For all the variety of content and diversity of approach evident in the preceding chapters, a common theme runs through them all: negation, variously conceived, is not to be seen as an adjunct to conventional Christian affirmations but rather as an integral element in their expressive power. Apophasis not only distinguishes Christian speech from ordinary human speech acts, setting the limit of what can be said about God, but also signals the sense that Christian speech is grounded at its origins in a Trinitarian dynamic, or even discourse, whose provenance is revelatory. This distinction is a crucial one, for it marks the point at which Christian apophasis as a semiotic phenomenon is overtaken by its dynamic as pragmatic language use. In other words, the need to negate in Christian apophatic discourse is not grounded in a recognition of the limits of language and expression as such, or at least not in that alone. Rather, it is shaped within particular liturgical communities who are called to give verbal expression to a specific intervention of God in history. Apophasis in this sense articulates the human response to a divine communicative presence, and it is burdened as much by an excess of presence as it is by an endemic sense of absence.