Celebrating the New Revelation of Jesus (Easter 2015)

By all accounts, the Urantia Book’s core spiritual message and most powerful narrative is contained in its 774-page Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.” The affection for this amazing account is nearly universal among those who have read it. Even the man who is arguably the UB’s chief critic—the famed debunker and science writer Martin Gardner—considers Part IV to be an especially “well-written, impressive work,” and writes, “Either it is accurate in its history, coming directly from higher beings in position to know, or it is a work of fertile imagination by someone who knew the New Testament by heart and who was also steeped in knowledge of the times when Jesus lived.” (See Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, Prometheus Books, 1995.)

I believe we urgently need a new revelation of Jesus that speaks to contemporary experience in a complex, dangerous, and globalizing world. For millions of readers worldwide since its publication in 1955, The Urantia Book fills this need by integrating an updated and enlarged presentation of Jesus’s life and teachings into a thoroughly modern cosmology—one that is commensurate with the leading developments in today’s science, culture, art, and philosophy. The portrayal of Jesus that the UB offers is, I believe, an epochal gift to the planet, a treasure whose authority and power have only grown over time. And, devoted Christians, please take note: This Jesus of the Urantia revelation is still the Word of God made flesh, still the Logos who dwelled among us, still the true Light that lights every man and woman living on earth.

The UB has a great deal to say about him, and yet Jesus Christ is and must be—even given this superb revealed biography—a reality, a power, and a mystery that is beyond words. The 2,096-page Urantia text reveals him to be a sublime being of origin in the Universal Father whose ultimate reality is beyond all speaking and all description. The Jesus of the Urantia revelation remains humankind’s best window into the mystery of the God we believe to be omniscient, eternal, universal, and infinitely loving of each person. As the Apostle John wrote: “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”—but his revelation to the world continues, and the world is destined to know the real Jesus, now revealed in the Urantia Revelation as “Christ Michael,” co-creator of our local universe.

But can this all really be so? Yes it can. The Urantia Revelation became possible because humanity has grown up in the past two millennia under the sponsorship of the Spirit. We are mature enough to know the universe name of our planet and to understand the place of Urantia among the trillions of inhabited planets in the grand universe. We are able to accept the reality of a feminine deity coequal with Christ. We can open our hearts and minds to receive an expanded depiction of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth based on the angelic record and cradled in a new manger: an epochal revelation that unifies science, philosophy, history, and religion.

Thus, God’s revelation to us did not arbitrarily stop in the first century; we have for two millennia received ongoing revelation to all sorts of devoted believers through the Pentecostal Spirit of Truth as well as through the power of the Holy Spirit. And this Holy Spirit is now revealed to us as Christ’s deity equal and cosmic co-Creator: our Mother Spirit. In other words, according to the UB, the Spirit of Truth is Christ’s personal gift to humankind; the Holy Spirit is of origin from the Mother Spirit, and confers upon us differing but complemental spiritual blessings. We discover, then, the identity of two central deity-personalities of the Urantia revelation, affectionately known to us as “Mother Spirit” (or simply “Mother”) and “Christ Michael” (or “Michael).” We know well the figure of Michael who is known to history as the human Jesus Christ. Our image of Mother Spirit is more diffuse. She has made her appearance to us as the “divine Mother” of almost every world religion, known by such names as Mother Mary (Christianity), Shakti (Hinduism) or Kuan Yin (Taoism). As taught in the Urantia text, Michael and Mother are our “universe parents”— in fact, Mother is the heavenly consort and the equal deity-partner of Michael. The Urantia Book reveals that the divine figure of Christ has a coequal feminine complement—and we are the evolving children of this sublime divine couple.