There seems to be some connection between language and the acknowledgement of a creator; as if the sense of finitude and dependence combined with the sense of not being a determined vehicle of natural processes were inextricably involved in using words in the way we do. To labour the point again, this is not an open-and-shut argument for an extra-mental non-finite reality, but it is a way of identifying where the concepts and images of theology and religious belief touch the basic questions about how we make sense of what we as humans characteristically do.
We speak because we are in search of recognition; we want to be heard and understood. And…this must mean that we want to have opened for us the possibility of new kinds of shared action, ways of ‘going on’ in the company of others. In seeking to be heard and changed by whatever presence it is that does not compete or exclude (i.e. does not behave as if it were another agent or subject like myself), I am also seeking to open myself to a kind of agency that is active beyond the plain realm of specific causal processes. We represent this only with the greatest risk and difficulty and habitually trivialize it by trying to display it as another and more effective causal factor in the world, a power that can override any other power. What we want to say is something more like a claim that there will be, for any imaginable future we could have, a context of ‘grace’, of absolution and renewal for our failures and of growing alignment with such an agency so that we become channels of its absolving and renewing operations.