Eleutheria 4, 1 (2015)

The most-recent issue of Eleutheria (an open access, peer-reviewed journal led, edited, and reviewed by graduate students of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary) is online, containing the following main articles:

Letter from the Editor

Timothy B. Chrisman

Jesus and Tiberius: An Examination of Source Reliability

Since the introduction to the critical method of studying the Old and New Testament in the nineteenth century, doubt has been thrown on the historical reliability of the biblical narrative accounts, especially the four Gospels. Yet, far less scrutiny and denigration have been applied to historical sources written during the time of the Roman Empire. A comparison, then, is proposed. It would be beneficial to compare the sources that detailed the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, namely, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the four sources which chronicled the life of Tiberius, emperor of the Roman Empire during the Ministry of Jesus. How do the sources compare as to their composition in proximity to their subject? Do the sources agree with one another? Is there a level of objectivity in the sources that allowed them to present the correct details of their subject? These questions will determine the reliability of the documents in question and whether the four Gospels measure up to critical examination.

John A. Sypert

Redeeming Rhetoric: Augustine’s Use of Rhetoric in His Preaching Ministry

The art and practice of rhetoric occupied a fundamental place in the ancient Roman world. It is thus not surprising that Augustine (354-430 AD) was deeply committed to the art of speaking well. He spent his youth mastering the theory of rhetoric, putting into practice what he had learned during a preaching career of almost forty years. This essay examines elements of rhetoric in Augustine’s preaching, arguing that he purposely appropriated common rhetorical elements in his preaching for the purpose of making Scripture both plain and compelling to his audience. Augustine’s training in rhetoric is summarized, followed by an overview of the context, Scriptural basis, and style of his preaching. His thoughts on the use of rhetoric in preaching are discussed, primarily by summarizing his arguments from Book Four of his treatise On Christian Doctrine. The essay concludes by offering several examples of rhetorical devices used by Augustine in his preaching.

Tyler D. McNabb

Defeating Naturalism: Defending and Reformulating Plantinga’s EAAN

During the past two decades, Alvin Plantinga has formulated an argument against naturalism that focuses on naturalism’s acceptance of contemporary evolutionary theory. Plantinga argues that given naturalism and evolution, our cognitive faculties have been developed to produce beliefs that meet the Darwinian requirement of survival and reproduction. Plantinga argues that accepting this will lead a naturalist to have a defeater for all of their beliefs, including their belief in naturalism. In this paper, I survey and respond to two types of objections that have been given as a response to Plantinga’s argument. The first objection that I interact with is an objection given by Michael Bergmann. Bergmann argues that a naturalist can continue to hold on to both their naturalism and their belief that their faculties are reliable, even if the probability of their faculties being reliable is low. The second objection that I interact with is an objection that can be seen in the work of Jerry Fodor and Stephen Law. This objection argues that beliefs that enable survival and reproduction will likely be truth conducive and thus, the chance of having reliable faculties is high. I respond to this argument by first reiterating Plantinga’s traditional response to this objection. After I clarify and defend this traditional response, I then reformulate Plantinga’s argument to specifically address metaphysical beliefs. Not only does this give the non-naturalist two different responses to this objection, but I take it that the reformulation could be seen as even more persuasive than the traditional formulation.

Book Reviews

John Carrick on Sacred Rhetoric

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2002), 202pp., ISBN 0851518265.

The current emphasis on the ‘big story’ of Scripture, seemingly coming from all sorts of theological quarters, whilst enormously helpful, might be misleading on its own or if not carefully circumscribed in certain ways.

In some preaching, for instance, the ‘big story’ approach can end up with sermons that see everything in the context of the… well, ‘big story’… which means interpreting and applying every text in the light of Jesus and the gospel. No bad thing, of course. The kind of preaching that relates every text and every passage to Jesus is sometimes called ‘redemptive-historical preaching’, and those who preach this way are rightly concerned that congregations all the time be directed to Jesus and the gospel. So, they advise, if you’re preaching from Old Testament stories, you need to be careful to avoid moralising from those stories, and make sure – instead – that you set those stories in the context of the biblical story of redemption as a whole, which means directing people ultimately to Jesus. Again, no bad thing, you might think.

Without for a moment denying the significance of Jesus and the gospel and the ‘big story’ of Scripture, John Carrick here reflects critically on this sort of preaching, and he does so by reminding us that God speaks in different ways through his word. Carrick uses the notion of grammatical moods to speak about the variety in biblical texts, a variety which should be reflected in the way we preach and apply biblical texts. He focuses on four in particular:

• The indicative. The indicative asserts objective fact. This is what the redemptive-historical advocates are most interested in. Indicatives are statements like: ‘God so loved the world’; ‘God was in Christ, reconciling himself to the world’; ‘Christ died for our sins’ (9-10).

• The exclamative. Exclamations, says Carrick, presuppose an element of emotion (30). They often begin with words like ‘Oh’, or ‘How’, or ‘What’: ‘Oh, how I love your law’; ‘Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity’; ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news’; ‘Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom of God’ (32-33).

• The interrogative. The interrogative is used in asking a question. It doesn’t assert, like the indicative mood, nor does it exclaim; rather, it questions: ‘Shall we go on sinning that grace might increase?’; ‘What shall we say to these things?’; ‘To whom will you liken God?’; ‘Am I not an apostle? Am I not free?’. Jesus, of course, asked lots of questions: ‘Who do people say I am?’; ‘Why do you call me good?’; ‘Which of these was the neighbour?’; ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’

• The imperative. The imperative mood expresses a command: ‘Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near’; ‘Believe and be baptised’; ‘Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice’; ‘Put to death what belongs to your evil nature’; ‘Walk worthy of the Lord who has called you’.

Carrick is particularly interested in the first and last of the moods, the indicative and the imperative. ‘Redemptive-historical preaching’, he says, tends to focus on the indicative of what God has done in Christ. But the indicatives of God’s dealings with men and women do not exclude the imperatives of ethics. The pattern is seen in the New Testament letters themselves, where Paul regularly moves from the salvation given us to how that salvation works out in our lives. Of course, the Christian faith begins with the indicative, with what God has done. However, some redemptive-historical preachers stop there, says Carrick, and don’t apply the imperative, because they’re afraid of heading down the path to moralism, for fear of putting the gospel at risk. But such preaching can, in turn be weak for leading a congregation to self-examination and repentance.

A sizeable chunk of Carrick’s study tracks the four moods in the sermons of five well-known preachers in the Reformed tradition (Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Samuel Davies, Asahel Nettleton, Martyn Lloyd-Jones), and his book effectively calls preachers likewise to do justice to the variety of the moods in Scripture.

So he concludes: ‘It is a regrettable fact that much Reformed preaching operates in a virtual mono-mood – that of the indicative – to the virtual exclusion of the imperative… It is absolutely essential that the great indicatives of Christ’s accomplishment of redemption be balanced by the great imperatives of the Spirit’s application of redemption’ (151).

Rhetoric and Preaching

Lucy Lind Hogan and Robert Reid, Connecting with the Congregation: Rhetoric and the Art of Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 175pp. ISBN 9780687085293, and André Resner, Preacher and Cross: Person and Message in Theology and Rhetoric (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), x + 205pp, ISBN 9780802846402.

[The following review of these two books was written in June 2000, and was first published on London School of Theology’s website.]

These two books join a number of recent others which are offering reflections on homiletics from a theological perspective first and foremost, hoping thereby to challenge and transform some of the more practical dimensions of preaching. Narrative, imagination, and community, among others, have all been explored; here rhetoric is placed on the agenda.

Rhetoric, in this context, focuses on what is persuasive in human communication. And this itself has given rise to a wider debate in homiletics: should preaching be persuasive? Some homileticians (e.g., Richard Lischer and Lucy Rose) have argued that preaching must be community-oriented, dialogical, nonhierarchical and inclusive; persuasion can lead to abuse, and is inconsistent with such openness and mutual respect. Preaching is to be communal in nature – the church speaking to the church, rather than one individual speaking to a collection of individuals.

Hogan and Reid disagree. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who argue that all human discourse is inherently persuasive, they argue that preaching, by definition, cannot not be persuasive. That is, persuasion is implicit in language itself, and just to speak (or write) is to persuade. (Even the arguments of Lischer and Rose against persuasive preaching are themselves enmeshed in rhetoric intended to persuade!) Moreover, persuasion does not have to lead to manipulation and exploitation. Of course, preachers must come to terms with the power of the ‘preaching situation’, but authoritarian discourse disregards the context, and the nature and needs of the listener. Rhetoric and community-building do not have to be seen at odds with one another, for persuasion can be seen in terms of respect for the other, and has to do (in the understanding of Hogan and Reid), with issuing an invitation to growth and transformation.

At the heart of the book (in chs. 3-5), they consider three major components of rhetoric: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is ‘persuasive proof that arises as an effect of the argument and rational linkages presented in the speech’. Pathos is ‘persuasive proof that arises as an effect of understanding who the audience is and the ability of the speaker to move the audience emotionally’. Ethos is ‘persuasive proof that arises as an effect of the character of the speaker’. As might be expected, they call for a balance between the three:

‘Overemphasis on logos becomes a perversion of the persuasive task through overreliance on the subject... and results in... the pedant’s stance. Undervaluing the subject and overvaluing the pure effect of pathos becomes the advertiser’s stance. Sacrificing substance and effect in order to convey personality, charm, or some other way of putting ethos forward becomes the entertainer’s stance.’

There is practical payoff to all this: these categories help preachers consider what is communicated, wittingly and unwittingly, by their own character in the sermon; how preachers can help listeners care about what is being said; how reasoning should function in the sermon, etc.

From a related perspective, in his book, André Resner devotes particular attention to the preacher’s ethos in a bid to tackle the question as to whether the preacher’s ‘self’ can be an appropriate means of persuasion in Christian preaching. He reviews the treatment of ethos in classical rhetoric in Greek and Latin philosophers, before looking at Augustine (for whom the person of the preacher was understood to be a powerful witness to the truth) and Barth (for whom God is the main speaker in Christian preaching, and so consideration of rhetoric is excluded).

Resner then turns to Paul’s discussion of ethos in 1 Corinthians 1-4, and argues that Paul is not hostile to rhetoric. Paul uses a ‘reverse-ethos’, where the preacher is judged not by assimilation to the cultural expectations of the listeners, but by faithfulness to the message of the cross of Christ. A preacher’s persuasive life is shaped by the cross. Resner applies this to contemporary homiletics in his final chapter: ethos appeals need to be subjected to the core values of the Christian community, which (for Paul) are shaped by the cross of Christ.

Both books will not go uncriticised. One has to recognise, of course, that rhetoric is not the only key to effective preaching. One has to ask whether it respects the diverse types of voices by which the Bible speaks and which must shape the preaching task. One has to reflect on how it relates to other aspects of church ministry and worship. In the final instance, the word of God takes effect not in a rhetorical theory, but in the ongoing life and ministry of the prayerful church in the presence and power of the Spirit. Nonetheless, preachers need to be more aware of the dynamics in the preaching event, not least related to their own character, and so be more responsible ambassadors for Christ. These two stimulating and persuasive books will help them on their way.