Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition

10: Resistance to Rhetoric in Christian Tradition

135 10 — Resistance to Rhetoric in Christian Tradition Thomas Amorose The title of this final chapter may surprise readers, since the preceding chapters of Renovating Rhetoric show so many successes for rhetoric at work in Christian tradition. But readers may have noticed that most of the successes documented in these chapters came in the face of resistance by some form of mainstream Christianity. Or they came when classroom instructors developed practices built on a theology espousing opposition to that mainstream status quo. (I am thinking in particular here of Priscilla Perkins and the way her Lonerganian approach to classroom relationships opposes that of her evangelical student, who espouses widely held Christian beliefs.) Bruce Herzberg succeeds in opposing the widely held view that with the birth of Christianity came wholly new ways of expressing faith, new ways of arguing faith. In each of these cases, rhetorical success involved shifting settled views and practices, rigid gender roles, confined homiletics, or narrow constructions of believers’ faith. They have in common the renovation of rhetorical materials in Christian tradition to overcome, undercut, or bring about reform, with marginalized rhetors overcoming power structures by shaping those materials for purposes of renewing the tradition, its members, and the rhetors themselves. 136 ■ thomas amorose But why the resistance to rhetorical practices that, in hindsight, have benefited Christianity so much? This chapter attempts to answer that question, if only in broad terms. My interests here are theoretical rather than historical, though some rhetorical history is involved in my trying to get at an answer. My sad hope is to show that Christian tradition, both early and late, has chosen positions that hamper and limit the possibilities of rhetoric, which explains why the work of renovation has generally fallen to outsiders, like those detailed in preceding chapters. These are figures who have aspired to claim a credible ethos within the tradition, change it, or make the tradition available for transfer to other discursive environments, thereby providing rhetorical flexibility to the likes of Christian students and other newcomers to mature literacies. But why the need for such struggle in the first place? Some Starting Points Anyone familiar with the issue of the roots of Christianity in rhetoric or the influence of rhetoric on Christianity recognizes certain invaluable sources. My intent here is not to replicate, much less try to improve upon (as though I could) the work of such fundamental thinkers in this area as James Kinneavy, Kenneth Burke, or Wayne Booth (on Kenneth Burke)—though I acknowledge their indispensable influence. I also acknowledge the influence of Walter Jost’s and Wendy Olmsted’s Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, a comprehensive investigation into the relationship of rhetoric and religion as a whole.1 All of this fundamental research on rhetoric in Christian tradition speaks of the important theological role played by text and language in Christianity . Christianity is one of the Abrahamic religions, and, as Bruce Herzberg has shown in chapter 9, shares with other faiths in this tradition a firm base in logocentrism. Christianity thus privileges language as the medium for eternal wisdom, that wisdom having been transmitted to humanity through a merging of God and human conceived as the coming of the Word—that is, of wisdom coming as and being shaped by language. But within the Christian tradition, language’s role isn’t simply transmissive. It’s also uniquely identified with the Christian God himself. As the apostle John says, the Word existed from the beginning, was God, and was with God. The Word is simultaneously Christ as one of the persons of a three-personed God and God’s verbal expression. When observing similarities between the study of language and the study of God, Burke has observed how the relationship between the persons of Father and Son in the triune Christian God shares properties with words as symbols and the things they symbolize. In both instances, says Burke, one of the elements can’t exist without the other. Just as the Father relies upon the Son to “symbolize ” his power—that is, make it manifest in history—so too, a symbolized “thing” (object, person, property) can’t exist, to the mind at least, without a resistance to rhetoric in christian tr adition ■ 137 symbol for it.2 This observation hits on more than some coincidental similarity between how language/text works and how God exists; it explicates as well the profound way, for Christians...