From: MM24681@UAFSYSB.BITNET (Michael Million)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Subject: At Dan's request...an excerpt
Date: 16 Oct 92 17:51:05 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU


    And so, for centuries, the Christian church has labored under great
 embarrassment because it dared to lay claim to those mysterious powers
 and privileges of the kingdom, powers and privileges which can be
 exercised and experienced only between Jesus and his spiritual believer
 brothers.  And thus it becomes apparent that membership in the church
 does not necessarily mean fellowship in the kingdom; one is spiritual,
 the other mainly social.
    Sooner or later another and greater John the Baptist is due to arise
 proclaiming "the kingdom of God is at hand" -- meaning a return to the
 high spiritual concept of Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom is the
 will of his heavenly Father dominant and transcendent in the heart of
 the believer -- and doing all this without in any way referring either
 to the visible church on earth or to the anticipated second coming of
 Christ.  There must come a revival of the *actual* teachings of Jesus,
 such a restatement as will undo the work of his early followers who
 went about to create a sociophilosophical system of belief regarding
 the *fact* of [Jesus'] sojourn on earth.  In a short time the teaching
 of this story *about* Jesus nearly supplanted the preaching of Jesus'
 gospel of the kingdom.  In this way a historical religion displaced
 that teaching in which Jesus had blended man's highest moral ideas and
 spiritual ideals with man's most sublime hope for the future -- eternal
 life.  And that was the gospel of the kingdom.
    It is just because the gospel of Jesus was so many-sided that within
 a few centuries students of the records of his teachings became divided
 up into so many cults and sects.  This pitiful subdivision of Christian
 believers results from failure to discern in the Master's manifold
 teachings the divine oneness of his matchless life.  But someday the
 true believers in Jesus will not be thus spiritually divided in their
 attitude before unbelievers.  Always we may have diversity of intellec-
 tual comprehension and interpretation, even varying degrees of social-
 ization, but lack of spiritual brotherhood is both inexcusable and
 reprehensible.
    Mistake not! there is in the teachings of Jesus an eternal nature
 which will not permit them forever to remain unfruitful in the hearts
 of thinking men.  The kingdom as Jesus conceived it has to a large
 extent failed on earth; for the time being, an outward church has taken
 its place; but you should comprehend that this church is only the
 larval stage of the thwarted spiritual kingdom, which will carry it
 through this material age and over into more spiritual dispensation
 where the Master's teachings may enjoy a fuller opportunity for
 development.  Thus does the so-called Christian church become the
 cocoon in which the kingdom of Jesus' concept now slumbers.  The king-
 dom of the divine brotherhood is still alive and will eventually and
 certainly come forth from this long submergence, just as surely as the
 butterfly eventually emerges as the beautiful unfolding of its less
 attractive creature of metamorphic development.
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 [Excerpted from _The URANTIA Book_page 1866; copyrighted by the Urantia
 Foundation, Chicago, Illinois  USA]