Why I Am Not Persuasive
By Richard Lischer (1999-2000)
Shortly after I preached at an Academy of Homiletics meeting in Oakland, California, a colleague said wryly, “I found your sermon most persuasive.” I presume he spoke tongue in cheek, having read a friend’s early critique of my rejection of ‘persuasion’ as a paradigm for Christian preaching.
Why would anyone wish not to be persuasive, especially a preacher, of all people, whose “success” depends on his or her ability to win an audience? In this endeavor the preacher follows certain biblical precedents. Jesus apparently told his parables in a religiously contested situation. Paul argued his message against a variety of opponents in the marketplace, the synagogue, and even in his own churches. Like Paul, we preach in an atmosphere of religious and cultural pluralism. Persuasion is a rhetorical necessity in a capitalist democracy. How else are you going to elect a candidate or sell a product? It flourishes in a society like ours that prizes the exercise and spoils of free speech.
The art of persuasion was born in the Athenian assemblies where free white men of property eloquently debated their rights among one another. With the Hellenization of Christianity, the ideal of persuasion was transposed into the church’s theology, polity, and preaching. Until our century, many of the church’s most famous preachers were professional rhetoricians and lawyers.
Despite many modifications of the concept, the legacy of persuasion flourishes among democratic churches that debate and vote on such issues as the ordination of women, hospitality to gays, same -sex unions, and the elements of the eucharist. In the culture of persuasion, biblical commands, as well as the historic doctrines of the church, are subject to the speaker’s ability to win assent to them.
Persuasion is in the air we breathe. One critic says that we really can’t talk without being persuasive, by which I think she means to affirm the generally “suasive nature of discourse.” The only alternative to persuasion is neutral statements, but thanks to J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, we know there is no such thing as a neutral statement. But one should not attenuate so rich and historic a concept as persuasion by reducing it to a general theory of influence in discourse. Persuasion then becomes a cipher to be filled by anything one wishes to say about language. Must the words “I love you” or “Glory to God in the highest!” always be persuasive? In what senses?
All uses of language, including its Christian iterations, are not automatically persuasive. Neutral statements are not the only alternatives to persuasion. Several weeks ago, during a worship service I mentally reviewed the importance of persuasion in the proclamation of the gospel (Yes, I am able to praise God and think about homiletics at the same time). It was during the Offertory, and we were singing, “Let the vineyards be fruitful, Lord,/ and fill to the brim our cup of blessing./ Gather a harvest from the seeds that were sown,/ that we may be fed with the bread of life,” when it occurred to me that “the seeds that were sown” represent the word of God in preaching. A sower went out to sow. A profligate, careless sower at that, who broadcast seeds over thorny, rocky, and inarable ground. One thinks of the many ways we profligately sow the word in pastoral care, teaching, preaching, and, above all, worship. We plant and pray in trust, knowing that God alone gives the increase. To insist on “persuasion” as a paradigm for the sowing and germination of the word of God simply does not do justice to the environment in which we live and minister.
Such a broad-band insistence on persuasion presupposes no environment or location for the preached word other than a vaguely democratic atmosphere and, if democratic, a necessarily agonistic atmosphere—what linguistic expert Deborah Tannen calls “the Argument Culture”—in which ideological battles rage like fires in an oilfield. It is the rhetorical version of Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” We know this culture too well. I am not ready to transpose that chaos onto the church and accept it as the normative environment for worship and preaching. Despite the increasingly conflicted nature of church life, the preaching of the gospel still occurs in an ecology of shared hope and humanity in which the listeners are no less persuaded than the chief persuader. Remember, in this discussion we are not considering the effects of a particular missionary sermon that might be labeled “persuasive,” but a paradigm for the way the church uses God’s word.
In his important book Early Christian Rhetoric, Amos Wilder reminded us that the basic character of the gospel is a revelation, not a persuasion (p. 21). If you reread the Gospels and epistles through the lens of his insight, you cannot miss the necessary continuity between God’s method of communication and our habits of speaking. And you cannot help but notice how regularly we sever that continuity. It needn’t follow that anyone (like me) who agrees with Wilder is anti-rhetoric, rhetorically-challenged, or indifferent toward the beauties of language. The question is whether our “sticking point,” to use one homiletician’s terminology, is the sermon’s adherence to the character of revelation or its adherence to rhetorical principles.
The great virtue of Wilder’s book is that it opens our eyes to a different kind of rhetoric whose rules and aims break the mold of language, which is why he calls the gospel “the New Utterance.” The Bible is rich in every mode and form of language. It is subtler, more dramatic, and much more interesting than we are. We should not take its manifold richness and crush it into a persuasion. One does not take a beatitude or a doxology, a promise or a lament, and twist it into a strategy of influence. That is the classic student mistake. That is how we turn the gospel into moralism.
One might say, yes, but Wilder was operating with a deficient view of persuasion. That may be true, but I doubt it. Persuasion is an old idea. It’s more likely he was reflecting the consensus definition, the one that has circulated freely in the blood of western culture for 2500 years, namely, persuasion as the use of language to get people to do or think what they don’t want to do or think. My critic honors the consensus definition when she asks, “How do we convince others to listen to us, accept, and act on our ideas?” But the New Utterance cannot be conveyed in an old bucket. Of course, the theories of Aristotle and Cicero have been massaged by Burke, Perelman, Kohrs Campbell, Derrida, and many others who have revised their concepts. Indeed, that there are now so many species of persuasion pretty much ruins the word for scholarly discussion. “Persuasion” offers a shaky platform, at best, for homiletics and preaching. The language of the gospel cannot rest on a disputed definition, especially one that is adventitious to theology.
I don’t reject persuasion as a paradigm for preaching because I disapprove of it for being rationalistic, exclusivist, coercive, or manipulative, though it can be and has been all those things. It’s simply inadequate—like explaining Jackson Pollock by a discussion of paint. A rhetorical paradigm cannot do justice to the richness of our theological calling.
One of my colleagues says I reject persuasion because I have such a low opinion of sinful human beings, the thought being that most sinners are too far gone to be moved by beauty or compelling arguments. At first, I resisted that conclusion, thinking of myself as a dour Lutheran, perhaps, but not a dour Calvinist. But she’s right. The “powers” of which Paul speaks will never be persuaded to behave themselves. Rhetoric will never “replace violence” or “create human community.” It will not change hearts. It is a utensil, as user-friendly to monsters as to saints. I am writing these lines as our military is dropping bombs on the people of another country, a mere sixty years after poet W.H Auden lamented the plight of Europe, “as the clever hopes expire.” If we are to have peace or genuine community, it will only occur when enemies embrace the true source of reconciliation.
On the other hand, I think my (friendly) reader is mistaken in her theological appraisal of me and of rhetoric. One’s attitude toward persuasion does not merely reflect a theological anthropology. It relates more directly to Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. Whatever happened to Jesus in the darkness of that cool Palestinian morning, happens to all who associate their lives and language with him. Because I understand our speech to be redeemed—crucified and risen—and located at the heart of a new community of the baptized, I see no sense in privileging the standard technique of persuasion over the church’s own life and habits of discourse.
Perhaps if we think of how ordinary preachers become wonderful preachers, it might help us understand how lives are actually changed in the church. I was asked recently why it is that some preachers suddenly blossom. It occurred to me that over the years I have not seen any preacher improve dramatically by focusing on persuasion either as a technique or a goal. I have seen no preachers change really change by working on their imagery or seeking the perfect glass slipper of form. The transformations I have witnessed occurred in those who caught fire in other ways, who have, for example, surrendered themselves to the Holy Spirit, or renewed their devotion to Christ, or given themselves to some practice of ministry only to be surprised by renewal. One pastor discovered the poor in his parish, and something happened to his preaching; another devoted herself to prayer as never before and began to speak with power; one discovered the goodness of his congregation as his wife lay dying, and suddenly in the midst of unspeakable sorrow he became a free man in the pulpit; another found his own voice in training others to witness. Mysteriously, they all became changed preachers! Many a church’s mission has loosed the tongue of its preacher. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a B+ preacher until he got caught up in something larger than himself.
Persuasiveness may be observed and even analyzed as an effect of the sermon. Two prior questions, however, are more important; the first I have already alluded to: how does the speech adhere to God’s revelation on which it is based? Does it respect the richness of its many voices? And second, how shall we join this speech to the other practices of the church? The preacher is always seeking a body for God’s word in order that language and action might become the obverse of one another, much in the way the Book of Acts portrays the word of God as a being with its own communal thickness and momentum.
I believe the word of God will grow and multiply when it is grounded in the church’s mission and not a rhetorical theory. Startling improvements in preaching will continue to erupt out of the ordinary practices of the people of God. Real transformations will occur but, disturbingly, at some remove from our most cherished homiletical rules. Homiletics must sustain its age-old dialogue with rhetoric but on a new footing. It must challenge traditional categories with the strength of its own message, the New Utterance of the gospel.