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 centurys 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 historicityi.e. prejudice and subjectivityis 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.

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 19 th 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, Gadamers Dialogical Hermeneutic, Hiedelberg: Universit tsverlag C. Winter, 1999). 4 Grondin, 111-114.
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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 dichotomythe 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 Aristotles 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 mans paideia aimed at producing a god-like heroic if violently unforgiving aret inculcated through Homers Iliad and Odyssey.5 Widely regarded in Platos day as the educator of all Greece (Republic, 606e), Homers 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

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G.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1969), 20-41. 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.

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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 influenceuniversal 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 preSocratic 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 Platos 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. Platos later alternative, a deity who was largely an impersonal idea, could hardly be less interested in humanity.

Bowra, 123-26. Jaeger, 36. 9 Ibid. 10 Bowra, 123. 11 Bowra, 61-62. 12 Ibid.
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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 itthe 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 Platos criticisms, Isocrates would later stress the importance of the orators 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

Renato Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Guilanna Menozzi, Theory and History of Literature 63 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 5. 14 AndrResner, 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.
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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 crafts magic when it suited.) But Platos truth thus discerned was no new truth. It was instead that which was already known by ones immortal soul.18 He thereby resolved the Parmenidean and Heraclitan dilemmahumans trapped in a changing world could indeed have access to certain truthbut at the cost of the dualism that has bedeviled Western philosophy ever since. For all that, Plato foreshadowed the problem Grondin describeswhen 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, Platos goal was nevertheless philosopher-poets. That Platos 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. Platos 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. Aristotles Organon and Analytics significantly refined Platos 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 ,
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 Platos 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.
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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 theologys 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 worlds 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 Augustines

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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 Galileos recognition that natures 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 Platos 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. Homers 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 wellmuscled faculty to be turned to a Dionysian pursuit of bermenschian power.25 Part 2: The Crisis in Analytics But as Grondins crisis indicates, this Promethean edifice did not long survive unscathed. Descartes tautological and Gods-eye view doubting self did not float so freely above his
F. Capra, The Turning Point, (London: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 39. 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).
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culture as he thought,26 and Kants 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 centurys Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ram e). He divided rhetoric in two and, in allocating invention, argument, and

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 Pontanos 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 Collingwoods 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.
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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 MacIntyres 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 mistakethere 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
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: Hutchinsons 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.
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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 er 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 Homers 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.

The Self as Agent, (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 80-89. Persons in Relation, (London: Faber, 1970); cf. Macintyre, After. 41 Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church , (New York: St. Vladimirs Se minary Press, 2002). 42 I owe this observation to Jim Houston. 43 Zimmermann, 188-89.
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Part 3: A Second Way44 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 Augustinethe 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 latters 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

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.
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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 Lashs attempt to reconcile the realists anxiety over the inescapably ideological element of narrative with the idealists concern for revelation,52 or in Donald M. MacKinnons portrayal of Kants view of knowledge as a finding of the world and yet also a fashioning).53 A rhetorical approach recognizes

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 Perelmans, 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 Burkes 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), 1378.
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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 elses coin, rhetoric is concerned not so much with describing the world as with changing it. One can perhaps see here adumbrations of Macmurrays emphasis on agency and parallels with J. L. Austins 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 persons intellect, it does not necessarily motivate a persons desire. As Platos 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
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.
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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 subjectiveafter 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 speakers 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

Perelmans, Realm, is widely recognized as the seminal work, notably on the types of argument that rhetoric employs. 58 Golsby-Smith, 202. Polanyis concern was to show that even scie ntific 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): 22737. 61 Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 85.
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(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, Gadamers, Truth and

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.
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Method, and Ricoeurs, 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 metaphors 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.

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 GolsbySmith, 166, and for much of the following, 166-89.
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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 rhetoricians, 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 speakers thos connects with that of the audience. (This explains, for example, Rodney Starks observations concerning the fundamental role of Christian ethics in the conversion of the Roman Empire).72 The choice of metaphor also reveals the speakers 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

Tradition and the Individual Talent, in Selected, 4. 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.
70 71

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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 ones 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 Enlightenments failed attempt to establish a purely analytical approach to ethics, rhetoric in its ethical appeal, as in Eliots discussion of poetry, must engage with the narrative of the audience (cf. perhaps Nietzsches 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
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.
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story is invited to exercise judgment and to participate more fully, even if vicariously, in the consequences of a given action.81 Narratives integrative and holistic nature also provides a means by which ones 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 Spocklike 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
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. OBanion, 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 Lonergans 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 (5 th ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
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Again because this subject matter is not that of analytics but of life, rhetorics cogency and coherence will tend to be more organic and aesthetically narrative-oriented than list-like with the latters 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 the 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 elses coin, rhetoric is concerned not so much with describing the world as with changing it. One can perhaps see here adumbrations of Macmurrays emphasis on agency and of J. L. Austins 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-openwhich is why Plato proposed an alternative, even if unsuccessful, approachand 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 naturalists problem of Darwins doubt: on what basis could an evolving mind be trusted?). Cicero and later Quintilian wrestled with the problem, the latter agonizing
On this at length, O'Banion. 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.
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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, Gadamers 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 Gods 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

15; see further Zimmermann, 178-79, for whom Christian hermeneutics is grounded in the imago Dei. Using Horst Rittels 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), Tbingen 1985); James L. Kinneavys interesting study, Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Wilhelm Wuellers 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): 327. Hundreds of related studies on rhetoric in the OT and NT have emerged in the last decade.
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of God),96 of symbol, poetry, affirmations of Gods 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 Gods 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.)
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. Charrys discussion of the importance of beauty, truth and goodnessthorough-going rhetorical categoriesin 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).
96

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But the key point here is that unlike analytics biblical rhetorics certainty is grounded not in our unaided reasons 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 Platos disembodied universals to relational personhood. Perhaps nowhere is this rhetorical cast clearer than in Johns 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 ina 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 Gods 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 antiheroic 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 Apollos logos and Dionysus vine (or Word and Spirit) are reconciled, and where authentically human action is imitative of self-giving love.99

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 pagans curriculum and hence a mo de 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 concour se as Tertulians disdainful question indicates: What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? ( Prescription against heretics 7).
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(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 aret of Homer. And as Mark Stroms 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 rhetorics 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 Gods character (and thus ethics) at the core. The Bibles metaphors and symbols must remain central. It seems odd that after expatiating on Gods 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 Israels 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).

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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 Bibles 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 Gods palace-temple and humanity his image placed within it. Not only do they address the most basic of human questionswhat 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 Churchs Mission: A Biblical Theology of the dwelling place of God , NSBT 17 (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

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Creation, seen then as Gods 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 Gods 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 Gods judgment as do the anti-cities which they establish. Worshipping idols leads to our becoming, like them, blind, deaf, and hard-heartedthough now toward God and one another. And just as the enlivening of that image required its sanctification and the indwelling of the gods 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 Israels 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 Gods firstborn son), Moses, the priests, Davidic kings, the prophets, Isaiahs 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

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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 Israels 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.

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