What Is Rhetorical Theology? Textual Practice and Public Discourse

What Is Rhetorical Theology? Textual Practice and Public Discourse.

By Don H. Compier. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity International Press,

1999. 112 pp. $12.00 (paper).

This is the book that can both introduce an interested, patient reader to the topic as well as provide the specialist with clear exposition of the most significant points. That is a remarkable accomplishment for a volume this small.

Compier unexpectedly opens by claiming that more is to be learned about rhetoric from Cicero and Quintilian than Aristotle. The choice has merit. Cicero stands against the division of rhetoric and philosophy into separate disciplines. For him rhetoric includes a full educational theory; eloquence is a positive aspect of any healthy society. In the end, the virtuous are more persuasive and decorum is a major asset. Rhetoric includes important technical skills, but it is primarily a method: practical, public, contextual, contingent, polemical, and holistic. The most significant early example of rhetorical theology is Augustine's On Christian Doctrine. Renaissance, Reformation, and Modern theologians, too seldom looked at rhetorically, follow Augustine's lead.

Contemporary postmodern discourse and attacks on scientism can find resources in previous rhetoric. Present-day theologians like David Tracy, David Cunningham, and Rebecca Chopp have looked there, each in a different way. Surely any return to rhetoric need not entail epistemological or ethical relativism even though objectivism and foundationalism are bankrupt. There is a text that represents as "irreducible objective pole"; "interpretive communities" cannot hold out against nihilism. Certainly both Cicero and Quintilian emphasized ethics.

According to Augustine's theology, sinful we remain. His doctrine of original sin needs adjustment so that sanctification becomes possible, but we often foil our liberation plans through our failures. "Faith seeking understanding" is not so much interested in right ideas by themselves as it is in orthodoxy empowering orthopraxy. Rhetorical theology is meant to transform people. Both Augustine and Calvin knew that. Calvin particularly expresses views that can fund liberation theology as well as historical and catholic studies that deal promisingly with varied viewpoints.

Two caveats. First, a critical text shaped by the comparison of manuscripts does not provide a base solid enough to destroy Stanley Fish's pronouncement that there is no text for any course. Both text critics and translators are located readers who make anything but "objective" decisions. The best counter to the strongest claims of reader-response theory is that its proponents still write books they expect us to understand. Another somewhat like it is that for all his sense of perspective, Fish probably would not insist that he is a seventh-century Chinese woman. Second, Aristotle and Plato are more complicated than Compier allows. His selected quotations support his case against them, but Plato's Phaedrus spells out a philosophical rhetoric that the philosopher commends. Aristotle's Rhetoric has been read by some ancient speakers of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic as the completion of his logic in a contingent, probabilistic direction. His Ethics remains powerful. Read that way both Greeks support Compier's argument. His command of ancient Latin and modern views of rhetoric, however, still make this volume a marvelous contribution to various fields of theology.

FREDERICK W. NORRIS

Emmanuel School of Religion

Johnson City, Tennessee

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2002
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