The 36 Lessons of Vivec treat the Tribunal's divinity as something maintained through repeated acts of telling, not as a fixed property acquired once and held forever.
Vivec returns again and again to the idea that the gods of Morrowind exist because people accept the story. The same text shows the three speaking events into being, then immediately qualifying those events with contradictions and layered retellings. The effect is to keep the reader inside the act of narration rather than outside it looking at a finished fact.
This is different from the standard account of mantling or the Heart of Lorkhan. Those explanations treat godhood as a transfer or a theft of power. The Lessons instead present it as a running agreement that must be renewed. When Vivec describes the birth of the Anticipations or the creation of the Ministry of Truth, the descriptions are framed as stories the Tribunal tells about itself. The power comes from the telling and from the listeners who keep the telling alive.
One practical result is that the Lessons make the loss of divinity thinkable. If godhood depends on continued performance, then a break in the performance ends the state. The text never states this outcome directly, but it leaves the mechanism in place. The same sermons that celebrate the Tribunal also include moments where Vivec admits the story could fail or be rewritten by someone else.
The approach fits the larger pattern in Morrowind where sources about the Tribunal are always presented as partisan. The Dissident Priests, the Ashlanders, and even some Temple texts treat the official account as one version among several. The Lessons simply make that condition part of the official account itself.
I have not found another in-game text that so openly builds its claim to divinity on the reader's willingness to keep believing the claim. Most other sources either assert the fact or deny it. The Lessons make the act of assertion the central subject.
How do you weigh the passages where Vivec undercuts the story against the ones that celebrate it? Do you read the whole set as one long demonstration that the Tribunal's power is conditional on continued belief?