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Theistic religions, I have argued, characteristically generate concepts and symbols other than their constitutive concept and symbol "God." This they do because, although the whole point of "God" is to explicitly identify strictly ultimate reality as authorizing a certain self-understanding as the authentic understanding of ourselves, different theistic religions, all of which are formally the same in thus using the term, nonetheless represent materially different understandings of the meaning of ultimate reality for us. The result is that the same term "God" that functions in one context to answer the existential question can also function in another context to ask it, the meaning of God for us having become, in turn, the very thing we are concerned to ask about in this other context.

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