Rhetoric, Classical and Christian

In his The Invention of Christian Discourse, Vernon Robbins explains how and why Christian discourse and rhetoric diverged from classical models. Ryan Leif Hanson summarizes the argument in Silence and Praise: “Classical rhetoric understands the basic social reality of persons as based in the Graeco-Roman urban environment. In this context the three most important social locations are the law court, the political assembly, and the civil ceremony, which underlie the rhetorical practices of judicial (or forensic), deliberative (or symbouletic), and epideictic (or demonstrative) rhetorics, respectively. However, Christian rhetoric does not assume these same underlying social situations for its argumentation.”

He quotes Robbins: “These conventional social institutions in cities throughout the Roman empire regularly created problems, suffering, conflicts, persecution, imprisonment, and even death for early Christians. To counter these institutions, early Christians developed argumentation that used picturing based on social interaction related to households, political kingdoms, imperial armies, imperial households, temples, and individual bodies of people. This picturing of multiple social situations created Christian rhetorical discourse in the form of wisdom, prophetic, apocalyptic, precreation, priestly, and miracle argumentation during the first century CE.”

With the settings of classical rhetoric closed, Christians had to invent what Robbins calls new “rhetorolects” – new rhetorical dialects. Hanson quoting Robbins again: “A major reason early Christians created distinctive rhetorolects was that they could not depend on civil courtrooms, political assemblies, and ceremonies to ‘hear their cases’ equitably, exhort the people to make decisions that would protect environments in which they could live safely and happily, and celebrate values that would affirm, nurture, and inspire people to think and act in ways that would build positive relationships and actions in the contexts in which they lived. All too often, the civil locations of courtroom, political assembly, and civil ceremony brought punishment, defeat, and celebration of values that threatened rather than nurtured their lives and their households. In this context, early Christians created discourses that ‘thought beyond and outside’ the local contexts of the courtroom, political assembly, and civil ceremony to the location of the inhabited world in God’s cosmos.”

Sounds like a project that may prove handy in the present day.