The Urantia Book (The UB) portrays the Supreme Being as, “the actualizing Deity of the evolving universes of time and space (113:3.6, pg. 1244).” This aspect of the 5th epochal revelation, the depiction of a God still evolving, was unusual in religion when I first came across The UB in 1978, and a concept that drew me into a deeper study of the book. Here religion had finally met science and formed an alliance in a world created by God, but a greater god who used, “the creative technique known as evolution,” (20:0.5, pg. 223). “Evolution is a cosmic technique of growth.” (100:3.7, pg. 1097)
The Supreme is also described as the Oversoul of Creation (117:5, pg. 1285), a term that we first encounter in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God.” (The Over-Soul)
In the Foreword, we find The UB’s initial more expanded definition, “God the Supreme – [is] ... personally experiencing the achievement of Deity unity as the … God of the evolutionary creatures of time and space.” (0:2.15; #4, pg. 4) We are also introduced in the Foreword to the seven levels on which Total Deity functions (as a unity), culminating in the Supreme and Ultimate levels.
The Supreme Being has been experienced and named by religious teachers in the past (for example by the authors of the Upanishads), but before The UB, the term Supreme Being was virtually a synonym for God. The UB is the first sacred text to clearly delineate it as a separate discernible reality from the Universal Father and has reserved the term Supreme for this specific sixth level of Total Deity.
Much more new information about the Supreme Being is revealed in The Urantia Book. I can suggest here a few questions that the concept of the Supreme answers for us.
Is Creation finished? Science has confirmed via pictures from space (first from the Hubble and later by more advanced telescopes) that stars are still being born, that creation is not completed.
Is God contentedly complete in the three persons of Trinity, removed or somehow outside of the Creation that is still unfolding? The statement, “God is himself still evolving” is a radical one in the context of traditional Christianity.
For those accustomed to the security of a religion of authority, a vista of imperfect, unstable, and unreliable situations arise. Disturbing to traditional religionists is the idea that if God is evolving it suggests he is not yet perfect, further leading to the implication that the previous revelations of God are only partially accurate, perhaps obsolete.
If new revelations of God are continuing to unfold, how do we assess the revelations we’ve already received in older sacred texts, the Bible, the Koran, the Torah? If they are in error, is it reasonable to continue to use them as guides to our decisions? We learn in the UB that, “in this way the sacred books of many religions have become fetishistic prisons incarcerating the spiritual imagination of man.” (88:2.6, pg. 969)
The important idea that God moves out of the “static” and “potential” aspects of eternity, the first two levels of Total Deity, into the “associative, creative, evolutional,” levels is hard for mortal beings to comprehend. My Catholic relatives could neither understand nor accept it.
Notice by the way how the first letter of each of these five Deity levels spells out the word SPACE. A joke, right? Possibly--but a good one. And also a useful way to memorize the seven levels of Total Deity. The last two levels, Supreme and Ultimate, spelling SU, prompted The UB study group leader, David Glass, to teach his mnemonic device, Space-Su(it).
In our era, process theology teaches, “a process must be inherent in God’s nature whereby his infinity is acquiring realization,” (A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas) and progressive Christianity is beginning to absorb such new thoughts.
On the back deck of a beautiful home in the mountains of Santa Cruz, a fellow reader and I stood together one cold winter night and watched the blazing stars of Orion dance across a clear, unpolluted sky like an unfolding spectacle of the Supreme, “He is seated upon the circle of the earth, and …he stretches out the heavens as a curtain (Isaiah 40:22). He was moved to the thought that if only people could come to know the Supreme, we might be better equipped to solve the planet’s problems, “… action, completion of decisions, is essential to the evolutionary attainment of consciousness of progressive kinship with the cosmic actuality of the Supreme Being.” (pg. 1211; 110.6.17)
I think my friend in Santa Cruz is right. We can rely on God the Supreme to reciprocate in any choice that has something to do with the further evolution of spiritual dominance over matter-energy, our spiritual natures finding greater control over material life circumstances. We are a harmony, a rhyme, with the purpose and destiny of the Supreme when our decisions help write this mighty song, this great poem.
“During the present universe age the evolving personalities of the grand universe suffer many difficulties due to the incomplete actualization of the sovereignty of God the Supreme, but we are all sharing the unique experience of his evolution. We evolve in him and he evolves in us.” (31:10.12, pg. 353)
“The purpose of cosmic evolution is to achieve unity of personality through increasing spirit dominance, volitional response to the teaching and leading of the Thought Adjuster. Personality, both human and superhuman, is characterized by an inherent cosmic quality which may be called “the evolution of dominance,” the expansion of the control of both itself and its environment.” (112:2.15, pg. 1229) Talk about a path to solving environmental problems! Please join us on that path.
