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12there is a God and that we are to serve this God with good works, but also what, or who, this God is and what we are to do if we are to serve or worship as we should. Without such an allowance, one would have to admit that the predicament of the natural man could only be ignorance rather than sin, and Luther's own characteristic teaching elsewhere that the Decalogue and the evangelical law are re-presentations of the law of nature and of reason would not be true but false. it. April 1994

AddendumI have always been puzzled by Placher's distinction between saying that "the meaning of the story is the story," as he would presumably say, and saying that "the meaning of the story is some moral lesson or religious truthit illustrates," as he supposes I would want to say. But only recently have I realized that what is almost certainly at stake in his distinction is what I would characterize as a distinction between a constitutivist and a representativist understanding of the event(s) that the story, or "the narratives," are about. "Whereas in his view the event(s) in question is(are) constitutive of the possibility of salvation, in my view they are merely representative of this possibility. So what is really at issue is not, in the first instance, the meaning of the story, but the significance of the event(s) of which the story is the story.