Few problems have been as perennial for both the believer in, and the critic of, religion as the linguistic problem involved in speaking to and of God. Not only is this problem of great concern to the modern philosopher of religion,1 but it was already recognized in the Bible itself, when Ecclesiastes (5 :1) warned: ‘Keep your mouth from being rash, and let not your heart be hasty to bring forth speech before God. For God is in heaven, and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few.'

If God is conceived as transcendent, that is, greater than the world and other than man, and if, in the nature of the case, man is limited to human speech, then speaking of God involves us in a twofold problem. On the one hand, if human language and discourse be burdened with the task of expressing something which, by definition, is ineffable and cannot be expressed, then the guardian of language and rational discourse may well conclude that the religionist is talking nonsense. This conclusion has, in fact, been reached by a number of modern linguistic philosophers- those approaching religion sympathetically insisting that they mean ‘non-sense,’ and not, pejoratively, ‘nonsense.’ On the other hand, from the religious believer's point of view, the application of mere human descriptive terms to the Deity borders, in its sheer inadequacy, on the blasphemous.

Thus, with some grammatical plausibility but doing violence to the context, a Rabbi in the Talmud can take the words of Psalm 65 :2, lekha dumiyah tehillah (commonly rendered as ‘Praise befits You’), and understand them in the sense of ‘For You, silence is praise.’ And, approaching the problem from a totally different angle, the modern linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, warns: ‘Of what cannot be said, thereof one must be silent.’ Maimonides, in the twelfth century, endeavors to work out a ‘negative theology,’ one which would confine itself to saying what God is not, rather than what God really is. And the twentieth-century psychoanalyst and thinker, Erich Fromm, insists that, ‘while it is not possible for man to make valid statements about the positive, about God, it is possible to make such statements about the negative, about idols.’