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In my theological understanding, God and faith belong together in the sense that "God" designates strictly ultimate reality insofar as it authorizes -- entitles and empowers -- our authentic self-understanding, while "faith" designates our authentic self-understanding insofar as, being such, it is authorized – entitled and empowered -- by strictly ultimate reality.

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Consequently, the authority of the sole primary authority is limited to explicitly authorizing -- entitling and empowering -- faith. Of course, faith, like any other self-understanding, necessarily implies both beliefs (credenda) and actions (agenda), and one cannot bear witness to it except by somehow formulating the beliefs and somehow specifying the actions that it implies. For this reason, the authority of the sole primary authority in explicitly authorizing faith might appear to extend to explicitly authorizing beliefs and actions as well, at least insofar as they are necessarily implied by faith. But, recognizing, as we must, that in different situations the same beliefs can be differently formulated even as the same actions can be differently specified and, conversely, that different beliefs can be similarly formulated even as different actions can be similarly specified, we can only conclude that the authority of the sole primary authority does not extend to the formulations of beliefs or the specifications of actions, except in the sense that it authorizes any formulations insofar as they appropriately formulate the beliefs necessarily presupposed and implied by faith and any specifications insofar as they appropriately specify the actions that faith  necessarily presupposes and impIiesimplies.

There can be no question, then, of the primary authority's authorizing everything in the formulations of beliefs or the specifications of actions through which faith has found expression in particular situations in the past. As a matter of fact, there can be no question of everything being authorized even in the formulations of beliefs or the specifications of actions in the primary authority itself. Because even its authority derives entirely from the primal source of authority, it is itself authorized only to the extent that the faith of which it is the witness is authorized and its formulations of the beliefs and its specifications of the actions necessarily implied by this faith are appropriate thereto.

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