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Having reflected further, however, I'm now convinced that the sense of "implicitly Christian" clarified in this passage is not really a third sense after all. On the contrary, if a witness can be said to be implicitly Christian if, and only if, it is a way of acting that "follows from, and in this sense is implied by, one's self-understanding as a Christian" – -- and this is the condition explicitly stipulated in the passage – -- then it necessarily presupposes the Christian proprium and can only be a Christian witness in the first of the two senses clarified, especially, in the second full paragraph of Notebooks, 13 December 2004. In this sense, I may be said to be implicitly a Christian because "I am so related to Jesus, mediately if not immediately, that he is of decisive significance for my life and for all human life, although I do not (yet) explicitly confess him to be so."

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