The compensatory nature of divine revelation

Starkly put, I believe we should open to new revelation at this time because our world needs, and indeed has earned, a divine rescue and salvage operation. We might refer to such an outreach effort as the compensatory nature of divine revelation. The extreme adversity that results from the presence of radical evils, such as genocide and world war, invites mercy as recompense, and all such divine “reparation” is in accord with the mandates of God’s love and justice. In particular, when a planet is nearing the very extinction of its native life, the heart of the Creator is aroused and is moved to call forth urgent measures such as new revelation or even a new divine visitation. The sovereign God of love, the very source of planetary life, finds cause to act in this way in an effort to console his children and conserve the riches of previous natural and human evolution, doing so while respecting the relative sovereignty of human free will.

Such a meeting of great opposites—that is, a compensatory revelatory response to horrendous evil—may remind us of Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel’s “labor of the negative” fosters the co-emergence of new and higher realities along a spiral of progress toward an eschaton. At each turn, a revelatory new “other” comes into view. At times it shatters present arrangements and pushes toward a new dispensation while also conserving hard-won ideas and truths.

We might also call this the dialectic of divine compensation. Planetary trauma opens the way for “a negation of the negation,” leading to a higher synthesis including a new theodicy suitable for our time. Yet it is important to bear in mind that encounters with “otherness” are also virtually inexhaustible, such that any given step in the spiral will lead to still others unforeseen.

It is worth noting that this dialectical pattern of divine compensation is also present in biblical narratives:

• Dramatic divine intervention delivered the Jews from bondage at the moment when the scourge of slavery had become intolerable. “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery’” (Ex 20:2-3).
• A millennium later, when the messianic expectation of the Hebrews was peaking in the face of the unbearable pain of Roman occupation, Jesus appeared to offer deliverance—but of a sort few had anticipated.
• Jesus himself alludes to the dialectic of divine recompense in his Olivet Discourse that occurs just before the Passion, where he explains to the Apostles the compensatory action of his Father at a future time of greatest tribulation: “For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again … Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will … see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory” (Matt 24:21-30).

And one can think of numerous other examples of how an unexpected “presencing” of the holy—such as the Marian apparition at Fatima in the midst of the horrors of World War I—becomes an instrument of compensation for suffering or even may act as the source of unexpected healing.

In this light, it is a remarkable fact that the original manuscript of the Urantia Revelation was completed in 1945, just as Western civilization had reached its own nadir, when the horrors of WWII were coming to light as a shocked world looked on.

The “neo-supernaturalism” of the Urantia Revelation itself can be seen as merciful recompense for two world wars that culminated in the atrocities of WWII, the Holocaust, and the nuclear bomb attacks on Japan. And, once again, here was a form of divine response few had anticipated, one provided at a time of great testing.