Christ & Baha'u'llah

Curious about the Bahai faith in relation to the Christianity I was raised in, I read this book. Judaism and Budhism are omitted but the chapters describing Christian, Muslim and Bahai history were very informative. Others were too evangelical for me and made some large leaps in reasoning. Still, even if I were a devout secularist I would not be able to resist the vision of world unity described in the final chapter. The notion that Baha'u'llah was Christ returned will make many Christians uncomfortable, but then, if you await Christ's return, exactly how will you discern when it happens? With all its imagery, Revelations does leave room for interpretation. If you are secure in your belief that the religion you were born into, or have since converted to, represents the whole truth and has no peer, then a book like this should pose no danger. In the other case, it may be what you are searching for.

There is revolutionary thinking in every part of taday's life. People are told to step outside the box and look at previously proven ideas from a different angles. This has led to many discoveries. But, when it comes to religion, all minds seem to be closed. We stick to the same old ideas that our ancestors had. This book helps you take the leap of Faith to find a new beginning.

George Townshend served as Canon of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin when he learned about Baha'u'llah and the Bahai Faith, starting a traumatic journey in search of religious truth which put him in disfavor with the church establishment and led to the resignation of his Orders after 40 years. In all revealed world religions the coming of the Kingdom is identified with the appearance of the Supreme World Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts, the returned Christ, the Qa'im, the new Buddha and about 1850 Baha'u'llah announced that he was this redeemer and the bearer of God's message to modern man. Ignored by the kings and rulers whom he addressed, he died in the Holy Land in 1892, an exile and captive of the Turks. Today there are followers of the Bahai Faith in every nation on earth. Townshend was particularly interested in that part of the Lord's prayer "Thy Kingdom come" and investigated whether Baha'u'llah was in fact the returned Christ. He found that a large number of people gathered in the Middle East in the 1840s waiting for Christ's return, but in vain as they overlooked an important clue in the Bible. 'Christ and Baha'u'llah' is the story of his investigation and in 1957 he decided to put his findings in book form to make it easier for others to conduct their own investigation.Townshend starts the chapter on "The False Prophets" with these words: "As Jesus had prophesied, the false prophets contrived to change the essential meaning of the Gospel so that it became quite different from that which the Bible recorded or Jesus taught. It has long been generally believed that Jesus Christ was a unique incarnation of God such as had never before appeared in religious history and would never appear again. This tenet made the acceptance of any later Prophet impossible to a Christian. Yet there is nothing in Christ's statements, as recorded in the Gospels, to support this view, and it was not generally held during his lifetime."Three chapters discuss Muhammad, but I found these excerpts helpful in understanding the relationship between religions. "Muhammad was already about 40 years old when he began to teach ethical principles similar to those in the Old Testament and to proclaim the succession of the prophets, including His own succession to Jesus Christ, whose Divinity and whose Gospel he called His believers to accept. But after a few years he found Himself forced by severe and continuous persecution to leave his native town for Medina where he at once began the execution of the real mission of His life, the building of a spiritual nation." And "To the Christian Muhammad showed the greatest kindness, insisting that all Muslims should fully accept both Jesus Christ and His Gospel, and assuring them in the Qur'am (Sura 5 verse 85) that they would find the Christians nearest of all men to them in affection, He took them under his protection."If you are uncomfortable about the religious truths that have been handed to you; if you are uncomfortable that reli