human language is inadequate to the divine praise,

Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

First — That the idea or belief of a word of God existing in print, or in writing, or in speech, is inconsistent in itself for reasons already assigned. These reasons, among many others, are the want of a universal language; the mutability of language; the errors to which translations are subject; the possibility of totally suppressing such a word; the probability of altering it, or of fabricating the whole, and imposing it upon the world.

Even the sensible and the competent have been given tongues by le bon Dieu — and they do not always employ their tongues wisely.

Languages do not spring up like plants, some weak and sickly, others healthy and robust. All their virtue lies in the will and determination of mortals. To condemn a language as being struck with impotence is to adopt a tone of arrogance and temerity; as certain of our fellow-countrymen do to-day, who, being nothing less than Greeks or Latins, regard with a more than stoical superciliousness everything written in French. If our language is poorer than the Greek or Latin, this is not attributable to our own inability, but to the ignorance of our own predecessors who have bequeathed it to us in so meagre and so bare a form that it stands in need of ornament, and, so to speak, of plumage from other sources.

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

I hope that our discussion of meaning-making and ethics-making has made it clear why we must stand firm in disputing god-talk: god-talk is at once a betrayal of our common humanity and a barrier to both meaning and ethics. That is not to say that you rise up in arms when you are visiting your parents’ home for dinner and grace is said or that you leap into the fray every time you hear some piety uttered. No one has the time or the energy for such vigilance, and no one wants to become a pariah. But you do need to pick some fights and then fight them. If you are upholding values such as justice, reason, fairness, equity, and decency—if these inform the meaning and the ethics that you make—then you are obliged to stand up to god-talk at least occasionally.

The shifty language of politics,... that strange language full of Maya and falsities of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for....

Of God one doesn't speak with any precision or seriousness except in poetry.

Christian' makes a poor adjective

We are struggling with language.
We are engaged in a struggle with language.

God's language is action. For God, faith is a verb.

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!'''