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What is right is that fundamentum fidei essentiale and funamentum fundamentum fidei ministeriale cannot be separated from one another, as crucial as it is to distinguish them. – This distinction is simply an alternative way of formulating the distinction between the primal authorizing source of faith (implicit and explicit), on the one hand, and the primary authority authorized by this source, on the other. But, then, it must be true of the fundamenta fidei that they, too, are "correlative concepts in that each may and must be defined in relation to the other." If the fundamentum ministeriale is really that, then it must depend entirely on the fundamentum essentiale. On the other hand, what the fundamentum essentiale is for Christian faith depends entirely on the fundamentum ministeriale. In the one case, we have what is first in the order of being (and experiencing); in the other we have what is first in the order of knowing.

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