological and philosophical system can be
internally consistent, but still be out of sync with reality. In other words,
logic alone is not enough; a worldview must be supported by evidence and must
conform to reality. This means that faith must be supported by logic,
evidence, and personal experience; one of those alone will not suffice.
For me, the UB passed the logic test, but failed the other two. But the
UB’s approach to faith is fideistic, which means that for the UB,
“religion is purely and wholly a matter of personal experience”
(138:2.1; emphasis original). The word “wholly” always bothered me
in this sentence. Of course personal experience should matter; that was one of
my biggest complaints against the UB: that it didn’t speak to my heart,
it didn’t work in my experience. But it also didn’t line up with
reality. Here’s a glaring example.
The UB claims that most of the Old Testament passages that Christians cite
as Messianic prophecies were “misapplied to the life mission of
Jesus” (122:4.4). But the UB never backs up this assertion with
evidence; it just makes this claim and expects us to take it at face value. Of
course, many of the Messianic prophecies support the doctrine of
substitutionary atonement, which the UB vehemently rejects. The problem is
that Christ’s death for our sins is foreshadowed all over the Old
Testament, in countless ways. I will just give a few examples.
The most often-cited reference is Isaiah 53, which is a direct allusion to
Christ’s atonement. But it’s not even necessary to look to
prophecy; the OT narratives also serve as types for Christ’s saving
work. For example, God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice is one of
our first hints. Why did God reject the sacrifice? Because it wasn’t a
lamb. Jesus is our sacrificial lamb. The story of Abraham and Isaac is also an
obvious example of substitutionary atonement. In fact, Abraham never actually
sacrificed Isaac, and he knew that God didn’t really want him to do it;
for he said, “God Himself will provide the lamb” (Genesis 22:7).
And of course, the blood of the Passover lamb foreshadows the blood of Christ.
Just as the blood on the doorpost protected the Jewish firstborn, so the blood
of Christ protects us from the consequences of sin.
The UB can rail against the doctrine of atonement as being irrational and
illogical, but how do UB readers get around these self-evident biblical
passages? The answer is that most UB readers don’t know the Bible well
enough to discuss the issue. And speaking of the Passover, the UB claims that
it was just a coincidence that Jesus died during the Passover feast, and that
he could have been crucified any other time. Essentially, the UB just
dismisses these facts, in the same way it dismisses the OT Messianic
prophecies.
In the same vein, the UB minimizes the significance of Psalm 22, which
Jesus quoted while on the cross. While I agree with the UB that God the Father
did not forsake Jesus, the UB goes further than that. The authors claim that
Jesus was just reciting Psalm 22 as a means of comfort while in a delirious
state. But what the UB completely fails to address is the Messianic character
of Psalm 22; it’s a Messianic Psalm that predicts the Crucifixion. In
fact, it’s pretty evident from the text that the Psalmist who is
speaking is Christ.
Earlier, I pointed out the numerous ways in which the UB rewrites the
Bible. I have already mentioned that the UB alters the resurrection accounts
to conform to its Gnostic view that Jesus did not rise in a physical body.
Here is how the UB authors do this. First, the UB modifies the biblical
account of Thomas putting his hands in Jesus’ side. Instead, Jesus
allegedly tells Thomas that touching him is impossible (cf. 191:5.4). The UB
also has its own version of Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. In
the Bible, Jesus tells Mary not to touch him. The King James translation says,
“Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (John
20:17). I never understood what this meant; the passage always seemed vague to
me. But the UB, in accordance with its Gnostic view of the Resurrection, says,
“Touch me not, Mary, for I am not as you knew me in the flesh”
(189:4.12). At first, the UB’s take on this passage made sense to me. I
thought there was a contradiction in Scripture between Thomas touching Jesus
and Jesus telling Mary not to touch him. It seemed to me that the UB had
resolved this apparent contradiction.
What I did not realize is that much of this is a translation issue. I am so
glad I found the New American Standard Version of the Bible (NASB). While
it’s not quite as poetic as other versions, its accuracy and precision
has helped me make sense of certain biblical passages. The one about Mary is a
good example. In the NASB version, Jesus says “Stop clinging to me . . .
.” When I read that, the lights came on for me. Jesus is telling Mary
not to cling to Him, because he’s about to return to the Father.
That’s it, it’s really that simple.
On a more foundational point, I can never embrace the Urantia Book because
I no longer accept the theory of evolution. At first, I thought I could be a
theistic evolutionist and still accept the inerrancy of Scripture. While
that’s theoretically possible, I soon realized that evolution is
ultimately incompatible with both Scripture and reality. If we accept the
biblical account of Adam and Eve as the first human beings, then we
can’t accept the evolutionary assumption that they were descended from
hominids. Scripture clearly teaches that God created Adam and Eve as
full-grown adults. The Bible says nothing about their infancy. We would have
to concoct some story about Adam and Eve being children of hominids and having
pre-human parents. Secondly, creationists used to tell me all the time that
there is evidence for micro-evolution, but not for macro-evolution. I never
understood this, but then, all of a sudden, it was clear to me. There is
plenty of evidence that species change over time, but I don’t see any
evidence that species can simply change from one to another by either gradual
or sudden mutation. While the fossil record clearly shows that certain species
appeared at certain times, where is the evidence one species evolved from
previous species? And why isn’t this happening today? Like so many
things we learn in school, we tend to accept them uncritically, and our
teachers do as well, which is why they teach these theories as facts.
Before I close this section, I must make one more brief but important
point. I have come not only to accept, but to appreciate the wrath of God. The
UB, of course, rejects divine wrath as a primitive, barbaric concept
incompatible with the loving Heavenly Father revealed in Christ. Part of the
problem is the English word “wrath,” which often connotes
arbitrary rage or abusive anger. But the Bible says that God is “slow to
anger” (Nehemiah 9:17), and since all of God’s attributes are
magnified in Scripture, slow means really, really slow, like slow as molasses.
And then there’s the issue of the anger itself. In the Bible, just what
does God get angry about? He gets angry about injustice, and terrible evils
like child sacrifice and oppression of the poor. I thank God for His wrath.
I’m glad we live in a universe where evil is truly punished, not just by
a set of impersonal laws, but by a just Judge who is outraged by human
suffering.
In the Bible, God is both just and merciful. God welcomes all those who
gladly accept His mercy, and justly condemns those who spurn it. If a sinner
repents, we can rejoice at God’s mercy, but if a sinner refuses to
repent, we can rejoice that God’s just judgment sent that person to
Hell. We don’t rejoice that the person is in Hell, for God says “I
take no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11), but we can
still rejoice that the world really is like the fairy tales of our childhood,
the good guys live happily ever after and the evil are punished forever. I,
for one, am glad that suicide bombers face God’s judgment of eternal
conscious punishment, rather than just being annihilated, as the UB teaches.
Sorry guys, you don’t get off scot-free.
This is probably the most controversial part of my letter, and I’m
sure it will raise eyebrows in some Christian circles. But I’ve never
shied away from controversy, so here goes. There are some things in the
Urantia Book that are true. Otherwise, I would not have been attracted to it.
This in no way should be taken as an endorsement of the book. I know
it’s a false gospel, and ultimately, a lie from Satan. But like all
Satan’s lies, it contains a good deal of truth. Satan knows our needs,
and He will use those needs and even meet them on some level, to keep us away
from the Kingdom. In my case, he didn’t keep me away from salvation, but
he took time that I could have been using to build God’s Kingdom and
wasted it on heresy. But since God uses evil for good, I am confident that He
will use this experience for His glory. It’s also important for
Christians to know what’s good about the Urantia Book, just in case we
have occasion to minister to someone currently caught up in it. Like Paul at
Mars Hill, we need to build on the truth they already know, and show them how
Christianity alone can meet the needs they are trying to fulfill through this
false faith. I can’t prove this, but I suspect that in most cases,
heresies develop as an attempt to correct a previous imbalance in church
teaching. But, like many such human attempts, the result is an
over-correction. And it’s up to us as believers to find the healthy
biblical balance.
One good example is an overly pessimistic view of human nature. While the
Bible definitely teaches original sin, it does not, in my opinion, teach that
human beings are essentially evil or wicked. As I stated earlier in this
letter, I was initially attracted to way the UB revised the verse in Jeremiah
(17:9) to say that the heart is only sometimes desperately wicked. But after
doing some research, I concluded that the KJV translation of this verse leaves
room for improvement. The Hebrew word ’anash, which the KJV translates as
“wicked,” is more appropriately translated as “sick”
or “incurable.” The New American Standard translation of this
verse renders the phrase “desperately sick” (“beyond
cure,” NIV). This makes far more sense to me, and resonates with my own
experience. I think we can all safely say that our hearts are incurably sick;
that’s one reason we need a Savior. And it is true that we are all
sinful, but that’s a different thing from saying we’re all wicked.
Therefore, the UB over-reaches in its attempt to “correct” this
particular biblical passage.
Secondly, while the UB is entirely wrong in its rejection of Christ’s
atoning sacrifice, some of its arguments against this doctrine are legitimate
reactions to unfortunate presentations of this teaching. For example, the UB
attacks the idea that God’s love and His righteousness are incompatible,
and that God needed a sacrifice to appease His justice so that His love and
mercy could flow freely. But unfortunately, I’ve heard many Christians
use this argument to defend atonement. For example, British evangelical John
Stott, in a speech I heard some years ago, actually said, “God has a
problem with forgiveness. God has a problem with forgiveness because of who
God is, in His blazing, and even blinding holiness.” Well, first of all,
can we really say that God has problems? We have problems, not God. And does
God really have a problem with forgiveness? Was the Cross the only possible
way for God to forgive us? Was God unapproachable apart from the Cross? Does
God’s holiness make forgiveness impossible apart from the Cross?
The UB also says that the atonement doctrine is an attack on the unity of
deity. “The affectionate heavenly Father … is not a divided
personality—one of justice and one of mercy” (2:6.6). These are very
good arguments, and we need to find a way to answer them. First of all, the
cross was not necessary in order to unify a divided God who had to reconcile
His love and His justice. The death of Christ on the Cross itself demonstrated
the unity of God. If you owed me money, and I wanted to forgive your debt, I
have two choices. The first is to simply waive the debt, which would be a fine
act of mercy and forgiveness. The second is to have someone else pay the debt
in your place. This would not only be an act of mercy, but an act of justice
as well. In other words, yes, God is fully capable of forgiving us without
satisfying His justice, but He went much farther than that; he arranged to
have Jesus pay our debt.
You see, sin counts. If we hurt someone, we are not just sinning against
that person, we are sinning against God. And while I can make amends to the
people I’ve hurt, how can I possibly make amends to God? I can’t,
and my sin would still remain. Sin matters because people matter; and God is
grieved and hurt when His children are hurt. So, the UB has forced me to think
more carefully about how I express my arguments in defense of atonement. One
article that does a great job of defending atonement is “Father Forgive
Them,” by Father Richard John Neuhaus, which appeared in the March 2000
issue of First Things.
The Urantia Book is also very optimistic about the future. While it is not
naive in its optimism, it definitely proclaims a gospel of progress. Some
years ago, when I first rejected the UB, I was afraid I had to reject this
idea entirely. I thought I had to accept the traditional premillennial
eschatology of the Left Behind novels. Thankfully, I was introduced to
postmillennial views, and soon found that there were all kinds of ways to
look at the Last Days, and that there was a lot of room for optimism about the
progress we could still make to build God’s Kingdom here on Earth. Yes,
I’m still an optimist, and not just because I know Jesus is coming back.
I’m an optimist because I believe God’s people have a role in
transforming civilization for Jesus Christ. I, for one, want to be a part of
that process.
The UB is also a vocal critic of the Christian church. While it dos not
condemn the church outright, it does warn against the dark side of
institutional religion. As I said earlier, I don’t want to turn this
into a church-bashing session; I currently do attend church, and have not
given up on it. And isolation from church can cause its own set of problems;
people who don’t sit under good teaching and claim that they are taught
only by the Holy Spirit are in danger of falling into heresy and spiritual
pride. Having said that, I went for several years with no church family, and I
know many Christians in the same boat.
In fact, some of the most mature Christians I know have left the church,
either because they aren’t fed spiritually, or because they can’t
find ministry and service opportunities that truly utilize their gifts. I hate
to say it, but many of the UB’s critiques of church culture sound like
sentiments echoed by frustrated Christians. Again, great book on this subject
is Julia Duin’s Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and
What to Do About It.
And finally, the UB has taught me a lot about love and forgiveness. In a
paper called “Religion and Human Experience,” in a section titled
“Problems of Growth,” the authors give an analogy that is dear to
the hearts of UB readers, and I can see why. Readers are asked to imagine a
caveman, a filthy, smelly, misshapen creature, with a club in his hand and a
look of hatred and rage on his face. For most people, the immediate reaction
would be disgust and contempt. But what if we enlarge the picture? In front of
the man is a saber-toothed tiger and behind him a woman and two children. When
we see that this man is just trying to protect his family, we see the
beginnings of something fine and noble in the human race. The point here is
when we see the whole picture, we can understand a person’s true motives
1and intentions. By extension, God sees all our motives, and can understand us
completely, so it is easy for Him to forgive us.
The UB says in several places that when we understand someone, we will
eventually learn to love them.
The same applies to forgiveness. There is even a French proverb that says,
“To understand all is to forgive all.” While this concept
completely sidesteps the issue of God’s justice and the need for
atonement, I have found it to be true in my own experience. Virtually all of
us have had the experience of being frustrated with a person’s behavior,
and then we find out later that something awful just happened to them, or that
they had a bad day at work. Then the lights come on for us, and we are able to
forgive them. In fact, I’ll take it a step farther—we can probably get
forgiveness down to a science.
The UB’s take on sin also helped expand my understanding of
forgiveness. The UB redefines sin to mean “deliberate disloyalty to
Deity” (89:10.2). In order for an act to be sinful, it must be rooted in
a conscious attitude of willful rebellion against God. This, of course, is
contrary to the Bible, which views sin as a natural impulse in the human
condition, not so much an act of conscious rebellion, but a kind of human
sickness that only Jesus can cure. But there’s a piece of truth in the
UB’s view, and here it is. I’m convinced that one reason there is
so much lack of forgiveness in the world is that people forget that most of
the things we do that hurt people are not done on purpose. We hurt people
unintentionally all the time, and if we see that a person’s actions are
not malicious or deliberate, it becomes much easier to forgive them. Even
Jesus absolved his own enemies on the cross with this insight when he said,
“Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”
(Luke 23:34). And the distinction between intentional and unintentional harm
is made numerous times in Old Testament law, and may be the basis for our
current legal distinctions, such as murder vs. involuntary manslaughter, etc.
Again, I don’t mean to endorse the Urantia Book. Its worldview is
unbiblical, and it presents a false gospel that does not lead to salvation.
And I certainly don’t believe the UB is a revelation. After all, the
concepts I cited above that I find helpful are easily explainable by purely
human insight. But they are still, in my opinion, valid insights that can be
integrated into a person’s Christian faith.
When I first came back to the Lord, I was rather frustrated with the
Christian church, meaning the institutional church but also the body of Christ
more generally. But the Lord has softened my heart considerably. So, instead
of complaining and finding fault, I’d like to offer some suggestions for
us as believers when reaching out to those caught up in the UB or similar
belief systems, whether they be Christians struggling with their faith, or
folks who have never embraced the Gospel at all.
1. Don’t patronize those with sincere doubts and intellectual
questions. Quite often, when I tried getting answers to questions about Bible
passages or concepts that I found confusing, I was told that I should just
have faith, or that I should not rely on my own understanding. Not only is
this insulting, but it’s counter-productive. A person who wrestles
deeply with doubts and questions can have their faith strengthened and renewed
in the process. We don’t have to turn off our intellects when we read
Scripture. There is nothing illogical or irrational about the Bible. In fact,
when we examine it critically, it comes out smelling like a rose. We should
expect people, both believers and nonbelievers, to ask hard questions and
demand logical answers. Sometimes I think people approached my questions in a
patronizing manner because they themselves didn’t know how to answer
them. That’s okay, because there are numerous resources, particularly
online tools, which can help. I’ll just name one right now, because
it’s the best one I’ve seen; it’s called
http://www.christianthinktank.com.
I have never seen a better apologetics site in my life. Another good one is
http://www.gotquestions.org.
2. We need to be careful how we present the Gospel. Most people caught up
in New Age religions or liberal theology like to talk of God’s
unconditional love. When I first heard the Gospel, I resisted it because I
thought Christianity taught a God of conditional love. I thought God
wouldn’t love me until I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. In
fact, one girl in high school put it to me rather crudely. “Before you
accept Christ, God is your enemy,” she said. “Then, once you get
saved, God puts down all His weapons against you.” Not only is this view
of God rightly disturbing, it’s not accurate. For some reason, I
didn’t get the most critical message of the Gospel; the unconditional
and unmerited grace of God. I somehow got the impression that getting saved
was something I was supposed to do, not something Jesus had done for me 2,000
years ago. The truth is that God accepted us before we ever accept Him.
Even the Urantia Book makes this point, though it denies the most important
evidence of God’s acceptance: His dying for broken sinners like me. When
presenting the Gospel we must make it clear, as the Bible does in several
places, that God came to us before we ever came to Him. “We love because
He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Romans 5 is a great chapter that makes
this point very well.
So, yes, God does love us unconditionally; He loves us so much that He has
provided eternal life for us even though we don’t deserve it. We
don’t have to accept Christ in order for God to love us, we accept
Christ because His love for us compels us to do so. As Romans 2 says,
“the kindness of God leads you to repentance” (2:4).
3. Don’t assume that a person is not saved just because they are
proclaiming heresy and doubting the inerrancy of Scripture. I was doing all
those things, and I was still saved. If you know a Christian who has strayed
off the path, make sure you let them know that they still belong to the Lord,
even if you disagree with their current belief system. This will make a person
feel safe enough to share their doubts and struggles with you without fear of
judgment. Pray for them, love them, and let them know they are still your
brother or sister in Christ.
Let’s close in prayer, shall we?
Dear Heavenly Father,
When I came out of my bondage to the Urantia Book, a UB reader I had worked
with closely told me that she had found the God of her dreams. Well, I’m
glad you are not the God of my dreams; you are far bigger and better; you are
the God of reality. Comfort those who are afraid to come to you because they
have distorted images of who you are. Help them to see that the God of
Scripture is actually far more loving, kind, and merciful than the superficial
god they have created in their own minds. Put people in their lives who can
explain your Word logically and clearly. At the same time, give them an
experience of your presence that they can feel deeply in their hearts; and not
just as an abstract intellectual concept. Help them to place their faith in
your Son, the real Jesus, the Jesus of Scripture, not a false made-up jesus,
but the Jesus who came to rescue them from their sin, to fix what is broken; a
Savior, not just a teacher, the way, not just the way-shower. Help those
caught up in false belief systems to find you, and to fall in love with you.
Give them a hunger for your Word, and a hunger to know you deeply and to walk
in your ways.
I ask these things in Jesus’ name and by the precious blood of His
cross, amen.
Andre Traversa, Park Ridge, IL
December 1, 2010
- Original publication information:
- Originally posted on ubhoax.org, uncommon_something.blogspot.com, and
somewhere else.
Light editing done with with the permission of the author.
Updated 2015-02-10.
