what if truth was personal

IBR 2005 What if Biblical Theology was Personal? 1

The Word become Flesh: What would Biblical Theology Look Like if Truth was Personal?

A Case for the Rehabilitation of Rhetoric as the Primary Mode of Theological Reflection.1

Introduction:

In his Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Jean Grondin argues that the present ―crisis‖ in

the field stems from the 19th century‘s double realization of the historicity of all of human life

and of the impossibility of grounding the human ―sciences‖ on the same epistemological

footing as the natural sciences.2 As Heidegger argued, the hermeneutical circle, or even spiral,

is fundamentally ontological, and with Gadamer, every act of understanding is conditioned by

its motivation and prejudices.3 Our historicity—i.e. prejudice and subjectivity—is therefore not

so much a limitation to be overcome as the very principle of our understanding. ―It is history

that determines the background of our values, cognitions, and even our critical judgments‖

and as such demonstrates our finitude.4 The fundamental question therefore concerns the

nature of our humanity.

What concerns us are the implications of this pervasive temporality for doing biblical

theology, and particularly in view of the two main modes of thought as recognized in our

Western tradition. In beginning a conversation, I want to suggest that the centuries long

dominance of analytics in Western theological reflection needs to be rethought and that

rhetoric, properly conceived, seems more appropriate to the practice and communication of a

genuinely biblical theology.

1 I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues at Regent College for their helpful insights and criticisms, and

also especially to James Houston and Alan Torrance for their work on personhood and epistemology, and also to Tony Golsby-Smith and Mark Strom on rhetoric, whose influence can readily be seen here.

2 Trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 77-90. Of course, whether the ―natural‖ sciences were as hermeneutically neutral as the 19th century believed is open to serious question, see e.g. Michael Polanyi, Personal knowledge: Towards a postcritical philosophy, (NewYork: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).

3 For a helpful discussion, Charles Richard Ringma, Gadamer’s Dialogical Hermeneutic, Hiedelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999).

4 Grondin, 111-114.


This paper consists of four sections: an overview of the rise of Aristotelian analytics as the

dominant mode of Western theological reflection, a review of the critiques leveled against such

analytics, a proposal that a rhetorical approach is more congruent with the personal nature of

biblical concerns, and finally an outline of an alternative biblical theology rhetorically

conceived. I appreciate that terms like ―analytics‖ and ―rhetoric,‖ which I have chosen largely

for historical reasons, are variously understood and want to alert the reader to the fact that I

am using them in quite precise, though not I hope, idiosyncratic ways. I also appreciate the

dangers of a false dichotomy—the boundary between rhetoric and analytics is rarely clear—

hence I would encourage readers to hear this discussion not in terms of stark alternatives but

rather as centers of gravity in overlapping fields. I am all too aware of the many

generalizations and over-simplifications that a broad brush approach like this necessarily

requires. But these risks are unavoidable if we are to broach large issues in a manageable

compass.

Part 1: The Rise of Analytics

It is difficult for us, heirs of nearly 25 centuries of syllogistic analytics, to grasp what

knowledge might have looked like before its development. Nevertheless it is important that

we do so in order to appreciate fully the implications of Aristotle‘s ―discovery.‖ In the 8th

century BC Greek world, animated as it was by daimonia and with a porous boundary between

the gods and humans, a young man‘s paideia aimed at producing a god-like heroic if violently

unforgiving aretê inculcated through Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey.5 Widely regarded in Plato‘s

day as the educator of all Greece (Republic, 606e), Homer‘s influence derived not only from his

claim to tell the truth, but especially from his chosen medium, namely, his use of myth,

metaphor, and symbol in narrative poetry. This was particularly so since, because of its

luminosity and power (which the Greeks called psychagogia6), poetry was ascribed to the gods

5 G.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1969), 20-41. 6 Werner Jaeger, The Ideals of Greek Culture. Volume 1: Archaic Greece and the Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet,

2nd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 37, and the very helpful extended discussion on Homeric poetry therein.


and regarded as expressive of the ―superior order of things.‖7 Since ―it is usually through

artistic expression that the highest values acquire permanent significance and the force which

moves mankind‖ and are thus able to convert the human soul,8 and because poetry ―alone

possesses the two essentials of educational influence—universal significance and immediate

appeal,‖ it surpassed ―both philosophical thought and actual life.‖9 Not surprisingly poetic

myth and dramatic performance were likewise central to Greek worship.

However, three developments caused a shift in outlook. First, in the 6th century, the pre-

Socratic philosophers (e.g. Thales and the Milesians, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides)

began to use reason to understand the world, and deliberately chose prose over poetry as

better suited to their task.10 Parmenides‘ assertion that the truth could not change, combined

with Heraclitus‘ observation that everything around us did, would eventually lead to the idea

that truth could not inhere in the contingent physical world and thus to Platonic dualism.

Second, further undermining Homer the 5th century Greek poets began to criticize the ethical

behavior of his gods.11 Xenophanes, followed by Euripides, complained that ―Homer and

Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among men, thefts

and adulteries and deceptions of one another,‖ forcing Pindar quietly to correct such stories,

and Plato a century later to seek to exonerate the gods of all faults imputed to them (though

one wonders if they are talking of the same deities since in Plato‘s hands they become

remarkably like his ―Forms‖).12 Since the gods were jealous of their power, and given Zeus‘

attitude toward Prometheus‘ generosity, it is not surprising that humans such as the wily

Odysseus, even while giving the gods their due and occasionally being tutored by Athena,

nevertheless had pretty much to find their own way. Plato‘s later alternative, a deity who was

largely an impersonal idea, could hardly be less interested in humanity.

7 Bowra, 123-26. 8 Jaeger, 36. 9 Ibid. 10 Bowra, 123. 11 Bowra, 61-62. 12 Ibid.


Third, the 5th century also saw the rise of the Sophists whose broad experience and

encyclopedic knowledge of different cultures led them to question whether Athenian practice

was based on things as they really were, physis, or mere convention, nomos. For them

knowledge was uncertain and approximate. Protagoras held that man was ―the measure of all

things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not‖ (Fragment

1), meaning that knowledge was a matter of individual perception or opinion (doxa). It was

impossible to distinguish between appearance and reality. Gorgias went further and argued

that "nothing exists … (and) even if it exists it is inapprehensible; … (and) even if it is

apprehensible, still it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or explained.‖13 Since

matters could always be otherwise, reality, and particularly the polis, was what a community

made it—the Sophists, as was the heroic ideal, were concerned with action. Since everything

was a matter of human perspective one's view of human nature dictated the way one

communicated and equally importantly the way one communicated said something about

how humans know; hence rhetorical technique.14 The key thing was the ability to persuade

which quickly degenerated into displays of rhetorical power where the aim was simply to

win.15 Responding to these abuses and in many ways to Plato‘s criticisms, Isocrates would

later stress the importance of the orator‘s moral character in obtaining the adherence of the

audience.16 The more upright the speaker the more likely the audience to accept his

arguments.

Eventually, the Sophists‘ corruption, relativism, and skepticism led to a reaction. Plato, in his

4th century antithesis to the Sophists' thesis, was convinced that certain knowledge (epist∑ m∑ )

was both possible and vastly superior to mere opinion (doxa).17 He also criticized the poets,

and particularly Homer, for being ignorant deceivers (Republic, 598b-d) who exalted emotion

13 Renato Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Guilanna Menozzi, Theory and History of Literature 63 (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1989), 5. 14 André Resner, Jr., The Preacher and the Cross: Person and Message in Theology and Rhetoric, (Grand Rapids and

Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999), 10. 15 Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 25. 16 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition From Ancient to Modern Times,

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 32-33. 17 Barilli, 5-7.


at the expense of reason (Republic, 603b, 605a-c), and who unlike the philosophers could only

expound distant images of reality (Republic, 598d). The path to truth, he argued, was the

Socratic dialectic of question and answer (though ironically Socrates himself was no mean

rhetorician and not above employing the craft‘s magic when it suited.) But Plato‘s truth thus

discerned was no new truth. It was instead that which was already known by one‘s immortal

soul.18 He thereby resolved the Parmenidean and Heraclitan dilemma—humans trapped in a

changing world could indeed have access to certain truth—but at the cost of the dualism that

has bedeviled Western philosophy ever since. For all that, Plato foreshadowed the problem

Grondin describes—when it comes to the human ―sciences‖ there is no ―natural‖ foundation—

and in positing the eternal forms he knew such a foundation must come from outside, as John

the evangelist would later agree.

For Plato, then, orators must not only persuade they must do so on the basis of knowledge.19

However, though he criticized the poets, Plato‘s goal was nevertheless philosopher-―poets.‖

That Plato‘s own work is in one sense ―poetic‖ (cf. the beauty of Ion, 533c-535c) and rhetorical

even to the point of exaggeration (Republic, 598e) implicitly admits not only the power of

image and metaphor but strongly suggests they are inseparable from the effective

communication of truth (cf. Plato‘s famous cave analogy, Republic, 507a; Gorgias 502c where

poetry is a sort of rhetoric, and Phaedrus, 261a8, where rhetoric is the art of leading the soul by

speech).20 Homer, after all, apparently had something going for him.

Aristotle‘s Organon and Analytics significantly refined Plato‘s quest by delineating the

propositional syllogism. Over against the accidental knowledge of the Sophist, Aristotle

argued it was possible on the basis of immediately apprehended premises to know the unique

cause upon which a particular fact depends thus to arrive at certain knowledge (epist∑ m∑ ,

18 Thus in the Gorgias, 449.B-460.A., Socrates through question and answer reveals the seductive and misleading

nature of rhetoric because a) it has no subject matter other than persuasion and thus smacks of manipulation, and b) it concerns mere opinion or appearances not knowledge (hence the famous cave analogy in book 10 of the Republic), Kennedy, Classical, 46.

19 Kennedy, Classical, 52. 20 On Plato‘s inability to do justice to the poets, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, ―Plato and the Poets,‖ in Dialogue and

Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. with introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 37-92.


Posterior Analytics, I, 71a-73a). By the nature of the case, the proper object of such knowledge is

that which cannot be other than it is (Posterior Analytics, I, 71b). That is, epist∑ m∑ concerns

the realm of the non-contingent. The essential characteristic of this kind of knowledge is that it

is universal and true in every instance and therefore cannot be qualified by location,

conditions, or personality.

But as Aristotle recognized syllogistic demonstration was only as secure as the premises on

which it was founded, and knowledge of those premises was itself independent of

demonstration. Such regress must end finally in immediate truths which themselves are

indemonstrable, that is, self-evident (Post, Ana. 72b). These premises ―must be true, primary,

immediate, better known than and prior to the conclusion which is further related to them as

effect is to cause‖ (Post Anal. 71a). How does one arrive at these foundational premises upon

which such demonstration rests? In a surprising concession to the subjective, Aristotle informs

us that they are known inductively through sense perception which is both ―more accurate

than unqualified knowledge‖ and its ―originative source‖ (Post. Anal., II, 100b).

It is significant that the biblical material never went in this direction, perhaps not least because

of the very different conception of a personal, compassionate, and trustworthy God. Poetry,

narrative, metaphor, and symbol remained its primary media. Even Paul, seen by some as the

most analytic of the biblical authors, is still more concerned with pastoral persuasion than

syllogistically articulating a theological system derived from first principles. What is one to

make then of modern theology‘s typically ―analytic‖ formulations whose epistemological

origins lie in a brew of supreme confidence in human reason, a belief that the truth lies already

within us, a distrust of the goodness of creation, is predicated on a ―god‖ who, far even from

those of Homer, is essentially an impersonal form moving the world‘s substance, and which

formulations are so different from those in which the one true God originally chose to reveal

himself?

Analytics eventually became the dominant mode of knowing in the West, and with it a

particular view of what it meant to be human. The debate over the implications of Augustine‘s


Neo-Platonism continues. But for Boethius man was an individual substance of a rational

nature while Aquinas worked hard at integrating Aristotle with Christianity. For Bacon

analytics provided the means to understand and thus control nature, which culminated in

Galileo‘s recognition that nature‘s language was mathematics and its characters those of

geometry.21 Descartes, deeply troubled by the contingent nature of human existence, likewise

settled on arithmetic and geometry because, in making ―no assumptions that experience might

render uncertain,‖ they proved ―much more certain than other disciplines‖ and hence

consisted ―entirely in deducing conclusions by means of rational arguments.‖22 His famous, if

problematic, ―I think therefore I am‖ reformulated Plato‘s spirit/matter dualism into one of

mind and body wherein, once torn from Descartes‘ original Christian vision of anchoring our

existence in God, the isolated Boethian thinker became separate, even alienated, from his

environment. The march toward the modern digitization of information had begun. Control

and management would become the new credo, with depersonalization hard on their heels.

Homer‘s once-permeable world where humans had engaged with the gods and daimonia had

now become an impermeable world of impersonal mathematics.23 As R.D. Laing complained

―Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell and along with them has since gone aesthetics

and ethical sensibility, values, quality, form; all feelings, motives, intentions, soul,

consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse‖24 …

and perhaps too from the realm of modernist theological formulations. Christian virtue, thus

morphed into the exercise of the will, required only the death of God for that now well-

muscled faculty to be turned to a Dionysian pursuit of Übermenschian power.25

Part 2: The Crisis in Analytics

But as Grondin‘s ―crisis‖ indicates, this Promethean edifice did not long survive unscathed.

Descartes‘ tautological and God‘s-eye view ―doubting self‖ did not float so freely above his

21 F. Capra, The Turning Point, (London: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 39. 22 Rene Descartes, Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. J. Cottingha, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2. 23 I owe this insight to personal conversation with Jim Houston. 24 Cited in Capra, 40. 25 Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1995).


culture as he thought,26 and Kant‘s principles and presuppositions of science and morality are

remarkably similar to those of the Newtonian physics and secularized Protestantism of his

day.27 The Romantics rejected the arid and ―otherworldly‖ rigidity of reason for the sensuous

and wild beauty of nature. If anything ―analytic philosophy has [only] succeeded in

establishing … that there are no grounds for belief in universal necessary principles … except

relative to some set of assumptions.‖28 Nietzsche could therefore dismiss European morality

and rationalist deification of the conceptual as nothing more than a cultural artifact and hence

his famous aphorism ―philosophy is biography.‖

And as noted at the outset, it was precisely because of the fundamentally historical nature of

human existence, as Dilthey realized, that the 19th century project failed. But the largely

ignored Giambattista Vico, echoing Leonardo Bruni (13th cent.) and Lorenzo Valla (14th cent.),

had two centuries earlier already understood that all such human ―sciences‖ are inextricably

situated in given societies.29 R.G. Collingwood was only underlining this fact when he argued

more recently that doing history was not the same thing as doing science.30

Equally problematic, the more knowledge became a matter of mathematics the more it

detached truth and thought from action.31 Key here is the 16th century‘s Peter Ramus (Pierre de

la Ramée). He divided rhetoric in two and, in allocating invention, argument, and

26 See most recently A.C. Grayling, Descartes: the life of Rene Descartes and its place in his times, (London: Free Press,

2005). 27 Alasdair MacIntyre, ―Postscript to the Second Edition,‖ in After Virtue, (2nd ed., Notre Dame: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1984), 266. 28 Ibid. 29 E.g. Ernesto Grassi, ―Humanistic Rhetorical Philosophizing: Giovanni Pontano‘s Theory of the Unity of Poetry,

Rhetoric, and History,‖ Philosophy and Rhetoric 17.3 (1984) 135-55. 30 The Idea of History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); and the recently published The Principles of

History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). With the crisis in analytical philosophy Collingwood‘s work is experiencing a resurgence of interest, e.g. Peter Johnson, R.G. Collingwood: An Introduction, with preface by Ray Monk (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998) and Gary K. Browning, Rethinking R.G. Collingwood: Philosophy, Politics, and the Unity of Theory and Practice, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2004).

31 For the next two paragraphs, Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 156-58; cf. his ―The ‗Q‘ Question,‖ South Atlantic Quarterly 87.4 (1988): 653-700.


arrangement to philosophy and leaving only style and delivery to rhetoric, effectively

divorced thought from language and reduced rhetoric merely to technique.32

Further, rhetoric had traditionally exercised a centripetal influence on the arts by seeing them

as informing the central art of the dissertation,33 that is, of constructing a holistic argument to

persuade as to the right course of action in the polis.34 As such, the arts were drawn upon as a

given argument demanded, which meant that the boundaries between them were fluid and

their subject matter often overlapped. Ramus disliked intensely this lack of focus and

precision. He developed a virtual obsession with creating self-standing divisions which later

congealed into our academic disciplines (and our topics in traditional forms of theology). For

Ramus the arts, now subjects in their own right, were to be ―constant, perpetual, and

unchanging, and … [were to] consider only those concepts which Plato says are archetypal

and eternal.‖35 But again as Dilthey discovered human life and history are simply

incommensurate with such categorizations. The conception of truth as static, disembodied,

and eternal mathematics had not only separated reason from action but left no place for ethical

vision as a guide to action. Hence Alasdair MacIntyre‘s complaint that the Enlightenment in its

pursuit of epistemological and ethical autonomy brought only anomie and spiritual

homelessness.36

Then there is the question of personhood. Gilbert Ryle argued that Descartes had made a

category mistake—there is no ghost in the machine37 (though recent medical research has

opened again the question of the existence of the soul).38 For John Macmurray, echoing the

observation that Descartes‘ ―Cogito‖ not so much established existence as it identified

32 Peter Ramus, Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian, trans. Carole Newlands (DeKalb: Northern Illinois

University Press, 1986), 99. 33 Lanham, Electronic, 158. 34 This seems to be what Gadamer is rediscovering when he argues for the fundamental unity of the

hermeneutical disciplines, Truth and Method, trans. edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 301-4.

35 Cited in Lanham, Electronic, 158. 36 After Virtue. 37 The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson‘s University Library, 1949). 38 Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, Ingrid Elfferich, ―Near Death Experiences in Survivors of

Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,‖ Lancet 351 (2008): 2039-44; see also a similar study: http://www.datadiwan.de/SciMedNet/library/articlesN75+/N76Parnia_nde.htm.


existence with thought, people are not merely thinkers but are instead agents in which action

and thought, itself actually a kind of secondary action, are integrated.39 The appropriate form

of that agency with respect to other persons is love, which interestingly stands in marked

contrast to Plato for whom the proper object of erø s was the impersonal logoi.40 Thus, as John

D. Zizioulas contends, persons, far from existing as isolated entities, really only have their

being in relationship with other persons, and for humans that means ultimately with God.41 In

other words, in rendering Homer‘s once porous world of engagement with gods and daimonia

impermeable, Cartesian and Romantic alike are confronted with the question of how humans,

whose very being consists in personal encounter, can find significance in the now impersonal

and solitary worlds of mathematics and nature? 42 Thus for Emmanuel Levinas, it is precisely

this tendency to see truth as neuter rather than personal that unites the modernist with

Nietzsche and Heidegger in their sublimation of ethics to hermeneutics.43

What I find both troubling and compelling is that these critiques are directed against an

approach to truth which has largely defined the project of Western theology. This is not to say

that people ought not to think carefully nor to seek to systematize their ideas. That would be to

mistakenly equate analytics with critical thought and coherence as though poets and

rhetoricians never engage in either. The question instead is whether a self-grounded analytics

with its now finally admitted unachievable goal of a disembodied, acultural, impersonal, and

therefore objective and value-free eternal truth ought to be the dominant much less sole mode

of dealing with the meaning of human existence.

39 The Self as Agent, (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 80-89. 40 Persons in Relation, (London: Faber, 1970); cf. Macintyre, After. 41 Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, (New York: St. Vladimir‘s Seminary Press, 2002). 42 I owe this observation to Jim Houston. 43 Zimmermann, 188-89.


Part 3: A Second Way…44

These are not new problems. As Wittgenstein and Gadamer were at pains to point out the

recognition of the universality of hermeneutics actually began with Augustine—the notion of a

teleological evolution in hermeneutical awareness from antiquity, through the Reformation

and Romanticism, and finally reaching its zenith in post-modern philosophical reflection is

largely mythical.45 The latter‘s concern for the incarnate verbum and its distinction from the

outward sign, and his ―existential anxiety‖ as to the stance of the reader already point in this

direction.46

Aristotle in his Organon was also aware that although analytics worked well for things which

could not be otherwise such as geometry or physics where one could demonstrate a case on

the basis of immediate premises, when it came to human action with respect to, for example,

ethics and politics matters were quite different:

Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which therefore we inquire, present us

with alternative possibilities. For it is about actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our

actions have contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity‖ (Rhetoric,

I.1332).47

(So for example whereas E=mc2 once demonstrated is simply accepted, deliberation continues

at length over the modern scientific culture from which that knowledge emerged.) Here there

are no immediately perceived premises or immutable data, and hence formal logic and

44 I am very much indebted for significant portions of the following to my good friend Tony Golsby-Smith, a

business consultant in Australia, who first introduced me to this distinction between analytics and rhetoric and its implications for thought and design, see espec. his thesis, ―Pursuing the Art of Strategic Conversations.‖ Ph.D. diss., University of Western Sydney, 2001. I owe to Tony my first foray into readings on rhetoric both in primary and secondary sources. See also David S. Cunningham, Faithful Persuasion: In Aid of a Rhetoric of Christian Theology, (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 8-41, and Resner, 9-34.

45 Grondin, 3, 32-9. 46 Especially as in On Christian Doctrine, 1.35; 2.7, 12; 3.1, 18, 29; see Grondin, 31-39. 47 These are what Horst Rittel calls ―wicked problems‖ where unlike analytics in which problem solving moves

from problem definition to problem solution, problem solution is much more synthetic where definition and solution are dynamic and require compromise, Richard Buchanan, ―Wicked Problems and Design Thinking,‖ Design Issues 8.2 (1992): 5-21.


analytics are of little help.48 These topics required a second and perhaps even more important

way of knowing since it dealt with what humans could change, with possibility. This kind of

knowing required dialectic and its counterpart (antistroph∑ ) rhetoric.49 In fact, it was precisely

because of the growing realization that the Western analytic project was in crisis that John

Henry Newman, steeped in the classical rhetorical tradition, argued for a de-emphasizing of

rationalism and empiricism and championed informal and inferential modes of

argumentation,50 though it would take the work of Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke in the

middle of last century to finally put rhetorical forms of knowing firmly back on the agenda.51

The implications are significant. Absent immediately intuited premises and immutable data,

discussion of human decisions must begin instead with human identity, narrative, and ∑ thos,

and in particular with a point of agreement, namely common opinion (endoxa). (One can see

the tension this raises for analytical thinking in, e.g. Nicholas Lash‘s attempt to reconcile the

realist‘s anxiety over the inescapably ideological element of narrative with the idealist‘s

concern for revelation,52 or in Donald M. MacKinnon‘s portrayal of Kant‘s view of knowledge

as a ―finding‖ of the world and yet also a ―fashioning‖).53 A rhetorical approach recognizes

48 Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John

Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), reflecting last century on the modes of argumentation employed in the courts and on moral issues recognized those of syllogistic philosophy and mathematics did not and could not work.

49 Which he discusses in his Topics, Rhetoric, and the Sophistical Refutations, see Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, trans. William Klubak with introduction by Carroll C. Arnold (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 1.

50 Cunningham, 24. 51 Perelman‘s, The New Rhetoric, translated into English in 1969, struck the world ―like a bombshell,‖ see David A.

Frank, ―Chaim Perelman's ‗First Philosophies and Regressive Philosophy‘: Commentary and Translation,‖ Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003): 177-188. Of Burke‘s work, which is both prolific and almost impossible to categorize, among the earliest and most significant would be: A Grammar of Motives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; orig. 1945; and A Rhetoric of Motives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; orig. 1950).

52 ―Ideology, Metaphor, and Analogy,‖ in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon, eds. Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart R. Sutherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 183-98.

53 ―Idealism and Realism: An Old Controversy Renewed,‖ Explorations in the Theology 5 (London: SCM, 1979), 137-8.


that all human deliberation and narrative is value-laden and therefore inescapably

ideological.54

Second, persuasion is not an end in itself, as though merely convincing listeners as to why a

thing should be this way and not another was enough. It is always persuasion with a view to

action. The concern after all was life in the polis. To re-mint someone else‘s coin, rhetoric is

concerned not so much with describing the world as with changing it. One can perhaps see

here adumbrations of Macmurray‘s emphasis on agency and parallels with J. L. Austin‘s

performative speech, where an utterance is not simply descriptive but is a performance of an

action.55 In a sense rhetoric can be seen as an act of imagination, of calling something into

being which is not, in other words of faith.

Third, since one had to start somewhere, and since demonstration was impossible, one sought

to begin on a point of agreement, namely common opinion (endoxa), what most of the audience

considered to be the case. One must begin with some kind of common ground, even if one

intends finally to cast the tenants out of the vineyard. Consequently, and fourth, rhetoric and

its counterpart dialectic cannot be for specialist philosophers only but for all people, since all

seek to persuade and be persuaded (Rhetoric, I.1354).

Finally, while analytics might convince a person‘s intellect, it does not necessarily motivate a

person‘s desire. As Plato‘s vision of the philosopher-poet and Socrates‘ own use of rhetoric

indicates, rhetoric is better able to motivate precisely because of its use of ―subjective‖

narrative, metaphor, and symbol, since these more closely engage the particular location,

emotional commitments, and self-understanding of a given speaker and audience.56

Why I think this is so important is because it captures much of the nature of scripture. From a

human perspective the fundamental questions of personhood and meaning could indeed be

otherwise; witness the plethora of proposed explanations, both ancient and modern. Not

54 As e.g. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul,

1936), and Clifford Geertz, ―Ideology as a Cultural System‖ in The Interpretation of Cultures, (NY: Basic, 1973) 193-233.

55 How to do Things with Words, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6. 56 Cf. Ernesto Grassi, ―Why Rhetoric is Philosophy,‖ Philosophy and Rhetoric 20 (1987): 68-78.


surprisingly, the scriptures, far from being an analytic demonstration, seem to me to present a

God who seeks to persuade. 57 So what then does a rhetorical emphasis offer that analytics do

not?

3.1 Reintegration of the subjective and the objective.

Whereas analytic logic with its emphasis on the objective seeks to remove the subjective—after

all the interest lies only in the object and in the demonstration of things as they ―really‖ are—

rhetoric and dialectic seek to integrate them.58 Since persuasion depends on a shared ∑ thos,

on seeking the hearers‘ adherence by appealing to their values, hopes, and dreams, the

speaker‘s and the audiences‘ perspective and values (∑ thos) are integral to the process.

Whereas the description of causes as ―dis-covery‖ is the climax of analytics, the argument is

the climax of rhetoric. And since the vision must first be formed in the hearts and minds of the

hearers the rhetorician must see the audience, not as neutral observers, but as active

participants, and indeed constitutive parts of the argument.59 Without this there can be no

common starting point.

Further, it is commonly held that people act on the basis of what they know to be objectively

true and that rhetoric, being only concerned with action, is epistemologically empty. But,

bearing in mind the personalists‘ critique that we are in fact not merely thinkers but agents,

might it not be that our frequent speaking and acting on partial and uncertain knowledge

suggests that we also speak and act in order to discover what is true?60 What if epistemology

and ontology are themselves rhetorical?61

57 Perelman‘s, Realm, is widely recognized as the seminal work, notably on the types of argument that rhetoric

employs. 58 Golsby-Smith, 202. Polanyi‘s concern was to show that even scientific explanation by its very nature involved

precisely this. 59 Ibid., 203. What the so-called New Rhetoric argues is that this dynamic occurs in all fields and for all audiences

whensoever persuasion is involved, Perelman, 5. 60 See Cunningham, 27-28; and Robert L. Scott, ―On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,‖ Central States Speech Journal

18 (1967): 9-17; and Walter M. Careleton, ―On Rhetorical Knowing,‖ Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 227-37.

61 Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 85.


(To fly a kite: I wonder if these two features might have something to contribute to the

traditional notion of ―on-going‖ revelation? Is there a sense in which a rhetorical model better

explains the bible as bearing witness to an on-going conversation in which the people of God

are called to respond in speech and action before that the conversation can move on?62)

Even so, it is important to understand that because rhetoric aims to integrate the ―subjective‖

and the ―objective‖ it is concerned with facts. Its facts, however, are not only those of physics

but also those of history, the social and civic facts of the community and the narratives that

define it, for it is these facts that communicate what is valued and which form the basis of

vision and deliberation.

3.2 The Role of Metaphor

Because rhetoric is concerned with things that could be otherwise, metaphor and analogy are

essential because they involve the imagination in introducing and clarifying dream and

vision.63 Although Aristotle regarded metaphor as primarily the tool of the poet, he

nevertheless saw metaphor as transformative: ―midway between the unintelligible and the

commonplace, it is a metaphor which most produces knowledge‖ since "it is from metaphor

that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Rhetoric, III, 1410b).64 (Kenneth Burke, echoing

earlier characterizations of humans as implement-using creatures, describes humans as

symbol-using both to interpret and to provoke action.65 Likewise, Gadamer‘s, Truth and

62 I suppose this could raise the question of process theology, but if I have little expertise in rhetoric, I have even

less on that topic. 63 On the inventiveness inherent in rhetoric, Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, eds. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M.

Lauer , Tennessee Studies in Literature 39 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002). 64 For Quintilian metaphor accomplishes ―the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything‖ (VIII,

vi, 4-5); Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pess, 1968), 66.

65 Cited in Cunningham, 26.


Method, and Ricoeur‘s, The Rule of Metaphor,66 have done much to rehabilitate the use of

metaphor as a cognitive act in its own right.67)

Metaphor, then, is not merely a comparison between two things but the creation of a third. By

connecting a subject with an unexpected predicate, metaphor opens up new ways of seeing.68

This generative quality derives from metaphor‘s intrinsic openness and instability and as such

reflects the interconnectedness and openness of human experience more faithfully than

Ramus‘ static and firmly delineated categories.

As T.S. Eliot argued that the task of great art was to elucidate the intractable aspects of human

experience, not by explaining life in causal objective terms but by speaking to our deeper

emotional engagement.69 He recognized that when it came to questions of human meaning we

engage at a more sensory level, not merely cognitively and certainly not primarily abstractly.

For Eliot this was done by skillfully creating an objective correlative, an image, or a set of

things, that evokes a particular set of emotions which themselves correlate with a wider field

of human emotion.

To ground this for a moment, when the bible speaks of creation as a Temple the effect of the

metaphor is far more than a simple comparison or a cognitively neutral description. Instead, in

mapping onto a pre-existing social, emotional, and ethical landscape it enables the hearer to

experience a much fuller appreciation of the significance of the statement. The same applies

when humans are described as the image of the (G)god now placed within that temple.

Metaphor thus counters Ramus‘ neutering of rhetoric and his artificial compartmentalization

of the arts which has so bedeviled modern life and I suggest modern theology and theological

education.

66 Also e.g. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago

Press, 1980). 67 Although the debate has stalled somewhat of late, the more recent work of Heather Graves, drawing on

cognitive theory and psychology, has demonstrated and illustrated the epistemic role of such in scientific endeavor, Rhetoric in(to) Science: Style as Invention in Inquiry, (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005).

68 Paul Ricoeur, ―The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,‖ Man and World 12 (1979): 123-141. 69 ―Hamlet and his Problems,‖ in Selected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 124-5, cited in Golsby-

Smith, 166, and for much of the following, 166-89.


It is because of this connotative web that Eliot argued, contrary to the popular view of his day,

that poetry was not solely or even primarily about a local individual but was instead a

corporate and social experience.70 The poet's task, as is the rhetorician‘s, is to indwell the

tradition on which they draw and in which their culture lives. Finally, for Eliot the goal is

neither the individual metaphor nor the objective correlative but the completed work, an

aesthetic unity, which provides the overall explanatory pattern. It is not hard to understand,

then, why Plato regarded poets as more powerful than philosophers and why he hoped for an

integration of both in his philosopher-poets.

3.3 The Centrality of Ethics

Since rhetoric cannot proceed from obvious premises, its authority must originate elsewhere.

For Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian this came in large part from the ∑ thos of the

orator.71 It seeks to respond to the question, ―Why should I believe you and not someone

else?,‖ and is thus related, as Quintilian understands, to the authority the audience grants the

speaker (Inst. Orat. 3.8.12). All things being equal, a speaker with a reputation for honesty,

integrity, and justice will be more persuasive. But again even this assumes some point of

commonality where the speaker‘s ∑ thos connects with that of the audience. (This explains, for

example, Rodney Stark‘s observations concerning the fundamental role of Christian ethics in

the conversion of the Roman Empire).72

The choice of metaphor also reveals the speaker‘s values. Whereas analytics is distinct from

ethics since it betrays no sense of purpose,73 ―it is precisely through metaphor that our

perspectives, or analogical extensions, are made – a world without metaphor would be a

world without purpose.‖74 Thus the choice of metaphor is a value-laden act capturing not only

the intellectual perspective of the speaker, but in laying aside the cloak of impartiality it

70 ―Tradition and the Individual Talent,‖ in Selected, 4. 71 See Resner, ―„thos in Classical Rhetoric‖ in Preacher, 9-37. 72 The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the

Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 73 Burke, Permanence and Change, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 171. 74 Ibid., 194.


reveals his or her motivation.75 Metaphor moves from being merely "a reformulation of the

object to a presentation of the ∑ thos of the speaker,"76 and is thus central to rhetoric as

persuasion, since one‘s choice of metaphor is itself argumentative.77 (As is clear for example in

the contrast between regarding humans as the gods‘ slaves, or as the image of the one true

creator God).

3.4 The Role of Narrative

Over against the rootlessness of the Enlightenment‘s failed attempt to establish a purely

analytical approach to ethics, rhetoric in its ethical appeal, as in Eliot‘s discussion of poetry,

must engage with the narrative of the audience (cf. perhaps Nietzsche‘s ―philosophy is

biography‖?).78 Cartesian rationalism introduced an egoism and a disembodied, generalized

listing of universals and hence an overly rule-centered approach to ethics. On the other hand,

as has been discussed at length by, for example, Stephen Crites, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley

Hauerwas and David Burrell, and Martha Nussbaum, narrative is essential in forming and

inculcating ethics,79 and according to some neurologists is central to our functioning as

persons.80

Narrative engages not only at the level of logic (the story needs to be coherent) but at the levels

of imagination, affection, and emotion. Integrating the objective with the subjective at the level

of interpersonal relationships it both confirms convictions and opens up possibilities. The

reader is not merely acknowledging a description but in identifying with characters in the

75 W.C. Booth, ―The Rhetorical Stance,‖ in Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing, eds. Yameng Liu, and

Rcihard E. Young, (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994), 21-28. 76 Golsby-Smith, 188. 77 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 168-70. 78 As Vico long ago noted every ethical system has always been the ethics of a particular community, they

nowhere exist as disembodied entities, MacIntyre, ―Postscript,‖ 265. 79 Crites, ―The Narrative Quality of Experience,‖ JAAR 39.3 (1971): 291-311; MacIntyre, ―Epistemological Crises,

Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,‖ Monist 60.4 (1977): 453-72; After Virtue; Hauerwas, and Burrell, ―From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,‖ in Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1977), 15-39; Nussbaum, ―Narrative Emotions: Beckett's Genealogy of Love,‖ Ethics 98.2 (1988): 225-54. However, in citing these materials, my concern is only with the question of narrative and its function, not the question of the historicity of those narratives.

80 Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, "The Neurology of Narrative," SubStance 94/95 (2001): 72-84.


story is invited to exercise judgment and to participate more fully, even if vicariously, in the

consequences of a given action.81 Narrative‘s integrative and holistic nature also provides a

means by which one‘s life can be understood as a whole.82 Moreover, given that it is at the

level of our emotions that our deep ethical commitments are made, stories instruct us as to

what our emotional responses ought to be in a given situation.83 None of this excludes

analytics or logic per se. But as the celebrated case of Phineas Gage suggests, memory, verbal

ability, perceptual and inferential capacity, and moral reasoning absent the capacity to feel

results in a world in which deliberation is impossible.84 The result is not a Spock-like paragon

of rational action, but as Simon Blackburn has said albeit with perhaps a little too much

flourish ―a hopeless flotsam incapable of rational agency.‖85 Perhaps part of the problem with

modernist analytic Western theology is that it is, unwittingly, attempting to produce Spock-

like figures.

3.5 Cogency and coherence.

Even though Plato was critical of the abuse of rhetoric he nevertheless observes that a good

speech must have its own ―organic shape, like a living being‖ (Phaedrus, 264, 270). That is,

rhetoric is concerned with bringing coherent form to its subject matter by arranging the

various elements into a pleasing sequence and well-proportioned whole. Rhetoric is therefore

both about meaning since it clarifies conceptual boundaries thereby unitizing experience86 and

about aesthetics since it seeks to integrate those units into a coherent and pleasing whole.87

81 See e.g. Nussbaum, ―Narrative,‖ and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001); John D. O'Banion, Reorienting Rhetoric: The Dialectic of List and Story, (University Park, PN: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 181-92.

82 Cf. O‘Banion, 198. 83 Nussbaum, ―Narrative.‖ 84 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994). The

legendary Gage was a foreman on a railway construction team before an accident with a tamping rod damaged his frontal lobe which according to his physician rendered him impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action.

85 ―To Feel or Feel Not,‖ review of Nussbuam, Upheavals of Thought, in The New Republic On-Line, 12.13.01. 86 Richard Young, cited in Golsby-Smith, 238. 87 Cf. the second of Bernard Lonergan‘s four transcendental principles, ―explanation,‖ whereby humans seek to

abstract from experience a coherent higher level of integration, as developed at length in his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, eds. Fredrick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (5th ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).


Again because this subject matter is not that of analytics but of life, rhetoric‘s cogency and

coherence will tend to be more organic and aesthetically narrative-oriented than list-like with

the latter‘s inherent fragmentation.88

3.6 Persuasion to action in the polis.

Finally, by integrating subject and object through metaphor and narrative rhetoric undermines

analytics‘ emphasis on theø ria. It challenges the detached life of the mind where ―the person

who devotes himself to the activity of the mind depends only on himself,‖89 whose goal is

knowledge for its own sake, and whose ethics are one of disinterest and of objectivity.90

Rhetoric by way of contrast is oriented toward the community and action. Thus persuasion is

not an end in itself, as though merely convincing listeners as to why a thing should be this way

and not another was enough. It is always with a view to action. The concern after all was life in

the polis. To re-mint someone else‘s coin, rhetoric is concerned not so much with describing the

world as with changing it. One can perhaps see here adumbrations of Macmurray‘s emphasis

on agency and of J. L. Austin‘s performative speech-acts.91 In a sense rhetoric can be seen as an

act of imagination, of calling something into being which is not.

3.7 The Rhetorical Problem and the Crisis in Hermeneutics

So is rhetoric the next great ―rainbow-hued‖ epistemological hope? Hardly. The difficulty is

that contingent questions are by their nature wide-open—which is why Plato proposed an

alternative, even if unsuccessful, approach—and hence Gadamer still cannot explain ―how we

are able to deduce from conflicting traditions the guiding principles for practical decisions.‖92

As Protagoras, Gorgias, and Aristotle recognized in the end opinion (doxa) was the final arbiter

(and hence modern naturalist‘s problem of ―Darwin‘s doubt‖: on what basis could an evolving

mind be trusted?). Cicero and later Quintilian wrestled with the problem, the latter agonizing

88 On this at length, O'Banion. 89 Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2002), 79. 90 Hadot, 81. 91 How to do Things with Words, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6. 92 Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 176.


over what would happen if a fool or a malicious person was eloquent (Institutio, XII, 1)?

Rhetoric would then become the most pernicious threat to public and private welfare alike. In

the end Cicero sought protection by requiring of the orator almost superhuman qualities in his

breadth of wisdom and knowledge of philosophy (De Oratore, I, x/ix). For Quintilian the only

safeguard was goodness: ―I do not merely assert that the ideal orator should be a good man,

but I affirm that no man can be an orator unless he is a good man‖ (Institutio, XII, I.). But what

defines good? As Grondin finally admits, Gadamer‘s project only succeeds if one has ―faith in

meaning.‖93

As should be evident from the history of Western analytical philosophy, the 2400 year-old

search for certainty in terms of ―personal‖ truth is in disarray. Since life is ultimately

inscrutable to analytics, the human ―sciences‖ simply cannot be placed on the same footing as

the natural sciences. Nor can we hope of any single answer, since as Aristotle recognized, most

of the problems we face are, to use an anachronistic modern term, ―wicked problems.‖94 That

is, they characteristically admit of multiple equally viable answers whose selection depends on

the values the actors bring to the decision making process. If there is hope of any such footing,

it must come from outside the limited circle of our human hermeneutical experience.

Part 4: Biblical Theology as God’s Rhetoric

Hopefully it is becoming clear from the foregoing that the Bible is fundamentally rhetorical in

nature.95 The preponderance of ethically motivated and culturally engaged narratives, of

particular audiences‘ histories, of metaphor (not least and perhaps necessarily when speaking

93 15; see further Zimmermann, 178-79, for whom Christian hermeneutics is grounded in the imago Dei. 94 Using Horst Rittel‘s terminology, fn. 46 above. 95 Obviously it exhibits various rhetorical strategies as scores of recent books and articles have already argued in

particular the work of Kennedy, Classical; ―An Introduction to the Rhetoric of the Gospels,‖ Rhetorica 1 (1983): 17-31; and New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); cf. also F. Siegert, Argumentation bei Paulus (WUNT 34), Tübingen 1985); James L. Kinneavy‘s interesting study, Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Wilhelm Wueller‘s survey, ―Where is Rhetorical Criticism Taking Us?,‖ CBQ 49 (1987): 448-63; and on the essentially oral and therefore rhetorical setting of the NT, Paul Achtemeier, "Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity'," JBL 109 (1990): 3-27. Hundreds of related studies on rhetoric in the OT and NT have emerged in the last decade.


of God),96 of symbol, poetry, affirmations of God‘s exemplary character, prophetic and

pastoral persuasion, and a thorough-going concern for the transformation of human life within

the polis are unquestionably features of rhetoric. Equally absent are formal syllogistic

demonstrations on the basis of immediately obvious premises, lists of categorized data, and

increasingly compartmentalized fields of causal description. All of which suggests that the

biblical witness should be read primarily as God‘s rhetoric aimed at persuading us of his

vision of a world that can and will be different, so that in trusting him we might act

accordingly.97

The fundamental difference, of course, is that, unlike humans whose limitations mean that

such matters could always be otherwise, God as the ―I AM‖ speaks with all wisdom, all

understanding, as one who is just in all his ways, good to all, and who has compassion on all

that he has made. So while thoroughly engaged in the cultural narrative, metaphors, and

concerns of the audiences he seeks to persuade, his authority and ethical character are

peerlessly absolute. In this sense, he is the ―superhuman‖ speaker whom Cicero stipulated and

the inestimably ―good‖ orator required by Quintilian.

(One should not be overly concerned with the prominence of culturally located metaphor.

While a single metaphor wrongly understood might cause problems, the biblical material

contains a vast range of interlocking metaphors whose mutual interaction stabilizes and

locates each; not unlike a galaxy which though not static is nevertheless maintained in its

equilibrium as a whole by the gravitational interaction of the parts. The upside is that the

dynamism of metaphor animates the whole and prevents it from sinking into the quietness of

the static list.)

96 E.g. Nicholas Lash, ―Ideology, Metaphor, and Analogy,‖ in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology:

Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon, eds. Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart R. Sutherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 183-98, and Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). It is interesting to see that when Lash admits the failure, in rationalist terms, of philosophers of religion and historians of Christianity he turns to the primacy of action, citing Newman who in turn is a major figure in the revival of rhetoric, Cunningham, 24-25.

97 On the gentle persuasion of God with the purpose of gaining our trust in order the he might transform how we act, see Ellen. T. Charry‘s discussion of the importance of beauty, truth and goodness—thorough-going rhetorical categories—in Jesus, Paul, and the early fathers, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).


But the key point here is that unlike analytics biblical rhetoric‘s certainty is grounded not in

our unaided reason‘s ability to derive a fixed impersonal list or an unchanging eternally

delineated system, but in the constant character of a personal and good God. As such it shifts

the focus away from mere description to ethics and from Plato‘s disembodied universals to

relational personhood.

Perhaps nowhere is this rhetorical cast clearer than in John‘s gospel. At the outset, Jesus is

introduced as the logos, with all its Jewish and Greek connotations, who as the personal word

comes to us ―from above‖ and to which, if we desire to understand, we must respond by

―believing in‖—a relational act, not an autonomous concept. The gospel itself is replete with

the panoply of rhetoric: narrative, metaphor, image, symbol, the dialectic of personal

engagement in argument and persuasion, ethical concerns, the centrality of the unquestionable

integrity and righteousness of the central speaker, and finally a particular emphasis on doxa.

This last characteristic bears closer scrutiny. While it is true that for John doxa means glory, the

word also has connotations of reputation, and perhaps through that of opinion. It cannot be

pursued here but I suspect that in John the logos, embodied in Jesus, is actually revealed as

God‘s rhetoric (surely not analytic epist∑ m∑ ). His glory, and thus reputation, in total

opposition to the unethical self-seeking rhetors of the day, is most clearly seen in Jesus ―anti-

heroic‖ self-sacrifice upon the cross. And this is finally for John the ―opinion‖ (doxa) that he

wants his hearers to hold as the basic assumption of life in the new community, the new

Temple-polis,98 the renewed cosmos wherein Apollo‘s logos and Dionysus‘ vine (or Word and

Spirit) are reconciled, and where authentically human action is imitative of self-giving love.99

98 Cf. Mary L. Coloe, God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,

2001). 99 Why was this rhetorical dimension eventually eclipsed? There are several possible reasons. It is possible that in

seeking to defend the Christian faith the early Graeco-Roman Christians found themselves having to respond to their critics in kind. Analytics was also a central part of the educated pagan‘s curriculum and hence a mode of thought in which they felt at home and it did hold out a greater hope of certainty and stasis. Without discounting either of these and more likely in concert with them, I wonder if given the Christian doctrine of revelation, and thus that the matters of previously uncertain ―personal‖ truth could now be regarded as immediate premises, the natural tendency was to create a theology that could boast the kind of timeless certainty that analytics seemed to offer. Not everyone was interested in such concourse as Tertulian‘s disdainful question indicates: ―What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?‖ (Prescription against heretics 7).


(Nietzsche it seems, and not surprisingly given his own rhetorical outlook, felt more sharply

than most the force of the Christian story in confronting and shattering the martial aretê of

Homer. And as Mark Strom‘s excellent book demonstrates, Paul took this deeply to heart such

that in manner of life and speech he everywhere sought to make Jesus‘ example the doxa of the

communities he served.100)

The Rhetorical Character of a Biblical Theology

So what then might a genuinely biblical theology look like? Whatever else it must preserve

rhetoric‘s subjective-objective, personal, ethical, and persuasion-to-action character orientated

toward the new creation. Divorcing biblical materials from the cultures and stories that gave

them their inculcating, ethical, and teleological orientation is to hand the Bible over to the

distantiation and alienation that characterizes the modern world. Just as persons are known

more richly through hearing their stories, surely also God and his Christ. It is perhaps not

surprising that an analytical approach to theology ends up, in practice, having to teach

theological ethics as a separate category and in separate courses. Alternatively, a rhetorical

approach, as I hope will be clear in a moment, by its very nature keeps God‘s character (and

thus ethics) at the core.

The Bible‘s metaphors and symbols must remain central. It seems odd that after expatiating on

God‘s love for his creation and his historical engagement with humanity we proceed to

articulate same in disembodied analytical terminology, whose increasingly Ramusian and

compartmentalized Platonic categories bear little resemblance to those ―temporal and

historical‖ integrative metaphors which constitute Israel‘s narrative. Consider, for example,

the conviction that exegesis has not done its job until it has tidily extracted the theological

mineral into neat piles of ―Soteriology,‖ ―Pneumatology,‖ ―Eschatology,‖ ―Christology,‖ etc.

Whence these particular categories, if not from an Aristotelian and Ramusian outlook, and if

so on what grounds should they be privileged over those constitutive of the biblical material

The problem though, to re-iterate, is that self-grounded analytics is at best in tension with and at worst largely incommensurate with both the content and aims of the biblical material.

100 Reframing Paul: Conversations in Grace and Community, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2000).


itself, not least given what we have just said about analytics and rhetoric? This is not to say

that such categories have no material basis in the text. It is simply to note that such boundaries

end up artificially separating what is an inherently organic holism.

Instead, may I suggest that metaphors, being dynamic and generative and by their ―personal‖

nature emphasizing human participation, better bear witness to the Bible‘s summons to

transformation? Not only are they more able to engage with the intractable nature of human

existence, they can motivate in ways that analytics cannot. Their emphasis on the personal

preserves the mystery and open-endedness of life, and as such constitutes a bulwark against

the human tendency to epistemological hubris which tempts us to speak authoritatively where

God has not. Neither God nor life lies within our control.

An Outline of a Rhetorically Shaped Biblical Theology

So what does this mean in practice? In reiterating what others have suggested long before me,

and what I have written elsewhere,101 I would propose that a biblical theology should begin

with those fundamental metaphors which at the outset the Bible itself offers: that creation is

God‘s palace-temple and humanity his image placed within it. Not only do they address the

most basic of human questions—what is the world, who am I, and how should I live in it?—

but when read against their second and first millennium cultural horizons, they are heavily

freighted with ethical and action-oriented concerns. Further, it seems to me that the entire

biblical witness unfolds within the frame of these twin declarations. This offers simplicity,

coherence, and an aesthetically pleasing integrated holism, within which a Christian ars

disserendi can again flourish by reflecting on the underlying complexity inherent in the

expansive nature of metaphor.

101 E.g. to name just a few, C.H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures, (London: Nisbet, 1952), Francis Foulkes, The Acts

of God, (London: Tyndale, 1958); W.J. Dumbrell, The End of the Beginning, (Homebush West, NSW: Lancer, 1985); N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); and Rikk Watts, ―On the Edge of the Millennium: Making Sense of Genesis 1,‖ Living in the Lamblight, ed. Hans Boersma, (Vancouver: Regent College, 2001), 129-51; and ―The New Exodus/New Creational Restoration of the Image of God,‖ What Does it Mean to be Saved?, ed. John J. Stackhouse, Jr., (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), 15-41; G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the dwelling place of God, NSBT 17 (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004).


Creation, seen then as God‘s Temple, is potentially a cosmic garden-sanctuary of abundance

and material and spiritual delight, wherein work is fruitful, and which place and its attendant

activity is also in a sense sacred. Nevertheless, creation is neither to be worshipped, since it is

not God, nor thoughtlessly exploited, since its destiny is restoration. Likewise, being made in

God‘s image our being is expressed in truly ―ek-static‖ (directed out of oneself) relationship of

trust and vulnerability whereby we learn to be human by imitating what is at last revealed to

be a Trinitarian God. Hence we are to be good and compassionate to all. Employing our

imagination, we are to create that which is good, and to bring order by calling into being that

which was not, thereby expanding the garden sanctuary throughout the cosmos, and all for

peace.

Ethical action is central both in the preceding call to imitation and in realizing that what is

done to the image is naturally understood as being done to the God in whose image we are

made. Given our personal nature, seeking for autonomy leads to alienation from God and one

another and ultimately, because we are fundamentally relational beings, to the loss of our

humanity. Consequently the beastly action of Pharaoh and all ungodly leaders comes under

God‘s judgment as do the anti-cities which they establish. Worshipping idols leads to our

becoming, like them, blind, deaf, and hard-hearted—though now toward God and one

another. And just as the enlivening of that image required its sanctification and the indwelling

of the god‘s spirit so too with us the promised spirit does what the command could not in

enabling us truly to ―look like‖ God.

If the above are the woof of a biblical theology, the warp is constituted by the major themes of

Israel‘s narrative, for example, creation-new creation, garden-tabernacle-old Temple-new

Temple, earthly Jerusalem-heavenly Jerusalem, first exile from the garden and second exile

from the garden land, the Passover redemption of the first exodus and that of the new, etc.

Likewise the image theme is continued from Adam and Eve, through Abraham and Sarah,

Israel (as God‘s firstborn son), Moses, the priests, Davidic kings, the prophets, Isaiah‘s

enigmatic suffering servant, the ―messianic‖ (!) Son of Man, culminating in Jesus who not

surprisingly is both fully human and fully God, and so to all those whether Jew or Greek, slave


or free, male or female who through trust are ―in him.‖ Key here is the presence of real

individuals to whose lives we can relate as opposed to merely conceptual patterns.

Can I suggest then that when thinking of salvation, election, redemption, etc. our reflection

might be better served by first locating these terms firmly within the rhetorical and ethically

transformational horizons of Israel‘s narrative and cultural milieu rather than the grid of a

more static analytic philosophy? It seems to me also that when the NT use of OT texts is read

from this perspective, many of the so-called ―acontextual‖ problems disappear and a richer

and fuller reading emerges.

Conclusion

Let me reiterate that this is not at all to deny any role to analytics. Only that it must find its

place within the larger rhetorical shape of the biblical material. Hopefully too what is clear in

all this is not only the integrative and generative power of narrative and metaphor, but the

integration of thought and teleologically oriented action. On the one hand, as already noted,

there is the centripetal component which draws together and makes meaning of the

fundamental questions of what is creation, and what does it mean to be human, by grounding

these ideas, not in timeless disembodied abstract truths, but in thorough-going incarnational

metaphors and relationally rich narratives. On the other, there is the centrifugal impetus to

new creation transformation. Holiness as ethical action is central. What this suggests to me is

that a truly biblical theology has little to do with description as a static list of increasingly

compartmentalized attributes which seem inherently to force apart thought and action. Its

focus is instead more rhetorical whose persuasive character not only informs and transforms

the imagination but also explicitly through its integration of subject and object and persuasive

use of metaphor spurs us to ethical action. In other words, a rhetorical approach is

fundamentally about a genuinely holy, and thus genuinely human, life whose present and

future is in fellowship with God and one another in the restored cosmos-Temple-polis of the

new creation.

what if truth was personal

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