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View submission: Religion teacher trying to understand the Baha'i Faith.
The Manifestations are Divine educators, they come to humanity from the transcendent Source of all reality and help us align into a more proper relationship with that Source. In doing so they bring the message as appropriate to the vocabulary and culture of the people at the place and time of their appearance.
For example, the culture of Israel at the time of the appearance of the Lord Christ was very different from the time of Moses. Therefore, Jesus altered the Mosaic laws of divorce and the Sabbath to fit the needs of His day. It isn't that God changed, it's that our human social context changes and therefore the social teachings of religion change.
Words come to have meanings based on specific cultural contexts. We as human beings are incapable of even understanding the whole of material reality, much less the Ultimate Reality which we call God.
Gautama Buddha came to a culture steeped very small and immature ideas of a universe of rivalrous and limited deities. Rather than associating the Creator of the universe with those woefully limited concepts, the Buddha instead spoke of the Unconditioned and the Ground of all being. That is not very different from what Christians mean by saying God is transcendent, for example: https://www.gotquestions.org/God-transcendent.html[1] . Baha'is are equally at home with those notions, in our own Faith God is both "closer... than [our] life-vein" and an "unfathomable mystery".
1: https://www.gotquestions.org/God-transcendent.html
Regarding Christ's sayings about His relationship with the Father, Baha'is would uphold them all as true and valid. As Baha'u'llah wrote:
"Were any of the all-embracing Manifestations of God to declare: “I am God”, He, verily, speaketh the truth, and no doubt attacheth thereto. For it hath been repeatedly demonstrated that through their Revelation, their attributes and names, the Revelation of God, His names and His attributes, are made manifest in the world…" - Kitab-i-Iqan
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