Dialogue is a uniquely human practice. Questions, especially open-ended questions, display the inherent fallibility of dialogue. Religious language, alternatively, seems to break into and interrupt the conversation we are with infallible monological proclamations. Moreover, those who speak in and from religious language appear to be beyond human. Yet questions repeatedly recur in religious language. Because many turn to religions for answers, it is shocking to note how often ultimate religious authorities are depicted as posing questions. Jesus asks over three hundred questions in the canonized Gospels. The biblical God is the first figure in the Hebrew Bible to pose a genuine question. This is not local to Western traditions. The Chan (Japanese: Zen) tradition, for instance, is well known for the prevalence of questions within its meditative practices as well as its classical literature.

By way of an examination of questions in religious language, I situate divinity within the context of dialogue. Divinity is a generic term for various figures of ultimate religious authority: individuals within religious narratives, sacred texts within which those narratives are told, and the traditions and representatives that grow out of those texts. Dialogue is that form of conversation in which participants exchange questions and thereby arrive at ever new understandings. If questions in religious language are such that they invite rather than inhibit dialogue, then divinity can be said to participate in dialogue. If instead they inhibit dialogue, then religious authorities transcend the domain of dialogue. I argue the former, that some questions in religious language are open questions and that they invite rather than inhibit dialogue. Through a progressive systematic analysis, I demonstrate the ontic ubiquity of open questions, trace their operation in a reader's engagement with religious texts, and conclude by suggesting that they are fundamental in constituting a specific form of responsibility. Only if open questions are a vital form of religious language can it be said that religion has transcended the two ages of monologue: the premodern age defined by the heteronomous dictates of an absolute divine being and the modern age defined by the autonomous dictates of reason.