Apocalyptic imagery and promise of peace

AK Merchant

Recent reports suggesting that Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is setting the hypothetical ‘Doomsday Clock’ to 85 seconds to midnight, meaning closer to a global catastrophe, have triggered a variety of responses from geopolitical commentators. Bahá’í interpretation treats apocalyptic imagery – tribulation, Day of Judgment, cosmic signs – as symbolic of spiritual and social processes rather than a single terminal catastrophe.

Warnings of calamity are understood as part of the Major Plan’s purifying and motivating role: they can precipitate change, but they are not the final aim; the ultimate aim is the establishment of justice and unity. Bahá’í writings offer profound insights and view the march of civilisation, in the context of crises and victories involving the three protagonists: individuals, communities, and institutions that constitute society.

The community is mindful of two complementary movements that are shaping the future of humankind. The Major Plan of God refers to the large-scale, providential forces by which God’s purpose is advanced. These can include upheavals, collapse of old orders and events that ‘disintegrate’ existing structures to make way for the establishment of a new global order. Bahá’ís understand these as alternating cycles of integration and disintegration that would ultimately lead towards a world commonwealth and spiritual unity.
God’s Major Plan may use ‘both the mighty and lowly as pawns’ in bringing about world-shaping changes.

This parallels the Minor Plan, which concerns spiritual regeneration of humanity and is largely carried out through collective services of believers: teaching, institution-building, social action, and moral transformation that concretely implement the vision of unity in diversity. Bahá’ís are urged to concentrate on constructive service: forming communities, schools, and consultative institutions, because these are means by which the promises implicit in prophetic language are to be realised.

From time to time, the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing council of the Bahá’í Faith, urges humankind to stay focused on activities for betterment of society rather than being overly concerned about catastrophes.

Because interpreting the Cosmic Will as licence for fatalism or panic undermines the emerging Golden Era. Humanity is not lacking in creativity, positive initiative, or even resources; millions of people of goodwill are contributing to halting and reversing destructive tendencies, remaining ever hopeful, galvanised by a vision of prosperity, and awakening to possibilities of spiritual and material well-being.

Yet grave dangers announced by the Doomsday Clock Statement should not be ignored: “Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winnertakes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing risks of nuclear war, climate change, misuse of biotechnology, potential threat of AI, and other apocalyptic dangers.”

As the world we know passes away and a new one struggles to be born, Bahá’ís, some eight-million-strong, stand together in shaping humankind’s collective destiny, greatly energised by the most recent guidance from the Universal House of Justice: “Looking back over one’s life, there can be no greater joy and comfort than to know that it was spent in acute awareness of the divine remedy, that no effort was spared to proffer that remedy to receptive souls, and that during those fleeting years when opportunity was at hand, even in the midst of difficulties, every chance was seized to respond to humanity’s intense need…”

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