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"[T]o make or imply a claim to validity on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis is in effect to issue a promise to all other members of [the] human community -- the community—the promise, namely, to submit one's claim to critical validation as and when it becomes problematic and needs to be critically validated. In this way, living on the primary level of living understandingly already anticipates living on the secondary level, which it makes both possible and, under certain circumstances, necessary" (Doing Theology Today: 23).

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"[I]n answering our vital questions as we do, we perforce make or imply certain claims for the validity of our answers. Ordinarily, we can make good on the promises to others implied by such claims simply by appealing, on the same primary level, to what we and they, as members of our particular socio-cultural group, agree in acccepting accepting as valid, in the sense of true, good, beautiful, and so on. But whenever appeals on this first level are, for whatever reasons, insufficient to redeem our promises, we have no alternative, if we are to validate our claims so as to remain in communication with others, but to shift to the secondary level [of] 'critical reflection.' There the questions we have to pursue are no longer the vital questions we ask and answer on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis, although such questions do and must continue to orient our inquiries, but rather the corresponding theoretical questions about the meaning of our answers and about the validity of the claims that we make or imply in answering them as we do" ("Paul in Contemporary Theology and Ethics": 292).