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In my more recent work, however, the earlier key phrase "meaning and truth" is replaced, in effect, by "meaning and validity" (although I'm not sure I ever actually make use of this phrase!). Correspondingly, my writings make constant use of the distinction between "critical interpretation" and "critical validation"-- the first being concerned with critically determining the meaning of Christian witness, the second, with critically validating the claims to validity that bearing this witness makes or implies.

Ths This later way of thinking and speaking has at least two advantages over the earlier.

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The second advantage of the later way of thinking and speaking is that it removes a possible ambiguity in my earlier talk of "the real meaning of the witness of faith." Given my earlier formulation of the question of critical reflection as "What is really the case?" (112), one sense that the above phrase

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could be used to express and/or taken to have is what the witness of faith really means, as distinct from what it appears to mean or is said to mean. But while I evidently use it in just this sense, the way I use it in at least some places may be only too easily taken to have the different sense of what the witness of faith normatively means. Thus I can say, "In the final analysis, the real meaning of the Christian witness is the real meaning of the canonical Christian witness" (140). As unobjectionable as this formulation may be in itself, as compared with saying that the real meaning of the Christian witness is the canonical Christian witness, it may nonetheless promote the very confusion between meaning and validity, or interpretation and validation, that any adequate prolegomena, to theology -- especially historical theology -- is at pains to overcome.

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