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• Therefore, "the religious life," in the same generic sense, is the way of understanding onese1f and leading one's life that is explicitly mediated by the images/ symbols, concepts/ terms of this, that, or the other specific religion. This means that the religious life, in the generic sense, is always an explicitly authorized life. And this it is because
• To live the religious life, then, as a 1ife explicitly authorized by a specific religion, is to make or imply a distinctive double claim for what one thinks, says, Clnd does in so living: not only
• This claim, however, is like all other claims to validity made or implied by life-praxis in that it is one thing to make or imply it, something else again to do so validly. Consequently, to live the religious life at an, particularly in the pluralized social-cultural circumstances in which more and more people live in a "globalizing-globalized" world, is to anticipate having somehow to make good on the claim, sooner or later, that one makes or implies in so living. it belongs to religion generic any, and thus to each religion specifical1y, to lay claim to decisive authority-to claim to be the authorized re-presentation of the answer to our existential question. Because, from its stand point, the self-understanding/ understanding of existence that it represents is uniquely realistic, being uniquely appropriate to, or authorized by, the very structure of ultimate reality itself, its re-presentations of this understanding have decisive authority for the understanding of human existence. (1) that it is, in turn, appropriate to whatever this religion takes to be the explicit primal source of its authority, but also (2) that it is credible to any woman or man as re-presenting the truth about her or his own existence as a human being.

1. 1n this way, Jiving living the religious life requires that one become a theologian and also a philosopher as well as a historian. This assumes, of course, the generic sense of "theology" in which, in correspondence with the generic sense of "religion" (§
2. To ask thus about either meaning or validity, however, is to ask questions that, in part, at least, are properly philosophical. This is so, at any rate, if one understands "philosophy" likewise in a generic sense, to mean the comprehensive critical reflection constituted by asking about human existence simply as such.
3. So, too, with the question about 1), it means the specific form of critical reflection constituted by asking about the meaning and the validity of some specific way of living re1igiously. So a theologian, in this generic sense, asks more or less critically what it really means to live in this way and whether the distinctive double claim to appropriateness and credibility that anyone necessarily makes or implies by so living is really a valid claim. It belongs to philosophy, so understood, that it should consist, in one aspect, in an analysis of 11leallill~, and thus of the different kinds of meaning involved in understanding ourselves and leading our lives through all the forms of culture, religious as well as secular. validity, including the validity of the double claim that living the religious life necessarily makes or implies. Although to ask whether a religious way of living is really appropriate to the source of authority authorizing it is to ask a question that is, in an essential part, properly historical and hermeneutical, even it is, in another essential part, a properly philosophical question. Insofar as one thereby asks about a certain kind of appropriateness, one asks a question that only philosophical reflection-whether done by philosophers or by theologians-is capabJe of answering. And the same is even more obviously true of the other question of whether a particular way of living religiously is really credible, in the sense that it really re-presents the truth about every woman or man's existence. This question can be answered affirmatively only if the necessary presuppositions and implications of this way of Jiving, moral as well as metaphysical, can somehow be validated as credible. But, again, actually validating them requires properly philosophical reflection. 

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