Newspaper Article - A Baha'i Understanding of God

Edinburgh University's Student Newspaper, imaginatively titled Student, came out this week with a "God Issue", with particular emphasis on religion and the like. As a well-known Baha'i on the scene, I was asked to write a short comment piece about God. Student don't seem to have updated their website with the latest issue (or indeed with any recent issues) so I can't link you to the article, but below I reproduce my pre-edit copy that I sent to them. (The actual one that was printed is shortened for space constraints and was made a little less academic.)

(Also, if anyone wants to source the three quotations: they're from Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p51-52, p46-48, and p215 respectively.)

I'm a Bahá'í student studying here at the University of Edinburgh. I'd like to share with you some of my thoughts on God, and how that fits into my belief system. The Bahá’í Faith originated in Persia, modern-day Iran, around the mid 19th-Century. Bahá’ís follow the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh (Arabic for ‘the glory of God’), a Persian nobleman who spent much of his life in exile for his radical teachings.

Bahá’u’lláh’s main teaching was that we have reached a new stage in humanity’s social evolution, where the unity of mankind must be embraced in the creation of a global and just society. Bahá’u’lláh also taught that all of the world's great religions come from the same divine source.

If thou wilt observe with discriminating eyes, thou wilt behold Them [religious prophets] all abiding in the same tabernacle, soaring in the same heaven, seated upon the same throne, uttering the same speech, and proclaiming the same Faith.

That all sounds very nice, but how does this work, when the various religions of the world have such diverse views on the divine reality? For example, the Islam promotes a strictly transcendent monotheism: there is but one God, exalted above all and completely unreachable to humans. Many Christians and Vaishnavite Hindus hold a belief in an imminent monotheism: that God is one, but was incarnated in flesh in the form of Christ or Krishna. Zen Buddhists adhere to a monistic vision of the absolute reality: that the absolute (Nirvana) is the only true existence, all else is illusion. Hindus who hold to the Advaita Vedanta will attest that the divine reality permeates all things – arguably a form of pantheism, or panentheism. And finally, there are concepts of polytheism and animism that we find in indigenous tribal beliefs.

The Bahá’í Faith affirms all of these teachings. Central to the Bahá’í understanding is that God (or the Divine Reality, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Brahman, or Dharma, etc...) is unknowable in His Essence. (The masculine pronoun is here used to refer to God simply as an accident of language: no masculinity or gender is being assigned to the Divine. The Bahá’í Faith, incidentally, is one of the first world religions to directly and unequivocally proclaim and uphold the fundamental equality of the sexes.)

A painting cannot comprehend its painter, and in a similar way, humanity cannot comprehend God. God both encompasses all creation, and transcends it. Any attempt on our part to come to some understanding of the divine will invariably be inadequate. In this way, we can state that each of the seemingly contradictory views outlined above are in fact complementary aspects of the unknowable essence. God is all of these things, and none of these things. The Bahá’í Writings speak of God as being the ‘all-knowing’ and ‘all-powerful’, but also that the station of God is that of ‘nothingness’. The divine reality is not constrained by human limitations, such as gender, power, space, time, or even existence. No words can suitably describe that which is beyond all understanding. As such, the Bahá’í concept of God is radically different from that of other religions, believing in an ‘Essence of essences’ that underpins all reality. As Bahá’u’lláh explains:

To every discerning and illuminated heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the Divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress. Far be it from His glory that human tongue should adequately recount His praise, or that human heart comprehend His fathomless mystery. He is, and will remain in His Reality everlastingly hidden from the sight of men.

This unknowable nature of God, however, does not mean that humanity is completely bereft of divine knowledge, or that any attempt at religious certitude is futile. On the contrary – an inability to completely understand something does not preclude a partial understanding. In the Bahá’í view, God has progressively revealed Himself to humanity through a series of messengers, including (but not limited to) Abraham, the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, and, more recently, Bahá’u’lláh. This line of messengers stretches far back into prehistory – although their names have been lost to antiquity – and will continue well into the future. The purpose of these messengers, called ‘Manifestations of God’ in Bahá’í terminology, Bahá’u’lláh outlines as follows:

The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship among men.

In my opinion, this understanding of God resolves controversial problems about which religion is ‘correct’. It makes it easier to reconcile science and religion – a major Bahá’í principle – by abstracting God away from physical reality. It calls for all people to have respect for all faiths. I think that this kind of global perspective is sorely needed in today’s suffering world.