A History of The Urantia Papers
by Larry Mullins
with Dr. Meredith Justin Sprunger
Chapter One
IN DECEMBER OF 1955, REVEREND Edward Brueseke, Pastor of the Zion United Church of Christ of South Bend, Indiana, handed Dr. Meredith Sprunger a copy of a newly published book. The 1955 printing of The Urantia Book was impressive in size, containing over 2,000 pages and a million words bound within its deep blue covers.
"Judge Hammerschmidt gave me this book," said Dr. Brueseke. "Some businessmen think it's a new Bible." He and his wife smiled as Meredith held the massive volume in his hands and opened it. Meredith scanned the Table of Contents pages. It was the alleged authors of the various 196 Papers that composed the book that challenged his credulity rather than the titles of the Papers. The second Paper was titled: "The Nature of God" by a "Divine Counselor." Another was titled: "The Universe of Universes" by a "Perfecter of Wisdom." Another: "Personalities of the Grand Universe" supposedly authored by a "Mighty Messenger." These were enough to turn him off and strike him as ludicrous.
Meredith read a few of the titles and authors aloud to his wife, Irene, seated next to him. Then they all had a gentle laugh about Judge Hammerschmidt's naiveté and closed the book. However, both ministers and their wives maintained respect for Judge Louis Hammerschmidt's contributions to the Zion Church. He was an esteemed layperson of the larger United Church of Christ. Judge Hammerschmidt had been instrumental in bringing a Children's Hospital to South Bend, and he had donated a chapel to Elmhurst College.
However, there seemed no euphemistic way of putting it, The Urantia Book must be some kind of hoax. Dr. Sprunger set the book aside, and assumed that the December, 1955 glimpse would be the last he would see of it. He was wrong.
About a month later, Dr. Sprunger, who was Vice President of the Indiana-Michigan Conference Board, was to pick up Judge Hammerschmidt and drive him to their January council meeting in Jackson, Michigan. During the two and a half hour journey, the Judge cautiously mentioned his tentative investigation of Spiritualism.
Hammerschmidt had lost his wife over a decade before and, in his grief, he looked into the practice of Spiritualism. He was not impressed by what he discovered. Upon seeing that Dr. Sprunger was not at all disturbed about an open discussion of such things, the Judge was emboldened to comment: "Say, I've got a book that I would like you to read and tell me what you think about it." Dr. Sprunger kept his eyes on the road and the bleak January landscape ahead. He knew what was coming. Not wanting to hurt the Judge's feelings, however, Meredith replied: "OK, Judge, send it to me."
In about a week, a package was delivered to the Sprunger household with The Urantia Book enclosed. Over the subsequent months, Dr. Sprunger made several efforts to read sections of the extensive work.
Dr. Sprunger in the mid-fifties
From his fleeting appraisal of the Urantia Papers, Dr. Sprunger thought the authors' use of esoteric names might indicate the Papers represented some form of Theosophy. He even took it on vacation with him that year, but could not get interested in the material enough to read much of it.
September of 1956 arrived, and The Urantia Book had not been even partially read. Dr. Sprunger realized that he would be meeting with Judge Hammerschmidt in October, and he felt obligated to read something to get off the hook. He decided to read a small series of Papers and candidly tell the Judge what he thought of the material. So Dr. Sprunger began to examine the Table of Contents again.
As he skimmed the contents, Meredith recalled the book had a large section devoted to the "Life and Teachings of Jesus." He surmised that with his academic theological background he could surely make short work of this material. Previously, he had read other attempts, such as the Aquarian Gospel, to portray the early life of Jesus. Apocryphal stories about Jesus molding little clay birds and then bringing them to life did not impress him. So, with the intention of quickly refuting the material, Dr. Sprunger began to read the Urantia Papers' account of the life of Jesus. He did not find what he expected to find.
Meredith became gradually enthralled as he read. The Papers had the ring of reasonable, perhaps even authentic, historicity. As the narrative progressed to the story of John the Baptist and paralleled the New Testament account, Dr. Sprunger was deeply impressed. The colorful and vivid recounting of the life of the Master unfolded, at times moving Dr. Sprunger to tears. When he closed the book on the final Paper: The Faith of Jesus, Meredith concluded the Urantia account was harmonious with perceived New Testament realities. More than that, he believed it was the most profound and inspiring life and teachings of Jesus in print.
Due to the unexpected high quality of Part IV -- the 700-page depiction of The Life and Teachings of Jesus -- Dr. Sprunger suddenly found himself intensely motivated to read the rest of the material. Starting with the Foreword, Meredith read the balance of the Urantia Papers. When he had finished, he realized the Urantia Papers offered the most comprehensive and integrated picture of science, philosophy and religion that he had ever read. Suddenly, everything he had ever learned was rearranged and melded with new concepts into a grand, new, mind-boggling synthesis.
Dr. Sprunger pondered this immense new paradigm of actuality for some time. He thought: "If this is not an authentic picture of Reality, it is the way it ought to be!"
Meredith contacted Judge Hammerschmidt to find out where he had gotten the book. The Judge, delighted at Sprunger's interest, informed him that a friend by the name of W. H. Harrah had given him the book. Mr. Harrah was a successful businessman, and the co-founder of the National Standard Company. He was also a member of a group in Chicago that had somehow originally acquired the Urantia Papers.
A luncheon meeting was arranged. Mr. Harrah explained that the leader of the group that had published The Urantia Book was Dr. William Sadler. Dr. Sprunger was surprised. He knew of William Sadler by his reputation. Dr. Sadler had studied overseas with Freud, and was sometimes referred to as the "father of American Psychiatry." Dr. Sadler was also a prolific author in his field and a college professor. Meredith had friends who had taken Dr. Sadler's course of Pastoral Counseling at McCormick Theological Seminary.
Mr. Harrah stated that he wanted to provide Urantia Books for some of Dr. Sprunger's ministerial colleagues in The United Church of Christ. He wrote out a check to pay for a dozen books and handed it to Dr. Sprunger. Later, Dr. Sprunger gave twelve of his ministerial colleagues a copy of The Urantia Book. All but one of these young ministers (who admitted he had not read the book) were as impressed as Dr. Sprunger with the material.
There ensued a deep, scholarly review of the book and its possible origins by the ministerial team. When Dr. Sprunger revealed to the group what little he had learned about the origin of the book from Mr. Harrah, the group began studying the books written by Dr. Sadler as part of their research project. They discovered highly relevant material in one of the books that Dr. Sadler had authored: The Mind at Mischief, Funk & Wagnalls, 1929. The subtitle of the book was: "Tricks and Deceptions of the Subconscious and how to Cope with Them."
The Mind at Mischief
Out of all of his voluminous mainline writings, Dr. Sadler mentions the process that was to eventually lead to the materialization of the Urantia Papers in only one year's printings of a single book. At the time of writing The Mind at Mischief, Dr. Sadler was known to be a leading debunker of psychic phenomena. The book itself is a powerful rebuttal of all known processes involving marginal human consciousness that produce "messages" from the "spirit world." In the foreword to the book, Robert H. Gault, Ph.D. and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University wrote:
"The psychiatrists of our day are showing us that in the background of personalities are wells of latent memories that may account, literally by the wholesale, for the phenomena of dreams, automatic writings, "spirit communications," and many other phenomena connected with hysteria, disassociation, and other abnormal psychic states." 1
In The Mind at Mischief Dr. Sadler took the position that, in his experience, all psychic phenomena fall into three categories: (1). Self-deception. (2). Emotional Illness. (3). Fraud. In his book he presented case history after case history to support these views. However, the ministers found a tiny crack in his professional stance on page 332:
"Perhaps this statement should be qualified by adding that there are possibly one or two exceptions to this general classification of so-called psychics and trance mediums. Many years ago I was made acquainted with a very extraordinary phenomenon of this sort, which it has been my privilege to observe periodically from that time to this, and some day I hope to report more fully upon this unique case; but I hasten to say that in none of my observations of this individual and the peculiar associated experiences of the night period was there ever anything that pointed toward spiritualism. In fact, the contacts of this individual with the alleged forces which dominated at such times, whatever they were, were always in a most positive manner antagonistic to, and condemnatory of, all beliefs or tendencies associated with the idea of the return of the dead to participate in the affairs of the world of the living." 2
A footnote for this paragraph led the investigators to an Appendix in the back of the book. Here they discovered a rather detailed disclaimer written by Dr. Sadler. Dr. Sadler mentions two cases in this Appendix, only one of which he was able to investigate. It was this case that he expanded upon in depth. It appeared that the ministers had found the thread they were looking for:
"The . . . exception has to do with a rather peculiar case of psychic phenomena, one which I find myself unable to classify, and which I would like very much to narrate more fully; I cannot do so here, however, because of a promise which I feel under obligation to keep sacredly. In other words, I have promised not to publish this case during the lifetime of the individual. I hope sometime to secure a modification of that promise and to be able to report this case more fully because of its interesting features. I was brought in contact with it, in the summer of 1911, and I have had it under my observation more or less ever since, having been present at probably 250 of the night sessions, many of which have been attended by a stenographer who made voluminous notes."
To most Urantia Book readers this is now a very familiar paragraph. Yet, in the Seventies and Eighties it was very seldom seen. I recall seeing it for the first time about 1975. It was in the home of Berkeley Elliott, of Oklahoma City. Berkeley had been a reader almost since The Urantia Book had first been published. She was a good friend of Bill Sadler, Jr., the son of Dr. Sadler, who often visited the Oklahoma group in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I happened to pull a volume off of one of Berkeley's bookshelves that day, titled: The Mind at Mischief. I remembered Clyde Bedell once telling me of the Appendix of that book, and how it contained a reference to an individual known only as the "sleeping subject." When I was able, at last, to read those words of Dr. Sadler the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It was so rare, in those days, to see anything like this. Material such as that in The Mind at Mischief was considered secret, and only a special few were privy to it. The narrative continued:
"A thorough study of this case has convinced me that it is not one of ordinary trance. While the sleep seems to be quite of a natural order, it is very profound, and so far we have never been able to awaken the subject when in this state; but the body is never rigid, and the heart action is never modified, tho respiration is sometimes markedly interfered with. This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities. In fact, he is more or less indifferent to the whole proceeding, and shows a surprising lack of interest in these affairs as they occur from time to time."
Although this may seem old-hat to Urantians now, we should remember that this may be the most complete description of the early contacts that Dr. Sadler ever wrote. The Mind at Mischief was printed in several editions in 1929, and after that, Clyde told me the reference was deleted. The most astounding paragraph follows:
"In no way are these night visitations like the séances associated with spiritualism. At no time during the period of eighteen years' observation has there been a communication from any source that claimed to be the spirit of a deceased human being. The communications which have been written, or which we have had the opportunity to hear spoken, are made by a vast order of alleged beings who claim to come from other planets to visit this world, to stop here as student visitors for study and observation when they are en route from one universe to another or from one planet to another. These communications further arise in alleged spiritual beings who purport to have been assigned to this planet for duties of various sorts."
Dr. Sadler then admits he has not been able to discover the psychic, or unconscious, source of the information that was being disclosed. The case remained a bafflement to him.
"Eighteen years of study and careful investigation have failed to reveal the psychic origin of these messages. I find myself at the present time just where I was when I started. Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind. Much of the material secured through this subject is quite contrary to his habits of thought, to the way in which he has been taught, and to his entire philosophy. In fact, of much that we have secured, we have failed to find anything of its nature in existence. Its philosophic content is quite new, and we are unable to find where very much of it has ever found human expression."
Note the scientific detachment by which Dr. Sadler addresses this case. He apparently had not yet, in 1929, given up his quest to find a scientific answer to the phenomenon.
"Much as I would like to report details of this case, I am not in a position to do so at present. I can only say that I have found in these years of observation that all the information imparted through this source has proved to be consistent within itself. While there is considerable difference in the quality of the communications, this seems to be reasonably explained by a difference in state of development and order of the personalities making the communications. Its philosophy is consistent. It is essentially Christian and is, on the whole, entirely harmonious with the known scientific facts and truths of this age. In fact, the case is so unusual and extraordinary that it establishes itself immediately, as far as my experience goes, in a class by itself, one which has thus far resisted all my efforts to prove it to be of auto-psychic origin. Our investigations are being continued and, as I have intimated, I hope some time in the near future to secure permission for the more complete reporting of the phenomena connected with this interesting case." 3
The next step for the team of ministers was clear: They would need to go to Chicago and meet personally with Dr. William S. Sadler to discuss the origin of the Urantia Papers. The remarkable meeting took place on May 7, 1958.
ENDNOTES:
1. THE MIND AT MISCHIEF, by William S. Sadler, M.D., F.A.C.S.; Funk & Wagnall's Company, New York and London, 1929, page xi.
