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That these are indeed the proper questions of believers qua believers is clear enough. But the questions proper to the theologian (including the dogmatic theologian) qua theologian are significantly different -- and more like the question that Balfour takes to be proper to the philosopher, who asks, what faith or creed does reason require us to accept? No doubt, the most basic and important issue between Gerrish's position and my own is that he quite misses the significance of this difference, and thus fails, finally, to uphold consistently uphold the difference as well as the unity between faith and witness, on the one hand, and theology (including dogmatics), strictly and properly so-called, on the other.

Another aspect of this difference between believers and the theologian is that the critically reflective question of the credibility of one's beliefs is not, and cannot be, answered simply by exhibiting their coherence with what one otherwise believes and, in particular, with what everyone else seems to believe, too. At the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory, where our questions are the properly theoretical questions of meaning and truth, the issue is not what is believed, but what is worthy of belief -- and that applies to all of the beliefs whose belief-worthiness or credibility is there called into question. A theologian would proceed uncritically, and thus be a theologian in name only, if she or he did not recognize the need to validate critically validate all of our beliefs -- those with which we expect our religious beliefs to be coherent no less than our religious beliefs themselves.

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