Academic Constraints in Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament

An Introduction to a Rhetoric of Power

J. David Hester Amador

• Publisher: Sheffield Academic Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780567250353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Rhetorical criticism promised to bring New Testament studies into a new era that approached the Bible as a document of persuasive discourse. Major proponents of this approach suggested that its potential lies in its democratization of biblical interpretation. To date, that promise has never been fulfilled. The reasons can be found by exploring the rhetoric of these rhetorical critics. Such an exploration uncovers systems of disciplinary constraints and discursive habits that keep rhetoric firmly within traditional units of academic biblical interpretation. The promise of rhetoric can only be fulfilled by shattering all notions of a rhetorical 'programme' of biblical interpretation.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: ‘ARE ALL SALES FINAL, OR CAN I RETURN THIS BOOK?’

Scrutinizing performances of rhetorical criticism yields a twofold contribution to knowledge. We learn, first, what critics reveal to us about the architectonics of reality-defining discourse, i.e., about the strategic constructions that organize our lives. We are reminded, second, of the reflexivity of critical practice, i.e., that critics deliberately construct knowledge of rhetorical practice; they design the discernible to achieve certain objectives. Given that the strategic architecture of criticism authorizes knowledge claims, its implementation in any given case cannot reliably serve the purposes of anyone who would mistake the outcome for disinterested insight. Thus, we must critique critical performance from the strategic perspective of vested interest—adopting, revising, and rejecting knowledge claims according to the personal and institutional ends they promote. As critics of criticism, moreover, we cannot afford to assume the immutability, or fail to examine the rhetoricity, of situated interests. By engaging in a calculated consumption of rhetorical scholarship, we complete the cycle of reflexive reconstructions, which keeps us alert to the interplay of motives in each performance of criticism.

‘scrutinizing Performances of Rhetorical Criticism’
Robert L. Ivie

Introduction

One of the most significant recent trends in biblical criticism is the rein-vigoration, if not reinvention, of rhetoric as a tool for the critical analysis of discourse. Reintroduced to biblical studies around the time of Muilenburg’s presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature,¹ rhetoric as a means of investigation and interpretation of the biblical text has generated an enormous amount of interest. Currently we are witness to the application of rhetorical methods upon both Old² and New Testament³ texts. We see an interest upon both the chronological history of rhetorical tradition in European education,⁴ as well as a synchronic approach to the systematic and non-systematic rhetoric of the discourse of many cultures and traditions, both ancient and modern.⁵

As many scholars have noted, this resurgence of interest in rhetorical method and theory is a significant development within the history of rhetorical education and biblical interpretation. For 1500 years throughout the west, rhetoric’s prominence in exegesis was secured through its role in education and the trivium (grammar, logic/dialectic/philosophy, rhetoric)⁶ and through its relationship with hermeneutics.⁷ Rhetoric was the standard exegetical approach for hundreds of years,⁸ from Origen to Augustine during the Second Sophistic, through the Middle Ages and into the early period of the Reformation.⁹ With the advent of both religious and educational reformations of the sixteenth century, rhetoric’s decline was signaled with the Ramist constriction of rhetoric’s prescriptive and classical tradition to concerns of only elocution and style, a restriction which distinguishes rhetoric from hermeneutics‘/dialectics’ focus on reasoning, invention and logic.¹⁰ Ramus’s was the culmination of centuries of development of rhetorical theory. Although initially the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a rise of works on rhetoric and its influence upon biblical interpretation,¹¹ by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we witness the demise of rhetoric in academented theology, a demise which coincided with the rise of historical scientism and the fragmentation of exegesis into sub-topics of specialization (text criticism, philology, literary criticism, historical and theological interpretation).¹² [I would also attribute rhetoric’s demise to the growing impact of print technology upon the consciousness of the western mind, particularly within academented fields of inquiry; more on that later (non-Chapter 4e).] It is with this history in mind that we may well be astonished by the resurgence of rhetoric [we should not be], but clearly throughout the history of biblical exegesis in the west rhetoric has played an important role and should not be considered ‘a comparative newcomer to the field of biblical studies’.¹³

This movement, however, is more than a modern revival of traditional rhetorical theories and practices. It is, as Terry Eagleton suggests, a reinvention of rhetoric¹⁴ whose impact can be seen and felt beyond biblical studies in areas such as: philosophy, literary theory and theories of reading and reception, postmodern hermeneutics, ideology criticism, even science.¹⁵ The essence of this reinvented rhetoric goes beyond its communicative purposes to focus instead upon the ‘discursive practices’ of a ‘text’, ‘grasping [them] as forms of power and performance’ and ‘as forms of activities inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers’.¹⁶ Modern rhetorical theories emphasize the ‘means by which a text establishes its relationship to its audience in order to achieve a particular effect’¹⁷ in every form of discourse: ‘written or spoken, poetic or ordinary language, indeed in all use of signs, as forms and functions of living discourse—not just once when first uttered, but retaining in its textuality [read: materiality] the text’s [read: media’s and message’s] power for future readers [read: audiences]’.¹⁸ The power both in and of¹⁹ a ‘text’ is not just limited to readers and audiences as producers of ‘text’, but extends as well to the producer and reader of theories about ‘textual’ power.²⁰ This is J. Hillis Miller’s concept of rhetorical reading, which concentrates upon the materiality of a ‘text’, by which he means not just the medium through which the communicative act is enabled, but also considers its authoritative status in a given community (canonicity), its genre and ‘intertextual’ context; its social, political, institutional context of production and interpretation; and the context of each individual act of ‘reading’; all of which serves to show ‘that an apparently abstract, purely “theoretical” issue may have decisive institutional and political consequences’.²¹ [Here we note the durative aspects of the conventions informing reading both prior to, during and after the activity of the ‘textual’ encounter,²² i.e. their productive and reductive roles in the regulation and control of ‘texts’ and their commentary.] Modern rhetoric overcomes hermeneutics’ hegemony of ‘truth and method’ to consider ‘truth and power’ in all its dimensions.²³

Rhetoric’s modern return to the field of biblical studies [for, as we shall see, rhetorical approaches to the Bible are hardly new] was signaled by James Muilenburg’s presidential address to the Society for Biblical Literature in 1968, entitled, ‘After Form Criticism What?’ Muilenburg’s suggestion was a concept of rhetoric [that’s ‘what’!] which was primarily literary and stylistic, concerned with identifying narrative and poetic structures (chiasms, parallelisms, etc.) in the Hebrew text. A number of scholars picked up his proposal and ran with it, but soon encountered a growing sense of displacement, a feeling that too much of what constituted rhetorical analysis of the Hebrew text was done intuitively, without the benefit of careful work on developing a shared theoretical basis and methodology.

In New Testament, the most important initial contributions came from the Seminar on Paul of the late 1970s, out of which a number of important articles and monographs were produced, the most well known perhaps being Hans Dieter Betz’s work on Galatians. Since then, the number of journal articles, monographs, Festschriften and dissertations which purport to adopt a rhetorical-critical approach to the New Testament has increased exponentially, especially in the last 15 to 20 years. There seems to be no end in sight for this renascence, and the future of rhetoric scholars of the Bible looks generally bright—except to a few of us who are beginning to ponder the ramifications of some of the methodological and critical assumptions which are all too often made in rhetorical-critical analyses of biblical texts. For the more such analyses are produced, the more one becomes aware of a predilection on the part of rhetorical-critical scholarship (esp. of the New Testament) to produce what others have termed a ‘rhetoric restrained’. Far too frequently analyses have been focused upon issues of style (topoi, figures) or attempt to identify (in rigid fashion) a given unit’s arrangement or structure [as though identification of the parts of a speech is supposed to help us understand its rhetorical impact]. Assumptions are frequently made concerning the relationship of a speech to its rhetor and its audience, an almost ‘causalist’ notion of argumentation being adopted in order to reconstruct what ‘must have been’ the text’s initial effects (hence, the rhetor’s ‘intention’). And, in almost every case, the whole of the rhetorical interpretive enterprise has been set within a historicalritical paradigm [the defining feature of biblical interpretation] and its hermeneutical center: the reconstructed ‘original’ ‘meaning’.

What makes this questionable is not that historical reconstructions of a given text’s effects are foreign to rhetorical-critical analyses [for they are not], nor that such reconstructions are necessarily ‘wrong’ for a rhetorical critic to pursue [though it may be a bit more problematical than assumed]. It is that there is so much more that rhetoric can bring to the field of biblical interpretation, if it were allowed to make the kind of impact which it is beginning to make on other fields. The qualitative contrast of research and analysis presented in journals from the field of rhetoric [Pre/Text, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communications, Communications Monograph, Philosophy & Rhetoric, etc.], the plethora of philosophical and theoretical musings, the myriad of interpretive and critical approaches found therein, and the comparatively monolithic results produced by rhetorical critics of the Bible, is striking. By ‘monolithic’ is meant simply this: not only a predominance of ancient rhetorical treatises as the basis of rhetorical-critical work, but also consistently exegetical direction of the analyses, that is, rhetoric as a means for reconstructing social, cultural and historical circumstances of utterance which are then used as a basis for determining the ‘original’ ‘meaning’ of the text under consideration. It is a consistently historicist approach which absorbs a number of assumptions, and predetermines the direction of the inquiry and its ‘appropriate’ methodological tools and theoretical bases. The result is a startling consistency, with minimal variation, in rhetorical-critical analyses [not of conclusions or results, but of approach] of the biblical material.

One is, however, initially enheartened to see some biblical rhetorical scholars showing interest in exploring further ramifications that might be brought about if one ponders the implications of approaching the biblical text in terms of its persuasion. Each one of the four scholars on whom I shall direct our attention in this tome (Burton Mack, Vernon Robbins, Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, Antoinette Wire) has explicitly addressed this question. They offer a variety of insights which ensue therefrom: that since audiences have a determining impact upon the kinds of persuasion pursued, ‘we’ may be able to trace carefully through the various stages of the tradition the social make-up of groups as represented by their argumentative and persuasive discourse; that ‘we’ may be able to reconstruct the ‘other side of the conversation’ not directly recorded in the tradition, but which the tradition nevertheless addressed; that all this bespeaks a dynamism of instruction which adapted to the changing circumstances of the community; that therefore biblical authority be reconsidered in light of its rhetorical tradition of adaptation and its changes in persuasive discourse practices, rather than be approached as a monolithic dogmatic authority over the community; that ‘rhetoric’ necessarily means a respect for the authority of the audience to reject or accept the argument presented, its appeals to ‘reason’ and not to force, and thereby granting to the audience the freedom to determine what expressions best represent its convictions; that indeed forms of persuasion embraced at certain stages of the tradition now be questioned in light of the precedence they have set in Christian discourse, their impact upon Christian faith and practice, and the damage that has ensued therefrom on the world and on the people with whom Christians have come into contact.

These are important insights which hold within them the seeds for a radical transformation of authority and power in Christian faith and tradition. The question I shall ask in this tome will be, however, whether this transformation is as complete as these scholars are hoping for. It is my belief that it is not, and the reason is because none of them crucially challenges the exegetical enterprise of biblical interpretation and the centers of power generated by a historicist hermeneutics.

How Did T Get Here?

It may be necessary at this point to ‘contextualize’ the impetus and foundations of the argument to be explored in this tome. After all, the implications of the statements so far offered seem troubling, if not arrogant. They seem to suggest a fundamental challenge not only to rhetorical critics who continue to perpetuate the historical-critical paradigm, but also to undermine the paradigm itself and question its disciplinary formation. What are the intentions of this work, and how can they be justified?

To begin, it is my intention to develop a limited strategic critique for the disruption of certain important disciplinary assumptions and practices. This critique takes its inspiration from a rhetorical hermeneutic which understands all epistemological and hermeneutical theorizing as strategies of argumentation dedicated to a given purpose, legitimated according to those specific aims. As such, the critique approaches a historicist hermeneutic not only on the basis of the rejection of certain

a priori assumptions regarding the nature of language/meaning/interpretation, but also with the view to exposing the particular strategic purposes and systemic networks of disciplinary power which such a herme-neutic serves to legitimate, and which in turn serve to legitimate it.

The rhetorical hermeneutic informing this tome was initially inspired by Bakhtin’s critique...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Miscellany
• Chapter 1 Introduction: ‘Are All Sales Final, or Can i Return This Book?’
• Chapter 2 ‘What is the Lay of the Land?’ or ‘Why Should i Care?’
• Chapter 3 Toward a Definition of a Rhetoric of Power
• Chapter 4 The (New) Rhetorical Criticism(s) and New Testament Exegesis
• Chapter 5 Messages in a Bottle: the Promise(s) of a Rhetoric of power
• Assorted Bibliographies
• Index of References
• Index of Authors