Abstract
This study focuses on the ways in which people live in speech and how speech becomes their home. It shows how through speech one expresses existential questions, how speech can grasp the search and finding of the good, the true, the beautiful, how speech formulates the question for God, how it asks for God's name.
At a deeper and more fundamental level, then, it traces speech as that which speaks to us, dealing with the relationship of speech and understanding, the possibilities of communication, dialogue, and, finally, how we can bear witness in speech to that which is inexpressible. The study takes inspiration from the ideas of (theological) hermeneutics, especially those of Hans-George Gadamer (1900-2002), which we use in the context of theological anthropology to show its relevance to how humans understand themselves and the world around them, how they understand God, and how they speak about themselves in relation to God.