ur letter the House of Justice understands that you desire to find
ways of conveying spiritual truths in logical ways and demonstrating their
validity through scientific proofs. There can be no objection to such an
attitude. 'Abdu'l-Baha Himself used such a method. The danger Baha'i
scholars must avoid is the distortion of religious truth, almost forcibly
at times, to make it conform to understandings and perceptions current in
the scientific world. True Baha'i scholars should guard against this. In a
letter to a National Spiritual Assembly dated 21 July 1968, the House of
Justice wrote:

While it may often be the part of wisdom to approach individuals or an
audience from a standpoint of current knowledge, it should never be
overlooked that the Revelation of the Manifestation of God is the standard
for all knowledge, and scientific statements and theories, no matter how
close they may come to the eternal principles proclaimed by God's
Messenger, are in their very nature ephemeral and limited. Likewise,
attempting to make the Baha'i Faith relevant to modern society is to incur
the grave risk of compromising the fundamental verities of our Faith in an
effort to make it conform to current theories and practices.

(7 June 1983 to an individual believer) [70]

71: "The principal concern of the House of Justice is over a
methodological..."

The principal concern of the House of Justice is over a methodological
bias and discordant tone which seem to inform the work of certain of the
authors. The impression given is that, in attempting to achieve what they
understand to be academic objectivity, they have inadvertently cast the
Faith into a mould which is essentially foreign to its nature, taking no
account of the spiritual forces which Baha'is see as its foundation.
Presumably the justification offered for this approach would be that most
scholars of comparative religion are essentially concerned with
discernable phenomena, observable events and practical affairs and are
used to treating their subject from a western, if not a Christian,
viewpoint. This approach, although understandable, is quite impossible for
a Baha'i, for it ignores the fact that our world-view includes the
spiritual dimension as an indispensable component for consistency and
coherence, and it does not beseem a Baha'i to write ... about his Faith as
if he looked upon it from the norm of humanism or materialism.

In other words, we are presented in s