Q: Mormons believe that God is a spirit being of flesh and bone. God also was once a man like us and had parents and worshiped a God at one time till he became exalted. Urantia says that God is a spirit without end. I’m confused.

A: While the Son and the Father are one, along with the the Holy Spirit (the trinity personalities) there is a difference between God—the Universal Father of all, and Jesus—the incarnated Creator Son of God. Jesus is indeed a divine being, and Jesus taught that when we had seen him, we had also seen the Father. These are mysteries that are incomprehensible to mortals, even though we can grasp the idea of these relationships.

Nowhere in The Urantia Book are we taught that God inhabits a corporeal body. The Universal Father is a Spirit being—the original and uncaused Cause. It is his infinite and endless nature that prompted him to create as he did—first the Eternal Son (the Word) and then the Infinite Spirit (the Actor). And in an almost endless series of downsteps and bestowals, God delegates his powers and reveals himself to ever more beings throughout the universes.

One of these bestowals is as a mortal of the realms, as happened with Jesus of Nazareth, who is also Michael of Nebadon, Creator Son of God. These Creator Sons are another example of God’s delegation of ability, duty and responsibility among his created beings. God even bestows a spark of his infinite being onto lowly humans like us, so that he can experience finiteness of being, since, of himself, this finite experience cannot be enjoyed.

Even though the Mormons may teach that God is “a spirit being of flesh and bone, ” I would not worry overmuch about the differing dogma and theology between Mormonism and The Urantia Book.

For Mormons, for Catholics, for Christians and non-Christians, for every person—the most important thing we can do is to establish and develop a vital relationship with the living God who dwells within us and who sojourns with us throughout our mortal lives and beyond. One can do this within the Mormon church, or by adopting and living the teachings of The Urantia Book, or even through no particular religious affiliation at all. All else is mere trappings.

In fact, getting lost in these trappings of dogma and theology can sometimes confuse us so much that we lose the essential truth—that all persons are beloved children of God, and God loves each individual as an individual child; each individual child of the Father is a unique expression of God, through the bestowal of personality. If we once get that truth into our beings, we are then free to enjoy the fellowship of any number of earthly, evolutionary religions, all the while practicing the revelatory religion of personal spiritual experience.

God does not come to us conditionally, but he bestows himself freely on ALL, no matter whether they are learned or unlearned, churched or un-churched. All are given the same potentiality of eternal life by identification with the beneficent indwelling Spirit of God, and through the decisions that they make throughout life towards the good, the true and the beautiful.

In the end, God will not ask what church you belonged to, or what religion you followed, but he will only require an accounting of the gifts that you were given and the use you made of them. This dutiful use of God’s gifts is accomplished through increasing identification with him, and through sincere desire to be progressively perfect, as God is perfect. This desire can be satisfied by all of the sincere of heart.