In this sense the Fathers did not associate Christianity primarily with the realm of religion and did not regard it as one of many religions; rather, they associated it with the process of reasoning and discernment. Here we should note parenthetically that the general term “religion”—which we use today to refer to the most varied phenomena and, among other things, Christianity, too—was developed only in the course of the modern period and as such represents a problematic generalization that already contains questionable prejudices within it.16 There is no way of approaching the uniqueness of
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