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Is Christ Unique? (99:10) "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. (ls 60:2) (99:11) see 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the impulses transforming men and women, in the creative, formative power of the word of God and in the judgment on the superseded religions..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." (ls 61:1) (99:12) see What about the resulting attitude of modern Christians toward their fellow religions: "Can sympathy and deep understanding be expected from a church.. for a phenomenon which claims to be a revelation of God to mankind and therefore seems to rival the Christianity represented by the Church? Merely to ask the question is to answer in the negative. Someone who is accustomed to think only in the hidebound categories of a dogmatic system that demands exclusiveness, someone who throughout his life has inveighed even against other Christian denominations, directly they deviate from his credal dogmas, can certainly be expected to give a rigid "no" when challenged from outside. Churchmen just cannot see the rival great religions as other than "lies" or at best as attempts at self-redemption which are human and therefore doomed to failure, as tissues of truth, half-truth, error, superstition, illusion and charlatanry, as.. a mass of "general religious concepts and general human hopes and expectations"-- in short as an amalgam of disparate elements. This blindness is a fact which has to be accepted.." (ls 56:1) (99:13) see ".. Bahá'u'lláh teaches (that) all the revealed religions are of divine origin and there is therefore an essential unity between the religions, if the revelation of God is a cyclically recurring, progressive process, if the purpose of revelation has always been the same, the education of the human race, then there can be no essential contradictions between the religions on questions about the purpose of their revelations. For God does not contradict Himself." (ls 86:1) (99:14) see "If religions contradict each other on questions independent of the turn of events on earth and the development of man and society, the contradictions go back to the individual centrifugal developments which all religions have been through, to the erosions of history. The criterion of judgment will always be the most recent revelation of God. For the purification of the religions is one reason, among others, why whenever it has pleased God, "the gates of mercy have been opened" "till the end which has no end. " God Himself reforms, by speaking again to mankind at the end of a cycle of revelation. That is why the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh is at the same time a judgment on the old religions. It is, as he testifies, "the right path" whereby "truth shall be distinguished from error and the wisdom of every command shall be tested. " It separates the thorns and thistles from the grain, the true and authentic from the untrue and false, the pure divine teaching from the human additions and misunderstandings: "Verily, the day of ingathering is come, and all things have been separated from each other. He hath stored away that which He chose in the vessels of justice, and cast into fire that which befitteth it. " (Bahá'u'lláh- Tablet to Pope Pius Ix) (ls 86:2) (99:15) see And that "Through his sacrifice we were saved, not through our own merits, but through the grace of God. We were freed from the law which kept us under the weight of sin, and death." (see mat 5:17-18, rom 7:4-6)
(99:16)
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