The Unity of Religions

Envir Hoxha (pronounced hoja) smashed the majority Muslim religion in Albania and reduced the faithful of all Illyria's religions to mere co-religionists. The result? Though Albania is 70% Muslim and almost all the rest are either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, it is all quite nominal. In a seminar on the value of religion for democracy, both a "Muslim" and a "Christian" gave an account of the essential unity of all religions, at least the monotheistic ones, and thus the basis on which we can all finally get along in this necessarily shared life. Secularists who remain sentimentally attached to their religious heritage are fond of viewing religion this way.

But is it possible that what is most important in religion--what is most profoundly significant--is not what they share in common but what distinguishes them, i.e. what is unique to each one? That, after all, is how the religious themselves view their own religions. It is only those who are more concerned about peace among men than about peace with God that view it otherwise.

And isn't it always the unique and distinguishing that is of greatest importance? What is common merely directs us to it. If we were to recognize only what is common to all human beings, friendship--that which sweetens life and affirms our humanity--would become impossible, and it is only in friendship--that attachment of one's own particular soul to another particular soul in all its particularity--that humanity is most profoundly understood and cherished. A tyrant has no friends.

Medicine, for example, is premised on an understanding of what is common to all human bodies--the circulation of blood, the respiratory system, the arrangement of organs--and yet without recognizing and taking seriously the distinguishing characteristics of particular bodies, the diagnosis and cure of illness are impossible.

So too with religion. If we recognize only what religions share in common and if we refuse to take seriously what distinguishes them, it is impossible to understand any particular religion or even religion itself.

God became man to remedy sin. But he became a particular man at a particular time to redeem particular men and particular women. If you suppress that distinguishing feature of Christianity, then the religion that you claim teaches essentially the same thing as Islam is not in fact Christianity.