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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.

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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