Aristotle calls rhetoric the “available means of persuasion.” Is persuasion at the pulpit an appropriate goal for the preacher? Perhaps persuasion conflicts with 1 Corinthians 2.1-5?
“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”
And yet, isn’t Paul trying to persuade Festus in Acts 26?
Dave Helm and Robert Kinney are both preachers who have studied rhetoric, Kinney having done so at the doctoral level. Kinney is the director of one of my favorite ministries, the Charles Simeon Trust (find his bio, read some of his articles). Dave Helm planted Holy Trinity Church in Chicago and now pastors Christ Church Chicago, and Kinney is an evangelical curate at Christ Church in Vienna, Austria.
In their talk, On Rhetoric, they notice that rhetoric, classically understood, is a means of persuasive argumentation. According to Aristotle and Quintillian, rhetoric is not persuasion for the sake of persuasion. For them, rhetoric must be persuasion that is driven by a sense virtue or truth. When we consider employing rhetoric in the service of not subjective truth but the truth of God in the Word of God, rhetoric becomes very meaningful. If rhetoric is about getting something across, then preaching ought to be understood as getting the truth across: the gospel.
Understood this way, Paul is actually one of the supreme examples of rhetoric. This makes sense because he was trained in Greco-Roman rhetoric.
This is not terribly hard to see. Kinney says that, classically, rhetoricians divided rhetoric into three parts. First, invention is the creating of an argument; again, classical authors would say that the truth invented must be virtuous. Second, arrangement is the structure, the way the building blocks (ideas) of the argument fit together. Finally, elocution includes all of those ornamental elements like vocabulary and tone and illustration that convey the argument.
As a preacher, I don’t have to invent an argument. The Bible tells the preacher what to say (and what not to say). The arrangement is likewise constrained; the structure of the sermon ought to be informed by the structure of the passage. Considering just these two elements, Helm notices that sometimes preachers simply jump to exegesis so that the only constraint to the sermon are grammatical elements. And then there’s elocution, what homiletic professors call delivery. While it may be harder to make this connection, even though a lot of delivery flows from the personality of the preacher (and the personality of the audience), every passage has a tone that ought to dictate delivery. For this reason, Helm and Kinney recommend that a preacher gains a sense of “conscious competence” in being aware of classical rhetoric.
A couple of personal take-aways from, On Rhetoric:
- Helm shares that Cicero placed a premium on brevity, clarity, and plausibility. I especially aim for clarity and yet find that I have to constantly and deliberately re-calibrate sermons to get there.
- Kinney says that an awareness of rhetoric helps him know what to cut from the sermon. The sermon writing process can sometime invite elements that don’t clearly serve the argument provided by Scripture, and can send our listeners down a distracting path.
- Finally, Helm observes that an understanding of rhetoric can help us drive the argument of our text into the hearts of the listener, and conclude the sermon! Oh, how dreadful (and tempting) is the long and meandering conclusion.
