I’ve finished a biggish writing project, so now I have time to revive this (non-blog) blog. The blog has often strayed from its original purpose, which was to think aloud about how we do teaching of Christianity. But this time at least I’ll come right to the center of that.
I’ve been thinking about it lately as part of what I’ve been calling the “knowledge” issue (see my post “Knowledge 1: Curiosity”). I picked up the idea of a “rhetoric of nonviolence” from John Howard Yoder a few years ago. It means basically using rhetorical analysis on ourselves to attend to whether our persuasive language treats people well. It might waffle down to a rhetorical strategy: if I seem to care, then maybe I’ll be more persuasive. But not if it’s part of a larger following of Christ in which people matter (see my post “Love 3h: Personalism”).
Once one has established an “objective truth” by argument and logic, we really haven’t arrived at truth because truth is in relationship. See Emmanuel Levinas on that. When I was in college I heard a fellow InterVarsity-ite convince a chemistry major that God exists, which that chemistry major had not believed before. The chemist’s response was “Yeah, so you’ve convinced me. So what.” And he walked away, rather miffed. So much for apologetics.
Love and knowledge are different things:
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. (1 Corinthians 8:1-2).
Skillful speech and “all knowledge” leave the possessor of them who does not also have love quite empty (1 Corinthians 13:1-2). If I want to possess truth,
Oops, time for a commercial break, or some sort of breaking and entering. Did I just say “possess truth”? What could that possibly mean? Wouldn’t I have to be bigger than the universe in order to “possess truth”? Has some sort of stealth absurdity entered into my thinking?
Anyway, if I want to possess truth, then I am like Eve responding to the snake’s temptation, gaining knowledge to become like God (Genesis 3:4-6). But Jesus set aside even divine knowledge to serve us (Mark 13:32). As God’s Servant, he worked to bring about not his own vindication but justice among the nations (Isaiah 42:1-4). And even as he “brings forth justice,” he is careful that that does not amount to beating up his enemies (v. 3). Winning the argument is not the goal because “bringing forth justice” includes (or is?) loving those to whom he must speak.
- “A biggish writing project”: doctor to man being x-rayed (in a cartoon, probably New Yorker): “That novel of yours will just have to come out.” More about it later.
- Yoder: “A few years ago”? Yoder died more than twenty years ago. I had talked briefly with him about “rhetoric of nonviolence,” having run across it somewhere in his writing. The phrase was used at least as early as Winthrop Yinger, Cesar Chavez: The Rhetoric of Nonviolence (Hicksville: Exposition, 1975). For “nonviolent epistemology,” see Yoder’s A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology, ed. Christian E. Early and Ted G. Grimsrud (Eugene: Cascade, 2010). And see also Ellen W. Gorsevski, Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). All that heads off in political directions, which come strongly to mind now that the U.S. and Iran are exchanging potshots. But thinking about what one’s manner of speech is doing counts in person-to-person head-bumping as well.
- “If I seem to care”: to make it sound all the more cynical, try “if I seem to be an ethical personalist.”
- Levinas: A Google search will tell you more about him in five minutes than I know.
The One Story 