“The plurality of religions … is due primarily to the simplicity of the uneducated”

I’ve been trying to make sense of this whole plurality thing. I’m no universalist, I’m learning, but only because it impinges on our freedom. Someone in my Balthasar class said the other week how universalism works in the same way as for those who insist that to be saved you only need to say a certain prayer. Both presume that you and I can know, for a fact, who is saved–these people versus all people. I don’t want to say. Of course I want, like ol’ Balthasar (and God, really), that all men be saved.

But if all men were saved, no matter what, where is our freedom? And if freedom is a gift to humanity–which I believe it is, if I believe in Divine Love at all–then salvation has to come down to a choice, somehow. And that’s where I’m stuck.

But until then, I am falling in love with Balthasar’s seemingly-universal-yet-not-so wisdom about truth and beauty. He believed that all truth is God’s truth and that all human myth, religion, and belief point to a True belief in which Christ is at the center:

“‘You do not find a different faith’ in the various wisdom teachings, Christ explains, “but rather one and the same faith lies behind each one. For . . . there can be only a single Wisdom”, which is the original enfolding (complicatio) of all the partial wisdoms. All the different forms of pantheism presuppose the unity of divinity; in every genuine belief in creation, one can find the doctrine of the Trinity; the Incarnation stands above every genuine prophetic religion as its fulfillment; and so forth.

“But such a consensus is possible only insofar as each religion acknowledges that, behind them all, stands the God who is Wholly-Other and Ever-Greater: ‘God as Creator is the Threefold nor the One, nor anything that can be uttered in speech. For the names that we attribute to God are drawn from creatures, while he himself, considered in himself, is unutterable and exalted above all things that can be named or expressed.’

“The plurality of religions, Cusanus concludes, is due primarily to the simplicity of the uneducated; it lies more in the rites than in the reality to which these rites point. The wise men of each religion should have no difficulty coming together at that spiritual place wherein all the fragments of wisdom find their center in catholic unity.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, p. 19.