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But there appears to be yet a third sense in which the term can be used – -- not, however, to characterize a person as implicitly Christian, but rather to characterize a witness as such. This is the sense in which I have long distinguished between explicit Christian witness and implicit Christian witness, defining the first as witness Inediated mediated by specifically religious cultural forms, the second, as witness mediated by so-called secular, or nonreligious, cultural forms. Underlying this distinction is the thought that all forms of culture, secular as well as religious, are implicitly religious in the sense that they necessarily imply an answer to the same vital question, the existential question, that religion as a cultural form, or "cultural system" (Geertz) asks and answers explicitly.

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