On reading God the author

Abstract

The first part of the essay explore's three features of Wolterstorff's account of God as a performer of speech acts: (1) the claim that God literally speaks, suggesting that this claim needs something like a Thomistic theory of analogy as an alternative to univocity and mere metaphor; (2) the claim that speaking is not reducible to revealing; and (3) the political implications of these claims, especially in relation to Habermasian theory. The second part focuses on the theory of double discourse, which seeks to make sense of the notion that God speaks to us through the human voices of prophets, apostles, and especially of Scripture, and seeks to show that a fuller account of the speech act by which God deputizes or appropriates human speech is needed. The final section suggests that Ricoeur and Derrida are not the threat to his theory that Wolterstorff takes them to be and that their emphasis on the text, rather than the author, makes sense in contexts where we have only the text to consult.