Theology In Language Rhetoric And Beyond

'Theology in Language, Rhetoric, and Beyond' places before a broad audience of students and general readers theological essays on both the Old and New Testaments. Theology is seen to derive from a number of sources: the biblical language, biblical rhetoric and composition, academic disciplines other than philosophy, and above all a careful exegesis of the biblical text. The essay on Psalm 23 makes use of anthropology and human-development theory; the essay on Deuteronomy incorporates Wisdom themes; the essay called Jeremiah and the Created Order looks at ideas not only about God and creation but also about the seldom-considered idea of God and a return to chaos; and the essay on the Confessions of Jeremiah examines, not the words thatthis extraordinary prophet was given by God to preach, but what he himself felt and experienced in the office to which he was called. One essay on Biblical and theological themes includes a translation into the African language of Lingala, which weaves together the story of early Christianity with the more recent founding of churches in Africa and Asia. Jack R. Lundbom argues eloquently through these essays that theology is rooted in biblical words, in themselves, in rhetoric and their different contexts.

An illuminating New Testament study depicts the power and beauty of language that speaks with the words of God and man. Words call man to battle or summon him to prayer. More and more, today man is analyzing his language and asking: What is the purpose of language? What do the words we speak mean? What is their religious significance? Dr. Wilder's extraordinary work attempts to answer these questions and, in particular, to study the qualities of the language that ushered in a new religion, the early Christian faith.

The Sermon on the Mount never ceases to challenge readers in every generation. New methods and new insights into new surroundings have to be applied to the most influential speech ever given. In this study, Ernst Baasland takes a fresh look at the history of research done on it, both on its broad influence and on the variety of interpretations. The historical questions are seen from new perspectives. Is orality the key to a better understanding? To what extent can we reconstruct a pre-text and the question of authenticity be answered? These questions are seen through historiographical lenses. The author argues in favour of a universal addressee and maintains that the speech contains radical philosophical thinking. The first audience consisted of Jews, and the religiously based understanding of life is conceived within Judaism. However, its ethics of wisdom is developed in a Hellenistic setting and provides a radical philosophy of life.

"Explores prayer as a rhetorical art, examining situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to the divine"--Provided by publisher.

This book analyses collaborative activities across the visual arts to show the power of non-verbal rhetoric in the Middle Ages.

Reading Heikki Räisänen’s hermeneutics in context, Timo Eskola explores the development of Western New Testament interpretation. Reclaiming a Wredean approach to the Scriptures, Räisänen focuses on tradition and interpretation. He builds on Weberian sociology, adopted through Peter Berger’s theories, and substitutes sacralized culturalism for biblical theology. After examining fourteenth century Quran-criticism and its impact on Reimarus, Eskola discusses the genesis of the revised history-of-religion theory that Räisänen developed when investigating the Quran’s relationship to the Bible. Sociology then becomes a link between standard historicism and poststructuralism as Räisänen reinterprets Berger’s sociology of knowledge. Räisänen’s sacralized culturalism finally becomes the theory from which his magnum opus The Rise of Christian Beliefs has been written.

This book, Rhetoric in European and World Culture, defines the position of rhetoric in the cultural and educational systems from ancient times through the present. It examines the decline of its importance in a period of rationalism and enlightenment, presents the causes of why rhetoric (reduced to a system of rhetorical tricks) came to have negative connotations, and explains why rhetoric in the 20th century was able to regain its position. It demonstrates that the prestige of rhetoric sharply falls when it is reduced to a refined method for deceiving the public, and increases when it is seen as a scientific discipline that is used throughout all of the fields of the humanities - philosophy, logic, semiotics, literary science, linguistics, the science of media and others. In this sense, rhetoric strives for universal recognition and the cultivation of rhetorical expression, spoken and written, including not only its production but also reception and interpretation. In such a renaissance of interest, rhetoric appears not merely as a guide to language skills, but as a complex theoretical field examining human behaviour in social communication. Chapters 1-9 describe the development of rhetoric from its Greek, Hellenic and Roman beginnings to rhetoric in the context of medieval Christian culture, later during the periods of humanism, Enlightenment, baroque. The final chapter is concerned with rhetoric in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It takes into account geography, including the history of rhetoric in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, Russia, the Czech Lands, Moravia, Slovakia and from the 19th century in the United States. The final chapter presents an answer to the question of whether corresponding systems of rhetorical knowledge have been formed beyond the borders of Mediterranean antiquity. The selected examples of theoretical works on "the art of speech" from India, the Middle East, China, Korea and Japan show that each language community forms its own concept, theory and practice of persuasive and suggestive speaking behaviours. Often such findings, instead of being used as manuals for the stylization and presentation of speeches, rather concentrate on analyzing written documents, in which we can find not only specific categorical devices of the given culture (as is the case with comments on the Vedic texts of ancient India) but also tropes and figures characteristic of Greek and Roman rhetoric, e.g., the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament.

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.