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True, there has been an important difference between classical Roman Catholic and classical Protestant theology. Whereas the first has been assigned the task of rationalizing the positions taken by a particular institutional churchnamelychurch -- namely, the Roman Catholic Church -- the second has been expected to rationalize the positions of that visible church which, being always only more or less visible in the various institutional churches, can never be silnply identified with any of them. Notwithstanding this difference, however, in neither case has theology been allowed, much less assigned, the task of critcally reflecting on the positions taken by the church in such a way as to ask and answer the more radical question as to their validity. On the contrary, theology has been and, for the most part, still is expected simply to assume the validity of the church's positions and then to occupy itself with giving reasons for them, or, at any rate, arguing from their assumed validity rather than arguing for it -- just this being the sense almost always given to Anselm's famous phrase, taken as descibing theology's task: "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum).