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During a discussion of the meaning of a “personal God,” I introduced my anti-theist friend, Ari, to the Baha’i concept of a manifestation — a prophet or messenger sent by the Creator to educate humanity.
The Baha’i teachings say that the purpose of the appearance in history of people like Krishna, Christ, and Baha’u’llah is to reflect the spiritual qualities of God — so that we might behold those qualities in another human being and be able to emulate them.
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Having established that scripture going back millennia from a diverse array of faith traditions describes God as being beyond human comprehension, I shared one of Baha’u’llah’s explanations about how an unknowable Essence chose to make Itself known:
The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days being thus closed in the face of all beings, the Source of infinite grace, according to His saying: “His grace hath transcended all things; My grace hath encompassed them all” hath caused those luminous Gems of Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit, in the noble form of the human temple, and be made manifest unto all men, that they may impart unto the world the mysteries of the unchangeable Being, and tell of the subtleties of His imperishable Essence. These sanctified Mirrors, these Daysprings of ancient glory are one and all the Exponents on earth of Him Who is the central Orb of the universe, its Essence and ultimate Purpose.
This concept has a long track record. Scripture is bejeweled with passages in which this holy personage — a Christ, a Buddha, a Baha’u’llah — is a spiritual mirror image of the One Beloved and the manifestation of God’s attributes, often referred to as “Names” in scripture. The Bhagavad Gita captured this concept vividly in Krishna’s first disciple Arjuna’s recognition of the spiritual reality of his closest companion:
Father of all. Master supreme. Power supreme in all the worlds. Who is like thee? Who is beyond thee? I bow before thee, I prostrate in adoration; and I beg thy grace, O glorious Lord! As a father to his son, as a friend to his friend, as a lover to his beloved, be gracious unto me, O God.
Krishna responded with an appeal to the essential relationship between the Manifestation of God and the believer:
Not by the Vedas, or an austere life, or gifts to the poor, or ritual offerings can I be seen as thou hast seen me. Only by love can men see me, and know me, and come unto me. He who works for me, who loves me, whose End Supreme I am, free from attachment to all things, and with love for all creation, he in truth comes unto me.
We see this repeated in the ages that pass; thousands of years later, Christ shares with his disciples, as recorded in Chapter 15 of the Gospel of John, the simple idea that the cause of their connection to God is love — their love for God and their love for each other: “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Later, Christ uttered these words to God in prayer: “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.”
In our online discussion, Ari digested all of this and then asked why human beings — especially scientists — would need God or religion.
That’s a question with many possible meanings and answers. I might answer from the moral dimension and talk about the need for a standard for human interaction, such as the ancient (repeated) commandment to treat one’s fellows as one would like to be treated. The passages quoted above tell us what we should already know — that human beings are in need of education and that interactions with the Creator’s educators will enable us to achieve our potential.
That the followers of Christ understood the purpose of his manifestation to be personal (and societal) transformation is clear from passages like this one in the words of the Apostle Paul from his second message to the Corinthians:
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.
Baha’u’llah repeated and strengthened this message:
These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may be obscured by worldly desires even as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never be ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.
To my friend Ari, I summed up: The purpose of God’s revelation to humanity is to transform our character so that we, in turn, transform our societies and, to use Baha’u’llah’s words, “carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.”
“Why does the Universe require the existence of God?” he wondered.
I’d argue, in part, that the universe requires God in the same way that the story in a book requires the intellect of a writer. A book, after all, is not just paper, ink, and binding or pixels on a screen. Nor is it comprised entirely of symbols like the ones I’m typing to form words and sentences. A book is both a material and intellectual reality, and it cannot exist or have an effect in this world without both components.
Without the invisible, intangible ideas formed by the writer’s intellect, there is no story to convey, no matter how many symbolic units have been assigned to specific sounds or specific meanings.
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Conversely, without those characters and units of meaning, no story can be shared; without either the electronic medium or the paper, ink, and binding, the story has no tangible presence in the material world.
The book, the story, the sentences, the words that emerge and exist in the material world are the evidence of the intellect of the writer. In the same way, history and those who live it are evidence of the Intellect behind the intangible process of creation, as the Baha’i teachings point out:
Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him — a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation. … Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty.
I truly believe that one of the greatest pieces of evidence of the human spirit, and, by extension, the Spirit that created it, is our ability — no, our need — to debate the question “Is there a God?” and to need it so profoundly that we must create language and the spoken and written word in order to consider it.
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