The Restoration of Rhetoric

Rethinking the Categories of Christian Education

Western culture is in crisis, and in large part due to our loss of confidence. Unwittingly, the dazzling certainties of mathematical and scientific reason have undermined the very grammar of hope. We have forgotten that for Aristotle, so influential in our educational tradition, scientific reason was only one and not even the most important way of knowing. Largely discredited in our culture, but as both Aristotle and Cicero knew, “rhetoric”—the art of persuasion in envisioning a different future—lay at the heart of Western civilization. In this session, after a fascinating historical overview, we will discuss the need for Christian educators to expand our horizons to embrace the much larger vision of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

Intro comments: Goodness. I apologize for the somewhat grandiose summary paragraph. Second, I am sure some of you are thinking: what the heck is this business about rhetoric? Hardly surprising since “rhetoric” in our culture most often means empty at best and downright deceitful at worst. But it was not always so. Rhetoric is actually a way of careful thinking, grounded in ethics, which is capable of transforming the future in ways in which traditional logic and analytical thought can not. I am convinced that not only biblical/historian scholars like myself but theologians and indeed Christian educators, such as your good selves may well discover that there is a great deal to gain by reconsidering its strengths.

So this morning, I want to do three things. First, to offer a brief overview of the rise of what most of us implicitly believe is the only way of rational thought: scientific syllogistic analytics. Second, briefly to note the crisis that has consequently engulfed the West, threatening even our very concept of what it means to be human. And third, to reintroduce us to the wisdom and power of a rhetorical approach. I’ll then conclude with a few suggestions as to how this might then shape Christian education.

(Tomorrow: we’ll look at the profound link between rhetoric, revelation, and the transformation of Western culture. I’d like to suggest that allowing rhetoric its true place, opens up the door for the restoration of Revelation, and the possibility of a renewed transformation of our world through a genuinely Christian vision.)

• Origins

It is difficult for us, heirs of nearly 25 centuries of Aristotelian analytics, to grasp what knowledge might have looked like before its development. The 8th century BC Greek world looked very different from ours, animated as it was by daimonia and with a porous boundary between the gods and humans. A young man’s paideia (sorry women), his formative education, was aimed at producing aret, that god-like heroic excellence that lay somewhere between Hector and Odysseus, and articulated by Achilles: “See what a man I am. Both strong and comely to look upon.” And the primary educational text? Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.1

Widely regarded in Plato’s day as the educator of all Greece (Republic, 606e), Homer’s influence derived not only from his claim to tell the truth, but also especially from his chosen medium, namely, his use of myth, metaphor, and symbol in narrative poetry. Full of luminosity and power (which the Greeks called psycaoa2), poetry was ascribed to the gods and regarded as expressive of the “superior order of things.”3 The apex of artistic expression and expressing the highest values of Greek culture, it was able to convert the human soul.4 Because poetry “alone possesses the two essentials of educational influence—universal significance and immediate appeal,” it surpassed “both philosophical thought and actual life.”5 Not surprisingly poetic myth and dramatic performance were therefore central to Greek worship.

However, four developments caused a seismic shift in outlook. First, in the 6th century, the pre-Socratic philosophers (e.g. Thales and the Milesians, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) began to use reason to understand the world. They deliberately chose prose over poetry as better suited to their task.6 Furthermore, in the search for truth, Parmenides’ argued that since if something was true, it must be true today and true tomorrow. Whatever else, the truth could not change. Fair enough. Except that as Heraclitus dryly observed, everything around us did. Have you looked in the mirror lately? The upshot of course is that truth, being unchangeable, was not to be found in our imperfect and changing experience. Geometry might theorize of a perfect circle, but such things did not exist in the real world.

This would eventually lead Plato to argue that truth could only exist in the realm of ideas, the eternal forms, of which this present world was but a mere distorted shadow. (ad lib: this naturally impacted his attitude to education. Education was not about teaching anything that the student did not already know nor did it involve anything that the teacher might contribute. It was simply a matter of bringing to light what his/her eternal soul had once known but forgotten when imprisoned in his/her physical body.).

Second, further undermining Homer, the 5th century Greek poets began to criticize the ethical behavior of his gods.7 Xenophanes, followed by Euripides, complained, “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.”

Third, there was the emergence of democracy. For the first time, the Greeks were no longer blindly following either the gods speaking through the Delphic oracle, or tyrant kings. With the introduction of democracy by Kleisthenes in Athens, human beings would begin to make their own decisions about their future. But the problem was on what basis ought we make those decisions?

This question was heightened, by the rise at around the same time of the Sophists. Their broad experience and encyclopedic knowledge of different cultures caused great consternation among the Athenians when the queried whether their practice was based on things as they really were, pys s, or mere convention, oo s. 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). What he meant, perhaps as the first proto-post-modernist, was that knowledge was a matter of individual perception or opinion (doxa). It was impossible to distinguish between appearance and reality. Since matters could always be otherwise, reality, and particularly the polis, the city, was what a community made it—the Sophists, as were Homer’s heroes, being men of action.

Since everything was a matter of one’s perspective, the key thing, if one was to shape the city, was the ability to persuade. This quickly degenerated into displays of rhetorical power where the aim was simply to win.8 Responding to these abuses and in many ways to Plato’s later criticisms, Isocrates would later stress the importance of the orator’s moral character in obtaining the adherence of the audience.9 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. There had to be a better way. Enter Plato. He was highly critical of the poets, accusing them of exalting emotion at the expense of reason (Republic, 603b, 605ac). He was convinced that certain knowledge (epst, from which get epistemology) was not only vastly superior to mere opinion (dox a) but also a real possibility.10 The path to truth, he argued, was the Socratic dialectic of question and answer whereby one tested arguments for contradictions and inconsistencies.

But Plato’s truth thus discerned was no new truth. It was instead that which was already known by one’s immortal soul.11 He thereby resolved the Parmenidean and Heraclitan dilemma. Humans trapped in a changing world could indeed have access to certain unchanging truth—but only at the cost of the dualism that has bedeviled Western philosophy ever since. Interestingly though, Plato in positing the eternal forms and John’s gospel in presenting Jesus as the eternal word, both seem to agree that any kind of lasting meaning for humanity must come from beyond us.

But this did not mean there was no room for orators. The difference was that their persuasion must be based on genuine knowledge.12 Indeed, though he criticized the poets Plato’s goal was nevertheless philosopher-“poets.” That Plato’s own work is in one sense “poetic” (cf. the beauty of Ion, 533c-535c), and at times 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. Plato’s 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).13 It seems that Homer, after all, had something going for him.

But the great step forward was really that of Aristotle, whose Organon and Posterior Analytics significantly refined Plato’s quest. Disagreeing with Plato, he argued that certain truth could be found in the created world. First, he transformed Plato’s forms. By abstracting general principles from observations and b) it concerns mere opinion or appearances not knowledge (hence the famous cave analogy in book 10 of the Republic), Kennedy, Classical, 46. about the world, he was able to make unchanging truths accessible to human rationality; truth was no longer a matter of tradition or spiritual enlightenment.

Second, he invented the world’s first “truth-making engine,” thereby assuring his place among the two or three most influential figures in history. In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle proposed an analytical tool he called the syllogism: if a = c, and b = a, then c = b. Essentially, Aristotle showed how by beginning with these general observations, we could employ his syllogistic engine to discover at least some sure and certain knowledge.

The exact details do not concern us, but its impact has been among the most significant in all of human history. By carefully observing the unchanging processes inherent in the world around us, and using the syllogism to express their causes and effects, humanity was able to understand fully the truth about how things worked. And once we could describe how things worked, we could begin to control them. We could have certainty, there would be no nasty surprises, and we could begin to chart our own destiny.

The key thing to note is that this epst concerns the realm of the non-contingent, of things that do not change. That is, we can design aircraft but only because the laws of aerodynamics are the same in Vancouver as they are in Lynden. 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. Real truth did not need to engage with culture or history. The Sophists, it seems, had been answered! And we no longer had to put up with Homer’s immoral deities, whose singular attribute was that they were more powerful than humans.

Aristotle and the Church

It is no surprise that this tradition eventually became the dominant mode of thinking in the West, nor that it had a profound influence on the church fathers. Several factors seem to be in play. First, many of the church fathers were schooled in this way of thinking. It is natural having found sure and certain premises—the eternal word had become flesh—that they should use Aristotle’s engine in the holy work of thinking through what this all meant; that is, to do theology. Second, by the second and third century Christianity was no longer on the margins and was attracting the critical attention of philosophically skilled opponents. Somewhat embarrassed by the rudeness, obscurity, and inelegance of Christian texts14 — and let’s face it, Paul is no Plato — many of the fathers felt the sting of Celsus’ requirement that if Christianity was to be taken seriously it must face the tests of Greek proof.15

Perhaps too there was a missional concern: if one wanted to speak to the pagan world one had to use the language it understood. If the NT is in Greek, then why not likewise translate Christian ideas? And if all truth was God’s truth on what grounds could one simply ignore the genuine gains of pagan philosophy? Even if some fathers like Tertullian denied any concourse between Athens and Jerusalem, the majority like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen did not. And who would want to gainsay the tremendous advances in e.g. ethics and natural law that emerged from this encounter? Given the certainty of Jesus the Logos, in the words of Robert Wilken “Christian revelation put an end to skepticism and gave men and women new confidence in reason... under the tutelage of historical revelation reason became more certain of its starting point, more confident, less abstract, and more purposeful.”16

Even so, the fathers were very much aware of how far they stood from their pagan counterparts. One of their most potent barbs was to observe, as did Clement, that 600 years of brilliant philosophical argument and “scientific” observation had led only to confusion and despair.17 If the big question was where in the process of knowing God (i.e. the truth) did reason begin, then the answer was that reason was secondary to faith. As Augustine pithily put it: I believe in order to understand.

Origen readily noted this significant difference in his response to Celsus: you are indeed right that this is not Greek wisdom, for we did not arrive at this belief by thinking our way to God, but by his condescending to us. Christians begin with history, with the revelation of God to Israel and through Christ to the world, and all this, be it noted, not in a dialectic of reason but in the recipricosity of love.

Christianity was not an idea, but a certain kind of story; it was an event.18 And as Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms reminds us, they were very aware of the markedly relational and personal nature of this truth. It was for this very reason that the priority lay with seeing rather with hearing. As the gospel writers remind us again and again, in what seems like a contradiction in terms: they were eyewitnesses of the word.

From the very beginning the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was a troubled one. When viewed through Greek informed eyes the Scriptures were problematic, filled with enigmas and dark sayings.19 Christ and the Scriptures “did not yield easily to conventional philosophical reasoning”20 nor was it always clear how the Gospel related to the Old Testament. Perhaps Origen unwittingly stumbled on the truth in his emphasis on the priority of history.

Perhaps then Athens will always loose something in expecting Jerusalem to speak its language when the two are speaking in different tongues (and the Pentecostals among us rejoice) — we will return to this in just a moment. And there was always a danger that Aristotle’s philosophy would corrode faith.

This is in fact what transpired in the eventual fallout of the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 11th and 12th centuries. Left behind in 11th century Spain by the retreating Islamic empire Aristotle’s works were eagerly picked up and debated by Christian scholars resulting in an explosion of excitement, inquiry, and learning. (As a matter of historical record, although the Catholic Church in this period is often characterized as oppressive and backward, the truth is quite the opposite. Catholic universities frequently permitted surprisingly free debate. In fact it has been argued that it was precisely the existence of the Catholic church that enabled Europe to absorb and criticize Aristotle in ways that other cultures, including Islam, had not.21)

After the initial battles at the University of Paris between those who saw Aristotle’s observational analytics as an attack on faith and those who, like Aquinas, felt he could be harnessed in support of faith, a tamed version became the orthodoxy of the scholastics. Theology had to take Aristotle into account, and while not for a minute giving an inch on the need for revelation, the book of nature nevertheless needed to be taken seriously. But as many have noted this was not a particularly stable situation, and it was not long before a frustrated young Francis Bacon (completed his education at Cambridge at the tender age of 14) and almost equally young Rene Descartes (at 18—hardly ages at which one might expect a mature understanding) jettisoned the lot for a new thinking, a novum Organon.

Rejecting traditional authorities and fanciful stories, they urged, respectively the use of methodical observation — Empiricism — or rigorous innate human reason — Rationalism — as the means to improve the human condition. Impatient of the soft explanations of the humanities, they began to suggest that everything could be reduced to cold hard numbers. All it took was for Galileo and later Newton to marry mathematics to Aristotle’s analytical logic machine and modern science was born, and with it the most creative, powerful, and far-reaching change the world has even seen. Once again it was Aristotle’s emphasis on observation (even if he himself did not always abide this principle—his theory of falling bodies was never tested at the nearby cliffs!!) that engendered this new flare up of the tension between the books of nature and scripture. And in the end as we know, scripture came off second best.

But already there was a serious if lurking problem. Both men, but especially Bacon, were motivated by a driving desire to make the world a better and more harmonious place. Well and good. But ironically, and even tragically, neither Bacon with his tentative empiricism (he was perhaps surprisingly less than certain of the human senses) nor Descartes with his rationalism were in the end able to justify their ethical motivation. That is, their own systems were unable to provide the ethics that gave them birth. In effectively limiting knowledge to the “true,” neither was really able to deal with either the “good” or the “beautiful.”

According to Montague Brown this has ever been the Achilles heel of Western philosophy from Bacon to Hume and from Descartes to Leibniz, and beyond to Kant, Hegel, Whitehead and Lonergan who in spite of their laudable and increasingly successful attempts, never quite, in Brown’s view, manage entirely to break free.22 Concerned with a narrow epistemology that focused on truth in order to provide certainty and control, vital even characteristically human categories like beauty and ethics have languished. The weaknesses of these various positions, their aridity, their failure to account sufficiently for the broader human experience, and in particular to give any kind of firm foundation or ethics, have been sufficiently recognized such that we need not repeat them here.

So how do things stand? On the one hand, like the Franciscan acolyte Adso in Umberto Ecco’s The Name of the Rose, the once-mighty but now largely irrelevant church is consigned to shuffling through the fragmentary remains of a worldview long consumed by the apocalyptic fire of the new learning. But neither can the modern rejoice. For in choosing such a path, as Nietzsche so aptly noted, once proud philosophy is unmasked to be nothing more than mere biography. There is only technique. Meaning and beauty are nothing more than what we make them. Aristotle’s search for certainty might have brought us control of over nature, but only it seems at the cost of the loss of our humanity.

History and Philosophy?

Enter rhetoric? Y-e-s, but not just yet. As previously noted, Bacon, Descartes, and their followers prepared the ground for what we might call the scientific method. It was extraordinarily successful. Soon we would be buzzing about in flying machines (well, not quite soon) and at last controlling nature such that famine and plague were phantoms of the past. Given its power and success, why not apply this new learning to all fields of endeavor? If it works so well in the natural sciences, why not create “human sciences”? Why not apply Aristotle’s engine to history, asked the Germans? But almost immediately they ran into serious trouble. There was something about human history that was intractable to scientific method and the project eventually sputtered out (though it seems that it has gained new life in the hands of certain economists and game theorists).

But while the Germans were fighting a loosing war in trying to make history submit to scientific methods (Marx being something of a hangover from this period), the Italian Benedetto Croce began to wonder if this was even a wise thing to do.23 He argued that history was in fact essentially descriptive. There were no laws at work since even in articulating causes, that is, why this or that event happened, we were still only looking more closely at the individual facts themselves and merely apprehending the relations between those individual facts;24 we were not coming up with deeper underlying universal laws.

Consequently, articulating the causes of the French revolution actually meant diddlysquat when it came to explaining the Russian. Each case had to beexamined on its own. History is NOT science.

Now, this next bit is rather tricky, and in a sense don’t worry if you don’t get it. But Croce explains this difference by taking a stunning step. Traditionally, philosophers have divided knowing into two classes: the a priori (things know before we look) and the empirical (things we know by looking). Or, if you like, we can speak of “ideas” and matters of fact (Hume). Croce takes the stunning step of denying this categorization. An individual fact, he says, would not be what it is apart from “reasons” for it (i.e. the world of ideas), and universal truths (also the world of ideas) are nothing if not true of the individual facts to which they apply. In other words, these are not two kinds of cognition but inseparable elements of every act of cognition. What this means essentially is that philosophy— theorizing about universals — is actually a subset of historical thinking.

Confused? Don’t worry. Basically he is saying that instead of science and philosophy ruling the roost, they themselves are actually subsets of history. Consider science. What is it really? It consists of a particular human being in a particular culture carrying out a particular observation at a particular time.

That’s history. Now, it is true that our scientist then goes on to express his observations in some kind of abstract generalization. But that generalization is only an abstraction, it is secondary. It is not real in the same way the experiment was real. They are what Croce calls pseudo concepts. And furthermore these pseudo concepts are always subject to revision on the basis of the brute reality of history. In other words, it is history that is the fundamental reality—not the abstractions which we derive from it.

Now I understand if you are wondering why in the world this matters. But you must understand that this is utterly remarkable. No longer is history the humble serf on the outskirts of the grand Cathedral from which queen philosophy rules. Instead, the very act of philosophizing is itself an historical act.

In other words, all reality is history and all knowledge is historical knowledge. Philosophy is only a constituent element of that historical knowledge. And the same applies to science. Our understanding is always incarnational, it cannot be separated from our being in time, and thus historical conditionedness. Can you begin to sense where this is heading? Origen’s retort to Celsus that Christianity is about history not philosophy was brilliantly perceptive. If that’s true, then it is the incarnation that drives philosophy and not the other way round. To make this more concrete. If Croce is right, and I think he is, then one can no longer say, science has disproved the resurrection. The resurrection is to be decided on the basis of history, not science. And if the historical evidence is solid. Then science simply has to deal with it.

Now why is this ontological priority of history so important? It is vital because we’ve just seen what happens when truth is reduced to syllogistic mathematics. Bacon and Descartes are no longer even able to justify what historically led them into their new thinking in the first place; i.e. their ethics. Let alone any other ethical action.

Well, NOW we ready to start restoring rhetoric.

The astounding thing, when you think about it, is that Aristotle himself was actually very much aware of the limitations of his truth-making engine. It worked well with things that did not change and whose effects are understood.

For example, because I know that an aircraft flies by adhering to the unchanging “laws” of fluid dynamics (that’s why we call them “laws”) I can board a plane in Vancouver and not have to worry about whether it will fly when it arrives in Hong Kong. If one has a question about the world of nature, then your best bet is to use Aristotle’s truth-making machine of analytical logic.

But what about those things which do not remain the same? Those things for which there are no natural “laws”? What about questions like “How should we Athenians govern our Aegean colonies?” Or, what should our next laptop look like? In a survey announced a couple of months ago, over 10% of US adults wanted to own an Apple iPhone. No amount of analytics could have predicted this result. More importantly no amount of analytics could have created the device that enabled Apple, utter newcomers to telecommunications, to rock the North American industry to its core.

Aristotle knew all this. In his Organon he fully recognizes that although analyticsworks well for things which cannot be otherwise, such as geometry or physics, when it came to human decision and action, for example the life and shape of the polis — the realm of history surely — matters were quite different:

Again, imagine Jonathon Ive and Steve Jobs approaching Cingular with their plan for the iPhone and Cingular responding: “prove it!” That would be, pardon the pun, a Cingular confusion of categories. One cannot prove the future; one envisions it. This is a matter instead of judgment and invention, of human vision, values (ethics), and intention.

Aristotle taught that those matters where human agency could create a different reality, that is the world of possibility and contingency, such matters required a second way of thinking. In fact it was even more important than analytics since analytics could only describe what is. This second way could actually change it! If science is our thinking God’s thoughts after him, rhetoric is us actually acting asthough we are God—creating, as it were, from “nothing.”

He called this approach rhetoric or dialectic and explained it even more fully than his analytics in various works such as the Rhetoric and the Topica. The distinction is crucial. This is not primarily about different methods. Nor is it to suggest that one method emphasizes reason while the other does not. Both approaches involve human rationality. They just employ it in different ways. Nor does this come close to proposing that analytics in the sense discussed above should be abandoned. It IS instead a matter of different domains of reality and thus of truth. But neither are they equal. For while analytics is largely descriptive, dealing with what is, rhetoric envisions things that can be; it changes things.

Cicero the great Roman orator and keen student of Aristotle made exactly this point when he claimed that arguments (rhetoric) were the engines of all human progress. He describes the members of an uncivilized tribe huddling together in their mountain caves overlooking the Tiber. One member initiates the argument or debate by introducing a new idea by means of a question: “Listen, why don’t we move down to the flats? They are closer to the river and our hunting grounds and we won’t need to waste time and energy coming up and down this mountain.” He is challenging the tradition by imagining a different future. One can almost hear the immediate response. “Oh yes, and what will stop us from freezing to death in the Winter months? This is why we do what we have always done.”

“Fair enough question,” answers our visionary. “But I have this idea, let’s call it a hut and we can make it out of wood from old trees, stones from the river bed, and skins …” “What? That’s crazy…! Who has ever heard of a hut? But I’m listening…” The next thing you know they are living by the Tiber in “huts” and enjoying their benefits in what will over the centuries become the city of Rome. If all they had done was devote themselves to Aristotle’s first way to truth, they would still be there analyzing the rock formations of caves.

So what does rhetoric involve? We can see from the above story. It begins with invention; someone has a new idea. They not only see something in a new way, but actually see something new, e.g. Cicero’s “hut.” Analytics cannot do this. It only sees what is. Science is not what made the world a better place. It was rhetoric—human imagining. Tomorrow I’m going to argue that this is precisely what happens, and even more so, in the gospel. The God who comes to us in Jesus is so unlike any deity the ancient world had ever seen that the incarnation opened up the possibility of an entirely new way of being human. In the words of Rodney Stark, what the early Christians gave the ancient world was, for the first time ever, its humanity.

Second, the rhetor summons others to consider his or her vision and to arrive at a decision. While analytics prides itself on neutrality separating objectivity and subjectivity by offering objective proofs and rejecting emotion, rhetoric instead seeks to integrate them. It has to.

First, since there are no applicable “natural laws,” and hence no possibility of scientific demonstration, and since one has to start somewhere, one must first find a point of agreement, some opinion held in common (endoxa), something that most of your audience considers to be the case. (There’s a reason that Paul on Mars Hill begins by agreeing with his Stoic and Epicurean hearers. There’s a reason that when Paul argues for justification by faith, he appeals to the very same Scripture that his Law observant interlocutors also hold in highest regard. Might Christian apologetics be more persuasive if Christian education in the first instance was less defensive, protective, and reactionary?).

Second, discussion about human action as to the future shape of the changeable polis must begin with human identity, story, and tos—the stuff of history, be it noted. Rhetoric recognizes that all human deliberation proceeds from story (i.e. who we are and what we stand for) and is thus value-(or ethics) laden and inescapably ideological—there is no neutral purely objective ground.26 Rhetoric, unlike scientific demonstration, can therefore never be impersonal and detached.

It must appeal to what the hearers not only hold to be true but also to what they regard as good and beautiful. The hearers themselves, far from being incidental dispassionate observers, are an integral part of the imagining process. Rhetoric is therefore a communal activity in which the audience is not passive but an active participant in coming to adherence.

By integrating subject and object rhetoric undermines analytics’ emphasis on ter a. In affirming human agency as the integration of thought and action, it challenges the tendency toward the detached life of the mind where “the person who devotes himself to the activity of the mind depends only on himself,”27 whose goal is knowledge for its own sake, and whose ethics are one of disinterest and of objectivity.28 Rhetoric, as we have seen, is inherently oriented toward the community and outward looking action. It assumes I am my brother’s keeper.

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 and primarily those of history, the social and civic facts of the community and the history that define it, for it is these facts that communicate what is valued and which form the basis of vision and deliberation. (This by the way, if you don’t mind me saying, is why Apple Inc have done so well. This is actually the secret to effective design: their products have “style,” “class,” and work well which is simply what I would call the good the beautiful and the true). Analytics works when seeking to explain what already is. But rhetoric persuades of a different future because the audience sees in this vision what they regard as good, beautiful and true.

And since all seek to persuade and be persuaded, rhetoric and its counterpart dialectic cannot be for specialist philosophers (or theologians, or educators) only but for all people, (Rhetoric, I.1354). There is then good reason for the storied nature of the biblical text — even if certain educated philosophers find it rude and unpolished. Stories are not only accessible to everyone but everyone loves a story.

We can say more here. Story plays a fundamental role in human self-conception and ethical formation—both individual and corporate. Rhetoric in its establishing a common ground, must and necessarily engages with the narrative of the audience.29 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, David Burrell,  and Martha Nussbaum, story is essential in forming and inculcating ethics,30 and according to some neurologists is central to our functioning as persons.31

This is because story 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 hearer is not merely acknowledging a description but in identifying with characters in the story is invited to exercise judgment and to participate more fully, even if vicariously, in the consequences of a given action.32 Story’s integrative and holistic nature also provides a means by which one’s life can be understood as a whole.33 Moreover, if it is true 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.34 This is not to exclude analytics or logic per se but only to argue that they are not alone. 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.35 The result is not a Spock-like paragon of rational action, but as Simon Blackburn has said with some flourish “a hopeless flotsam incapable of rational agency.”36 It is not hard to see why the modernist analytic paradigm is so inadequate.

And then, third, rhetoric as persuasion, unlike bald demonstration, is not an end in itself (though of course, demonstration is often employed in the service of persuasion; analytics certainly has its place). It is always persuasion with a view to action, to life in the polis. To re-mint someone else’s coin, rhetoric is concerned not so much with describing the world as with changing it. In a sense rhetoric can be seen as an act of imagination, of calling something into being which is not…. I can’t resist the observation: where have you seen this before? “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things as yet unseen!” What if Christianity is not primarily about describing the world (what theologians and writers of catechisms have sometimes fallen into), but changing it?

Rhetoric actually restores the link between thinking and action. The more knowledge became a matter of mathematics the more it detached truth and thought from action.37 Key here, at least in educational terms, is the 16th century’s Peter Ramus. He divided rhetoric in two and, in allocating invention, argument, and arrangement to philosophy and leaving only style and delivery to rhetoric, effectively divorced thought from language and reduced rhetoric merely to technique.38

The problem was, rhetoric had traditionally exercised a unifying influence on the arts by seeing them as informing the single art of the dissertation,39 that is, of constructing a holistic argument to persuade as to the right course of action in the polis.40 As such, the various arts were drawn upon as a given argument demanded; 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. 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.”41

This conception of truth as static, disembodied, and eternal mathematics has not only separated reason from action but left no place for ethical vision as a guide to action. A fundamentally rhetorical mode of thinking can help restore both the link between thought and action—education is not just about knowledge for its own sake—and a sense of unity to the whole process. What have become polyversities might again become uni-versitities. (note in passing: since it was the Christian conception of a unified truth that lead to the foundation of universities it might well be restores them to their earlier integrative state).

A Problem?

So is rhetoric the next great “rainbow-hued” epistemological hope? Hardly. The difficulty is that contingent questions are by their nature wide-open—which is why Plato proposed an alternative, even if unsuccessful, approach—and hence Gadamer still cannot explain “how we are able to deduce from conflicting traditions the guiding principles for practical decisions.”42

Since rhetoric cannot proceed from obvious premises, its authority must originate elsewhere. On the one hand, as Protagoras, Gorgias, and Aristotle recognized, in the end common opinion (doxa) was the final arbiter. It provided the basis on which the question “Why should I believe you and not someone else?,” was both asked and answered. It was the basis, as Quintilian understands, on which the audience was willing to grant authority to the speaker (Inst. Orat. 3.8.12).

Cicero and later Quintilian wrestled with the problem, the latter agonizing 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. For Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian the answer lay in large part in the tos of the orator.43 Cicero sought protection by requiring of theorator almost superhuman qualities in his breadth of wisdom and knowledge of philosophy (De Oratore, I, x/ix). For Quintilian, however, the essential 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.). All things being equal, a speaker with a reputation for honesty, integrity, and justice will be more persuasive.

This is critical. Again and again in the biblical material God’s character is fundamental—the Lord is good to all and has compassion on all that he has made—as is that of Jesus and Paul as they speak in their defense. This also helps us understand, for example, the well-recognized impact of Christian ethics in the conversion of the Roman Empire.44 The quality and caliber of their lives expressed in their sacrificial generosity and equality of fellowship (no longer slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female) constituted their greatest and most powerful apologetic.

Although we’ll say more about this tomorrow, a rhetorical perspective seems much closer to 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 surprisingly, the scriptures, far from being an analytic demonstration, present a God who on the basis of culturally aware stories and metaphors seeks reasonably to persuade his hearers about truths to which they have no demonstrable access—how does one “prove” that human beings are made in the image of God? 45

Conclusion:

So what then has this to do with Christian education? To borrow from Paul, much in every way.

1. By recognizing the ontological priority of history and its place in human meaning, one might hope to a greater emphasis on the humanities, but from a truly Christian perspective. Christian students need to be informed of the larger Christian narrative, a narrative that extends beyond our parochial interests. Maths and science (and theology that has been formulated to look like a mathematics or analytics of God), helpful as they might be in some respects and two-edged swords in others. For, not only do they not help us answer the deeply human questions about meaning and purpose, but as Michael Polanyi has argued, they actually blind us and reduce our humanity by deceiving us into thinking that their truths are the only truths that really matter.

On the contrary. Since it is impossible to conceive our doing science unless we could somehow transcend nature, how can one then possibly seek to exhaustively explain that transcendence on the basis of that which we transcend?

Ethics, and our understanding of the value of creation and of human beings, must arise from somewhere else. Science and mathematics have no answer, and since they must necessarily reduce humans to that which is unchanging, and small wonder, we become merely complex machines. History, however, does.

And we are not dealing with any ethics. No amount of Greek philosophy, seeking to think its way up to “god,” led to the utterly radical understanding that slaves and women are as fully human as men. But an event in history did—we’ll talk about this more in the session tomorrow on “restoration.”

And what convinced the ancient world of the truth of this message? The undeniable ethical character of its bearers. Ethical formation, a godly understanding of the good, the beautiful and true in the context of love of God and love of neighbor, should be foundational to a truly Christian education.

Inherent in this must be a larger history of God’s people, and particularly of the many good and transformative things the historical moment of the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus has brought to this world. If history is the fundamental ontological reality, then inculcating ethics and identity through the larger Christian story is essential.

A Christian rhetorical mode of thought, thinking based on ethics and seeking the transformation of the city, will also help to reintegrate our oft times disparate educational programs. A genuinely Christian education would seek toreintegrate our knowledge and learning.

In a world in which Western culture has not at all surprisingly lost its way — how can Mathematics or analytics even conceive of hope much less speak of it? — a rhetorical perspective, growing out of God’s good character and his deep love and compassion for all of his creation, expressed the historical moment of the resurrection, and testified too by the many fruits of that moment, can offer hope for a better future in a world that is neither accidental nor deterministic.

Indeed as Christian communities learn to live in love of God and love of neighbor, one would expect that these ethics would lead to transformation. Once more we might see Christian communities as engines not of reaction but of design, of transformation, and of a brighter future. It happened in the first century; is there any reason why it cannot happen again in our own?

3 Bowra, 123-26.

4 Jaeger, 36.

5 Ibid.

6 Bowra, 123.

7 Bowra, 61-62.

8 Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 25.

9 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.

10 Barilli, 5-7.

11 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,

12 Kennedy, Classical, 52.

13 On Plato’s 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.

14 E.G. Weltin, Athens and Jerusalem: An Interpretative Essay on Christianity and Classical Culture, AARSR 49 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1987), 80.

15 Robert Louis Wilken, The spirit of early Christian thought : seeking the face of God, (New Haven [Conn]: Yale University Press, 2003), 13.

16 Wilken, 23.

17 Weltin, 77.

18 Wilken, 15.

19 Weltin, 80.

20 Wilken, 13.

21 Richard Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages, (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003).

23 Anticipated by Giambattista Vico who also doubted the all-sufficiency of science, and was himself indebted to the earlier thought of Leonardo Bruni, 13th cent.23 and Lorenzo Valla, 14th cent.

24 Cited in R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 192.

26 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.

27 Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 79.

30 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.

31 Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, "The Neurology of Narrative," SubStance 94/95 (2001): 72-84.

32 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.

33 Cf. O’Banion, 198.

34 Nussbaum, “Narrative.”

35 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.

36 “To Feel or Feel Not,” review of Nussbuam, Upheavals of Thought, in The New Republic On-Line, 12.13.01.

37 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

38 Peter Ramus, Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian, trans. Carole Newlands (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 99.

39 Lanham, Electronic, 158.

40 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.

41 Cited in Lanham, Electronic, 158.

42 Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 176.

43 See Resner, “tos in Classical Rhetoric” in Preacher, 9-37

44 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).

45 Perelman’s, Realm, is widely recognized as the seminal work, notably on the types of argument that rhetoric employs.

The Restoration of Revelation

Rethinking the Categories of Christian Rhetoric

Under the assault of the modern world’s diminished understanding of “truth” Christian revelation has fared badly. But the fact remains that it was Christian revelation that through its astoundingly innovative ethics not only gave the ancient world its humanity but also the motivation to alleviate suffering that gave birth to modern science. If faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not yet seen, then in this broader sense Christian revelation is effectively God’s rhetoric, a source of hope and of a long history of undeniable and unmatched this-worldly transformation. In the face of this cultural crisis perhaps it is time for revelation to come into its own again. But that presupposes that we educators both understand and are willing to embody its content.

Intro: responses to groups

- a copy of the first paper will be available in few days on the CSI website.

- interaction/questions:

Thanks too for your interaction, inundated—so just a few suggestions; first, as always, where do we go from here? A rhetorical approach is not about disembodied ideas; yes, it definitely involves imagination, but that imagination is grounded in a particular environment, in a particular culture and in the particular narrative of a particular community. As a faculty why not sit down and discuss what it means to indwell your history: ask what is good, beautiful and true (your ethos) about what you do (in the light of the biblical narrative)? You might need some help doing this, but it is where I’d start. (Taxation office story). It is out of reflecting on this, that imagination comes to life.

Second, faculty must embody your narrative/ethos. I know it’s popular to say that school is about the students. Yes, but also no. It’s the faculty/teaching staff/etc. who are the school. Students come and go. They are important but they are not the school. Once we understand this the more readily we will grasp the importance of the faculty owning and embodying the good, beautiful, and true of your narrative. At Regent we try to think of ourselves as a community of friends. It is because of what we embody as a community (not individual stars) that students come for a semester and end up staying for three years. School size, for us at Regent: what is the maximum number of faculty that we can have and still hold a faculty conversation in which everyone can be part of the conversation? It’s also why we do not have departments. We don’t want to lose that communal aspect. Relationality, so vital to personal transformation, is just too important to loose. Even if it means that we don’t get to teach certain subjects.

Importantly, this is how I get to hear about the exciting things my colleagues are doing. I can discuss the philosophy of history with Sarah Williams and it finds its way into my Life of Jesus course. Her husband Paul outlines his ideas for taxing capital flow between regions as a means of implementing the Jubilee principle. And I discover from him that Capitalism is in fact a moral vision, one which believes that human happiness is best correlated to freedom of choice. And then he shows why this is mistaken. Put two and two together and one is a little more careful about assuming that education is fundamentally about the students’ choice. Loren Wilkinson explains a poem by a late medieval mystic and you resonate with the power of those images, before Hans Boersma talks about nouveau theologie. Because I’m thinking about and seeking to live integration, a class on Isaiah is going to involve art, history, economics, an exposition of the brilliance of his poetry, etc.

Show me an interesting teacher and I’ll show you an interesting person. It’s difficult to be convincing about integration when in my classroom my students never see any evidence of it. So, I’m teaching geometry. And I stop at one point and begin to explain what Euclid and Pythagoras were up to. They had discovered this amazing deeper structure that they thought was the secret to the universe. I try to help my students understand the excitement that these men felt as they made these extraordinary discoveries. Suddenly, Math is about history too, philosophy, and people asking big questions about the meaning of life. And I do this, not because I want to spruce up the class., but because this is actually who I am. I think like this; I’m interested. And because it flows naturally out of who I am, rubs off on the students.

Second, what if teaching is actually a form of discipleship? I have CD series covering NT Foundations. I regularly have students come to Regent who’ve taken the course and they drop by to say hello. I was initially a bit surprised, but at some point, sometimes even a bit sheepishly, they say: I feel like I know you. I think good teachers, teachers who embody this rhetorical/transformative ideal, are teachers who are genuine persons: transparent, real, and transformational.

Third, if history in this broader sense is the fundamental ontological category, why not use it as the spinal column of your curriculum? Let the debates, ideas, and the discoveries of interesting and passionate people that shaped our world drive the curriculum. And this includes the story of the whole church and of course the bible itself.

Again (sorry about talking about my experience but it’s all I know) the core course at Regent is Christian Thought and Culture. Because we are convinced that humans are fundamentally about story, we want all of our students to understand the great story. So they take OT foundations, and NT foundations over two semesters — and remember you always have your best people teach those courses — and at the same time we do a year long overview of the grand Christian narrative. Beginning with the transformative impact of Xty on the Roman world, we see the church fathers struggling with integrating the Christian story and Greek philosophy, we hear about the early monastics and what motivated them, Xn art in the Byzantine period, the Irish monks who saved civilization, friendship love and desire in Medieval Mysticism, the Franciscans’ role in the birth of modern science, the nominalist debates, etc. etc. Nearly every professor at Regent gives at least one lecture —it makes little sense to talk about our communal story if our community is not taking part. And we have lots of visiting speakers from the larger Christian world, just to remind us that this goes beyond our Green Roof. Now, perhaps one could consider what a narrative based curriculum would look like; of course one still does science, math, music, art. Only now the links between them would be less artificial. And because history is what embodies the good the beautiful and the true, it naturally lends itself to thinking about the future, and therefore transformation.

Well, those are just some general ideas. In the end, the precise shape of what you do is going to be peculiar to your community, its giftedness, history etc. Have fun!

Okay.. this leaves about 30 minutes.

Yesterday, I tried to argue that while Aristotle’s logic engine works extremely well in understanding the regularity of the natural world, it cannot address ethics or beauty and thus cannot help us in creating a different futures. I tried to argue that Aristotle already knew that the thinking involved in human decision- making, in human action, had to be of a different kind since it dealt with possibilities, with things that could be otherwise. Whereas analytics described what was unchanging, rhetoric in seeking to shape the future, drew upon the imagination in the act of invention, and in appealing to the common opinion of the good, the beautiful and the true, sought the community’s adherence to a proposed course of action in the city. As Cicero argued, rhetoric is the engine of civilization. I also suggested that since doing science implies that humans can somehow transcend nature, it seems futile to seek to explain that transcendence on the basis of the very thing we transcend.

Stanley Fish addresses this dilemma directly when he protests that the thoughtful post-modernist philosopher is often misunderstood. As a post-modernist he is not saying he does not believe in universal truths. He in fact does. What he argues is that there is no calculus or mechanism by which their truths can necessarily be demonstrated to any sane person who has come to a different conclusion. And I think he is right. Objectivity, so beloved of those seeking truth, is not an option when it comes to ethics. Although we know that certain truths are universal, for example, it is wrong to torture a baby for fun. We cannot demonstrate it as we might E = mc2. Ethics is instead, and I think this is historically the case, a part of the world of public opinion, what the rhetorician calls doxa.

But given my conviction of the priority of history, I am not particularly troubled if the philosopher is at a loss. What I can argue, historically speaking, is that Christian ethics, including what we now take to be common opinion, namely, inalienable universal human rights, came through revelation. Of course moral individuals existed before Christ. Nevertheless it is equally certain that Greek philosophy, with all of its accumulated learning, never came to the conclusion that every human being, including women and slaves, was made in the image of Israel’s unique God. While slavery has existed in every great civilization, whether in Mesopotamia or China, and in the pre-European Americas, both North and South, it took Greece and Rome to produce the first true slave societies. No Greek seriously questioned it. Plato had slaves in his ideal Republic and Aristotle in his Politics held that slavery was good for all concerned since some people were born to lead and others to serve. It was surely “obvious” that people were not equal.

So what changed the common opinion of the ancient world? Clearly not a few learned laps around the Stoa. No, it was an event, a moment of God’s self-revelation and particularly the cross of Christ. Remember Origen? Celsus, you are right. This is not Greek philosophy. We did not think our way up to God. Christianity—including its ethics—is not an idea. It is an event, and it arises not from our reason but from God condescending to us in love. It was only after the staggering realization that in the cross God was in Christ reconciling all humanity to himself and that his Spirit was given freely to all regardless of gender, social status, wealth, or education that Paul could utter perhaps the most extraordinary words ever heard in the ancient world, that “in Christ there was no longer male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile.”

It is easy for us in a pluralistic modern democracy where everyone at least in theory is expected to be given equal rights to fail grasp just how radical were Paul’s words. But Christians became the first movement in history to break the link between a particular city, ethnicity, empire, culture, or religion and what we now call human rights. All were to be loved, all to be treated equally, and when they gathered, much to chagrin of the later Julian the Apostate, everyone’s opinion mattered, and even slaves could become bishops.

In other words, Plato was onto something. We did need a wisdom from outside. We might be able to make sense of the natural world, but the very transcendence which enabled us to do so could not be fully explained on the basis of what it transcended. As a matter of historical fact, it took revelation, and that an event.

John and God’s Rhetoric

This is John’s concern when he declares that the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his doxa, full of grace and truth. We knew of ethics before the incarnation, but it took the incarnation to show us just what ethics could and should be. In the historical moment of Jesus we saw God’s glory, his reputation. John seeks to persuade the citizens of the new city, the new Jerusalem, that God’s doxa, his reputation, should become their doxa, i.e. their common opinion. Only with this understanding of the good, the beautiful and the true, guiding their imagining could a truly different future emerge. Jesus, if you will, is God’s rhetoric. God’s argument by which to create a different future.

Central to the ancient world were cities, and central to understanding the ancient classical polis is the realization that it was, first and foremost, a home for the divinity.1 The local deity’s earliest shrine, and later temple, was the sun from which the city’s identity radiated. The richer the city the more and the richer its temples. Built from public funds, the city derived status and income from the practice of its cult. It was around these centers then that families, clans, and tribes gathered, seeking a kind of peace under a vague ancestral law which itself was seen as the deity’s gift.

Then in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, and most likely under Persian influence, the Hellenistic Attalid kings of Asia Minor’s Pergamum began to take to themselves divine titles and honors. Thus arose the saying “What is a god? That which is strong. What is a king? That which is like the divine.”

This would provide fertile soil for Rome, already rising in the West, and especially so when Pergamum’s Attalus III bequeathed his entire kingdom, and thus control of Asia Minor, to the Republic in 133 BC. Here he was only following the lead of Smyrna which in 195 BC had already been the first Asian polis to build a Temple to Roma, the patron deity of Rome. If the basic attribute of a god was power, then clearly the goddess Roma was a deity with which to be reckoned.

Surprisingly, however, in the late first century BC Rome apparently suffered a blow “even unto death.” Racked by civil war and social chaos, all appeared to be over when the Eastern potentate, Mithridates VI of Pontus, drove the Romans from Asia Minor. In 88 BC, 80,000 Italians were slaughtered across the region; a single day of bloody reprisals for the Republic’s shameless pillaging of the richest and most populous lands of the Mediterranean world. But then, against every expectation and under the guidance of the clever if difficult and brutal Octavian, in the immortal words of Steven Spielberg, the Empire struck back. Rome re-emerged stronger and more powerful than ever. Who could doubt that the genius of the gods rested in Caesar Augustus, the “savior of the world,” who now “presided over the great new corporate family of the Roman Empire as surrogate super priest and father”?

Fearing the worst, Asia Minor’s major cities fell over themselves currying for the honor of building a provincial Temple to the newly resurgent Empire. In AD 25/26 Smyrna competed with seven other cities and won, dedicating it also to the Empress (a nod to the Julians), and the Senate. Some even proposed the institution of a new calendar, dating from the “good news” of the divine Augustus’ birthday, to mark the beginning of the Imperial eschaton.

On every level a crushing hierarchy for the most part subsumed the individual beneath the polis and ultimately the irresistible Empire and its Emperor who embodied the divine law and thus represented all that was best for humanity’s welfare. Contrary to much of the popular imagination, fuelled by the misleading marble remains of the grand public buildings, ancient cities were not happy places. As Rodney Stark summarizes: “The ancient city was often filled with misery, danger, fear, despair, and hatred. The average family lived a squalid life in filthy and cramped quarters, at least half the children died at birth or in infancy, and lost at least one parent before reaching maturity.” They were breeding grounds for hatred and fear rooted in intense ethnic antagonisms and exacerbated by a constant stream of strangers. They were so lacking in stable networks of attachments that petty incidents could prompt mob violence. Crime flourished, the streets were dangerous at night, and their structures were repeatedly smashed by cataclysmic catastrophes” (p. 160).

And if life on earth was hard it didn’t help that the heavens seemed like brass. The classical gods, themselves hardly moral paragons—it was after all power not ethics that defined deity—did not care much for humanity. It is one of the reasons why the mystery religions of the East, with their tantalizing offer of friendship and fellowship made such inroads, arguably preparing the way for yet another strange Eastern creation—Christianity.

For the philosophers and the educated elite, there was impersonal, impassible, and pantheistic Reason, to which the Stoic sought to align his life in order to rise untouched above the surrounding chaos. The neo-Platonist sought his escape through a form of mysticism, and Epicureans, convinced that the gods, if they existed, cared nothing for humanity, found some relief in friendship among their equals and a measured enjoyment of life’s fleeting pleasures. And everywhere there was the increasingly oppressive weight of the sometimes smiling, sometimes glowering, often cruel, and always impervious face of fickle Fate.

If anything characterized the religious disposition of these times it was astrology, magic, and occult practice: anything one could do to ward off impending doom. And in order to strengthen their position, the political powers were more than happy to offer distractions in bloody games and donations of bread. And the more violent the life, the more violent the distraction. The ancient world was one of “capricious cruelty, and a vicarious love of death.”2 After all, what does one make of a society whose idea of a fitting birthday bash for a young boy was the death of dozens of people in the games? Imagine starting the day at Ephesus with a visit to the theater to watch the public execution of a criminal or two? What kind of emotional life did such people have?

But we ought not be surprised. Neither Homer’s epics nor the Greek gods seem to know much about compassion, and precious little about forgiveness. Small wonder that Virgil concludes his Aeneid with “the Trojan hero Aeneas, the symbolic forerunner of Augustus, standing over the corpse of an enemy he has just killed in a vengeful rage.”3 And the Emperor approved.

This is the world into which John writes its inhabitants might “believe,” might be persuaded of a different kind of king under whom a different kind of city could emerge. And what was so different about this king? John knows, and very well. It was customary for ancient teachers to designate a particularly “beloved disciple” to pass on and interpret their teaching. John is that one—and yes I do think it was John of the twelve. If Bauckham is right and John’s gospel assumes a knowledge of Mark, then only the twelve were at the last supper, and the beloved disciple could then only be John, as church tradition has unanimously maintained. And in his story of Jesus, written late in life and matured over decades of preaching and reflection, he fulfills his task of telling us what lies at the heart of Jesus’ message.

John is himself quite a brilliant rhetorician. As Hugh Kenner once famously said, John is a whispering forest of all traditional poetries. In his use of near universal metaphors, e.g. light-darkness, above-below, vine, shepherd, etc. John, is able to appeal to the common opinion of a broad range of first century hearers.

So, in beginning with Logos, he speaks both to Jew and Gentile. For the one logos means Torah, God’s covenant word revealed in history, and for the other, the rationality that underlies both the universe and, in indwelling us, enables us to understand it. For John both gracious gifts are supplanted by an even greater grace: the son, which word he has seen, touched, and handled. Again, not an idea, but an event, a person, a story. History.

Apparently John too is utterly convinced of the ontological priority of history. It soon becomes obvious that his Jesus cannot be fully understood without locating him in history: the particular history of Israel. Regardless of how this might scandalize autonomous Greek philosophers, historically, salvation has come from the Jews.

This is why we find then no derivations from first principles in John. At the foundations of reality stand neither stuff nor mathematics. From here on, argues John, all reality is to be defined by this WORD who is not a concept but a person. If the framing of every question presupposes it knows something of the answer then Pilate’s question of Jesus makes just this point. He asks “What is truth?” But it is the wrong question. He thinks truth is a “what-ness.” Instead it is “who.” And one learns about “who-ness” in stories.

This one, being from the beginning, already was. He is not defined but he himself defines everything. And this one John declares, is the only one who has seen the father. And this one has come from the father’s bosom—he knows the father’s heart—in order to make him known. Now remember, John is probably writing in Ephesus in Asia Minor which is not only the cultural and financial centre of the richest Roman province but also of the early church. And these people already have one view of fatherhood: the Emperor who is father and savior of them all.

But what does John’s savior of the world and great father look like? I was chatting with someone after the morning session and they were wondering what to do with the fact that the first word of revelation was a command not to eat of the tree. It was a very helpful question that helped us open up a new way of seeing. Was it in fact the first revelation? Could not revelation also be an act? What if the first revelation was not a word at all, but a gift? The gift of a good cosmos, and in particular an abundant and well-watered garden, Eden, a name that means delight? And in John, what is the first sign that reveals Jesus’ glory, his reputation? A 120 gallons of dishwater becomes the best wine anyone had tasted. Is this not delight? Is this not life and abundance? And now we understand why John states more than forty times that Jesus came to give us eternal and abundant life. He wants us to be persuaded, to believe, in not just the possibility but the certain assurance of a new future. And this new future is not primarily about the forgiveness of sin, important as that might be, but the gift of life.

And this is why John is so interested in Jesus’ glory, his doxa, his reputation. If the world is going to be different, then “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” will no longer work. And this explains something particularly brilliant about John — for him nothing better demonstrates God’s reputation, his glory, than Jesus on the cross.

Scholars have often puzzled over why the enigmatic “beloved disciple” is not introduced until the last supper. But it is not difficult. In the ancient world the final meal was the time for the teacher to summarize and encapsulate his teaching. Socrates had done just this in his last night with his friends just before being executed. So too Jesus in John. Only in John do we get the extended farewell speeches wherein the heart of Jesus’ teaching is expressed. And here for the first time we meet the “beloved disciple” who is leaning on Jesus’ breast (kolpos, 13:23). And we’ve seen this before, just the once. John tells us that no one has seen the father, but the only begotten son: Jesus himself had come from the breast (kolpos) of the father (1:18).

And what is the heart of this teaching? Much can be said, but I want to focus on two elements of the one major theme. First, here we are at the meal. Tonight the heart of everything will be revealed. And this from the one who is one with the father, who has come from him and will soon return to him. One can almost feel the tingling anticipation, touched by dread at the thought of what is soon to come upon them. They are hungering for a word. And instead they get an action. Jesus takes up the towel and the wash basin. There it is. Not Imperial domination, but servanthood. Our unity and love for one another. This is the centre of Jesus’ mission and message, and indeed our greatest apologetic. And yet how soon we replace it with other things: arguments, debates, etc.

Second, at the outset of his final prayer for his disciples and those who would believe in them, Jesus asks God to glorify him with the glory they had from before the world was. But in his gospel, the high point of Jesus’ glory is his death on the cross. How can this be?

History helps. John is on Patmos, and he sees in the power of Rome a looming confrontation with this new community. He is caught up to heaven, and on the throne sits the one who in his hand holds a Roman inheritance scroll. Whoever had the authority to open this would inherit the cosmos. But no one was found, and John weeps. Was Rome and Augustus really the destiny of creation, as Imperial propaganda suggested? But no, the Lion of Judah is worthy. But what John sees is a lamb, looking like it was slain. This is different kind of king. Later in Rev 13 John reveals the full terror of the Roman beast, underwritten by Satan. But then note that over against him stands the lamb again, still slain, but now we are told, from the foundation of the earth (13:8). This is a deep mystery. How can this be?

I’m not entirely sure, but I wonder whether John is trying to tell us something profound and utterly central to the possibility of a different future. What if the glory which Jesus had with the father from before the world is precisely that glory which John declares is set forth in the cross? What if John is telling us that God knew from the very beginning that his creation of the sevenfold good cosmos, with its garden of delight, would require, at some point, God in Christ dying for his creation? What if the very act of creating life for us, was already an act of crucifixion?

Things begin to be clearer. John has no transfiguration where Jesus, having just anticipated his coming death, is glorified. Instead he hammers this home by turning the cross into a new Sinai moment in which God reveals his glory: a God so full of goodness to all, and of compassion for all that he has made, that he dies for his enemies, including Gentiles.

Now we understand why when we hear for the first time of Greeks, in Jerusalem, asking “Sirs, we would see Jesus,” that Jesus exults and speaks of the necessity of the dying seed so it can bear much fruit. John is writing to that fruit, in Ephesus! Now we understand why early in Mark when the unclean spirits declare Jesus to be the son of God he silences them. They want to continue the deception that gods are just about power. But not THIS god and he silences them. The only time that Mark allows this confession, and now for the first time by a human being, it is a ROMAN centurion standing at the foot of the cross: surely THIS is the son of God.

People who love power and the certainty of control want knockdown proofs and overwhelming displays of God’s power that compel us to believe. But life is not about power, life is about people. And people are about relationship, and relationship depends on trust, and trust requires vulnerability. Yes, Jesus shows his power, but only to those who have already come to him on other grounds.

The gods of the ancient world were all about power. This God, the one true God, is different. This is about love. This is the key to a truly different future. As John argues as he seeks to persuade his audience, let this be your common opinion. And so Paul, let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus: who even though he could claim equality with God took on the form of a servant.

Thomas Aquinas, champion of Christianizing Aristotle who guided the church through the tumultuous 13th century, as thoroughly convinced that faith and reason could be reconciled. But on the 6th December 1273 at St Dominic’s in Naples celebrating mass he had a profound experience and he sat down and said to his friend, “I will write no more.” He never wrote another thing, and died three months later. Reason has its place. But the Christian story is about something much bigger, something that includes the good and the beautiful.

Here is the one WORD that changes everything. This is a different thing, a glorious revelation of a new temple and a new king, around which a new city can be built. That’s our story, that’s our heritage, it is for us the final and complete expression of the good, the beautiful and the true. Perhaps this is what Christian education is all about.

1 For more on Christianity and the ancient world, see especially E.G. Weltin, Athens and Jerusalem: An Interpretative Essay on Christianity and Classical Culture, AARSR 49 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1987) and Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, (Princeton: Princeton University, 1996).

2 Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

3 Joy Connolly, “Pox Populii: Catullus in a new transation, Glimpses Rome’s Decadent Decline”, review of The Poems of Gatullus: A Bilingual Edition by Gaius Valerius Catullus, trans. with commentary by Peter Green, in Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2006, internet edition.