Utterances made in religious contexts are of many sorts. In the performance of public and private worship men engage in acts of praise, petition, thanks, confession, and exhortation. In sacred writings we find historical records, dramatic narratives, proclamations of law, predictions, admonitions, evaluations, cosmological speculations, and theological pronouncements. In devotional literature there are rules of conduct, biographical narratives, and introspective descriptions of religious experience. Philosophical discussions of religious language have concentrated on a restricted segment of this enormous diversity, namely, theological statements, that is, assertions of the existence, nature, and doings of supernatural personal beings.

There are two reasons for this emphasis. First, the crucial problems about religious language appear in their purest form in theological statements. If we consider a petitionary prayer or a confession, what is puzzling about it is not the act of petition or confession, but the idea of addressing it to...