Question:

What can you tell me about the book Urantia?

Answer:

This is a very interesting story.  A most anonymous group produced a book commonly known as Urantia (It actually has a longer title) in 1955.  They claimed that the book was taken down by direct dictation from a man who recited these letters while sleeping.  They claim that this was done in some sort of altered psychological state and that the things dictated were from some sort of cosmic being.  The claim is that the person dictating had no idea what he was saying and that the ideas expressed were completely outside anything he would even be able to conceive of or be aware of.   There are several reasons to be extremely suspicious of the entire claim.  First of all, the group is very secretive.  They have never given the identity of the person who supposedly gave the dictation.  We have no places or dates.  This whole process is spookily reminiscent of the work of Joseph Smith who never produced his Golden Plates.

The content of Urantia sounds, on a surface level, to be quite similar to Christianity.  In fact, it lifts up Jesus as the greatest who ever lived, as perfect, as Son of God and so forth.  However, it makes statements about Jesus and about God which are directly opposed to biblical truths.  For example, the Urantia denies that Jesus died to save us from sin.   They deny that God will judge sinners and even the very idea of judgment.  According to Urantia, the idea of the wrath of God is false.  According to Urantia, Jesus is the incarnation of Michael of Nebadon, one of more than 700,000 Creator Sons.  Now we are starting to look like a sort of New Age blend of Hinduism and Christianity.  It begins to sound like Gnosticism.

Urantia relies on a completely bogus cosmology.  It describes a world in which our galaxy is the universe, but there are many "superuniverses."  The cosmology gets quite complicated, but one thing for sure, it cannot possibly be made to agree with what we know from science. 

Bottom line, this is false prophecy which has the convenient advantage of having a prophet who cannot be disputed because he is not named.  It is a "nice" philosophical, modern, happy "improved" eclectic kind of Christianity which is, of course, not Christianity at all.

John Oakes