Eloquence Divine: In Search of God's Rhetoric by Philip Arrington Eugene (review)

How has someone in our field not done this yet? Imagine God as the primary rhetor of the Bible, a recurring figure who not only speaks but also is the text's ultimate author. That was the echoing thought while reading Phillip K. Arrington's Divine Eloquence: In Search of God's Rhetoric. This book both enchanted and puzzled me as a bold experiment in rhetorical criticism.

Arrington sets for himself a challenging, arguably impossible, task in Divine Eloquence. What follows is an idiosyncratic effort to bring canons of classical rhetoric (invention, arrangement, etc.) to bear upon a text composed under very different genre expectations, albeit a text profoundly concerned with the persuasive power of the word, and the Word.

Arrington acknowledges the strangeness of his self-assigned task to read God as a rhetor. Chapter one, "Why God's Rhetoric?" frames his analysis with appropriate caveats. He approaches the Bible as an agnostic, not a believer; he reads the Bible that we know today in English, not in the original Hebrew and Greek; he eschews formal modes of Biblical criticism developed by textual scholars in favor of what is at once a naive reading of the text and a robust, even forced, use of rhetoric's tools to break open the text in unexpected ways. As a case in point, Arrington creatively uses the neologism "invenesis" in chapter two to read the creation story in Genesis as an act of God's rhetorical invention, in terms of both what God says and does. Of course, the divine act of creation ex nihilo, in which saying is doing (e.g., "Let there be light"), confounds notions of human rhetorical invention. From the beginning, then, God is no ordinary rhetor.

A benefit of applying interpretive categories to a rhetor who routinely violates them is mutual illumination of both biblical text and concepts of classical rhetoric. What is most significant in this respect is Arrington's willingness to question God's motives and methods via a rhetorical lens. Arrington observes that God's frequent displays of power lay at one end of a spectrum ranging from "artistic" proofs through reasoned discourse to "inartistic" displays of power through "violence or threats of violence and to theophanies, physical but indirect manifestations of His power and control, to try to achieve His goals" (21).

We see the range of God manifestations of His power and control to try to achieve His goals. What is most significant in this respect is Arrington's willingness to Ark, God vows never again to destroy the Earth. Yet, God also places conditions on Noah and his descendants (to avoid eating meat containing blood) that find their fruition in the Law God later delivers to Moses in Exodus. In Arrington's treatment of the flood in chapter five, God exercises rhetorical agency when arguing with Himself about how to purge his creation of evil when instructing Noah to save a remnant of creation, and in the covenantal language that will be the spine of God's rhetoric through the Bible.

By such fine-grained analyses of key motifs and passages, Arrington shows how God, in effect, prosecutes the case for Himself as God, with humanity as an audience. This act of persuasion reaches a lyrical crescendo in God's soliloquy in the Book of Job, a performance Arrington treats with great insight in chapter six, entitled "Style—How God Puts His Case." In between this chapter on style and three preceding chapters on invention, Arrington considers dispositio, or arrangement, in chapter five. Arrington treats language that will be the spine of God's rhetoric through the Bible. onditces inherent limitations of this project for all its illuminating observations. Ultimately, one must grapple with the conceit animating this act of reading: God is not a character in a text but an actual rhetor, one whose performance may be evaluated or, as Arrington pointedly asks in chapter eight, "Can God...