Christian rhetoric: scraps for a manifesto.

Too much Christian theology is rhetorically dangerous, by neglect or by design. Academic writing excuses itself from rhetorical care in the selfless service of some precise truth--and then deforms our only means for speaking truth. Popular theology typically borrows rhetorical tricks without regard for their criteria or consequences. Theology dangerous by design threatens in the name of God when it means really to summon the local police.

Each of these theological styles--there are many others--is dangerous as writing because it neglects or abuses rhetorical power. The preached or prayed religion of an enfleshed Word, Christianity professes ultimate rhetorical ambitions. So the double danger: A theological writer can refuse to attend to the rhetorical devices necessarily in play or can claim them grandiosely for anti-Christian purposes. The first danger leads to the second.

Histories of Christian theology place its origin in the contest between revelation and philosophy. The narratives can forget that those philosophies were not textbook systems. They were persuasive schools, historical communities constituted by relations of students to teachers, by common practices of ways-of-life, by the handing on of certain texts that had the power to call and correct. Some of the forms of philosophic persuasion are reflected in the New Testament letters. Many more find their way into early Christian writing.

A moral fable about Christian theology might better stress the original competition with flourishing schools of rhetoric. We read this in Augustine's Confessions, of course, but we do not remember it, partly because Augustine represents his conversion as a decisive turn from rhetoric to revelation. Attentive readers of any page in the Confessions know how much rhetoric survived conversion--or motivated it. In his Milanese garden, Augustine sees not Christ, but the stately figure of a personified Continence. She exhorts by example and by well modulated shame. Augustine is then commanded to read by a pure voice--by the provocation of voice alone, without name, body, sex, logic. A rhetorician's conversion towards a new rhetoric able to command bodies.

Augustine was not alone. The three other "doctors" or teachers of Latin-speaking theology--Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory--were accomplished orators, but also avid students of rhetorical arts. Ambrose wrote a whole treatise in imitation and correction of Cicero, while Jerome dreamed that he would be accused before God of being more Ciceronian than Christian. Even Gregory the Great, two centuries later in Christian time, is praised by his biographer as pre-eminent at Rome for rhetoric. Latin theology invents itself when rhetoricians read the Christian bible in search of a higher art. It can be no surprise then that all four of the Latin "doctors" are renowned not only as theologians, but as preachers and moral exhorters. Or, to speak less anachronistically: the four founders are simultaneously teachers and preachers--persuaders to divine wisdom more than professors of it.

In this fable, the rhetorical cast of theology survives the decline of civil rhetoric. Long after the pagan schools languished or were closed in Western Europe, rhetorical sensibility continued to animate Christian writing. Some medieval writers of theology are praised as gifted stylists--certainly the "mystics," women and men, canonized and heretical, but also theological poets and allegorists (Alan of Lille, the Victorines, Bonaventure). Even the staple forms of Scholastic writing, disputed question and literal exposition, imitate classroom exercises and so echo performed persuasion. The disputed question descends from the Platonic (or Augustinian) dialogue, and the expositions or commentaries carry forward practices of the ancient instruction.

Theological eloquence remains as well an ideal among Scholastic writers. When Thomas Aquinas describes what it is to compose Christian theology, he speaks of instructing intellects, moving passions, changing those who receive its formation. Roger Bacon insists that the rhetoric of theology surpasses in grandeur anything that has been or could be attained by pagan philosophy. Bonaventure writes that the Spirit of God founded the church on "holy speeches (eloquia divina)," which remain its foundations. Of course, the fable would continue, this rhetorical sensibility decayed with the industrialization of late medieval schools. Older classroom forms were rejected or exploded. More popular genres--homiletic, pastoral, spiritual--were split off from academic theology. Models of legal speech occupied moral topics, while doctrine operated increasingly under bureaucratic surveillance for heresy. The recovery of ancient belles-lettres by "humanists" brought pagan rhetoric to life again outside its Christian transformations. The pressure was increased by polemic against groups outside: the heretics who passed from being recurring conventicles to founding alternate churches. Then philosophy itself seemed to abandon ancient rhetorical modes for new ideals of logic and science. It began to prefer the literal report of experimental inquiries or quasi-geometrical arguments. Theology, cut off from its philosophical and rhetorical origins, became the strident speech of warring sects.

The fable is much too simple. It demands a hundred qualifications and counterexamples. But it may point us to a moral worth noticing in our present situation: One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when most humanistic disciplines--not to say, literature and all of the fine arts--have passed through several generations of radical formal innovation, theology is still written as if the conventional forms posed no problems.

In the modern centuries, some theologians have tried to provoke the crisis of expressive forms. If Pascal's Pensees remains in fragments, their concentration and vivacity suggest a strong alternative to theological composition as usual. The Provincial Letters go further: puncturing debates over grace and morality in gossipy correspondence, Pascal's persona reclaims for theology not only satire, but social portraiture and convincing counter-example. Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers mobilizes the despisers' taste against them as it deploys the ancient forms of philosophic protreptic and baptismal catechesis. His dialogue, Christmas Eve, pays its respects to Plato (whose rhetorical forms he elsewhere appreciates), but also revivifies the parable. Then Kierkegaard, whose fierce challenges to theological form have been so regularly--so necessarily--ignored by commentators. His pseudonyms are treated as the flimsiest masks for his presumed doctrines, and his elaborate dialectical structures are reduced to formulae and "-isms."

These and a few other modern writers have tried mightily to provoke a general crisis of Christian expressive forms, but they did not succeed. They are typically treated the way some theologians treat negative or apophatic theology: You quote pseudo-Dionysius on the failure of the divine names, agree with him, and then go on to write your treatise as if language about God functioned just like language for buying five red apples--or for attacking your political opponents. Picking up a new tome of systematic theology, I sometimes exclaim: How could this be written more than a century and a half after Either/Or, more than a century after Nietzsche's Zarathustra? Hasn't the author heard the news?

Some recent theological authors have heard it. In their different ways, Rahner and von Balthasar were preoccupied with re-ordering the structure of theological topics and arguments. Rahner was a master of muted irony, and von Balthasar a gifted elegist. Lonergan too, by the time of Method in Theology, broke through his own standard prose to a severe simplicity, liturgical in its rhythms and repetitions. From another direction, engaged theologies--liberatory, feminist, queer--have relied on the rhetoric of testimony, ethnography, and political criticism. But who was the Kierkegaard--or Pascal or Schleiermacher--for the twentieth century? Who pushed the crisis of theological form to its next stage? So much theological writing has been intent upon regaining intellectual respectability by rejecting rhetoric in order to be rigorous--or by lapsing into persuasion's tritest forms to reassure itself that it could still move people to tears. It has sought respectability or instant effect. The great formal experiments happened elsewhere in Christian culture--in certain novels and poems, for example, or in films and paintings, or in increasingly self-conscious performances of liturgy.

Rhetorical impulses and effects can be ignored in theology, but never erased. The denial of rhetoric is a rhetorical cliche: it was overused already when Socrates quoted it to mock it. Speech stripped of all ornament or flourish still aims to persuade, to address. Systematic argument that affects to be passionless algebra makes rhetorical claims through constriction, pure abstraction, universality. Spiritual counsel that claims to be heartfelt improvisation adheres to tacit conventions of genre. Testimonies, like sonnets, have their rules--which are all the more binding for being unacknowledged.

It would be more candid to admit how rhetorical theology must be--and then to take up the challenge of finding new rhetoric for our current circumstances. A comparison of contemporary theological writing with the library of earlier genres can suggest some retrievals or adaptations. Other experiments could be imitated (as in the first Christian centuries) from philosophy or philosophically instructed theory. Many "Continental" writers now engage Christianity and its linguistic practices. (Some names: Agamben, Derrida, Kristeva, Ranciere, Vattimo, Zizek.) Unexampled experiments are also required--to make good on Augustine's claim that Christian rhetoric knows devices that exceed any pagan persuasion in attractiveness. Deliberate experiments are needed not only to write theology seriously, but to prevent Christian rhetoric from being colonized by other forces.

When theology forgets or denies its kinship with rhetoric, it denies the limits on its language and opens itself to manipulation. A doctrinal formula adopted for particular polemical purposes becomes more dangerous, not less, when it pretends to be a dispassionate and general proposition. Ethical precepts that are helpful and necessary when correcting a particular community or accusing some of its members become tyrannical when read as universal norms. So far as theology pretends to be un-rhetorical, it deprives itself of the resources for resisting abuse or for responding to the wholesale corruption of Christian language.

In the United States, at least, we witness a corruption of Christian language in the service of bellicose imperialism. So many Christian images, genres, and source-texts have been pressed into service as slogans for one violent policy or another that I am never sure how many are left standing. A cynical and greedy tyranny may yet fuse its violence into Christian discourse so effectively that people feel themselves ethically impelled to reject the discourse as a whole. It wouldn't be the first time--even in recent history: think, for example, of theological justification for chattel slavery or torture in the name of state security. This is the rhetorical situation we inhabit--the feverish regime of a Christian sophistry, to use the term with Plato's sense: the twisting of the most precious words and the most attractive promises into a marketable technology for acquiring and exercising police power. (Leave aside the justice of Plato's portraits of actual sophists.) Theology's heedlessness about rhetoric weakens its powers for resisting cynical abuse. The failure to take responsibility for rhetorical energies invites their transformation by sophistry--into sophistry.

Responding to sophistry cannot be easy, precisely because sophistry aims to twist language so that it cannot be untwisted. Sophistry encourages its victims to meet it always on in its terms. They are seduced into competing for mere rhetorical victory, conceived as coercive persuasion. It is possible to gain victory over sophistry while succumbing to sophistry. Indeed, it is only too likely that one wins the war of coercion by a slightly cleverer sophistry.

The genius of Christian rhetoric ought to prefer other potencies in language--and perhaps especially ellipsis, irony, negation, or silence. These are the devices of Jesus in the canonical gospels and of the gospels themselves as persuasive structures. These are also--not coincidentally--the best devices for resisting sophistry.

At present, Christian speech in America is so thoroughly colonized by the impulses of empire that the examples are likely to be tediously familiar. The most telling are the most overused. At the risk of tedium, it is worth looking again at examples from debates around gender and sexuality, because in them theological anxiety and social disapproval have opened the door wide to violent sophistry. It has not hesitated to move in.

Ours is hardly the first time, of course, during which Christian sexual teaching has borrowed dubious scientific language or medical models for purposes of regulation--only to find itself colonized by the forces behind them. Nor is it the first time in church history that new science or medicine has been deployed alongside much older rhetorical devices. The most striking similarity in the rhetoric of Christian attacks on queer desire over centuries is their violence.

At my hometown Pride parade last June, "Christian missionaries" were stationed at prominent intersections with signs and megaphones. Here is how they describe what they did on one of their Web sites:

    Christians brought the theology of the church house to the very
    gates of hell in Atlanta ... gentle Christian warriors brought the
    Gospel of Christ to the "Pride Parade" held in beautiful Piedmont
    Park. This parade marked the 35th consecutive year that sodomites
    have paraded their perversity and sin through the streets of this
    great city and spilled into its parks. God help us. (1)

Here is what I actually heard from the "gentle Christian warriors": a droning misquotation of the Christian Bible as proof that homosexuals must repent or else commit crimes from treason to child-abuse and then be tortured forever by a God who will delight in their screams. How many of the sentences shouted through the air could have been taken word for word from preaching against sodomy by Peter Damian in the 11th century, by Bernardino of Siena in the 15th, or by Puritan tracts in the 17th. Word for word, but also rhetorical blow for rhetorical blow. If you put out on a table a sample of Christian discourses on queer sex from the middle ages to the present, from authors in different denominations and countries, you will be astonished by the repetition of rhetoric designed to produce violence.

That recognition raises painful questions. For example, how should a Christian writer take responsibility for the bodies of Christian rhetoric already shouted? For the twisting arguments, ugly condemnations, mocking caricatures--for instant judgments that issued in bloody punishments? Must you rehearse these rhetorical crimes whenever you retrieve the old texts, their terms and genres? To ask the question hopefully: How might a theologian write against the violence of those enduring rhetorical devices? It is so much easier to proclaim the reformation of Christian concepts than to escape the rhetorical force of the repeating Christian speeches. The rhetorical naivete of perfect reform.

I have tried over the years to analyze Christian rhetoric around queer love. I have sometimes carried out the analysis as ideological critique, emphasizing the political uses of deliberate internal contradictions. At other times, I have practiced critique after Foucault, studying how speeches and disciplines flow through a network of institutions, practices, even buildings to regulate bodies. Now I return to a sort of Augustinian critique, the mobilization of alternate desire. I say "Augustinian," but it might be clearer to call it Socratic.

Socrates is an erotic rhetorician. He outdoes the sophists in calling forth desire, but he calls it forth ironically into erotic communities without tyranny. Read through Augustine, Socrates offers hope not only for more beautiful theology, but for a theology less vulnerable to violent abuse. You resist abusive theology by recognizing community of flesh--not a proposed, utopian community, but community already attracted into how many unrecognized unions of divine eros. The violence of corrupted Christian speeches is counteracted by confessing that church already lives where church is about to be most violently imposed.

On Sunday evenings in Atlanta, a troupe of drag queens used to take over a gay bar to hold a Gospel Hour.2 With the help of their guest musicians, and the enthusiastic participation of the crowd, they sang old hymns and new praise music. Towards the end of the hour, when voices were hoarse and handkerchiefs waved in the air, members of the audience began to cry. Because this was, after all, worship--not faux worship, not drag of church, but church.

This event--this church in a queer bar--answered Christian condemnations not only by surviving from week to week, but by embodying a counter-rhetoric that instructed baptismal desire without committing new violence. The particular form of this counter-rhetoric we might call "camp."

Camping is closely allied to a number of core Christian concepts, including incarnation, sacrament or liturgy, and moral imitation, but also to indispensable forms of theological rhetoric, including spiritual exegesis and negative theology. Camping is impossible to define--Susan Sontag was right about that, at least--and impossible even to circumscribe with a hedge of adjectives (say the combination of irony, aestheticism, theatricality, sharp humor). (3)

If you cannot define it, you can tell stories about its devices or effects. So I could say that camping is passionately imitating or inhabiting another role or way of life or style while making clear all the time that you refuse simple identification. Or camping assumes that while you can never capture what you're trying to perform, you can still gain spiritually potent access to it through your imperfect gestures. Or camping produces piercingly beautiful effects through the artificial and the comic, though grotesque tatters and unbelievable plumes. Camping does this by scavenging and inventiveness, by odd combinations or juxtapositions, but also by its willingness to go over the top, to transgress good taste, to get in your face. Most of all, camping is done by putting queer bodies at risk of social incoherence--with its attendant ridicule or violence.

We know the rhetorical tropes or genres associated with camping--and used to great effect by queer Christian groups in America since the 1940s. These genres include invective and reasoned critique, but they blossom in the sometimes offensive satire that calls down shame on tyrants. Other tropes and genres follow shaming. These performances commend roles, shapes of life, that are not supposed to exist: the Queer Christian, the Woman Priest, the Monk-Paramour. You commend the roles by embodying them unexpectedly--out of place, fantastically garbed, self-knowing, with persuasive presence all the more convincing because sudden in its epiphany.

What Christian body is not queer, reborn as it is into a resurrected flesh that it eats in order to join eternally? (4) What queer Christian body is not also a word?

"Camp" names the ironic rhetoric of Christian bodies. It is a contribution to negative theology--and a rebuke specific to our new positivisms, not least those presumed in the disedifying church wars over sex.

The wars display a general rhetorical failure. They call for a rewriting of every kind of theology, not just the theology of sex or gender. Camp is not a special taste among queers and their hip allies (or critics). It is a gift to the future of theological rhetoric.

Theological camping, with Socratic irony, recognizes the asymmetry in any rhetorical response to Christian sophistry. Sophists always have an advantage so far as they will resort to deceit, coercion, and violence. Totalizing rhetoric--propaganda--preens itself on its ruthless effectiveness. There is no immediate reply to propaganda that can boast equal or greater effect in the moment. Camping--along with other forms of incarnational irony--concedes the asymmetry in order to flip it. Flipping sophistry does not mean reversing the asymmetry. The asymmetry of totalizing rhetoric has to be undone, not reactivated in favor of "our side." So camping can never, while remaining itself, become the literal, the dominant, the victorious. We write camp theology to resist--but also to remind ourselves of the theology we must not write.

Notes

1. I quote from http://www.operationsaveamerica.org/streets/ga/atlanta-pride-parade-2005.htm (last consulted in October 2005).

2. See for a description and much richer analysis, Edward R. Gray and Scott Lee Thumma, "Amazing Grace! How Sweet the Sound! Southern Evangelical Religion and Gay Drag in Atlanta," in A Rainbow of Religious Studies, ed. J. Michael Clark and Robert E. Goss (Las Colinas TX: Monument Press, 1996), pp. 33-54.

3. Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,'" first anthologized in her Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966) and frequently reprinted since. The four attributes are proposed by Jack Babuscio, "Camp and the Gay Sensibility," in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 19-38, at p. 20.

4. There are fuller descriptions of the queerness of Christian flesh. To give only two recent examples: Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), and Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Each is more ambitious and more accomplished than these scraps.