Is Jesus Unique?
It is often difficult to have a discussion with Christians: not only because they are split up into many schools of thought and belief, and because everything to do with Christianity is a matter for multiple dispute within the Churches; but above all because their eye for the parallels in religious history is blurred by their sense of uniqueness and exclusiveness and their belief that the Christians are a "chosen people." This prevents any real insight into the facts. (60:2)

The originality of a religion.. lies less in the proclamation of new ideas never thought of before than in the impulses transforming men and women, in the creative, formative power of the word of God and in the judgment on the superseded religions.. Early Christianity and Islam in particular are testimonies to these impulses, which are behind religious concepts and imperatives both new and old. The ideas alone could not have produced the victorious campaign through which these religions conquered the world. (61:1)

As to the slogans.. bestowed on the Baha'i Faith: religion "made to measure", religion "without any logical difficulties, without mysteries or paradoxes, religion deliberately modern, sensible and rational." This judgment shows once more how he (the critic quoted) judges a religious system alien to his own according to the concept of religion obtained from neo-Protestant theology.. The phrases.. ("all too harmonious, all too conflict-free, all too lucid") are meaningless and unintelligible for anyone who does not share his premises. Quite a clever trick perhaps: to turn a good epithet into its opposite by a dialectical manoeuvre, using the words "all too" without good cause (and indeed without possible good cause). As if one can add "all too" to 'any' epithet? Something can be too easy, too dangerous, too frivolous, but not too true, too correct, nor "all too lucid" and "all too harmonious." To say "all too lucid" is a form of pseudo-argument which the uncritical reader accepts at its face value, but logically the phrase is nonsense and it also exposes its user: anyone who has resort to such "reasons" shows that he lacks real ones.. (61:2)

But this criticism shows something else: that.. (he) does not know the Baha'i Faith well enough and has not grasped its essential features. Human reason is certainly given a different value than it is in the Protestant Church (Martin Luther spoke of "that whore, Reason"). This, however, is not because the Baha'i Faith is " a deliberately modern religion" in the sense that in order to enhance its attractiveness, everything is geared to plausibility and effect; but quite simply because the divine truths do not run counter to human reason. Paradox is by no manner of means an indispensable element in original religion. Judaism and Islam-- to mention only these two religions-- get along without it, and, after all, even Protestant theologians will agree that the God who spoke in Judaism was the same God who revealed himself to man in Jesus. (62:1)

But the Baha'i Faith with all its rationality is more than a dry rationalism, more than a late product of Western "enlightenment." The irrational, what Rudolf Otto called "the numinous," is also its innermost being. The Baha'i Faith is a religion of law, and its revealed laws are "irrational" in that they acquire validity primarily through the Founder's statement, not through their special wisdom and rationality. The recognition that ethics has its ultimate source in revelation and can only be discovered 'from' it, the refusal to admit the possibility of objective value judgments and therefore the rejection of "natural law"-- these are further evidence against.. (his) theme. Nor is it true that the Baha'i Faith is without mystery. The status of 'Abdul-Baha and the short duration the Bab's mission are regarded by the Baha'is as hidden mysteries. (62:2)

..If the Baha'i Faith were only.. an intellectual and moral system in traditional religious terms, there would be no room in it for the mystical element.. in great contrast to Catholic Christianity, the Protestant version has always maintained a very distant attitude to mysticism. The main theme of modern Protestant theology is the statement that there is no way from man to God but only from God to man, and.. (some) have castigated all mystical experience as "the most monstrous human presumption," being an attempt "on the part of a creature to surmount an absolute difference, that between creator and creature." So the Protestant oriented to this theology has as little liking for mysticism as the Devil for holy water. It is not surprising, therefore, that.. (he) made no effort to understand Baha'u'llah's 'The Seven Valleys' or 'Kitab-I-Iqan'. (63:1)

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