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The expected kingdom of peace will not come upon men like a cosmic event, as the millennialists envisaged, but will be the fruit of a universal process of change taking place with history, whose driving impulse is the new revelation: "God's purpose is none other than to usher in , in ways He alone can bring about, and the full significance of which He alone can fathom, the great, the Golden Age of a long-divided, a long-afflicted humanity. Its present state, indeed its immediate future, is dark, distressingly dark. Its distant future, however, is radiant, gloriously radiant-- so radiant that no eye can visualize it." (Pdc- Shoghi Effendi) (65:1) That man is in rebellion against God cannot be denied. Baha'u'llah repeatedly gave warning of the impending judgment of God, which is "at once a visitation from God and a cleansing process for all mankind," and for which "the world's supreme leaders, both secular and religious, are to be regarded as primarily answerable." (Pdc) The catastrophe, however, will not be the end of our temporal world, but the total break-up and overthrow of the existing order and the beginning of a new age, in which "the folly and tumult of strife that has, since the dawn of history, muted into the wisdom and the tranquillity of an undisturbed, a universal, and lasting peace, in which the discord and separation of the children of men will have given way to the world-wide reconciliation, and the complete unification of the divers elements that constitute human society." (Shoghi Effendi) (65:2) I wonder how this vision of the future is supposed to be unbiblical. The Old Testament is full of promises of a time of peace when "swords will be turned into ploughshares" and men will learn to wage war no more; and 'The Book of Revelation' foretells not only the passing of the old but the beginning of a "new Heaven" and a "new Earth." The "Last Days," which started in 1844, do not end in the destruction of the universe and the extermination of mankind. The "End," when the stars fall from Heaven and the sun is darkened, is the end of the aeon, the age of Adam, and also the turning-point in time, the beginning of a new time, in which mankind will achieve its perfection under the law of Baha'u'llah.. Christian theology gives a different interpretation of the biblical expectations of the End. But there is one point to be noted: whereas Christians have always ventured to claim all the prophecies of the Old Testament, in allegorical interpretation, for the people of the new Covenant and for the Church, they take the same attitude towards their own Scripture with which they reproach the Jews, namely that of "sticking to the letter," and at least in their eschatology banish any sort of allegorical interpretation. What stands in contradiction to the Baha'i vision of the future is not the Bible but the theological interpretation of it.
(65:3)
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