A Rhetoric Of Contemporary Christian Discourse

A Rhetoric of Contemporary
Christian Discourse
Robert Stephen Reid
This essay argues for a rhetoric of Christian discourse that also provides
for the possibility of a set of critical moves by which the coherence of public
expressions of a Christian ethos that “dwells rhetorically” in discourse
(Hyde 2004) can be assessed. Three domains of identity are explored as a
narrative rather than doctrinal conception of Christian identity configured
in oral and written discourse: a tradition-based reasoning, a narratively-
shaped worldview, and a hope engendered identity & ethic of responsibility.
Critical moves by which the coherence of each feature can be determined are
indicated. Keywords: Ethos; Christian identity; Christian discourse;
Christian criticism; narrative; Hyde; Ricoeur; MacIntyre.
W
hen the Conference on Christianity and Literature
debated the question of whether there is such a
thing as Christian criticism in 1986 they were un-
able to arrive at a satisfactory answer (Mikolajczak 4). Leland
Ryken had argued for what amounted to a univocal vision of
the critic who applies “standards and criteria” that represent a
holistic and consistent doctrinal center concerning assumptions
about Christian truth and experience independent of emerging
theories. And rather than proposing a criticism centered out of
a specific Christian doctrine such as the creation (Cary 48-52;
Harned 10; Fortner 25-50), the Incarnation (Cary 53-57), the
Trinity (Cary 58-62), the doctrine of sin/falleness (Harned 176-
84; Romanowski 11-21), or a hermeneutic of love/caritas (Jacobs
9-17), Ryken argued that the “whole grand edifice of Christian
JCR 31 (November 2008) 109–142
ARTICLES

110
doctrine” would be necessary to develop an adequate aesthetic
of Christian criticism (29).
In his critique of Ryken’s proposal, Clarence Walhout was
less sanguine about the prospect of conducting this type of uni-
vocal criticism when there is “no clear consensus among Chris-
tians” themselves concerning this grand edifice (“Response”
43). Yet he agreed that to be distinctive from other criticism,
Christian criticism would need to be grounded in consistent
assumptions about its doctrinal beliefs. More recently Walhout
has presented a case for what Christian belief can contribute to
the study of literature, noting that “Christianity does not imply
that a critical theory can be deduced directly or entirely from
its religious beliefs. But it does offer guidelines for assessing
developments in the history of criticism and for finding its own
place in that history. While Christian criticism will share much
with other schools of criticism, its set of beliefs will also provide
an emphasis and a coloring that is uniquely its own” (“Public
Sphere” 373). For Walhout, these doctrines frame the possibili-
ties of a Christian literary criticism that would take seriously the
religious dimension of literature and/or literary understanding.
Second, it would view the history of theology and the history of
ecclesiastical practices as important influences on the history of
literature. Third, it would be concerned not only with the interior
ethical principles working within a literary work but also with
the ways in which a literary work influences personal and social
life. Fourth, such a criticism would guide decisions about what
is important in research as it relates to what is important in hu-
man life and guide decisions that may lead to the study of topics
that may be neglected or slighted by other critics. And, fifth it
would provide certain principles for assessing which emerging
critical theories and methodologies may have enduring value
(370-73). Though consciously amenable to the plurivocity of
contemporary Christian self-understanding, Walhout’s proposal
still privileges a doctrinal or confessional center as the locus of
understanding in the development of a Christian criticism.
Coming at the question from a different perspective Mar-
tin Medhurst has recently noted that the absence of a coherent
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION AND RELIGION 111
theory of North American Christian discourse limits the ability
of rhetorical critics to offer effective critique (“Religious Belief”
43). In response he proposes that a Christian rhetoric would
necessarily be characterized as biblical, as committed to the
teachings of Jesus, as sensitive to 2000 years of confessional
tradition(s), and as open to the preceptive additions of contem-
porary Christian scholars (43-45). In a related examination of
the religious rhetoric of the 2000 US presidential campaign, “Re-
ligious Rhetoric and the Ethos of Democracy,” Medhurst draws
on similar criteria in assessing the manner in which Albert Gore
and George W. Bush set forth their values agendas as consonant
with their own faith tradition and their personal convictions
about the good society grounded in a principled understanding
of the biblical narratives (e.g., 118; 121-22). Medhurst’s purpose
in the latter essay is to establish how contemporary expressions
of religious rhetoric in political discourse point “to an abiding
dimension of the American character or, better yet, a national
character seeking a place to abide, a locus of communal values
that transcend parties, politics, and philosophies” (“Religious
Rhetoric” 116). In both theory and practice, Medhurst seeks to
provide a means to identify what counts as the contemporary
contours and contribution of expressly religious rhetoric in the
public sphere. His proposal, however, does not provide a means
to identify the features of a religious ethos tacitly configured in
discourse. Nor does it provide a means to clarify how the mythos,
the narrative structure of Christian self-understanding, can be
differentiated from the abstractions of doctrinal or confessional
assumptions ostensibly implied by the discourse.
This distinction may be illustrated by contrasting the na-
ture of the public discourse Medhurst analyzes in the “Religious
Rhetoric” essay (something which can be readily identified as
religious discourse by his criteria) with the question of how
one might then evaluate the manner in which Medhurst’s own
religious ethos is configured in the essay’s evaluative claim that
Americans are “a people, a demos, hungry for spiritual values
and willing to support those who articulate with clarity and pas-
sion the specifically moral, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of

112
public policy choices” (115). His conclusion cites Richard John
Neuhaus’ argument in The Naked Public Square, that religious
rhetoric of this kind reveals a dynamic that “‘holds the promise
of binding together (religare) a nation in a way that may more
nearly approximate civitas’” (“Religious Rhetoric” 131). As the
last word of the essay it appears to characterize Medhurst’s own
discursive vision of hope for religion and democracy in America.
The issue is not whether one might contest his argument that
the rhetoric of the candidates reveals that their religious beliefs
are integral to their moral vision. Medhurst establishes this. The
issue is that had a different critic, whose core commitments were
primarily Marxist, or perhaps post-colonialist, analyzed this
political discourse the thesis and the conclusion drawn might
have been remarkably different.
FewindividualswhowriteandspeakoutofaChristianethos
necessarilybegincomposingdiscoursebydetermininghowaspecif-
icdoctrineoraparticulartheologyframesorauthorizeswhatshould
besaid.NorwouldwewanttolimitcriticismofChristiandiscourse
onlytorhetoricthatisself-consciouslyChristian.Individualswhose
discursive identity is shaped by a Christian worldview generally
can be differentiated from others whose discourse is controlled
by a different worldview or ideology. There are even writers and
speakers whose talk or text may reveal an identity shaped by the
concerns of this type of religious identity who would actually deny
that it was their intention to speak or write Christian discourse,
but whose cultural voice and moral vision would still locate their
discourse as distinctively Christian. For example, in four volumes
of collected short stories entitled Listening for God Paula Carlson
andPeterHawkinshaveablydemonstratedthatthisidentitycanbe
attributed to several authors included in these volumes even when
some of the them (e.g., James Baldwin, Anne Tyler, Sue Miller)
would be hesitant to accept it. This is why we need to ask how a
rhetoric of Christian discourse can be conceived that locates the
ethos and even the mythos that structures the horizon of its ‘faithful
persuasion’ in a narrative rather than a doctrinal identity.
In their preface to the important collection of essays in
Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology Stanley Hauerwas
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

and L. Gregory Jones summarize the significance of this move-
ment that shifts the center of Christian identity from doctrine
to narrative by stating,
We are concerned with suggesting that narrative is
neither just an account of genre criticism nor a fad-
dish appeal to the importance of telling stories; rather
it is a crucial conceptual category for such matters as
understanding issues of epistemology and methods of
argument, depicting personal identity, and displaying
the content of Christian convictions (5).
In the intervening twenty years since they first made this argu-
ment, the shift has become a virtual fait accompli. What is needed
for communication theorists is a rhetoric of Christian discourse
that reflects this same conceptual shift in our disciplinary un-
derstanding as well.
This proposal seeks to provide a critical means to clarify the
identifying features of a Christian ethos that ‘dwells rhetorically’
in the presentation of self configured in oral or written texts. In
such discourse it is the coherence of religious influence from a
faith tradition, specifically the Christian faith, which implicitly
and/or explicitly structures argument or serves as sources of
rhetorical invention in framing argument.1
Michael Hyde argues
that identification of such an ethos would lead to an appreciation
of how the premises and supporting material of argument “mark
out the boundaries and domains of thought that, depending on
how their specific discourses are designed and arranged, may
be particularly inviting and moving for some audiences (xiii).
Hyde explores this conception of the ethos of rhetoric by way of
a Heidegarrian conception of the abode of voice in which the
identity of one who speaks dwells (xix). It functions, he argues,
as an ontological quality of character constructed in the identity
of the self communicated in discourse. By exploring what counts
as a coherent Christian ethos of “dwelling rhetorically” I believe
that a proposal for a rhetoric of Christian discourse would need
to identify what the boundaries and domains of thought are that
function as discourse appeals in the cultural voice, the narra-

114 ROBERT STEPHEN REID
tive identity, and the moral vision configured as the abode of a
Christian ethos for one who speaks.
A second contribution of this proposal is that it provides
direction to the question “What’s a critic supposed to do?”
What is needed is a rhetoric of Christian discourse that can
assist critics in determining the rhetorical presence and coher-
ence of the cultural presuppositions, the narrative identity, and
the moral vision of hope characteristic of a Christian ethos and
the Christian mythos embedded in discourse whether or not
a rhetor’s argument is purposefully religious. Such a rhetoric
would provide critics with the means to distinguish Christian
discourse from non-Christian discourse and from other cultural
sources of identity by which ethos is discursively configured.
It would provide the ability to clarify the difference between
the ethos of the self expressed in Christian discourse and the
ethos of, say, an Enlightenment rationalist autonomous self or
a radically postmodern de-centered self. And just as we can
generally identify the rhetorical ethos of a Marxist, a feminist,
or a post-colonialist critic, we should be able to identify the
way in which a Christian ethos “dwells rhetorically.” Though a
criticism of this kind is likely to be of use to Christian critics,
the identification it permits should be evident even when the
critic is not ideologically committed to its tenets just as one need
not be a Marxist critic to be able to identify and critique the
implications of what amounts to a Marxist argument. In other
words, whether Christian or not, a critic examining an argument
should be able to ascertain whether the discursive ethos of the
rhetor’s cultural voice and moral vision as well as the mythos
of the rhetor’s narrative identity, are predominantly Christian,
dominated by some other ideological concern, or incoherent in
one or more of these three domains.
This rhetoric of Christian discourse would need to be able
to locate the features of Christian ethos revealed in the cultural
assumptions implied by the one who speaks in the creation of the
discourse regardless of whether the discourse is presented orally
or in text, whether it is conceived of as argument or as story, and
whether the ethos is self-consciously or unconsciously present.

It would necessarily need to be broad in order to provide for the
rich manifestation of contemporary Christian discourse, but it
would still need to be specific enough to provide critics with a
set of commensurable features that constitute a Christian ethos.
Finally, it would need to provide critics with a bounded means
to be able to determine whether the discourse is an internally
coherent representation of a Christian self or an incoherent
representation of a culturally, narratively, or morally fragmented
Christian ethos.
In what follows I absorb the notion of a Christian mythos
into the larger project of describing an ethos that dwells rhe-
torically in the rhetoric of Christian discourse. Mythos, the
individual’s own narratively shaped understanding of gospel
that functions as a worldview which speaks the individual as
much as she or he may speak of it, is folded into the notion of
ethos as an expression of Christian self interpretation. For the
rest, I begin by offering a brief orientation to the manner in
which I arrived at the boundaries of each of the three domains
of a Christian discourse revealed in the appeals implied by the
rhetor’s cultural voice, the narrative identity, and the moral vision.
This is followed by an exploration of each domain that concludes
with a suggestion in answer to the question “What’s a critic to
do?” to determine the coherence of that expression of ethos.
A Rhetoric of Christian Discourse
Paul Ricoeur’s ontology of the self and poetics of self identity
are particularly useful for identifying the manner in which ethos
is rhetorically configured in discourse. Ricoeur offers the fol-
lowing brief claim as a summary of his project developed over
the last three decades: “Self-understanding is an interpretation;
interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among
other signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation; the
latter borrows from history as well as fiction, making a life
story a fictional history or, if one prefers, a historical fiction,
interweaving the historiographic style of biographies with the
novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies” (The Just 114).
For Ricoeur, an individual conceives of the identity of the “self”

as “the speaking, acting, character-narrator of its own history”
(Oneself as Another 291), refiguring his or her life continually
“by all the truthful or fictive stories [that the individual] tells
about himself or herself” (Time and Narrative III.246). The “self
of self-knowledge” is a narratively situated subject and, for that
reason, Ricoeur rephrases Socrates’ famous aphorism from the
Apology: it is the unnarrated life that is not worth living (Time
and Narrative II.130; cf. Time and Narrative III.247; and Oneself
as Another 178).
In Time and Narrative Ricoeur examines the intersection
between the Aristotelian theory of narrative representation and
the Augustinian conception of temporality in an effort to arrive
at a theory of the discursive figuration of meaning as it relates
to text. Since plot is the means by which humans narrativize a
representation of temporality, Ricoeur draws on Aristotle’s use
of the term mimesis in the Poetics, best summarized in Aristotle’s
dictum that “the imitation of the action [mimesis] is the plot”
(1449b). He then turns to Augustine’s Confessions (Book II)
for the conception of temporality as a “present awareness” that
constantly negotiates the temporal capacities of “memory” and
“expectation.” In joining these two conceptions to create a
poetics of identity Ricoeur proposes a thesis which he acknowl-
edges to be circular: “Time becomes human time to the extent
that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative,
in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features
of temporal experience” (III.3). He contends that these two
aspects of the human process of understanding operate in a
healthy dialectical relationship and are necessary correlates of
one another. Aporias of temporality remain: narrative’s intention
toward concordance never fully resolves the discordance of how
it is that we understand everything, including ourselves, to be
“in time” (III.243).
Like Ricoeur, I begin with Augustine’s inter-signifying
moments of memory, present awareness, and expectation to
frame a plurivocal notion of Christian ethos characterized by
tradition-based Christian reasoning (cultural voice), by a nar-
ratively-shaped Christian worldview (narrative identity), and by

a commitment to live in the hope engendered by this Christian
identity in ways that imply an ethic of responsibility (moral vi-
sion). These three features of the discourse produced by a speaker
or writer provide a means to identify the manner in which the
individual’s Christian ethos dwells rhetorically. They also pro-
vide the means by which a critic can explore the coherence of a
Christian speaker or writer’s voice, identity, and vision.
A Tradition-Based Reasoning
What shapes Christian reasoning and distinguishes it from other
kinds of reasoning? It is quintessentially a tradition-based form
of reasoning grounded in the commitment that its canonical
texts embody a divine communication revealed in and through
a record of divine acts. It is also a tradition reliant on the history
of interpretation of these texts and how this understanding has
shaped the expression of Christian consciousness in diverse ways
and through different cultural adaptations of this faith across
the centuries. Throughout its history, the church—whether Ro-
man Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant—has provided
formulations of its faith convictions about the sacred character
of this revelation in various confessional formulations that have,
in turn, given rise to explicit theological discourse about the
meanings of these biblical texts and the traditions of interpreta-
tion that arise from them.
In 1941 Richard Niebuhr wrote a small treatise entitled The
Meaning of Revelation in which he raised the question of how
the meaning of the “story told” of this conceptual understand-
ing of historic faith is transferred to the story of an individual’s
own faith story. Niebuhr concluded that “Revelation means for
us that part of our inner history which illuminates the rest of
it and which makes itself intelligible…. Revelation means this
intelligible event which makes all other events intelligible”
(68-69). For Niebuhr, this conception of revelation becomes for
those who are committed to its tradition of thought the means
by which “all the occasions of personal and common life become
intelligible” (80). In summarizing Niebuhr’s argument Ricoeur
states that this pattern of tradition-based reasoning,

…is nothing else than the task of making the past
intelligible, of interpreting our present according to
the analogy of the life and death of Christ, and of
discovering the potentialities of our future. In other
words, revelation ‘furnishes the practical reason with
a starting point for the interpretation of past, pres-
ent, and future history” (“Narrative Theology” 247;
citing Niebuhr 97).
Niebuhr had moved the discussion of revelation out of the fixed
categories of dogma and into the narrative domain of personal
identity, claiming that the “heart reasons with the aid of revela-
tion…. [That] we become fools because we refuse to use rev-
elation as the foundation of a rational moral life” (96). Many
look to this argument as the initial expression of 20th
century
narrative theology.
In making a contemporary argument in favor of valorizing
this narrative privileging of tradition based Christian “heart”
reasoning over dogmatic or apologetic reasoning, I turn to
the work of Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. In that study
MacIntyre argued that practical rationality is inextricably tied
to the kind of moral transformation of personal identity that
occurs as a function of participating in communities shaped by
traditions of reasoning (cf. Hauerwas and Jones 9). He advances
this argument in Three Rival Versions of Morality by depicting the
polarized trajectories of 20th
century rationality incipiently em-
bodied in two moments of 19th
century thought. At one end was
Nietzschean genealogical relativism. At the other end was the
foundationalist desire to see Enlightenment rationalism fulfilled
in just the right assignments to complete “all knowledge” for
an edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Between these polarized
scylla and charybdis MacIntyre proposes the Papal Encyclical
of 1879 as a third 19th
century alternative that suggested a way
through the impasse of these competing rationalities. This en-
cyclical reaffirmed the role of Thomistic reasoning as the regu-
lative tradition for the Catholic expression of faith (72-73). As
MacIntyre observes, “The encyclopaedic, the genealogical, and

the Thomistic tradition-constituted standpoints confronting one
another not only as rival moral theories, but also as projects for
constructing rival forms of moral narrative” (80).
The weakness of this continuum is in locating Thomism in
a Catholic encyclical. MacIntyre needed a 19th
century exemplar
of Thomism that reaffirmed tradition-based reasoning rather
than merely reaffirming it as the means of Catholic reasoning.
His argument would have been even stronger if it had located
the 19th
century moment in John Henry Newman’s argument
in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Newman’s Essay
challenges the foundationalist rationalism that had begun to be
treated as logical reasoning in his day. He argued for a Thomistic
form of probable reasoning he called reasoning by “converging
probabilities (254, 319-21). This form of rhetorical reasoning
could attend to the influence of historical tradition in ways that
logical reasoning, especially logical reasoning heavily influenced
by empiricism, could not (cf. Jost 63-106). Newman’s Thomistic
belief in the “development of tradition” is core to his embrace
of a faith tradition in which the development of doctrine was
possible (Chadwick 47-48). Whether the casuistic tradition of
the church or the Talmudic tradition of Judaism (cf. Jonsen
and Toulmin 341), this approach of probable reasoning that is
shaped by but not fixed by a tradition of knowing includes and
subsumes the notion of doctrinal knowing. This Thomistic ap-
proach to reasoning that affirms tradition-based reasoning layers
current understanding in a refractory tradition of interpretation
that resists obsolescence because it is willing to be resistant to
some of what is handed down and even be satirical with respect
to its outmoded allegories (Bruns 211). It affirms the notion of
the development of tradition.
For an individual, tradition-based reasoning implies a way
of expressing oneself that prefers forms of probable reasoning
(e.g., Newman’s “converging probabilities”). It respects the
role tradition has played in forming the moral character that
shapes decision-making. In proposing a middle way through
the impasse of radical objectivism and radical subjectivism,
MacIntyre concludes,

120
So the encyclopaedists’ narrative reduces the past
to mere prologue to the rational present, while the
genealogist struggles in the construction of his or
her narrative against the past, including that of the
past which is perceived as hidden within the alleged
rationality of the present. The Thomists’ narrative,
by contrast with both of these, treats the past neither
as mere prologue nor as something to be struggled
against, but as that from which we have to learn if
we are to identify and move towards our telos more
adequately and that which we have to put to the ques-
tion if we are to know which questions we ourselves
should next formulate and attempt to answer, both
theoretically and practically (79).
MacIntyre’s project looks back to the wisdom of what has gone
before as a means to understand the possibilities of what should
lie ahead. As Kallenberg has stated succinctly, “He has clarified
how the notions of telos, virtues, practice, narrative, and tradition
form a mutual supporting and interlocking web of concepts”
(“Master Argument” 28). This is a variation on Ricoeur’s proj-
ect to develop an ontology of the self that takes up Augustine’s
conception of time in order to identify how a conception of
narrative unity is at the heart of personal identity (Oneself as
Another 157-63). It is a way of taking up consideration of the
cultural forces that shape one’s pre-understanding, the traditions
of knowledge and experience one brings to the task of formulat-
ing any specific idea or argument.
My claim here is that Christian knowing, like any other
meta-narrative of knowing, forms the cultural voice out of
which speakers and writers make argument. It is shaped by an
interpretive tradition—whether confessional, doctrinal, or tex-
tual—that provides a trajectory of interpretive meaning located
in a variously understood Christian meta-narrative. But in this
way of viewing pre-understanding, doctrine is only one of the
ways people come to frame how this knowing dwells rhetori-
cally in the expression of one’s discursive ethos. Other than for
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

theologians, it is rarely the starting place for anyone composing
discourse called forth by situations.
So what’s a critic supposed to do? It may be more useful
for a critic to ask whether a specific piece of discourse expects
a response specifically predicated on the way in which its argu-
ment reflects a Christian worldview. By identifying the expected
response, the hoped for reaction to the implied appeal in the dis-
course, the critic can begin to identify the cultural consciousness
out of which that individual configures a particular worldview
as part of the appeal of his or her discourse. Talk always reveals
the default assumptions that make up a person’s sense of cultural
identity. What matters in clarifying the social location of any act
of discourse are the ideological assumptions about the notion of
identity of the self revealed in the ethos of the one who speaks.
And what makes any particular act of speech Christian is the
nature of its narratively construed ethos—the character—voiced
in the discourse. Here we return to Aristotle’s great insight that
“character [ethos] is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor
in persuasion” (Rhetoric 1356a). It is this narrative quality of
identity, typically raised as an issue of ontology or a question of
agency, in light of the contemporary notion of the decentered
subject (cf. McGee; Charland), that is at stake in my critical
exploration of the notion of voice as the prefigural domain of
a cultural identity. When configured in text or talk, it is this
notion of voice that gives body to a discursive ethos capable of
influencing the autonomous judgment of others.
This claim is particularly relevant given the manner in
which critics have recently challenged the ideological assump-
tion that individual agency is originary or essential, arguing that
any one individual’s talk is inevitably pre-structured by the mate-
riality of that speaker’s default social and cultural consciousness
(Watts; Gunn and Treat; Jeannerod and Pacherie). This proposal
of a rhetoric of Christian discourse draws attention to the manner
in which the materiality of default assumptions may ‘speak’ an
individual in ways she or he is otherwise unaware. As Lucaites,
Condit, and Caudill have recently argued, contemporary rhetori-
cal theory “denies neither the materiality nor the significance

122
of the agency of speaker or audience, but it does contextualize
the agency of all parties to a social intersection as bound in
relationship, rather than as the solitary product of some sort of
determinism (be it economic or biological) or autonomous free
will” (612; cf. Hariman and Lucaites).
The default assumptions that make up a person’s sense of
cultural identity, one’s cultural voice, is a function of what Ricoeur
terms the “silent speech” configured in a discourse—the network
of understandings and pre-understanding an individual brings
to making argument. It is silent because the one who speaks is
often wholly unaware that in the act of configuring discourse
there are always traces of prefigural identity revealed in the
presuppositions about the nature of reality as well as the way
these assumptions structure the desired response the discourse
expects (Time and Narrative, II.99). This notion of voice reveals
‘Who is speaking here?’ in ways that can be ontologically dif-
ferentiated from the point of view expressed in a narrative or
the overt authorial claims of someone engaged in making an
argument. This notion of silent speech represents the default set
of cultural presuppositions that structure the implicit appeals
embodied in a person’s discourse—the individual’s evocation of
world as understood quite apart from the content of what the
individual has to say.
In The Four Voices of Preaching I proposed a “Matrix of
Contemporary Christian Voices” that provides critics with
a means to determine some of the more significant cultural
determinants of the pre-understanding that specifically shape
Christian appeals, not only in preaching, but in any expression
of contemporary North American religious discourse. More than
merely a exploration of contemporary homiletics, my purpose in
that study was to provide a matrix that maps four different kinds
of Christian discourse distinguished primarily by the nature of
the faith response called forth by the explicit or implied appeal
embedded in the silent speech of a preaching voice (12, 22-26).
But homiletics was merely a social location that provided both
theory and practice to explore a conception of the abode of voice
in which the religious identity of one who speaks dwells. Rather
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

than exploring stylistic or rhetorical differences in ways people
preach, that study explored distinctions in voices as expressions
of contemporary Christian prefigural cultural consciousness
that control what preachers want to have happen as a result of
people listening to their sermons (26).2
The matrix works two tensions. The first axis contrasts
Christian discourse appeals that assume a more ambiguous,
interpretivist orientation to reality on one hand with an answer
oriented objectivist set of reality appeals on the other. The sec-
ond axis contrasts Christian discourse appeals that negotiate
the tension between confessional order with that of appeals
made to individuals on a personal journey of meaning-making.
The matrix works both axes to form four different expected
responses to appeals: 1) “That’s right! That’s what we believe
around here;” 2) “May it be so in my life, Lord;” 3) “Whoa!
What should I make of/do with that?” and 4) “This conversation
matters. Let’s keep talking.” By focusing on the socio-rhetorical
question ‘Who is speaking?’ revealed in the way expectation
concerning these appeals are embedded in argument (rather
than in the theo-centric point-of-view expressed by the content
of the discourse) critics would be able to identify whether the
argument appeals are consistently construed in the same voice
throughout the discourse. In this way a critic can determine
whether the rhetor’s silent speech represents a coherent Christian
identity, by which I mean congruent as opposed to a confused
expression of a cultural voice.
A caveat must be noted concerning the recognition of plu-
rivocity in this proposal: issues of congruence of cultural voice
in a rhetor’s discourse should not be narrowly construed. Indi-
viduals can simultaneously communicate in ways that reveal the
presuppositional commitments of, say, both an Enlightenment
Rationalist and a Christian. Other Christians may speak out of a
radically de-centered postmodern Christian worldview while also
attempting to frame speech as part of the traditional Christian
meta-narrative of faith. The fact that no speaker operates out of
only one set of cultural commitments is not a bar to determining
whether the appeals implicit in the rhetor’s discourse are either

124
congruent or confused. What must be realized is that Christian
speakers cannot simultaneously invite listeners to respond to
appeals deeply grounded in the commitments of order/social
solidarity while also making appeals deeply grounded in the
claims of radical individualism. Similarly, Christian speakers
and writers cannot simultaneously invite listeners to accept the
ambiguity of “de-centered” thought while also asking listeners
to accept “objectivist” answers. A working critic should readily
be able to identify the nature of the Christian speaker’s tradition
based voice (be it a Teaching, Encouraging, Sage or Testifying
Voice) as a function of the intersection that negotiates the axes
of these presuppositions of cultural consciousness and determine
whether it is congruent or confused.
What remains constant across various evocations of tra-
dition-based reasoning—be they confessional, experiential, or
merely cultural—is the assertion that what is experienced as
a cultural voice out of which a person influenced by Christian
thought speaks is the extension of an ethos enmeshed (know-
ingly or unknowingly) in the unfolding meta-narrative of the
Christian story as a faith-shaped approach to interpreting one’s
sense of self as a person in this world. And it is this second
domain of Christian identity that I take up next.
A Narratively-Shaped Worldview
A second assertion concerning the nature of a Christian rhetori-
cal ethos is that it is best understood by its narratively shaped
worldview. A narrativized worldview is preferable to efforts to
identify the doctrine or doctrines that control a Christian world-
view because, as indicated above, the “self of self-knowledge”
is a narratively situated subject. Christian self understanding
matures as a self-conscious choice to participate in “the unfin-
ished story of Jesus” in one’s life.
Hans Frei argued that the story of Jesus as found in the
biblical texts invites those who experience it to enter into the
world of its story as incomplete because “Jesus is his story”
(“Remarks” 43). It is an unfinished story because it brooks no
division between Christology and eschatology. Christology is
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

not static. It continues unfolding eschatologically, Frei argues,
because the gospel stories provide incomplete clues to the rest
of scripture and ambiguous clues to our experience of history in
ways that invite us to envision being taken up into and joining
our story with the story unfolded in the world of the text.
In the Eclipse of Biblical Narrative Frei had concluded that
the power of the biblical narrative is lost when an interpreter
relocates its meaning in thematized propositions, ideals, and
doctrines derived as abstractions from the text. For Frei, these
rational abstractions should never replace the way in which
biblical narratives interpret experience and theological reflec-
tion about it. If readers begin with the narrative reality of the
biblical world and accept its story-world as the defining reality
of their meaning and existence, then it constitutes their identity
and their citizenship, and interprets their reality and life by its
vision of meaning and identity.
This narrative center is important since univocal Christian
apologetics and univocal Christian theologies too often begin by
having already thematized the biblical story world into a com-
prehensible system of beliefs by which supposed commensurate
argument can be rationally conducted. This secondary articula-
tion of meaning may have a role within theology, but the heart
of theology is narratively rather than propositionally idealized.
Narratives rarely if ever mean one thing which is why Frei argues
on behalf of the narrative center of Christian faith and rejects
other centers of authority be they American pluralistic culture,
Enlightenment critical epistemology, or the apologetic needs
of the church. For Frei, any attempt to begin theology with the
assumption that a universally accessible system of beliefs can be
distilled from the texts—whether a systematic theology or a sys-
tem of thought used to critique it—leads to a hermeneutic that
ignores the narrative character of the biblical text (cf. Placher
162). Rather than a universal system of belief, what is needed
for a rhetoric of Christian discourse is a universal grammar that
is commensurate with the mythos of other religious grammars,
yet distinctive in presenting the particularity of the Christian
narrative worldview.

126
Huston Smith’s The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great
Tradition provides one example of this kind grammar in a set of
fifteen warrants (1-35). These warrants represent the Christian
worldview in a grammar commensurate with other revealed
religions of the world grounded in a narrative ontology (34).
These warrants function in a dialectical manner of reasoning
that Wayne Booth calls ‘judging rhetoric,’ where the goal is to
create a commensurate grammar so that actual difference can
then be explored in ways that permit a productive conversation.
Warranted argument that demonstrates this degree of listening
to the other functions with the implicit claim that, “I am not
seeking a truce; I want to pursue the truth behind our differ-
ences” (The Rhetoric of Rhetoric 46). Booth argues that framing
an argument by first determining the warrants of agreement
between opposing worldviews portends the greatest possibility
to build community while still getting at the truth behind differ-
ences. Smith compresses the argument of his warrants of belief
common to all revealed religions of the world thus:
The world is objectively there and intelligible. It is
infinite and includes the finite with its value-laden
degrees, hierarchically ordered. As virtues ascend in
the hierarchy, they meld into one another until their
differences disappear in the Simple One. Evil features
in finitude but not in the Absolute, and because the
Absolute is all-powerful, in the end absolute perfec-
tion reigns. Human beings intersect the degrees of
reality, but in them they appear inverted, as if seen on
the surface of a glassy lake. We can not comprehend
the fullness of Reality on our own, but its outlines
are revealed to us. The key to unlocking the truths
of Revelation is symbolism. Knowing is both ratio-
nal and intuitive, both concrete and abstract. After
we have done our best to understand the world, it
remains mysterious, but through the shrouds of mys-
tery, we can dimly discern that it is perfect (33).
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

With a universal grammar of a religious worldview in hand,
Smith then offers a similar dialectical inquiry concerning the dis-
tinctivestandpointsoftheChristianTraditioninwhichheseeksto
frame universal warrants that represent a grammar of agreement
between the three great traditions of Christian belief—Roman
Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Protestants—that
comprise “The Christian Story.” He explores this storied approach
to standpoints of what is common to these traditions by simple
summaries of common belief about the historical Jesus, the Christ
of faith, Holy Week, the end and the beginning (resurrection), the
ascension and Pentecost, the gospel, the mystical body of Christ,
the theology of Saul of Tarsus, and the apocalyptic theology of
John (37-128). He concludes his survey by attempting to identify
the truly distinctive manner in which the three great traditions of
Christianity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant)
can be distinguished from one another.
His study serves as an example and perhaps even an exem-
plar of the kind of work that purposefully locates the grammar
and the mythic/storied world of Christian identity in conversation
with its other partners in world religions, in conversation within
its grand traditions, and in even in conversation with the distinc-
tive emphases within these traditions in order to challenge what
he calls “modernity’s mistake” (164). In its effort to deny any
power to symbol and uncertainty, he asserts that modern secular
thought “equated two things, absence-of-evidence and evidence-
of-absence, which once one stops to think about it, are very
different. The fact that science cannot get its hands on anything
accept nature is no proof that nature (alternatively, matter) is all
that exists” (xvi). The storied worldview of a revealed religion
like Christianity argues that it is self evident that other things do
exist which give life meaning in ways that a secular worldview
ultimately denies. He concludes, “The Christian worldview is
drenched with meaning throughout. Christians don’t seek mean-
ing. Along with other traditional people (traditional cultures are
invariably religious) they eat it, drink it, swim in it, and become
it. For the most part they don’t even bother to ask if life is mean-
ingful. They take for granted that it is” (xvi).

128
It is beyond the frame of this essay to unpack the uni-
versal grammar of a narratively shaped worldview’s distinctive
Christian beliefs—something which required ninety-one pages
in Smith’s otherwise slim volume. What matters here is that
modernism has given birth to its own form of dogmatism, even
Christian dogmatism, which begins by assuming evidence-of-
absence as the norm that refutes the power of meaning arising
from narratively construed identity. Contemporary theology’s
move to re-center its own ground of knowing in narrative rather
than propositional knowing may even be an artifact of this re-
action to modernist forms of argument that have transformed
truth into facts as determined by Enlightenment rationalism’s
criteria of certainty and validity (cf. Smith xx).
So what can a critic do? By moving Christian identity out
of doctrine and dogma that have been significantly reshaped
by the modernist conception as to what counts as truth into
a narrative-story presented as a tradition of affirmations and
beliefs, the critic is freed from having to discuss coherence with
reference to a particular doctrinal or creedal perspective. Rather
than locating a Christian ethos in abstractions of doctrine or
dogma, a Christian ethos is better understood as an identity
whose frame of reference is socially and historically located in
a tradition of Christian thought (mythos) which may be only
incidentally institutional (e.g., Grace Davie’s idea of “believing
without belonging”).
If a speaker or writer’s identity is found in the narratively-
shaped worldview of an ethos that “dwells rhetorically,” critics
can more readily determine the narrative coherence and narrative
fidelity that make up the logic of good reasons Walter Fisher
has developed in Human Communication as Narration (105-23).
His principle of narrative coherence provides critics a means to
determine the narrative integrity of the inherent storied world-
view in a rhetor’s argument. His principle of narrative fidelity
focuses on the quality of the warrants either stated or implied
by the discourse, whether they represent reasonable assertions
about a conception of social reality that would ontologically
constitute good reasons for belief and action given the world-
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

view operative in the world or a way of knowing that dwells
rhetorically in the discourse (105). Thus a coherent Christian
worldview configured in discourse must either offer or imply a
“reliable, trustworthy, and desirable guide to belief and action”
(95) commensurate with a narrative conception of Christianity’s
‘Great Tradition’.
Fisher notes that his proposal of the narrative paradigm is
heavily reliant on MacIntyre’s argument that human understand-
ing is best understood as an enacted dramatic narrative. “The
narrative paradigm,” Fischer argues, “stresses ontology rather
than epistemology, which is not to say that knowledge does not
exist but that it does not have an absolute foundation in ordi-
nary discourse. The subject of such discourse is symbolic action
that creates reality” (93). He also understands his proposal for
critical method to be an extension of Ricoeur’s explorations of
narrative theory by adding a critical dimension of rationality and
praxis (96). This shift to an ontology of the self revealed in the
constructed ethos of discourse rather than an epistemological
set of doctrines or dogmas provides a more accessible means of
engaging in critique of a narratively-shaped worldview.
A Hope Engendered Identity & Ethic of Responsibility
One does not have to be a post-Christendom philosophical theo-
logian like Frei or Ricoeur to accept the centrality of the claim
that Christianity is a religion grounded in a historical story of
faith and that any effort to appropriate that faith as one’s own
must, by necessity be understood as participating in the continu-
ation of that story. At its heart Christianity, when practiced, is a
story-shaped faith and adherents choose to live in commitment
to the notion that life matters and has meaning because this
story-shaped view of reality is controlled by the telos implicit
in the Christian narrative (cf. Wicker 71-106). Because of the
teleological implications of this narratively shaped worldview,
a proposal of a rhetoric of Christian discourse would need to
embody a theology of hope that entails an ethic of responsibility
(Ricoeur, The Just 11-35). The moral vision of one who writes
out of a Christian ethos ought to be apparent in the way in which

130
it works the tension between a poetics of love and a prose of
justice (Ricoeur, Memory 324-29).
A Christian worldview assumes that people are in this
story (the human condition) together. Therefore, Christians
who reason by a faith-based tradition of understanding, who
believe that the meaning of their life is complicit in the life of
Christ, have a moral responsibility to act in faith-constrained
ways toward the Other. This commitment to tradition and to
the narrative structure of the story in which we find ourselves
has ethical implications that form living conclusions concern-
ing how one lives into the unfinished story of Jesus. This is at
the heart of Frei’s argument that Christianity is a worldview
that brooks no division between Christology and eschatology
(“Remarks” 31-24).
Discourse that can be considered implicitly or explicitly
Christian should provide some evidence that the rhetor ap-
proaches the world as constituted by persons in need of God’s
grace and that Christian people must be willing to be the means
by which this grace is expressed (cf. Reid 21-22). Hence, Chris-
tians expect to witness or participate in instances of enacted
grace that support the “converging probabilities” that provide
a basis for the conviction that hope is reasonable. There is an
inevitable circularity to this belief (as there is to any faith—re-
ligious or secular), but this circularity does not deny the pos-
sibility that faith can be a critical commitment. Being Christian
means an individual has concluded that there is reason to hope
even when hope seems an odd notion. In Peter Berger’s language
a Christian would affirm the necessity of The Heretical Impera-
tive at work because modernity forces individuals to pluralize
both belief and experience. The medieval possibility of heresy
is now the modern existential norm. We are far more conscious
of our own existential need to choose among ways of believing
and understanding ourselves as people of faith than were our
forebears (28). He argues that our contemporary social and
intellectual commitment to modernity has created this crisis
of religious identity shaped equally by its reaction to secularity
and the way it requires individuals to constantly negotiate the
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

options of pluralism. If the viability of religious tradition is to be
sustained, he argues, those who wish to continue to be formed
by their faith tradition must choose between the deductive, the
reductive, and the inductive imperatives. The deductive option
is simply to reassert the authority of a religious tradition as if
nothing has changed (61). The reductive option is to concede to
the demands of secularity and pluralism in order to participate
in modernity’s worldview (62). The inductive option is to consis-
tently retrieve and engage the experiences and beliefs embodied
in the tradition as a way of determining self-understanding as
one participates in “modern consciousness” (62). This third
imperative “chooses” neither to continue re-inscribing the sacred
tradition of the past as if nothing has changed nor surrender
to a secularized future as if hope is limited to political and
economic might. Berger calls Christians to affirm the humanist
perspective (though some might be opposed to this qualifier)
that challenges deductive notions of truth as seemingly fixed
dogma (or doctrinal formulations) while confessing belief in
“the supernatural and sacred character of religious experience”
that lays challenge to the reductive notion that we are our only
hope (154).3
This hope implies an ethic of moral responsibility. It is
difficult to imagine a person of Christian faith who would or
could deny the teleological implications of hope as the central
affirmation of an identity that gives his or her life meaning and
purpose. Moral failure of the imperative that Berger framed
occurs when there is either an “excess of memory,” an “excess
of forgetting,” or the influence of commemorations or abuses
of either (cf. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting 56-92). Any
theory of justice articulated from a Christian perspective must
come to terms with this interplay between memory and forget-
ting. History can too easily be pressed into service of present
needs that can become a loss of hope for the Other. Christian
self-understanding cannot deny the moral consequences of a
belief in a God who acts in history, who is known through a
tradition of interpretation, and in whose story one participates
as the unfinished story of hope. At its core, this hope is ethical

132
and therefore implies an ethic of moral responsibility, whether it
be for the widow and the orphan, or for people to whom justice
has been denied over generations.
In discourse shaped fully by a Christian ethos, the telos of
hope that is configured in discourse is also rooted in faith in the
divine Other as well as an assumption that an unconditional love
flows from the divine Other to the individual and communities of
individuals who participate in this storied identity. In this sense
there need not be an explicit identification of this faith which
may more readily be found in the rhetor’s construction of the
providential nature of circumstances and purposefulness of the
divine story. Faith in the divine Other must still be embodied
in an expression of this love toward others, even enemies, as
those who are divine image bearers and co-participants in this
storied reality. While some people who present a Christian ethos
may order an ethic based on human rules, systems, programs,
or compulsions, this should not control an understanding of
Christian ethics in action. Storied approaches to a Christian
moral world recognize that hope can lay in a surprisingly un-
manageable Other who may appear in unexpected ways, places,
and persons.
So what is a critic to do? Christian hope embraces and
includes strange Other(s), who may even stand in vehement
opposition to this hope. Miroslav Volf argues that identification
of a coherent vision of justice can be articulated that does not
force a choice between analytic philosophical conceptions of a
universal justice and the inability of postmodern philosophers
to explain adequately why anyone can justify a struggle against
injustice and oppression. Rather than giving up on hope, Volf
argues in Exclusion and Embrace that there is another way of
connecting particularity and difference with justice that serves
as an alternative to both modern and postmodern thought. Like
McIntyre, he proposes that “a coherent tradition is very much
something particular and justice can be seen as dependent on
such a tradition” (205).
A critic examining discourse she or he believes to be
shaped by a Christian worldview would not look for proposals
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

for a grand solution in matters of justice, but should look for
evidence that suggests “piecemeal convergences and agreement”
(207). Christian hope is rarely articulated in grand edifices like
those attempted in systematic theologies and confessional state-
ments of faith. It is the rare individual who comments on the
issue of justice by first locating its argument in a Christian just
war theory or some other creedal means of determining an ethic
of responsibility. Volf argues that an ethic of hope, what he terms
“a will to embrace,” is revealed in how questions of the struggle
against deception, injustice, and violence are negotiated with the
desire for truth, justice, and peace in Christian discourse and
actions. He argues that Christian discourse avers that grace must
have primacy over the demand for truth and justice (29). For
Volf, coherent Christian discourse typically reveals only aspects
of such concerns, only questions and possible piecemeal solu-
tions. His argument recognizes that in human discourse there is
often a tensional dialogue between the poetics of Christian love
and the prose efforts to account for Christian justice.
Christian discourse may bear a variety of inflections
– toward truth, toward justice, toward peace – that may not be
consistent. A critical perspective that looks at Christian discourse
in this manner would not assume that a rhetor must display
a unitary system of ideas or ideals since “most of us stand in
more than one place” (Volf 207). Rather, a critic would find
fault with constructions of hope that serve self alone rather than
demonstrating a recognition of the significance of the Other,
faith-talk that functionally denies the moral consequences of a
belief in a God who acts in history, calls for forgiveness that
separate it from its Abrahamic (here including Judaism, Islam,
and Christianity) tradition of sacrifice, cost, and responsibility
to someone or something. Discourse that provides evidence of
Christian ethos that “dwells rhetorically” must provide some
orientation that suggests a coherent moral vision of hope that
entails an ethic of responsibility.
I have explored this notion of hope primarily as it affects
issues of justice and injustice. A critic of Christian discourse
could as readily attend to the manner in which discourse reveals

134
that a rhetor demonstrates a lack of respect for the Other (whether
failures in observing the needs of justice, or failures of greed and
exploitation) or demonstrates a lack of faithfulness to a tradition
of gospel understanding (through failures of self-absorption, of
pandering or of self-righteousness).4
Or conversely, the critic
may elect to explore the manner in which a rhetor has been
true to a tradition of understanding by electing to demonstrate
respect or through faithfulness even when other forces (be they
secular or pluralizing) would work against foregrounding such
belief. What is possible is that, together with the critical moves
clarifying the coherence of a rhetor’s tradition-based reasoning
and the coherence of a rhetor’s narratively shaped worldview,
a critic can also determine the coherence that inheres in the
argument of a hope engendered identity shaped by an ethic of
Christian responsibility.
CONCLUSION
In his The Religious Critic in American Culture William Dean
argues that American religious critics need to become proactive
in providing a conventional, re-visioned religious myth that can
serve to repair the disintegrating fabric of cultural identity occur-
ring because of the loss of the “exceptionalist” Puritan myth of
American destiny. Dean concludes his book by asking, “What is
an American religious critic to do?” (179). Rather than provide
the answer his project is directed to invite religious intellectuals to
stop retreating into parochial conversations and take up a public
venue to knit together a narrative that serves American life—or
at least the American spiritual culture that nourishes it.
Dean argues that religious critics need to move their ideas
out of the subcultures of religious denominations (re: George
Lindbeck’s challenge of Postliberal theology in The Nature of Doc-
trine) and out of the colony of university intellectuals (re: George
Marsden’s challenge to religious academics in The Outrageous Idea
of Christian Scholarship) and learn to speak as public intellectuals.
Ignoring conversation in the public sector, he argues, abandons
the role religion has played in providing a conventional narrative
of the public good. Though he calls for a unifying narrative, Dean
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

is keenly aware of the limitations of turning the need to look to “a
sense of the whole” (xxii) into a univocal response (166). But he
is equally aware that an embrace of pluralism as an end continues
to foster the fragmentation of any sense of the prior uniqueness
of the American identity (cf. “Sheltering Skies” 95).
As intriguing as Dean’s challenge may be, its concern and
the responses it evoked (see for example the responses in the
1995 issue of American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 16.1)
is primarily for religious insiders. Though I would not quibble
with Dean’s assessment concerning this loss of tradition’s role in
our culture nor with his challenge that academic critics who are
committed to faith traditions need to learn how to become public
intellectuals, my purpose here has focused on the question “What
is a rhetoric of Christian discourse?” and, after having identified
such a rhetoric, his question of “What’s a critic to do?”
Before critics can go public they must reach some agree-
ment about what constitutes coherent expressions of a particular
religion’s discourse while respecting its internal diversity of
expression and, especially for Christianity, recognizing that it
can no longer be assumed as the norm of North American civic
discourse. Now that Christianity is no longer the ‘resident chap-
lain’ of North American culture and no longer speaks with the
hegemonic voice of our national sense of identity (cf. Hauerwas;
cf. Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar 227-34), a rhetoric of Chris-
tian discourse is needed if critics are to recognize the unique
contribution such a discourse continues to make to the culture.
This rhetoric is needed even though some religious critics would
clearly hesitate to engage in a project if it comes close to reducing
the notion of God to a sacred convention (Cady 46) or seems
to call for a pluralistically sensitive Religion-dom to replace the
particularity of Christendom’s prior cultural contributions.
The proposal of this essay serves neither of these interests.
The value of Dean’s argument, I believe, is the clarity with which
he has identified the problem that critics face as they try to analyze
Christian speech even as we witness its collapse as a substantive
factor in the normalizing discourse of North American intellectual
culture. Nor does the proposal of this essay solve the problem

136
Dean identifies as the “ineffectual intellectual” who speaks only
to disciplinary conversation partners rather than as a public in-
tellectual who finds “a way to conceive their vision of the whole
concretely and to convey it to the society effectively” (172). I am
less sanguine about the task of recovering the social capital that
could lead us back to the era defined by a biblically religious and
classically republican worldview (Robert Bellah’s version of recov-
ering the kind “sacred conventionalism” of which Dean speaks). It
seems to me that such an enterprise cannot escape its longing to
return to a univocal expression of a normative American cultural
consciousness. Instead, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge
the plurivocal nature of public discourse especially in matters
of religious faith and provide a means to identify that which
constitutes a specifically Christian cultural consciousness given
voice in public discourse. Such a task, it seems to me, is initially
necessary if one who is self-consciously Christian wishes to take
up the work of a public intellectual willing to engage Christian
discourse in the public square.
This study has sought to identify a rhetoric of Christian
discourse, the features of a Christian ethos tacitly configured in
discourse that can be described as a particular cultural, narrative,
and moral expression of an identity that, in Simon’s term, dwells
rhetorically. I have sought to identify both the boundaries and
the domains of thought that function as the basis of its discursive
appeal configured as an abode of a Christian ethos by one who
speaks. It is offered as an alternative to critical efforts to locate
a discursive Christian identity in propositional or doctrinal con-
ceptions of Biblical faith. Rather than a repudiation of the role
of doctrine or dogma, the argument has been that these ideas
have been significantly refracted by Enlightenment rationalist
assumptions about what counts as fact and truth. As a result,
theology over the last century began to relocate its center in
gospel as story rather than as a set of propositional beliefs about
gospel, and to reaffirm Christian identity as a storied rather than
an ideational way of expressing one’s ‘self.’
Ontologically, discourse that reveals Christian expressions
of a culturally, narratively, and ethically shaped identity can be
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

distinguished from non-theistic Enlightenment rationalist, post-
modern radical subjectivist, or other non-theistic perspectives
because persons primarily characterized by one or the other of
these commitments are generally unwilling to accept the entail-
ments of each of the three commitments of a Christian ethos.
And while non-Christian theists may find this proposal for a
constitutive rhetoric of Christian discourse adaptable to their
own faith traditions (cf. Goldberg), what would make instances
of it specifically Christian is its commitment to tradition-based
Christian reasoning, the Christo-centric quality of its narratively-
shaped worldview, and the eschatological implications of its
Christian ethic of responsibility.
Of necessity the proposal offers a broad statement in order
to avoid reifying a particular, univocal conception of Christian
belief as the actual faith practice of all Christians (Marsden 38-
40)—or worse, reifying the assumption that such a rhetoric need
not be identified because everyone knows (remembers) what it
is when they see it. A proposal of this kind must also be sensi-
tive to the diversity of contemporary expressions of Christian
identity. In addition, this proposal takes an additional step to
provide critics, be they religious or secular, with a means to dis-
tinguish whether a Christian voice/identity has been implicitly or
explicitly expressed in an instance of public speech. It provides
contemporary critics with a means to compare commensurate
and incommensurate expressions of Christian pre-figural voice,
of Christian configuration of a narrative identity, and explores
how this expression must embody an ethic of responsibility that
implies a moral vision of hope. At heart, this proposal of a rheto-
ric of Christian discourse provides a starting place to identify
speech which is identifiably and distinctively Christian in its pre-
sumptive worldview. We can no longer assume that a Christian
worldview (or even a Judeo-Islamic-Christian worldview) can
be taken for granted as the norm of our culture’s discourse. For
this reason we need a rhetoric of Christian discourse that also
provides for the possibility of a set of critical moves by which
the coherence of public expressions of a Christian ethos that
dwells rhetorically can be assessed.

138
Robert Stephen Reid (Ph.D. 1994 University of Washington) is
Director of the Master’s degree in Communication program (MAC) and
Department Head of Communication at the University of Dubuque. Address
correspondence to author at 2000 University Ave, University of Dubuque,
Dubuque IA, 52001 or at rreid@dbq.edu. The author wishes to thank
Martin Medhurst for the email in December 2005 in which he asked the
various authors of the textbooks to be used in his fall 2006 graduate rhe-
torical criticism seminar to respond to the question “Is there such a thing
as a Christian approach to criticism?” and “How does your own Christian
commitment affect the way you think about and do criticism?” I came
up with the threefold division of this essay’s argument that evening and
returned it to him by email the following day. When I took up my response
later I realized that the argument might serve a wider audience and what
follows has mostly been documenting, clarifying, and editing what I sent to
him. I am also grateful to my colleague, Professor John Hatch, for a careful
reading of the essay’s argument and especially for some phrase suggestions
concerning ‘an ethic of responsibility.’ Appreciation is also expressed to the
JCR jurors whose thoughtful analysis helped clarify the argument. It is a
much better essay for the work of all of these individuals.
Endnotes
1
This task is similar to Medhurst’s invitation to twelve academic
rhetoricians to consider how their own faith traditions may influence
the manner in which they pursue their scholarly projects within the
academy in a 2004 issue of Rhetoric and Public Affairs. These rhetori-
cians explored ways in which their own faith traditions affect the
kinds of projects that interest them and the topoi that are relevant
to how they reason. This last measure is particularly relevant to the
argument of this essay.
2
A footnote at my discussion of this matter in The Four Voices of
Preaching states, “Though developed as a means to identify contempo-
rary preaching purposes, the matrix is part of my ongoing project to
identify a theory of contemporary Christian discourse” (26n16). The
present essay represents my effort to deliver on that promise.
3
More recently (2004) Berger has indicated that it is this pluralizing
tendency, perhaps even more than the secularizing tendency, that is the
greater of the two pressures on the contemporary individual who would
be committed to a tradition of faith as the norm of self-understanding or
his or her identity (Matthews “Interview with Peter Berger”).
4
These categories of moral failure in Christian discourse were
worked out through extensive conversation with Professor Lucy Lind
Hogan of Wesley Theological Seminary. I presented them at the 2002
Academy of Homiletics in an as yet unpublished paper entitled “Ir-
responsible Preaching.”
ROBERT STEPHEN REID

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