Question:
Answer:
No, Jesus will be himself and can only be himself, the Incarnate Word and thus God eternal, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
The Baha’i faith is a world religion whose origin dates to an early division in Islam. Baha’i is syncretistic in that it accepts the scriptures of all faiths. For the Baha’i, God is called by different name but unknowable. Christ was a “manifestation” of God and a way to God, but not the only way to God.
Charitably share with your Baha’i friends that their religion is rooted in Islam, which itself began sixth centuries after Jesus and is not historically and doctrinally connected with Christianity and Judaism in crucial ways. Rather, there is serious discontinuity between Christianity and Islam. In significant part, Islam traces its religious roots to the heretical Christian milieu that had existed in the East for centuries because of Arianism, which denies that Jesus Christ is eternal God and posits instead he is only an exalted creature. (Arianism was condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325.) Similarly, for Mohammed, Jesus is a great prophet but a creature, and certainly not eternal God.
If Jesus were only a creature, and not “the way, the truth, and the life” as our Lord identifies himself in Scripture (John 14:6), we would expect this to be affirmed in Scripture and otherwise taught by the Catholic Church that Jesus founded and against whom he said the gates of hell would not prevail (see Matt. 16:18-19). Instead, Jesus identifies himself as the Word made flesh (John 1:1-3, 14) and the Savior of mankind (John 3:16-17), and his Church has faithfully proclaimed this teaching for 2,000 years.
In addition, John the Baptist was his own person, not an identity taken on by the prophet Elijah. Rather, John was a fulfilling type of Elijah, and Jesus clearly distinguishes between John, who was beheaded by Herod, and Elijah, to whom Jesus spoke along with Moses at his transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-13). Similarly, Jesus is a “new Moses,” not stand-in for Moses (Acts 3:17-26; see Deut. 18:15-18).
Finally, Baha’u’llah, who lived in Persia in the 19th century, is an exalted person in the Baha’i Faith. However, unlike Jesus, he is a mere creature and will not stand in for Jesus at the Second Coming, irrespective of the revelation he reportedly received from God that he is “the Promised One of all religions.” Charitably stated, he is merely a man and his purported revelation from God is erroneous, because it contradicts what Jesus Christ revealed about himself and what his Church has taught for some 2,000 years through the power of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, if the Church were merely a human institution, we would have been consigned to the dustbin of history centuries ago, not simply because of external persecutions but also internal scandals.