Much of the recent discussion of the justification of religious belief has been enriched by philosophy of science and social-science perspectives on issues like the contextdependence of concepts and the possibility of commensurability (hence mutual understanding and evaluation) between contexts or practices. The best of the discussion has self-consciously attempted to walk the fine line of guaranteeing both the autonomy and the objectivity of religious belief sufficient autonomy to satisfy the demands of devotion and sufficient objectivity or commensurability to satisfy the demands of reason. My purpose in this paper is to clarify the character and limits of a strategy used by a number of authors as a way of attempting to insure autonomy without incurring the liabilities to which certain other attempts to insure autonomy are subject. More precisely, the strategy consists in an appeal to both 'universal' standards (or, at least, standards which transcend a variety of contexts) and their context-dependent application; the double appeal is meant to avoid the incommensurability between contexts to which attempts to secure autonomy might lead, without foregoing due sensitivity to differences between contexts. I want to bring into sharper focus the ambiguity of the effect of this strategy, and to argue that, as it stands, it fails to be effective in making an advance over those positions on the autonomy of religious belief which it is intended to correct. In "The Christian Language-Game," William Alston provides a very recent and detailed consideration of questions of contextdependence and commensurability, as they apply to Christian belief.1 He explicitly contrasts his method of insuring autonomy with the method of D.Z. Phillips, Peter Winch and others. I will therefore begin my discussion by analyzing the way in which Alston's account illustrates the particular strategy in question; after indicating how this strategy comes into play in other accounts, I will argue that it fails, as it stands, to achieve its stated aim.