Includes bibliographical references (p. 391-399) and indexes.

Language and the Trinity -- God speaking -- God's creation of man -- God sustaining language -- Creativity in language -- Exploring examples of language -- The rules of language -- The rules of language --God's rule -- Responding to God's government -- Small pieces of language within the big pieces -- Imaging -- World history -- The fall into sin -- Redemption through Christ -- Peoples, cultures, and languages -- Principles for cultural reconciliation -- Good and bad kinds of diversity -- Human action -- Speaking and writing -- Analysis and verbal interpretation -- Interpreting the Bible -- Genre -- Storytelling -- The story of redemoption -- Many mini-redemptions -- Counterfeit stories of redemoption -- Modern reinterpretations of redemoptive stories -- Stories about Jesus -- Sentences in use : foundations in truth -- Foundations for meaning in trinitarian inter-personal action -- Subsystems of language -- Words and their meanings -- Truth as perspective -- Living in the truth -- Appendices. A. Modernism and postmodernism -- B. Doubt within postmodernism -- C. Non-Christian thinking -- D. Platonic ideas -- E. The contribution of structural linguistics -- F. Translation theory -- G. Symbolic logic and logical positivism -- H. The theory of speech acts -- I. Reaching out to deconstruction -- J. Special cases of human speech.