Oneness of God

The Baha'i Faith teaches that there is one God: eternal, uncreated, the source of all things, and in essence unknowable. Human language and thought cannot reach the divine essence, only its attributes as they are mirrored in the Manifestations of God and in the created world. Baha'u'llah holds that the God worshipped under the many names of the religions, as Yahweh, as God, as Allah, as the Absolute, is one and the same Reality, differently addressed. This uncompromising unity is the root from which the other Baha'i teachings grow: because God cannot be known directly, revelation must be mediated through the Manifestations; and because there is one God and one revelation, there is finally one human family.

Baha'u'llah developed the doctrine at length in the Kitab-i-Iqan, the Book of Certitude, written in 1862 before his declaration of prophetic mission, arguing that every earlier scripture already points to this same hidden, unknowable God. Scholars of the Baha'i Faith, including Juan Cole, have traced the doctrine's vocabulary partly to the Islamic principle of tawhid and to Sufi and Shaykhi theology current in nineteenth-century Iran and Iraq, the milieu from which the Babi movement out of which Baha'u'llah's own mission emerged; Baha'is themselves hold the teaching to be an independent and renewed revelation of a truth underlying, rather than borrowed from, those earlier currents.

Article one traces the doctrine's roots into Islamic tawhid and Shaykhi theology. Its introduction to a Western audience has its own separate and more precisely dated history, and it did not happen through Baha'i missionaries at all.

The 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, convened alongside the World's Columbian Exposition and widely regarded as the founding event of organised interfaith dialogue in the West, is where the Baha'i teaching of the oneness of God first reached significant American public attention, when the Reverend Henry Harris Jessup, a Presbyterian missionary long resident in Beirut, read a paper describing the Babi movement and quoting a message attributed to Baha'u'llah calling for the unity of all religions and peoples under the one God worshipped, in different names, by them all. Jessup had not intended to promote the teaching he described, but newspaper coverage of the Parliament carried the message to American readers who then sought out further contact, and small Baha'i study circles began forming in the United States within a few years.

The episode is a useful check on how "oneness of God" travels compared with how it is argued for internally. Article one's account rests on Baha'u'llah's own writings and their Islamic and Sufi background; the doctrine's actual entry into Western religious consciousness came instead through a hostile external observer's report at a comparative-religion event whose own founding premise, that the world's faiths could be surveyed together on a shared public platform, was itself a working instance of the same impulse toward religious unity the doctrine describes.