604. I have misled -- and been misled...

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I have misled -- and been misled -- in saying that Christians are called "to exist authentically in a very specific way, namely, both by the effective use and by the valid and efficacious administration of the specifically Christian means of salvation" ("Theology as a Christian Vocation": 2).

This statement is misled and misleading in implying that Christians bear responsibility for the efficacy as well as the validity of Christian witness. In truth, whether or not a witness is efficacious is the responsibility, not of the one who bears it, but solely of the one who receives it. In this respect, the efficacy of a witness is like its effectiveness and unlike its validity, which is indeed the responsibility of the bearer of the witness -- although there is this important difference: whereas the efficacy of the witness depends, not on the receiver's having faith, but only on her or his seriously asking the existential question to which Christian witness claims to be the answer, the effectiveness of the witness entirely depends on the receiver's receiving it through faith.

What should be said instead, therefore, is that Christians are called to exist authentically both by the effective use and by the valid administration of the specifically Christian means of salvation. Of course, they need always to keep in mind that the "validity" of their witness comprises not only its adequacy to its content, and so both its appropriateness to Jesus Christ and its credibility to human existence, but also its fittingness to its situation -- the situation of a human being who, for all of her or his differences from other human beings in other situations, is like them in being moved, implicitly if not explicitly, by the existential question.

6 January 2004 (Epiphany)