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On the prevailing understanding, confirmed by accepted theory as well as customary practice, only one of the two main tasks of systematic theology is regularly recognized. As is evident from the widespread agreement that theology is rightly understood and practiced as, in Anselm's phrase, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum), it is usually supposed to be concerned solely with explicating the meaning of Christian witness and not also with establishing its truth. Thus, even when theology is more or less clearly distinguished from witness as a "second act" of critical reflection, the only task assigned to it is critically validating the one claim of witness to be appropriate to Jesus Christ. The other no less essential claim of witness to be credible to human existence is commonly held either not to need theological validation or to be incapable of it. Being based either in revelation, and thus on the authority of scripture and/ or the church, or in the experience of faith of Christians, the credibility of Christian witness is regarded as the basic presupposition of doing theology rather than as one of its possible conclusions.

To be sure, mainstream Christian theologies have typically allowed that the credibility of the necessary presuppositions of witness can be, in one way or another, critically validated. But aside from the fact that critically validating their credibility has usually been regarded as a pretheological task, instead of as a task of theology proper, the credibility of witness itself, as distinct from its necessary presuppositions, has been excluded from the scope of theological reflection.

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