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And so theistic religions develop certain other concepts and symbols, the whole point of which is to ask and answer this further question about the meaning of God for us by explicitly identifying someone or something that, making this meaning fully explicit, decisively re-presents God and thereby authorizes a whole system of dependent re-presentations. Thus, just as "God" is used in theistic religions as the name for strictly ultimate reality insofar as it is the implicit primal source authorizing authentic self-understanding, so someone like Jesus, being designated "the Christ," "the Word of God," "the Son of God," and so on, is thereby said to be the decisive re-presentation of God because he is the explicit primal source authorizing the same self-understanding.

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