Shoghi Effendi and Mark Foster are speaking about different things and so
their statements are not contradictory. According to my dictionary (an old
pocket Oxford), eclectic means borrowing freely from various sources, not
exclusive in opinion, taste, etc.
The Guardian is referring to the Baha'i Faith in the sense of the divine
Laws and Teachings, which Baha'u'llah did not collect from various sources,
but received as a perfect whole in the form of revelation. If the Faith, in
this sense, was eclectic, it could not be from God, which is presumably why
Shoghi Effendi categorically stated that it was not. If we try to borrow
from other sources to add to it, we are adding man-made accreditions to the
divine foundation.
Mark referred to the Baha'i Faith, the organisation. As a sociologist he
presumably had in mind the totality of the Baha'i experience, so to speak:
Baha'i community life and social norms, Baha'i intellectual life and
philosophy, Baha'i art, and so on - IOW, the human aspect of the religion as
opposed to the divine. In this sense, the Baha'i Faith indeed is - and
should be - eclectic, as long as we do not claim that our borrowings have
the same immutable and authoritative status as the divine core of the Faith.
A simple example: I attended a Baha'i wedding (between two young Persians)
where the ceremony included a gesture adopted from the Navajo tradition. It
was wonderful! Eclectic is essentially a synonym for unity in diversity.
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