Abstract
Admitting that God’s rhetoric in the Bible is extremely difficult to judge by human standards, Philip Arrington, a self-confessed agnostic and professor of literature and rhetoric living in the evangelical heartland of America, attempts to do just that. His book is a deliberately anachronistic critical exercise in reading the Bible, using the resources and forms of classical Greek rhetoric to analyse the persuasive language of God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament. He is immersed in the rich literature of rhetorical studies since Kenneth Burke, but less well equipped in biblical and theological materials, perhaps more conscious of the assumptions of his surrounding Christian culture. But with perseverance and a willingness to exercise the suspension of disbelief (that the God of Genesis was somehow schooled by Aristotle), this book becomes a challenging and sometimes provocative read. Like Robert Alter before him, who played with biblical narrative and modern fiction, Arrington plays with rhetorical forms, tropes and styles that are almost entirely foreign to most of the Bible in close readings of ‘conversations’ between God, Abraham, Moses, Job and others and the result is often revealing for both literature and theology. Of course it is all a game within the text in which everything is an invention of God who ‘invents’ his own ethos in creation, and then invents the humanity that is the ‘audience’ of his covenant-building rhetoric. To the skeptical mind there is nothing outside the text. Nevertheless, though sometimes skating on a rather thin ice of theology, this literary exercise in biblical reading does provoke questions for theology that demand attention, disturbing religious assumptions that are inbuilt into doctrines of creation, atonement, Christology and so on. Most interdisciplinary critical exercises have to begin with an excuse, and Arrington confesses that ‘my effort suffers from its own admitted limitations’ (p. 253), but that should not be cause for their abandonment. As is so often the case, the agnostic author admits that this exercise has brought him to a far deeper respect for the Bible than he had previously possessed. He is not prepared to say more.
No doubt this respect is assisted by the particular identity of the theistic opposition at the outset since ‘this book’s focus from the start was the biblical God in whom so many Americans believe, often without being familiar with the Bible itself.’ (p. 252). This is an important observation and to be borne in mind by the book’s likely readership of biblical scholars and students. This is an agnostic’s shrewd and clever critique of Christian fundamentalism—but it is also a fascinating journey into biblical literature and the assumptions that are made about it by more critical voices within theology.
One practical observation: the book is presented in a tiny print that occupies little more than half each page in an odd column. It does not make for comfortable reading.