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This is so, at any rate, if one construes "asserting" broadly enough to include "implying," or, alternatively, makes a threefold distinction between "asserting" and "implying," on the one hand, and "assuming," on the other. For, clearly, the assumptions we human beings make in asserting or implying the constitutive christological and theological assertions or any of the other assertions of Christian witness and theology are by no means exhausted simply by such empirical-historical assumptions as we may make about Jesus. They also include all the other assumptions that go to make up our self-understanding and life-praxis as human beings -- metaphysical and moral as well as scientific and technological, practical, and emancipatory. But for our making such assumptions we would have no preunderstanding of the Christian witness, which is addressed directly to our self-understanding and indirectly to our life-praxis as human beings. At the same time, any Christian witness sufficiently elaborated to address us effectively at both of these levels -- of self-understanding and lifepraxis life-praxis -- must perforce be involved in making the same range of assumptions.

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Relative to what is assumed intellectually with respect both to selfunderstanding self-understanding and life-praxis, one is thus critical by way of demythologizing and existentialist interpretation, so understood and developed as to avoid reducing talk about ultimate reality simply to talk about ourselves. Relative to what is assumed practically with respect both to self-understanding and life-praxis, one is thus critical by way of deideologizing and political interpretation, so understood and developed as to avoid reducing talk about changing social and cultural structures simply to talk about changing the external, objective structures of society and culture themselves, while ignoring or neglecting the subjective internalizations of these structures by individuals.

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