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To take the italicized clause seriously is to realize that Luther appreciates, in his way, as much as any of us does, that faith has an active aspect as loyalty as well as a passive aspect of trust, and that God, accordingly, can only be -- in be—in H. R. Niebuhr's terms -- the terms—the cause we serve in all that we do as well as the center of value that makes us and everything else valuable. This means, of course, that he does full justice to Paul's confession that, "For us, there is one God the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Cor 8:6).

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