When I mentioned to various friends and acquaintances that I had resolved to reflect and write on the topic of divine discourse, further conversation almost always revealed that they assumed my topic was divine revelation, and that my conversation partners would be a sampling from that vast number of thinkers who have written on the topic of revelation. “Is there anything new to be said on revelation?” a rather skeptical theologian friend remarked. I replied that my topic was divine discourse, not divine revelation. His response was like that of almost everyone else: “What's the difference?”

So I judge that our topic will not have been adequately located until it has been established that divine discourse differs from divine revelation. If we assume that illocutionary actions, such as asserting, commanding, promising, and asking, are a species of revelation, they will elude our grasp. It's true that in promising someone something, one reveals various things about oneself. But the promising does not itself consist of revealing something – does not itself consist of making the unknown known.

My case will not really be complete until, in Chapter 5, I discuss what constitutes speaking. Here I will have to be content with taking various examples of discourse and holding them up against revealing, trusting that the reader has a sufficiently developed intuitive sense of what goes into such cases to recognize that there's not a fit.