Page History

PDF Version of this Document

Properly religious assertions of the existential beliefs necessarily implied by authentic self-understanding (i.e., credenda) are correctly said to include "symbolic metaphysical assertions" (cf. – The Point of Christology: 144 f.). Such assertions are indeed about ultimate reality, including strictly ultimate reality. But what they express as distinct from what they imply is the meaning of ultimate reality for us as distinct from the structure of ultimate reality in itself, which properly metaphysical assertions express, and that literally, not symbolically. Their point as properly religious assertions, in other words, is not intellectual but existential: they are indeed assertions about ultimate reality but only such as also call for a certain selfunderstanding and therefore also a certain form of moral action -- of acting in certain ways and doing certain things (i.e., agenda).

...