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Excerpt from The Substance of a Discourse, in Two Parts: Delivered in the Meeting-House of the First Baptist Church in Lexington, February 3, 1822; To the Class of the Medical School of Transylvania University If it be asked why I am so much in earnest upon the subject of revealed religion I answer, that the God of the Bible may be regarded as the God of nature, and that our opinions and sentiments of him and ourselves be formed in accordance with his character and the relation we sustain to him as he has revealed them for a man may live all his life ignorant of God and of himself and be a philosopher too. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1839.

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Prominent in the canonical texts and traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the claim that God speaks. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that contemporary speech-action theory, when appropriately expanded, offers us a fascinating way of interpreting this claim and showing its intelligibility. He develops an innovative theory of double-hermeneutics - along the way opposing the current near-consensus led by Ricoeur and Derrida that there is something wrong-headed about interpreting a text to find out what its author said. Wolterstorff argues that at least some of us are entitled to believe that God has spoken. Philosophers have never before, in any sustained fashion, reflected on these matters, mainly because they have mistakenly treated speech as revelation.