Per Se

I just realized that I had the wrong understanding of the phrase "per se". I had assumed that it meant that the statement coming before it was true in a sense, but is not true in all senses. That was rather wrong. If this word is unfamiliar to you, it essentially means "intrinsically". While I was reading Roy Clouser's "The Myth of Religious Neutrality" I kept asking myself, "why does he keep saying "divine per se". Under my previous understanding, he would have only needed to say that once. Any subsequent uses of the word would be supurfluous. But since per se means intrinsically, it is clear that he uses the term to mean that which is divine of itself, and does not receive its divinity from something else. Because of this, he must use "per se" to distinguish between the two kinds of divinity.
To clarify Clouser's use of the term, he would speak of Christians as believing that God is divine per se, while other religions, like the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Norwegians, and Hindus would have something they regard as divine per se, distinct from "gods" they might consider divine.