This chapter analyses main trajectories how the epistemological and methodological unity of the study of religion has been understood. It thus returns to the issues first highlighted in the second and third chapter, now offering a critical evaluation of the arguments in defense of the main conceptualization of the scientific character of the study of religion. Their strengths as well as shortcomings will be fully assessed. As a result it will be shown why the study of religion is lacking a generally accepted unifying foundation as well as why it is unlikely for anything like that to appear as well. In addition the chapter explain in detail why matters of cross-disciplinary translatability and integration are centrally important for any attempt to formulate the discipline in a way that incorporates all the different research programmes, method(olog)ies and paradigms currently in existence in the study of religion.