Light On Dark Water

I found a copy of Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions in a local library and looked up the quote referred to in the Three Epiphanies post. I’m relieved to find that my memory wasn’t too far off:

This leads to the last and most universal problem of our subject: Does our analysis demand either a mixture of religions or the victory of one religion, or the end of the religious age altogether? We answer: None of these alternatives! A mixture of religions destroys in each of them the concreteness which gives it its dynamic power. The victory of one religion would impose a particular religious answer on all other particular answers. The end of the religious age…is an impossible concept…. For the question of the ultimate meaning of life cannot be silenced as long as men are men. Religion cannot come to an end, and a particular religion will be lasting to the degree in which it negates itself as a religion. Thus Christianity will be a bearer of the religious answer as long as it breaks through its own particularity.

The way to achieve this is not to relinquish one’s religious tradition for the sake of a universal concept which would be nothing but a concept. The way is to penetrate into the depth of one's own religion, in devotion, thought, and action.

(My emphasis.) I don’t know exactly what that stuff about “negat[ing] itself” and “break[ing] through its own particularity” means. Not too much, maybe.

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