Aside from the fact that I am religious studies scholar, not a theologian, the model [presented in this book] cannot legitimately considered to be an exercise in academic religious studies, including the sociology of religion and the history of religions.
As an old gentleman, I pointedly avoid making pretensions concerning my work. We are, after all, naught but dust. Perhaps, instead, the lay philosophical model is an illustration of inspired categorization, an admittedly pretentious, and retrospectively humorous, term I coined as a youth.
My attempt has been, using personal understandings of the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith and other subjects, to expand upon the four turns in Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of critical realism, especially the final two: transcendental dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality.
As previously suggested, they jointly, and successively, constituted the epistemological and ontological expressions of Roy’s more generalized spiritual turn. It followed an excursion—possibly even a pilgrimage in quest of the sacred—to his father’s homeland of India.
There is, of course, no Bahá’í sociology or Bahá’í history. Such fields may, in some manner unknown to us, develop in the distant future.
From the perspective of a sociologist and historian, the most I can do is to study the histories of lives of the Prophets, in the scant cases they are available to us, and the historical and contemporary social and individual responses to those Prophets.
Sociology and history are, at least presently, the study of human, not divine, agency. Our knowledge of the latter is grounded in divine Revelation, not historiography.
Aside from explicit statements made in Bahá’í primary sources, not one of us, as a mere mortal, has, I believe, a means of intelligently discerning supernatural causes and effects in human affairs. That notwithstanding, anyone is free to affirm that those relationships exist:
I am compelled to recognize that He Who holdeth in His hand the immediate destinies of all created things is but a vassal dependent upon Thee, and is the creation of but a word proceeding from Thy mouth.
Bahá’u’lláh. Prayers and Meditations by Bahá’u’lláh. Shoghi Effendi, translator. Wilmette, Illinois: Bahá’í Publishing Trust. 1962. Page 123.
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