Ch. 74, After the Pentecost
“Son of Man: Urantia,” 2nd edition
After the Pentecost
The results from Peter’s sermon on the Pentecost decided the future plans and policies of the majority of the apostles’ individual efforts to announce the gospel. Peter was the real founder of the Christian church; Paul carried the Christian message to the gentiles and the Greeks carried it to the whole Roman Empire.
Although the priest-ridden and tradition-bound Hebrews as a people refused to accept either Jesus’ gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity, or Peter and Paul’s announcement of the ascension and resurrection of Jesus that eventually became Christianity, the rest of the Roman Empire was receptive to the evolving Christian teachings. Western civilization was at this time intellectual, weary of war, and thoroughly skeptical of all existing religions and universal philosophies. The people of the Western world—the beneficiaries of Greek culture—had a revered tradition of a wonderful past. They could ponder their inheritance of major accomplishments in art, politics, literature, and philosophy. But with all of these achievements they had no soul-satisfying religion: their spiritual longings remained unsatisfied.
Jesus’ teachings embraced in the Christian message were suddenly thrust on this stage. A new way of living was presented to the hungry hearts of Western people. This situation meant immediate conflict between the older religions and the new Christianized version of Jesus’ message to the world. Such a conflict must result in either a decided victory for the new or for the old or some degree of compromise: history shows that the struggle ended in compromise. Christianity dared to embrace too much for any one people to integrate in one or two generations. It was not a simple spiritual appeal such as Jesus had presented to people’s souls: early on it took a firm stance on art, law, sex, magic, morals, medicine, polygamy, education, literature, government, religious rituals, and to a limited degree even slavery. Christianity became not merely a new religion, but a new order for human society: it quickly started the moral-social clash of the ages. Jesus’ ideals as they were socialized in Christianity and reinterpreted by Greek philosophy now boldly challenged the traditions of the human race embodied in the ethics, morality, and religions of Western civilization.
At first, Christianity only won the lower social and economic strata of society. But by the beginning of the second century the best of Greco-Roman culture was increasingly turning to this new Christian belief—this new purpose for living. How did this new message of Jewish origin that had almost failed in the land of its birth capture the best minds of the Roman Empire? The triumph of Christianity over the mystery cults and philosophical religions was due to first, organization: Paul was an excellent organizer and his successors kept up his pace; second, Christianity was thoroughly Hellenized: it embraced the best in Greek philosophy, as well as the cream of Hebrew theology; third, Christianity contained a new and noble ideal: the echo of Jesus’ life bestowal and the reflection of his message of salvation for all humanity; fourth, the Christian leaders were willing to make enough compromises with the Mithraic cult that the better half of those people were won over to the Antioch cult, and fifth, the next and later generations of Christian leaders made enough compromises with paganism that even the Roman emperor Constantine was won to the new religion.
With the pagans, the Christians made a shrewd bargain. While Christianity adopted the ritualistic pageantry of the pagan, it compelled the pagan to accept the Hellenized version of Pauline Christianity. With the Mithraic cult, they came off more like conquerors because they succeeded in eliminating the gross immoralities and other disgraceful practices of the Persian mystery.
Wisely or unwisely these early Christian teachers deliberately compromised Jesus’ ideals in an effort to save many of his ideas, and they were hugely successful. But mistake not! Jesus’ compromised ideals are still latent in his gospel and they will eventually assert their full power on the world. With the paganization of Christianity the old order won many minor victories of a ritualistic nature, but the Christians gained domination in that a much higher note in human morals was struck; a grander concept of God was given to the world; the hope of immortality arose in a recognized religion, and finally, Jesus of Nazareth was given to humanity’s hungry souls.
Many of the loftier truths taught by Jesus were almost lost in these early compromises, but they still slumber in paganized Christianity—the Pauline version of the life and teachings of the Son of Man. Even before Christianity was paganized it was first thoroughly Hellenized. Christianity owes much, a huge amount, to the Greeks. It was a Greek from Egypt who bravely stood up at Nicaea and fearlessly challenged the assembly, stopping them from obscuring Jesus’ actual nature to the point that the real truth of his bestowal may have been lost to the world. This Greek was Athanasius, and but for his logic and eloquence Arius’ arguments would have won.
The Greeks’ Influence
The Hellenization of Christianity started in earnest that eventful day when the Apostle Paul stood before the council of the Areopagus in Athens and told the Athenians about “the Unknown God.” There under the shadow of the Acropolis, this Roman citizen announced to these Greeks his version of the new religion that had its origin in Jewish Galilee. There was something strangely similar in Greek philosophy and many of Jesus’ teachings. They both had a common goal—they aimed at the emergence of the individual: the Greek at social and political emergence; Jesus at moral and spiritual emergence. The Greek taught intellectual liberalism leading to political freedom; Jesus taught spiritual liberalism leading to religious liberty. These two ideas put together constituted a new and mighty charter for human freedom; they presaged humanity’s social, political, and spiritual liberty.
Christianity came into existence and triumphed over all contending religions primarily because the Greeks were willing to borrow good ideas even from the Jews, and Paul and his successors were willing, shrewd, and sagacious compromisers—they were keen theological traders. At the time Paul stood up in Athens preaching “Christ and Him Crucified,” the Greeks were spiritually hungry: they were interested, questioning, and actually looking for spiritual truth. Never forget that at first the Romans fought Christianity while the Greeks embraced it, and that it was the Greeks who literally forced the Romans to later accept this new religion as it was then modified as a part of Greek culture.
The Greeks revered beauty and the Jews holiness, but both people loved the truth. For centuries the Greeks had earnestly debated all human problems—social, political, economic, and philosophical—except religion. Few Greeks had paid much attention to religion: they did not even take their own religion seriously. For centuries the Jews had neglected these other fields of thought while they devoted their minds to religion. They took their religion seriously, too seriously. As illuminated by the content of Jesus’ message, over centuries the combined product of these two cultures became the driving force behind of a new order of human society, and to a certain extent a new way of human religious practice.
Greek culture had already penetrated the lands of the western Mediterranean when Alexander spread its civilization over the near-Eastern world. The Greeks did well with their religion and their politics as long as they lived in small city states, but when the Macedonian king dared to expand Greece into an empire stretching from the Adriatic to the Indus, trouble began. Greek art and philosophy were equal to the task of imperial expansion, but not so Greek religion or political administration. After the Greek city states had expanded into an empire their rather unsophisticated gods appeared queer. The Greeks were searching for one God, a better and more magnificent God, when the Christianized version of the older Jewish religion arrived.
The Greek Empire could not survive as such. Its cultural sway continued on, but the empire only endured after learning from the Roman’s how to administer it, and from the East obtaining a religion whose one God possessed empire dignity. In the first century after Jesus, Greek culture had already attained its highest levels: its deterioration had begun—learning was advancing, but genius was declining. This was when Jesus’ ideals that were partially embodied in Christianity helped salvage Greek culture.
Alexander had charged on the East bringing Greek civilization; Paul assaulted the West with the Christian version of Jesus’ gospel. Wherever Greek culture prevailed throughout the West, Greek Christianity took root. The Eastern version Jesus’ message, even though it remained truer to his teachings, continued to follow Abner’s uncompromising attitude. It never progressed like did the Greek version and was eventually lost in the Islamic movement.
The Roman Influence
The Romans bodily took over Greek culture replacing a government by lot with a government of representatives. This change soon favored Christianity because Rome brought the whole Western world a new tolerance for strange people, religions, and languages. Much of the early persecution of Christians in Rome was because of the unfortunate use of the term “kingdom” when they preached. The Romans were tolerant of any and all religions, but resentful of anything that smelled of political rivalry. When these early persecutions that were mostly due to misunderstanding died out, the field for religious propaganda was wide open. The Roman was interested in politics, and while he cared little for either art or religion he was unusually tolerant of both.
Asian law was stern and arbitrary; Greek law was fluid and artistic; Roman law was dignified and bred respect. Roman education instilled an unheard of and emotionless loyalty. The early Romans were politically devoted; they were honest, zealous, and dedicated to their ideals but without a religion worthy of the name. Small wonder that their Greek teachers were able to persuade them to accept Paul’s Christianity. And these Romans were a magnificent people: they could govern the West because they governed themselves. Such unparalleled honesty, devotion, and vigorous self-control was ideal soil for the growth of Christianity.
It was easy for these Greco-Romans to become just as spiritually devoted to an institutional church as they were politically devoted to the state. The Romans fought the church only when they feared it was competing with the state. Rome, having little native culture or national philosophy, took over Greek culture for its own and boldly adopted Christianity as its moral philosophy. Christianity became Rome’s moral culture, but hardly its religion, at least not in the sense of being the individual experience of spiritual growth. True, many people did penetrate beneath the surface of this state religion and found their souls nourished by the dormant truths of the now Hellenized and paganized Christianity.
The Stoic and his sturdy appeal to nature and conscience had all the better prepared Rome for Jesus’ reception, at least in an intellectual sense. The Roman was by nature and training a lawyer—he revered even nature’s laws: now in Christianity he saw nature’s laws—the laws of God. A people that could produce Cicero and Vergil were ripe for Paul’s Greek version of Christianity. These Romanized Greeks forced both Jews and Christians to philosophize their religion, to co-ordinate its ideals, and to adapt religious practices to the existing current of life. All of this was immensely helped by first translating into Greek the Hebrew scriptures, and then later the New Testament.
The Greeks, in contrast with the Jews and many other people, had for a long time believed in some sort of immortality or survival after death, and since this was the heart of Jesus’ teaching it was certain that Christianity would make a strong appeal to them. A succession of Greek cultural and Roman political victories had consolidated the Mediterranean area into one empire with one culture and one language, and had made the Western world ready for one God. Judaism provided this God, but as a religion it was not acceptable to these Romanized Greeks. Philo helped some people to reduce their objections, but Christianity revealed to them an even better concept of one God and they readily embraced it.
Under the Roman Empire
After the consolidation of Roman political rule and the spread of Christianity, the Christians found themselves with one God and a grand religious concept but without an empire. The Greco-Romans found themselves with an enormous empire, but without a suitable God. The Christians accepted the empire, and the empire adopted Christianity. The Roman provided a unity of political rule, the Greek a unity of culture and learning, and Christianity a unity of religious thought and practice. Rome overcame the tradition of nationalism by imperial universalism and for the first time in history made it possible for different people to at least technically accept one religion.
Christianity came into favor in Rome at a time when there was intense disagreement between the Stoics vigorous teachings, and the mystery cults promises of salvation. Christianity came with liberating power and refreshing comfort to a spiritually hungry people whose language had no word for unselfishness. What gave Christianity its most impressive power was the way its believers lived lives of service and the way they died for their faith during the earlier times of dire persecution.
The teaching regarding Jesus’ love for children soon put an end to the widespread practice of exposing them to death when they were not wanted, particularly girl babies. The format of early Christian worship was largely taken from the Jewish synagogue, modified by the Mithraic ritual, and later embellished with pagan pageantry. The backbone of the early Christian church consisted of Greeks who had converted to Judaism and then became Christianized.
The second century after Jesus was the best time in all of the world’s history for a good religion to make progress in the Western world. During the first century Christianity had prepared itself by struggle and compromise to take root and rapidly spread. Christianity adopted the emperor; later the emperor adopted Christianity. This was a wonderful age for the spread of a new religion: there was religious liberty; travel was universal, and thought was unrestricted.
The spiritual momentum of technically accepting Greek Christianity came to Rome too late to prevent the already begun moral decline, or to compensate for the already increasing and well-established racial deterioration. This new religion was a cultural necessity for imperial Rome, and it is unfortunate that it did not become a means of spiritual salvation in a larger sense. Even a good religion could not save a majestic empire from the sure results of standardization, physical plagues, the degradation of women, extreme focus on amusement, slavery and racial decadence, too much governmental control, over-taxation and gross collection abuses, people not participating in their government, unbalanced trade with the East that drained away the gold, and a state church that became institutionalized nearly to the point of spiritual barrenness.
Conditions were not so bad at Alexandria. The early schools continued to hold true to much of Jesus’ teachings. Pantaenus taught Clement, and then went on to follow Nathaniel in announcing Jesus’ gospel in India. While some of Jesus’ ideals were sacrificed in the building of Christianity, it should in all fairness be recorded that by the end of the second century practically all the distinguished minds of the Greco-Roman world had become Christian. The triumph was approaching completion. This Roman Empire lasted long enough to ensure the survival of Christianity even after the empire collapsed. But we have often speculated what would have happened in Rome and in the world if it had been Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom that had been accepted instead of Greek Christianity.
The European Dark Ages
The church, being an ally of politics and adjunct to society, was doomed to share in the spiritual and intellectual decline of the so-called European dark ages: religion became increasingly isolated, legalized, and ultra-disciplined. In a spiritual sense, Christianity was hibernating. Throughout this period there existed alongside this slumbering and secularized religion a continuous stream of mysticism—fantastical spiritual experiences bordering on unreality and philosophically akin to pantheism.
During these dark and despairing centuries religion again became virtually secondhand. The individual was almost lost before the overshadowing authority and tradition of the church. A new spiritual menace appeared in the creation of a galaxy of saints who were assumed to have special influence at the divine courts, and who if correctly appealed to would be able to intercede on a person’s behalf before the Gods.
Christianity was sufficiently paganized and socialized that while it was impotent to hold back the coming dark ages it was better prepared to survive this long period of moral darkness and spiritual stagnation. Christianity persisted through Western civilization’s long night and was still functioning as a moral influence in the world when the renaissance dawned. The rehabilitation of Christianity following the passing of the dark ages resulted in bringing into existence many sects of Christian teaching: beliefs suited to special spiritual, emotional, and intellectual types of human personalities. Many of these special Christian groups still persist at the time we are making this presentation.
Christianity shows a history of having originated out of the unintended transformation of Jesus’ religion into a religion about Jesus. Its history is one of paganization, fragmentation, Hellenization, secularization, institutionalization, moral hibernation, spiritual decadence, intellectual deterioration, threatened extinction, later rejuvenation, and more recently, relative rehabilitation. Such a pedigree reveals its inherent vitality and vast recuperative resources. This same Christianity is now in the civilized Western world, and stands face to face with a struggle for existence that is even more threatening than those eventful crises that have characterized its past battles for dominance. Religion is now confronted by the challenge of a new age of scientific minds and materialistic tendencies. In this gigantic struggle between the secular and the spiritual, Jesus’ religion will eventually triumph.
The Modern Problem
The twentieth century has brought new problems for Christianity and all other religions. The higher a civilization climbs, the more important it is to first seek the realities of heaven in all of humanity’s efforts to stabilize society and solve its material problems. Truth often becomes confusing and even misleading when it is isolated, segregated, dismembered, and analyzed too much. Living truth teaches the truth seeker correctly only when it is embraced in wholeness and as a living spiritual reality, not as a fact of material science or an inspiration of intervening art.
Religion is the revelation to humanity of its divine and eternal destiny. Religion is a purely spiritual experience and must forever be distinguished from people’s other forms of thought, such as people’s logical attitude toward things of material reality; people’s aesthetic appreciation of beauty contrasted with ugliness; people’s ethical recognition of social obligations and political duty, and even people’s sense of morality are not, in and of themselves, religious.
Religion is designed to find those universal values that bring forth faith, trust, and assurance. Religion ends in worship: it discovers for the soul those supreme values that are in contrast with the relative values discovered by the mind. Such superhuman insight can be had only through genuine religious experience.
A lasting social system without a morality predicated on spiritual realities can no more survive than could the solar system without gravity.
Do not try to satisfy the curiosity or gratify all the latent adventure surging in the soul in one short life in the flesh. Be patient! Do not be tempted to indulge in a lawless plunge into cheap and sordid adventure. Harness your energies and bridle your passions; be calm while you await the majestic unfolding of an endless career of progressive adventure and thrilling discovery.
In confusion over humanity’s origin, do not lose sight of its eternal destiny. Do not forget that Jesus loved even little children, and that he forever made clear the enormous worth of the human personality. As you view the world remember that the black patches of evil that you see are shown against a white background of ultimate good. You do not merely view white patches of good that show up miserably against a black background of evil.
When there is so much good truth to publish and announce, why should people dwell on the evil in the world just because it appears to be a fact? The beauties of the spiritual values of truth are more pleasurable and uplifting than is the phenomenon of evil.
In religion Jesus advocated the method of experience even as modern science pursues the technique of experiment. We find God through the leadings of spiritual insight, but we approach this insight through loyalty to duty, the pursuit of truth, the love of the beautiful, and the worship of divine goodness—of all these values love is the true guide to real insight.
Materialism
Scientists have unintentionally brought humanity into a materialistic panic. They have started an unthinking run on the moral bank of the ages, but this bank of human experience has vast spiritual resources: it can stand the demands being made on it. Only unthinking people become panicky about the spiritual assets of the human race. When the secular-materialistic panic is over, Jesus’ religion will not be found bankrupt: the spiritual bank of the kingdom of heaven will be paying out hope, faith, and moral security to all who draw on it in his name.
No matter what the apparent conflict between materialism and Jesus’ teachings may be, you can rest assured that in the ages to come the Master’s teachings will triumph. In reality, true religion cannot become involved in any controversy with science: it is in no way concerned with material things. Religion is simply indifferent to but sympathetic with science while it supremely concerns itself with the scientist. The pursuit of mere knowledge without the attendant interpretation of wisdom and the spiritual insight of religious experience eventually leads to pessimism and human despair. A little knowledge is truly unsettling.
At the time of this writing the worst of the materialistic age is over; the day of a better understanding is already beginning to dawn. The higher minds of the scientific world are no longer wholly materialistic in their philosophy, but the rank and file of the people still lean in that direction as a result of former teachings. This age of physical realism is only a passing episode in humanity’s life on Earth. Modern science has left true religion—Jesus’ teachings as translated in the lives of his believers—untouched. All science has done is destroy the childlike illusions of the misinterpretations of life.
Science is a quantitative experience; religion a qualitative experience as regards life on Earth. Science deals with phenomena; religion with goals, values, and origins. To assign causes as an explanation of physical phenomena is to confess ignorance of ultimates, and in the end only leads the scientist straight back to the first great cause—the Universal Father of Paradise.
The violent swing from an age of miracles to an age of machines has proved altogether upsetting to humanity. The cleverness of the false philosophies of mechanism contradict their mechanistic assertions. The fatalistic agility of the mind of a materialist forever disproves the assertions that the universe is a blind and purposeless energy phenomenon. The mechanistic naturalism of some supposedly educated people and the thoughtless secularism of the person in the street are both exclusively concerned with things: they are barren of all real values, sanctions, and satisfactions of a spiritual nature as well as being devoid of hope, faith, and eternal assurances. One of the critical problems with modern life is that people think they are too busy for religious devotion and spiritual meditation.
Materialism reduces a person to a soulless robot and makes them merely an mathematical symbol finding a helpless place in the numerical formula of an unromantic and mechanistic universe. But where does all of this vast universe of mathematics come from without a master mathematician? Science may expound on the conservation of matter, but religion validates the conservation of people’s souls—it concerns their experience with eternal values and spiritual realities.
The materialistic sociologist of today surveys a community, makes a report on it, and leaves the people as he found them. Nineteen hundred years ago unlearned Galileans watched Jesus giving his life as a spiritual contribution to humanity’s inner experience, and then he went out and turned the whole Roman Empire upside down. But religious leaders are making a critical mistake when they try to call modern people to spiritual battle with the trumpet blasts of the Middle Ages. Religion must provide itself with new and up-to-date slogans. Neither democracy nor any other political remedy will take the place of spiritual progress. False religions may represent an evasion of reality, but Jesus in his gospel introduced people to the entrance of an eternal reality of spiritual progression.
To say that mind emerged from matter explains nothing. If the universe were merely a mechanism and mind was not separate from matter, we would never have two differing interpretations of any observed phenomenon. The concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness are not inherent in either physics or chemistry. A machine cannot know, much less know truth, cherish goodness, or hunger for righteousness. Science may be physical, but the mind of the truth-discerning scientist is at once super-material. Matter knows not truth neither can it love mercy or delight in spiritual realities. Moral convictions rooted in human experience and based on spiritual enlightenment are just as real and certain as mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on a higher level.
If people were only machines they would react more or less uniformly to a material universe. Individuality, much less personality, would not exist. The fact of the absolute mechanism of Paradise at the center of the universe of universes in the presence of the unqualified will of the Second Source and Center makes it forever certain that determiners are not the exclusive law of the cosmos. Materialism is there, but it is not exclusive; mechanism is there, but it is not unqualified; determinism is there, but it is not alone. The finite universe of matter would eventually become uniform and deterministic but for the combined presence of mind and spirit. The influence of the cosmic mind constantly injects spontaneity into even the material worlds.
Freedom in any realm of existence is directly proportional to the degree of spiritual influence and cosmic mind control—the degree of actually doing the Father’s will. When you finally start out to find God, that is the conclusive proof that God has already found you. The sincere pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness leads to God. Every scientific discovery demonstrates the existence of both freedom and uniformity in the universe: the discoverer was free to make the discovery, and the thing discovered is real and apparently uniform or else it could not have become known as a thing.
The Vulnerability of Materialism
How foolish it is for the material-minded person to allow such vulnerable theories as those of a mechanistic universe to deprive them of the vast spiritual resources that come with personally experiencing true religion. Theories may quarrel with real spiritual faith but facts never do. Better that science should be devoted to the destruction of superstition rather than attempting to overthrow religious faith—human belief in divine values and spiritual realities.
Science should do for people materially what religion does for them spiritually—extend the horizon of life and enlarge their personality. True science can have no lasting quarrel with true religion. The scientific method is merely an intellectual yardstick to measure material adventures and physical achievements, but being material and wholly intellectual it is utterly useless in the evaluation of spiritual realities and religious experiences.
The inconsistency of the modern mechanist is that if this were merely a material universe and people were only machines, such people could not recognize themselves as such or be conscious of such a material universe. The materialistic despair of a mechanistic science has failed to recognize the fact of the spirit-indwelt mind of the scientist whose super material insight expresses these mistaken and self-contradictory concepts of a materialistic universe.
Paradise values of truth, beauty, goodness, infinity, and eternity are concealed in the facts of the phenomena of the universes of time and space. But it requires the eye of faith in a spirit-born mortal to see these spiritual values. The values and realities of spiritual progress are not a psychologic projection: a mere glorified daydream of the material mind. Such things are the spiritual forecasts of the indwelling Adjuster, the spirit of God living in the minds of people. Do not let your dabblings with the faintly glimpsed findings of relativity disturb your concepts of the infinity and eternity of God; in all your requests for self-expression do not make the mistake of failing to provide for Adjuster-expression: the manifestation of your real and better self.
If this were only a material universe, people as material beings would never be able to arrive at the idea of the mechanistic character of such an exclusively material existence. This mechanistic concept of the universe is in itself a nonmaterial phenomenon of mind, and all mind is of nonmaterial origin no matter how thoroughly it may appear to be materially conditioned and mechanistically controlled.
The partially evolved human mind is not over-endowed with wisdom and consistency. People’s conceit often escapes their logic and outruns their reason. The pessimism of the most pessimistic materialist is in and of itself sufficient proof that the universe of the pessimist is not wholly material. Both optimism and pessimism are reactions to ideas in a mind conscious of values as well as of facts. If the universe were truly what the materialist regards it to be, a person as a human machine would then be devoid of all conscious recognition of that fact. Without the consciousness of the concept of values in the spirit-born mind, the fact of universe materialism and the mechanistic phenomena of universe operation would be completely unrecognized by people. One machine cannot be conscious of the nature or value of another machine.
A mechanistic philosophy of life and the universe cannot be scientific because science recognizes and deals only with facts and materials. Philosophy is inevitably super-scientific. Humanity is a material fact of nature, but people’s lives are a phenomenon that transcends the material levels of nature by exhibiting the control attributes of mind and the creative qualities of spirit.
A person’s sincere effort to become a mechanist represents the tragic phenomenon of their useless effort to commit moral and intellectual suicide. But they cannot do it. If the universe were only material and people only machines, there would be no science to embolden the scientist to postulate this mechanization of the universe. Machines cannot classify, measure, or evaluate themselves: such a scientific piece of work could be only be executed by some entity of super-machine status. If universe reality is only one vast machine, then humanity must be outside of the universe and separate from it to recognize such a fact and become conscious of the insight of such an evaluation.
If people are only machines, by what technique does a person come to believe or claim to know that the person is only a machine? The experience of self-conscious evaluation of one’s self is never an attribute of a mere machine. A self-conscious and avowed mechanist is the best possible answer to mechanism: if materialism were a fact, there could be no self-conscious mechanist. It is also true that one must first be a moral person before one can perform immoral acts.
The claim of materialism implies a super-material consciousness that presumes to assert such dogmas. A mechanism may deteriorate, but it could never progress. Machines do not think, create, dream, aspire, idealize, hunger for truth, or thirst for righteousness. They do not motivate their lives with the passion to serve other machines or make the beautiful choice of finding God and striving to be like him. Machines are never moral, ethical, spiritual, aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual.
Art proves that people are not mechanistic, but it does not prove that they are spiritually immortal. Art is mortal morontia, the intervening field between humanity the material and humanity the spiritual. Poetry is an effort to escape from material realities to spiritual values. In a high civilization, art humanizes science while in turn it is spiritualized by true religion—insight into eternal and spiritual values. Art represents the human and time-space evaluation of reality. Religion is the divine embrace of cosmic values and means eternal progression in spiritual ascension. The art of time is dangerous only when it becomes blind to the spirit standards of the divine patterns that eternity reflects as the reality shadows of time. True art is the effective manipulation of the material things of life; religion is the ennobling transformation of the material facts of life and it never ceases in its spiritual evaluation of art.
How foolish to believe that a robot could conceive a philosophy of robotics, and how ridiculous that it should dare to form such a concept of other robots!
Any scientific interpretation of the material universe is valueless unless it provides due recognition for the scientist. No appreciation of art is genuine unless it gives recognition to the artist. No evaluation of morals is worthwhile unless it includes the moralist. No recognition of philosophy is edifying if it ignores the philosopher, and religion cannot exist without the real experience of the religionist who in and through this experience is seeking to find God and to know him. In the same way the universe of universes is without significance if separate from the I AM, the infinite God who made it and unceasingly manages it.
Mechanists—humanists—tend to drift with the material currents. Idealists and spiritualists dare to use their oars with vigor and intelligence to modify the apparently material course of the energy streams. Science lives by the mathematics of the mind; music expresses the tempo of the emotions. Religion is the spiritual rhythm of the soul in time-space harmony with the higher and eternal melody of infinity. Religious experience is something in human life that is truly super-mathematical.
In language, an alphabet represents the mechanism of materialism while the words expressive of the meaning of a thousand thoughts, grand ideas, and noble ideals—of love and hate; courage and cowardice–represent a mind defined by both material and spiritual law directed by the will of personality and limited by the inherent situational endowment.
The universe is not like the laws, mechanisms, and uniformities that the scientist discovers and comes to regard as science, but rather like the curious, thinking, creative, choosing, combining, and discriminating scientist who thus observes universe phenomena and classifies the mathematical facts inherent in the mechanistic phases of the material side of creation. Neither is the universe like the art of the artist, but rather like the striving, dreaming, aspiring, and advancing artist who seeks to transcend the world of material things in an effort to achieve a spiritual goal.
The scientist, not science, perceives the reality of an evolving and advancing universe of energy and matter. The artist, not art, demonstrates the existence of the transient morontia world intervening between spiritual liberty and material existence. The religionist, not religion, proves the existence of the divine values and spirit realities that are to be encountered in the progress of eternity.
Secular Totalitarianism
But even after mechanism and materialism have been more or less vanquished the devastating influence of twentieth-century secularism will still blight the spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls. Modern secularism has been fostered by two world-wide influences. First, the father of secularism was the godless and narrow minded attitude of nineteenth and twentieth-century so-called science: the science of atheism. Second, the mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church: secularism had its start as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.
At the time of this revelation the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate of both American and European life is decidedly secular—humanistic. For three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are unknowingly secularists.
It required a mighty influence, an impressive power, to free the living and thinking of the West from the crushing grasp of totalitarian Christian domination. Secularism broke the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern people. The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophical secularism. Secularism no sooner frees people from the domination of the institutionalized church than it sells the person into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state. Secularism frees people from Christian slavery only to betray them to the tyranny of economic and political slavery.
Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him: at least that was the earlier attitude. More recently secularism has assumed a militant attitude assuming to take the place of the religion whose totalitarian bondage it onetime resisted. Twentieth-century secularism tends to support the idea that people do not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead only to war, unrest, animosity, unhappiness, and world-wide disaster.
Secularism can never bring peace to humanity: nothing can take the place of God in human society. But mark you well! Do not be quick to surrender the beneficial gains of the secular revolt from Christian tyranny. Western civilization today enjoys many liberties and satisfactions as a result of the secular revolt. The critical mistake of secularism was that in revolting against the almost total control of life by religious authority and after being liberated from such Christian tyranny, the secularists went on to institute a revolt against God himself, sometimes hidden and sometimes out in the open.
To the secular revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. But because the secular revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed the unlooked for harvest of world wars and international chaos.
It is not necessary to sacrifice faith in God to enjoy the blessings of the modern secular revolt: tolerance, social service, civil liberties, and democratic government. It was not necessary to antagonize true religion to promote science and advance education.
But secularism is not the sole parent of all these recent gains in the expansion of living. Behind the gains of the twentieth century are not only science and secularism, but also the unrecognized and unacknowledged spiritual workings of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Without God—without religion—scientific secularism can never coordinate its forces or harmonize its divergent cultures, interests, and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, even with its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism, and nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.
The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for power and politics. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of humanity while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God. Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty nor wealth and property will lead to peace. The complete secularization of society, science, industry, and education can lead only to disaster. During the first third of the twentieth century Urantians killed more human beings than were killed during the entire Christian dispensation up to that time. This is only the beginning of the dire harvest of secularism and materialism: still more terrible destruction is yet to come.
Christianity’s Problem
Do not overlook the value of your spiritual heritage, the river of truth running down through the centuries even to the barren times of a secular and materialistic age. In all of your worthy efforts to rid yourselves of the superstitions of the past, make sure that you hold fast to the eternal truth. But be patient! When the present superstitious revolt is over the truths of Jesus’ gospel will persist to gloriously illuminate a new and better way.
But paganized and socialized Christianity needs a new contract with Jesus’ uncompromising teachings: it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master’s life on Earth. A new and fuller revelation of Jesus’ religion is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow the world influence of mechanistic naturalism. Urantia is now quivering on the brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of moral quickening, social readjustment, and spiritual enlightenment.
Jesus’ teachings, even though largely modified, survived the mystery cults of their birthtime, the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages, and are even now slowly triumphing over the mechanism, secularism, and materialism of the twentieth century. Such times of intense testing and threatened defeat are always times of momentous revelation.
Religion needs new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must wait the coming of these new teachers of Jesus’ religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of humanity. These spirit-born souls will quickly supply the leadership and inspiration needed for the moral, social, economic, and political reorganization of the world.
The modern age will refuse to accept a religion that is inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity—the real life and teachings of Jesus.
Primitive people lived a life of superstitious bondage to religious fear. Modern civilized people dread the thought of falling under the dominance of strong religious convictions. Thinking people have always feared to be held by a religion. When a strong and moving religion threatens to dominate a person, that person always tries to rationalize, traditionalize, and institutionalize it in the hope of gaining control over it. In such a way even a revealed religion becomes made and dominated by people. Modern men and women of intelligence evade Jesus’ religion because of their fears of what it will do to them—and with them. All such fears are well founded. Jesus’ religion does indeed dominate and transform its believers by demanding that they dedicate their lives to seeking knowledge of the will of the Father and dedicate their energy to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of humanity.
Selfish men and women simply will not pay such a price for even the most significant spiritual treasure ever offered to humanity. Only when people have become sufficiently disillusioned by the sad disappointments linked to the foolish and deceptive pursuits of selfishness and after they discover the barrenness of formalized religion will they be ready to turn wholeheartedly to the gospel of the kingdom—the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.
The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity—the best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a religion about Jesus, but one that people experience secondhand: they take their religion completely as given to them by their religious teachers. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he lived on Earth and know firsthand his life giving teachings! Descriptive words of things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight of them; neither can holy words inspire people’s souls like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But keen faith will always keep the door of hope in people’s souls open to receive the eternal spiritual realities of the worlds beyond.
Christianity has dared to lower its ideals before the challenge of human greed, war-madness, and the lust for power, but Jesus’ religion stands as the pure and unequaled spiritual summons calling the best in humanity to rise above all of these legacies of animal evolution and by grace attain the moral heights of true human destiny. Christianity is threatened with slow death from formalism, intellectualism, over organization, and other nonspiritual trends. The modern Christian church is not a brotherhood of dynamic believers like Jesus continuously commissioned to bring about the spiritual transformation of successive generations of humanity.
So-called Christianity has become a social and cultural movement as well as a religious belief and practice. The stream of modern Christianity drains many an ancient pagan swamp and barbarian morass; many old cultural watersheds empty into this present day cultural stream as well as the high Galilean tablelands that are supposed to be its exclusive source.
The Future
Christianity has indeed done an important service for this world, but what is most needed now is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on Earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who reveal the Master to all people. It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity: you must go forward from where you find yourselves. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life, and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. When Jesus becomes thus lifted up he will draw all people to him. Jesus’ disciples should be more than conquerors, they should be overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all people. Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the presence of God in personal experience.
The beauty, the humanity and divinity, and the simplicity and uniqueness of Jesus’ life on Earth present such a striking and appealing picture of revealing God and saving humanity that the theologians and philosophers of all time should be restrained from daring to form creeds or create theological systems of spiritual bondage out of such a divine gift of God in human form. In Jesus, the universe produced a mortal man in whom the spirit of love triumphed over the material handicaps of time and overcame the fact of physical origin.
Always bear in mind—God and people need each other: they are mutually necessary to the full and final attainment of eternal personality experience in the divine destiny of universe finality. “The kingdom of God is in you” was probably the most important announcement that Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit.
In winning souls for the Master it is not the first mile of duty, compulsion, or convention that will transform a person, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty-loving devotion that causes Jesus’ believers to grasp their sisters and brothers in love and sweep them on under spiritual guidance to the higher and divine goal of mortal existence. Christianity now willingly goes the first mile, but humanity languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second-milers—so few supposed followers of Jesus who live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.
The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him like people have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on Earth as his friends in the flesh. No social system or political regime that denies the reality of God can contribute in any lasting and constructive manner to the advancement of human civilization. But Christianity as it is subdivided and secularized today presents the most serious single obstacle to its further advancement; this is especially true concerning the Asian countries.
Too much attention to church dogma is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing spirit, and firsthand experience of the faith-comrades of Jesus in the brotherhood of humanity. The praiseworthy desire to preserve traditions of past achievement often leads to the defense of outgrown systems of worship. The well-meant desire to foster ancient thought systems effectually prevents the sponsoring of new and adequate means and methods designed to satisfy the spiritual longings of the expanding and advancing minds of modern people. Likewise, the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as huge but completely unconscious obstacles to the immediate advancement of the real gospel—the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Many of the earnest people who would gladly yield loyalty to the Jesus of the gospel find it difficult to enthusiastically support a church that exhibits so little of the spirit of his life and teachings, a church that they have been wrongly taught he founded. Jesus did not found the so-called Christian church, but he has in every manner consistent with his nature fostered it as the best example of his life’s work on Earth. If the Christian church would only dare to adopt the Master’s program, thousands of apparently indifferent young people would rush forward to enlist in such a spiritual undertaking and they would not hesitate to go all the way through with this magnificent adventure.
Christianity is seriously confronted with the doom embodied in one of its own slogans, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The non-Christian world will hardly submit to a sect-divided Christianity: the living Jesus is the only hope of a possible unification of Christianity. The true church—the Jesus brotherhood—is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by unity, not necessarily by uniformity. Uniformity is the earmark of the physical world of mechanistic nature. Spiritual unity is the fruit of faith union with the living Jesus. The visible church should refuse to any longer handicap the progress of the invisible and spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom of God. This brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. It may well utilize such social organizations, but it must not be replaced by them.
The Christianity of even the twentieth century must not be despised. It is the product of the combined moral genius of the God-knowing people of many cultures during many ages, and it has truly been one of the most significant powers for good on Earth: therefore, no person should lightly regard it even with its inherent and acquired defects. Christianity still works to move the minds of reflective people with mighty moral emotions.
But there is no excuse for the involvement of the church in politics and commerce: such unholy alliances are a flagrant betrayal of the Master. Genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this powerful institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox ways.
It is all too true that such a church would not have survived unless there had been people in the world who preferred such a style of worship. Many spiritually lazy souls crave an ancient and authoritative religion of ritual and sacred traditions. Human evolution and spiritual progress are hardly sufficient to enable all people to dispense with religious authority. The invisible brotherhood of the kingdom may well include these family groups of various social and temperamental classes if they are willing to truly become spirit-led sons of God. But in this brotherhood of Jesus there is no place for religious rivalry, group bitterness, or assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility.
These various groupings of Christians may serve to accommodate many different types of would-be believers among Western civilization, but such a division of Christianity presents a grave weakness when it attempts to carry the gospel of Jesus to Asian people. These cultures do not yet understand that there is a religion of Jesus separate and somewhat apart from Christianity, which has become a religion about Jesus. The grand hope of Urantia lies in the possibility of a new revelation of Jesus with a new and enlarged presentation of his saving message: one that will spiritually unite the many families of his present-day professed followers in loving service.
Even secular education could help in this vast spiritual renaissance if it would pay more attention to the work of teaching young people how to plan their lives and develop their characters. The purpose of all education should be to foster and further the supreme purpose of life: the development of a majestic and well-balanced personality. There is critical need for the teaching of moral discipline in the place of so much self-gratification. On such a foundation religion may contribute its spiritual incentive to the enrichment and enlargement of mortal life, even to the security and enhancement of life eternal.
Christianity is an improvised religion, and because of that it must operate in low gear. High-gear spiritual performances must wait the new revelation and the more general acceptance of the real religion of Jesus. But Christianity is a mighty religion seeing that the commonplace disciples of a crucified carpenter set in motion the teachings that conquered the Roman world in three hundred years and then went on to triumph over the barbarians who overthrew Rome. This same Christianity conquered—absorbed and uplifted—the whole stream of Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy. Then when this Christian religion became comatose for more than a thousand years as a result of an overdose of paganism and mysteries, it resurrected itself and virtually reconquered the whole Western world. Christianity contains enough of Jesus’ teachings to immortalize it. If Christianity could only grasp more of Jesus’ teachings it could do so much more in helping modern people to solve their new and increasingly complex problems.
Christianity suffers under an immense handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as a part of the social system—the industrial life and moral standards—of Western civilization. Christianity has unwittingly appeared to sponsor a society that staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality.
The hope of modern Christianity is that it will cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly praises to learn again from Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortals can ever hear—the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity.