Response to Religious Convergence: A Parable

A couple days ago I was talking with a guy that I'm just starting to get to know. He expressed that his impression of the various faith and religious traditions was that there was a tremendous amount of convergence and overlap--enough to conclude that they probably weren't all that different. I've been ruminating on a response, should I get a chance to offer one as our relationship develops, here it is:

When I lived in Richmond two major interstates ran right through the middle of town: I-95 and I-64. For several miles in Richmond, 95 and 64 were the same roads. So I could be driving from St. Louis to Williamsburg, you could be driving from D.C. to Miami, your mom could be driving from Virginia Beach to Charlottesville and my Aunt Margaret could be driving from Pooler, Georgia to Philadelphia and for that stretch of road we'd all have the same experience. We'd see the same buildings, share the same traffic, and hit the same pot holes.

But what makes the journey the journey is not just the roads we take to get where we're going but where we came from and most importantly where we end up. Miami is emphatically NOT St. Louis.

It is not surprising, then, that many religious views share common stretches of road, particularly behaviorally and moralistically. Indeed, if we are all 'image bearers' of God, it would be surprising if we did not. But the points of commonality and convergence are not fundamentally defining to any of the world's major religions. All religions start with some sort of deity and offer some sort of paradigm or story about how the world works, what's wrong with it, and how the gods/God intervenes to make it better.

And at these points of supreme importance, the most central aspects of each religion, the road diverges sharply. The answers to the most important questions of "Who is God?" and "What is the purpose of humanity?" are so deeply disputed that the only way to create convergence in these most serious places is to do serious violence to the historical assertions of each faith tradition. The Trinity is a deep offense to the Allah of Islam; re-incarnation is not Muslim, nor is it 'the new heaven and the new earth' of the Christian Scriptures. It sounds rather like hell to me, actually.

History is so full of violence over religious disputes that the post-modern, 21st century world is weary of disagreement and wary of where difference might take us. I am glad to embrace the places of convergence and partner with people of other faith traditions in issues where we wholeheartedly agree. We must not, however, facilitate the illusion that points of convergence means that the whole thing is essentially a convergence.