Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition

Introduction

Introduction — Elizabeth Vander Lei This book grows out of and contributes to a persistent scholarly curiosity about the relationship of rhetoric and religion, a curiosity that dapples the history of rhetoric from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine to the work of contemporary scholars, a curiosity that persists in part, I believe, because scholars have found that examining this relationship produces useful insights about complex rhetorical acts like argumentation. Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition focuses attention on rhetors who press into service an array of rhetorical strategies—some drawn from Christian tradition and some contributing to Christian tradition—to achieve their rhetorical ends. And it gives us more to be curious about: this collection brings together a range of arguments made during times and places of significant social rupture associated with Christian tradition—from the formation of Christianity (Bruce Herzberg) to contemporary questions about religious ways of being (Priscilla Perkins), from colonial Africa (Aesha Adams-Roberts, Rosalyn Collings Eves, and Liz Rohan) to present-day American classrooms (Beth Daniell). These chapters demonstrate that as rhetors argue, they press into service a variety of strategies, including beliefs and practices that are cultural as well as religious, subtle, multiple, interdependent, and historically situated. Chapters in the first three parts of this collection attend to three particular areas of social rupture: the rise of Christian sects, the rise of female rhetors, and the rise of academic concern about American Christian fundamentalism. In each of these parts, readers meet rhetors who have taken the opportunity to renovate rhetorical resources associated with Christian tradition and, through their use of those resources, reshaped their discourse communities. Chapters in the fourth part, which centers upon rhetoric in Christian tradition, line out the complexities encountered by such rhetors (and those who study them) as they create and resolve moments of social upheaval in Christian tradition. In the first part, “The Rise of Christian Sects,” contributors Anne Ruggles Gere and Lizabeth A. Rand consider how rhetors from “outsider” groups have created arguments with and against Christian tradition to assert the identity of ix x ■ elizabeth vander lei their sect. In this piece, Gere and Rand, like other chapter authors, contribute to a body of scholarship that explores how rhetors have made use of the rhetorical resources available in Christian tradition and how these rhetors sometimes mix those resources with other resources to create hybrid discourses. The rhetorician Patricia Bizzell provides an example of this kind of blending in her analysis of the 1263 Barcelona Disputation, a staged theological debate between the Jewish scholar known as Nahmanides and the Dominican friar Paul Christian.1 As a Jew living under the rule of a Christian king, Nahmanides represented religious believers who troubled a culturally promulgated argument for the rationality of the Christian faith because “the Bible was the central holy text for [Jews] but they did not find the same meanings in it that the Christians did.”2 In this contest Nahmanides found himself in a difficult situation: if he won, he risked “offending the high secular and religious authorities in attendance and bringing down more persecution of his fellow Jews.”3 And if he lost, “he risked seriously demoralizing a population who was already under severe psychological and physical assault from the majority culture.”4 Bizzell emphasizes that in this disputation, both Nahmanides and Friar Christian (also a Jew but one who had converted) made extensive use of their knowledge of Jewish and Christian warrants, evidence, and argumentative strategies.5 Bizzell argues that in rhetorical moments like this, many features of a rhetorical situation—religion and culture, language and argumentation, belief and rationality—intertwine to create a Gordian knot of meaning. Such mingling of features is possible, Bizzell concludes, because “as is often the case when we analyze mixed discourses, we discover that the discourses being mixed were not so separate to begin with.”6 As a result of its long history and global distribution, Christian tradition has been shaped by innumerable mixed discourses like these. In her chapter “Constructing Devout Feminists: A Mormon Case,” Gere studies the rhetorical influence of Mormon women on the arguments for Utah statehood and for the acceptance of Mormonism as an expression of Christianity . She rehearses the terrible social stigma that Mormons, particularly women, endured as a result of the Mormon religious practice of polygamy. She describes how, in the face of this prejudice, Mormon women countered prevalent attitudes toward Mormons by arguing in support of women’s suffrage and by getting involved in the...