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The Relationship Between the Bahá’í Faith and Christianity |
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Dear Readers, From the 13th to the 31st August I was staying on the Faroe Islands with the purpose of visiting the local Bahá’í community. I also wished to clarify the relationship between the Bahá’í Faith and Christianity since I had become aware that this had been a controversial subject in the Faroese newspapers. It is with this controversy in mind that here offer my comments on this important issue, which deserves clarification. Most questions in this connection relate to Bahá’u’lláh’s claim that He is the return of Christ. Bahá’u’lláh in His appeal to the Christians writes: “Say, O followers of the Son! Have ye shut out yourselves from Me by reason of My Name? Wherefore ponder ye not in your hearts? Day and night ye have been calling upon your Lord, the Omnipotent, but when He came from the heaven of eternity in His great glory, ye turned aside from Him and remained sunk in heedlessness.” (Lawh-i-Aqdas) This declaration has been a problem for many Christians since Bahá’u’lláh does not live up to their expectations of the return of Christ. Amongst these expectations are the manner, consequence and time of His coming. Let us first examine the first advent of Jesus to see how He fulfilled the Jewish expectations that were based on the inspired scripture of the Old Testament. Generally it was expected that the Messiah would be of the house of David and would sit on his throne. He would throw the Roman yoke off Israel and conquer the east and west. Jesus was, according to both Matthew and Luke, “a son of David,” which meant that formally He had rights to the throne. Yet we find no interest in this physical heritage in Jesus’ own words. It is in fact doubtful whether His Messianic declaration was commonly known, we notice several places in the gospels where He admonishes someone who has recognised His station to keep it a secret: “Then charged He His disciples that they should tell no man that He was Jesus the Christ”. (Matthew 16:20), and “And He straitly charged them that they should not make Him known.”” (Mark 3:12). Moreover he defied the importance that Jews put on the heritage by citing and interpreting Psalm 110 as a reference to the Messiah: “While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them Saying: What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he? They say unto Him, The son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call Him Lord, how is He his son? And no man was able to answer Him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions”. (Matthew 22: 41-44). As to sitting on the throne of David and conquering the east and the west, establishing the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus did not seem to fit the shoes which the Messiah should fill as a warlord. Because of this expectation of a visible conquest of east and west, a military establishment of the kingdom of God, the Pharisees once asked why they could not see this kingdom which John the Baptist had proclaimed was nigh, saying: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2) and which Jesus had claimed had come in these words: “No doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.” (Luke 11:20). To this Jesus did not answer that the kingdom had not yet come, or that it would come later. Rather, He denied that it would come as they expected: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20,1) The Jews’ understanding of the kingdom became their excuse to have Jesus crucified (for if He was the Messiah He was the Romans’ enemy). Jesus explained the nature of the kingdom of God at his hearing with Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from here.” (John 18:36). Another thing that the Jews expected was the return of Elijah: “And they asked Him saying: Why say the scribes that Elias must come first?” (Mark 9:11). He would come in “a chariot of fire, and horses of fire” (2 Kings 2:11) on “the great and terrible day of the LORD” (Malachi 4:5). Again Jesus did not deny that Elijah should come before the Messiah, just that it should not be interpreted in the manner done by the Pharisees and the scribes. He told them in a clear and emphatic way that John the Baptist was Elijah, but that they should open their minds and their inner ears beyond their literal expectations in order to receive and perceive the truth: “And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Matthew 11:14-15) “O kings of Christendom! Heard ye not the saying of Jesus, the Spirit of God, ‘I go away, and come again unto you’? Wherefore, then, did ye fail, when He did come again unto you in the clouds of heaven, to draw nigh unto Him, that ye might behold His face, and be of them that attained His Presence?” (Bahá’u’lláh, Lawh-i-Aqdas) There are other things that the Jews expected would come with the immortal kingdom of David, namely the resurrection of the dead. This expectation, however, was only amongst the Pharisees and their followers. Although Jesus was never challenged on this point, He made it clear that He had brought the promised resurrection. For this reason He said: “Verily, verily, I say to you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but hath passed from death to life. Verily, verily, I say to you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” (John 5:24,5). It should be clear to all that Jesus is here allegorising the expected resurrection and is applying it to “the hour” in which the disciples now found themselves. Before the resurrection of Lazarus we see that Martha, when she meets Jesus, says: “I know that he [Lazarus] shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” To this common understanding of the resurrection Jesus answered: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:” Notice here that he is using present tense (ego eimi), as He is not describing a future miracle or deed, but is explaining about His own nature. Jesus goes on to say: “And whoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (John 11:24-6). If we just consider these verses, we will soon realise that a literal interpretation will not do, since many believed in Jesus, yet today they are not with us. We should therefore conclude that “the resurrection at the last day” was interpreted by Jesus as the spiritual awakening which His coming caused. “Lauded be Thy name, O Lord my God! I entreat Thee by Thy Name through which the Hour hath struck, and the Resurrection came to pass, and fear and trembling seized all that are in heaven and all that are on earth, to rain down, out of the heaven of Thy mercy and the clouds of Thy tender compassion, what will gladden the hearts of Thy servants, who have turned towards Thee and helped Thy Cause.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations) Why then, one must ask oneself, do so many Christians expect the same literal fulfilment of the Scripture? Why do they let the same imaginations, that hindered the Jews from reaching salvation, once again hinder the Divine Physician from treating the feeble body of mankind? Most people are familiar with the Adventists who, in the 1840’s, started warning the peoples that the return of Jesus was approaching. This they did because of William Miller’s calculation, based on Daniel’s promise of the 2300 days and nights (which is the amount of years between the order for the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the year 1844). The year 1844 came and passed, the Adventists gazed at the sky, yet they saw nothing which looked like what they expected, so the year became known as the “year of disappointment.” What the Adventists did not know was that in the East, in 1844 in Persia, One Personage entitled the Báb (meaning “the Gate”) had arisen and proclaimed that He was the Promised One. When the authorities questioned Him about who He was and what His claims were, He answered: “I am, I am the Promised One! I am the One Whose name you have for a thousand years invoked, at Whose mention you have risen, Whose advent you have longed to witness, and the hour of Whose Revelation you have prayed God to hasten. Verily, I say, it is incumbent upon the peoples of both the East and the West to obey My word, and to pledge allegiance to My person.” In 1850 the youthful Báb was publicly executed. But the Báb left His disciples, of whom no less than 20,000 became martyrs, with a promise that One would come after Him, in the same way John the Baptist had promised the coming of Jesus. About “Him Whom God shall make manifest”, He said: “Of all the tributes I have paid to Him Who is to come after Me, the greatest is this, My written confession, that no words of Mine can adequately describe Him, nor can any reference to Him in My Book, the Bayan, do justice to His Cause.” Therefore the followers of the Báb gathered around Bahá’u’lláh (the Glory of God) Who, having suffered severe ordeals in prison, was now in exile in Baghdad. He was visited by high and low, and His advice was sought by people of all creeds and walks of life, but this awakened jealousy in the priesthood who appealed to the authorities to have Him removed. The governor of the city, who greatly admired Bahá’u’lláh, ignored the first four letters from the Grand Vizier which ordered him to send Bahá’u’lláh to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. After the fifth edict, however, he had to yield to the Grand Vizier’s order and informed Bahá’u’lláh about the letter. Bahá’u’lláh travelled through severe winter conditions and snow filled mountains and reached Constantinople only to be transferred to Adrianople a few months later. Here He once again lived under inhuman conditions, and yet He wrote fearlessly to the monarchs of Europe, the Pope, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Shah of Persia. To the German emperor, William I, He wrote: “Do thou remember the one whose power transcended thy power (Napoleon III), and whose station excelled thy station. Where is he? Whither are gone the things he possessed? Take warning, and be not of them that are fast asleep. He it was who cast the Tablet of God behind him, when We made known unto him what the hosts of tyranny had caused Us to suffer. Wherefore, disgrace assailed him from all sides, and he went down to dust in great loss.” ... “O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the swords of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have another turn. And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous glory.” In more than one hundred volumes of books and letters, Bahá’u’lláh expatiated upon the significance of this new Day of God, and claimed that He was the Lord of Hosts and the One of whom Jesus had talked: “Verily, He Who is the Spirit of Truth is come to guide you unto all truth. He speaketh not as prompted by His own self, but as bidden by Him Who is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.” (Lawh-i-Aqdas, c.f. John 16:12) He proclaimed all the teachings - both spiritual and social - which are indispensable for the establishment of the long-awaited, Christ-promised Kingdom of God on earth. Just as Jesus had told us before, His coming again in the Glory of the Father (Bahá’u’lláh, which literally means the Glory of God), would not mean a dramatic catastrophic descent of the Kingdom of God onto the earth, but rather a process of building “a new earth” or, in other words a new civilisation, based on the teachings of God Himself and not on man-made ideologies, when “the Lord alone would be exalted “ (Isaiah 2:11), and “the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord , and of His Christ.” (Revelation 11:15) He explained that the Revelation of God to man would educate and transform human beings, and the resulting new race of men would in turn build the Kingdom of God on earth, according to the grand design of the Father. He said that the ages of the infancy and childhood of the human race had passed, that humanity was now entering its most momentous period of maturity, capable of building a peaceful and just world and that the age of the fulfilment of the prophesies of Isaiah and St. John was, at last, at hand: “They (the nations) shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:4) “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes...” (Revelation 21:4) After Adrianople Bahá’u’lláh was further exiled to the grimmest city of the world at that time: the prison city of Akka (referred to as the Strong City in the Old Testament) in the Holy Land. Here, despite the unspeakable sufferings and privations to which He was subjected, He continued to reveal the essentials of building the fabric of the Kingdom of God, and as God had promised, He “made all things new” (Revelation 21:5) This outpouring of heavenly guidance is unprecedented in the entire history of religion. The authentic Writings of Bahá’u’lláh were published in His own life time and are today available for every one to see. Bahá’u’lláh passed away in 1892 in the vicinity of Akka, as a prisoner and an exile. “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth...” (Revelation 16:15) It was here that the English orientalist Professor Edward Granville Browne of Cambridge University met with Bahá’u’lláh in the evening of His earthly life: “The face of Him on whom I gazed I can never forget, though I can not describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to read one’s very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow... No need to ask in whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before One who is the object of a devotion and love which kings might envy and emperors sigh for in vein!” |
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