Article one sets out progressive revelation as a claim about the succession of Messengers across the whole of religious history. Baha'i institutional writing has also applied the same logic one level down, periodising the Baha'i Faith's own short history as a further instance of the pattern it teaches about religion generally.
Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to 1957, organised its history in God Passes By (1944) into named ages mirroring the structure article one describes for revelation at large: an Apostolic or Heroic Age running from the Bab's 1844 declaration through Baha'u'llah's ministry and death in 1892, marked by persecution and the direct leadership of the founding figures; a Formative Age, beginning with Abdu'l-Baha and continuing through the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice, devoted to building the administrative institutions the entry on the Covenant describes; and an anticipated future Golden Age, not yet reached, in which the teachings inform a unified world civilisation.
The internal periodisation does real theological work rather than merely organising a timeline. Just as progressive revelation holds that each Messenger's social teachings suit the age receiving them, Shoghi Effendi's ages hold that the community's own institutional development, from charismatic founders to elected bodies, is a graduated unfolding rather than a decline from a purer original state, which pre-empts a common criticism of new religious movements, that institutionalisation is a falling away from the founder's immediacy, by folding institutional growth into the same providential logic the tradition uses to explain the difference between one Messenger's teaching and the next.