Aside from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, all proposals and offerings are conditional upon the differences among individuals.

In the non-religious realm, this is obvious. Athletic success presupposes health and genetic endowment. Artistic achievement lies within the purview of those natively gifted and with the opportunity to train and exercise their gifts. In business, accomplishment rewards those of discipline and application, or sometimes the lucky, or sometimes the socially advantaged, or sometimes those without conscience.

Where we are born and what opportunities we have there, the nature of our culture and education, our skin color, our friends…all the accidents of time and place that make us distinct from one another provide the conditions for the various possibilities of material life.

And the same is true in the realm of religion. Hinduism is only viable to those exposed to its mythology and capable of rigorous asceticism; Islam, like Orthodox Judaism, requires rigorous observance within a cultural milieu; even the ‘social’ religions like communism and capitalism, offer their appeal to subsets of humanity, subsets defined by their differences. A seventeenth century Eskimo could never be a Marxist, as an Egyptian laboring on the pyramids could never practice Catholicism.

Unlike these, the gospel of Jesus Christ is responsive to what every single human being has in common: sin and helplessness – the sin of deviating from the light, and the helplessness of being unable to return to it. That condition has been dealt with for the communist and Catholic alike, for the Hindu and the Moslem, for the isolated Eskimo as well as the ancient Egyptian.