Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Chap. 4: Challenging the Rhetorical Half-Turn: Feminist and Rhetorical)

At this particular critical juncture in its country's history1 South African biblical scholarship seems in a fortuitous position to make a significant contribution to biblical scholarship on the whole by engendering a "full rhetorical turn" in biblical studies2. Not only has significant work on the rhetoric and ethics of inquiry already been done here3 but the New South Africa in search of democratic forms of living together also seems to cry out for the articulation of an emancipator rhetoric and politics of meaning. Hence it is my hope that this new situation will foster rhetoric of inquiry that enables scholars to recognize the socio-cultural location and religion-political functions of their discourses. The present rhetorical-historical situation of South Africa, which consists in a microcosm of global differences and struggles, challenges biblical studies, I suggest, to engage with feminist biblical studies4 and feminist theory to create a theoretical space in which a radical democratic politics of meaning and a religious rhetoric of transformation can be articulated.

As the title of this chapter suggests, I will explore the rhetoric of inquiry in biblical studies by focusing attention on the contested notion of "feminist criticism5 I begin with the observation that biblical studies has become stuck in a "rhetorical half turn." Although the past decade has seen the revival of rhetorical criticism6I argue that biblical scholarship has not yet made the full epidemiological turn to a rhetoric of inquiry insofar as it has barely recognized the contributions feminist and liberalization scholarship have made to the New Rhetoric7.Most recent male stream works on the reinvention of rhetoric or on new approaches in Christian Testament studies barely take note of feminist and critical liberation theories because they remain caught up in the scientist and objectiveness ethos of the modern logic of identity.9 I illustrate this contention with reference to Vernon Robbins's interpretation of the Mark an anointing story. Next I sketch the salient points of a feminist critical rhetorical approach. In a third step I suggest that the "feminine" coding of religion and rhetoric keeps both of them in their ongoing captivity to positivist scientific. A concluding section discusses how the collaboration between a critical feminist rhetoric of liberation and a biblical or theological rhetoric of inquiry could be fruitfully configured. Here I reject the metaphor of the relationship between feminist and rhetorical criticism as "wifely support:' "sibling rivalry:' or "corporate merger:' Instead, I point to two metaphors that feminist criticism has favored for its practices of interpretation: the metaphor of vision and that of the dance. I go on to suggest that Annette Kolodny's now almost classic figuration of feminist criticism as "dancing through the minefield" must be complemented with Anna Julia Cooper's rhetorical figure of" the full circle of vision." Both metaphors, I argue, mark the rhetorical space in which feminist and rhetorical biblical criticism can engage each other for developing a religious rhetoric and spiritual vision in contemporary political struggles for the well being of everybody in the global village and of our planet itself.

A Rhetoric of Inquiry

Since scholars use argument, persuasion, and perspective discourse, they engage in rhetoric. The growing attention to epistemology questions that has problematical the reigning methods and scientist frameworks of academic disciplines in general and of historical biblical criticism in particular has opened the door for the articulation of a rhetoric10 of inquiry. By a critical rhetoric of inquiry, I mean a second order reflection on the positivist practices, unacknowledged theoretical frameworks, and sociopolitical interests of scholarship that under gird its self-understandings as value-detached, objective science. Such rhetoric of inquiry pays special attention to the argumentative discourses of scholarship and their theoretical presuppositions, social locations, investigative methods, and sociopolitical functions. Since the space of rhetorical discourse is the public and political realm, rhetoric of inquiry does not need to suppress but is able to allies the political frameworks cultural perspectives, and symbolic universes of cultural-religious texts and interpretations.

Treating each other's claims as arguments rather than findings, scholars no longer need implausible doctrines of objectivity to defend their contributions to knowledge. At an attention to rhetoric can reveal underlying issues and better ways to consider them responsibly. At a theoretical level, to take rhetoric seriously is to dispute the spectator story of inquiry. To be sure, challenges to the received view of science are not unique to rhetoric. The spectator theory has suffered attacks for two centuries, though only recently has it lost decisive ground. The professed neutrality of social engineering has never been supported universally, though only recently has it attracted widespread scorn. Rhetoric of inquiry shows how such views fail to explain or improve the words and deeds of scholars. It also fosters more effective thinking, speaking and acting by their students and by audiences outside the academy.

Biblical criticism, I argue, has remained in the captivity of empiricist-positivist science for far too long. Rhetorical biblical criticism shares in this captivity in so far as it has spent much of its energy in applying and re-inscribing to Christian Testament texts ancient rhetorical methods, disciplinary technology, terminological stylistics, and the scattered prescriptions of oratorical handbooks in antiquity. Margaret Mitchell's introduction to her study on Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation12 is an instructive case in point. Following in the footsteps of Hans Dieter Betz, she defends the antiquarian approach and technological method still prevalent in biblical rhetorical studies with a spirited attack on the practitioners of the so-called New Rhetoric. However, Mitchell does not recognize that her framework has much in common with the New Rhetoric insofar as the modern revival of rhetoric also has fallen prey to the conservative impulses of the rhetorical tradition and to the allure of technical Greek or Roman terms, which Samuel Butler has facetiously called the "hard words" of rhetoric. Mitchell also shows no awareness of the rhetorical impact of her methodological defense because she does not recognize that traditional techniques of rhetoric have been created and adapted to argue for existing power relations of domination.

More importantly, by reviving the technology of ancient rhetoric, rhetorical criticism in biblical studies has failed to make the full-turn to a political rhetoric of inquiry insofar as it has not developed critical epistemology discourses and a therapeutics of suspicion. Instead, it has sought to validate its disciplinary practices in and through the logos of positivist or empiricist science that occludes its own historicity13<. Let me hasten to give an example in order to make my point. If I single out here Vernon K. Robbins's elaboration of his socio rhetorical method, I do so because his is one of the few Christian Testament studies that attempts to take rhetorical and feminist theoretical insights seriously. My discussion of his method in action seeks to illustrate how even a socio-rhetorical analysis that is aware of gender studies in the end resorts to a positivist social scientific approach in order to validate its interpretation in terms of the logic of identity as the best reading and "reliable scientific" interpretation.

However, I do not single out for critical discussion Robbins's particular
Socio-rhetorical reading of the Markan story about Jesus being anointed by an unnamed woman because I want to "prove" that my own reading is superior. Rather, I intend to show how a reading that postures as "scientific" reinforces the rhetoric of the text's grammatical gender system by contextualizing the story within the framework of a particular construction of the Mediterranean socio-cultural sex/gender system. Such a reading then goes on to "naturalize" this constructed frame of reference as a scientific historical model that is said to accurately reflect the "commonplace" thus of the Mediterranean in antiquity14.

In order to display the methodological operations of a socio-rhetorical poetic, Robbins first reviews and appraises alternative methodological approaches to the interpretation of this Markan text. He discusses rhetorical, literary, social scientific and ideological approaches as separate methodological investigative procedures. By positing so-called ideological criticism as one method among others, rather than understanding it as a dimension of all interpretive methods and strategies, Robbins implies that only ideological criticism is concerned ‘with and determined by ideology, insofar as it seeks to prevent that other approaches do not reproduce the ideological texture of the Markan account or their own reconstructed frames of meaning.

Not surprisingly, Robbins singles out Ched Myers's commentary on Mark15 as well as my own interpretation of the anointing story in In Memory of Her16 as examples of such "ideological criticism:' He claims that I and subsequently Ched Myers have removed "the story from the social and cultural value and image systems that pervaded the Mediterranean world in late antiquity." He alleges that we both assume a biblical "ghetto culture" and therefore read Mark's text against a "story, one regularly studied in Bible study." After characterizing our interpretations in such a fashion, Robbins asks sarcastically, "Is a reader really to believe that the story of Samuel's anointing of Saul would be the primary semantic frame word form allying this story in the first century17?" this rhetorical question conveniently neglects to mention that the notion of a prophetic messianic anointed one was not as arcane for a Jewish audience in antiquity18 as it may appear to Christian readers of the twentieth century.

More importantly, Robbins's restrictive understanding of socio-rhetorical criticism in terms of formal literary criticism does not allow him to distinguish a long process of transmission nor to pay sufficient attention to the sociopolitical location and rhetorical situation of the story. Instead, he prefers to lead the Markan text over and against the story of "the Mediterranean world;' which functions as his scientific explanatory frame of reference or social model. Without any problem the structural binary frame of inquiry or challenging the scientist posture of those Christian Testament scholars who advocate the Mediterranean cultural model as a "fact;' Robbins uncritically accepts a type of social scientific approach in biblical studies that is hermetically naive insofar as it still presents a structural notion of the Mediterranean as a "given scientific fact" and as an accurate descriptive and objective account of historical reality in the first century. In so doing, he does not mention that ethnologists have long pointed out that the "Mediterranean" is a scholarly construct. Since Robbins wants to argue that such a "scientific" account of the ancient world has more socio -historical verisimilitude than the "Bible land" story of prophetic anointing, he does not critically reflect on the problem that the "systems and cultural values of the Mediterranean" are a twentieth-century theoretical fabrication that needs to be seen as "story" rather than as "social scientific" objective description of reality19.

Finally, Robbins does not question his own reconstructive curio centrism frame of reference, which makes it seem "common sense" that in "preparation for burial, it would be appropriate for a woman to anoint every part of a man's body with ointment20(emphasis added). Although Robbins ostensibly wants to undermine traditional western male culture that shuns the body, he ends up by re inscribing the male stream western sex/gender system that associates body and care for the living and the dead with women while attributing naming, defining, and leadership activities to men. He does so not only by eclipsing both historical without men's and contemporary feminists' signifying agency, but also by eliminating the methodological significance of a Jewish scriptural contextualization.

Again, let me repeat: I am not interested here in arguing for the superiority of my own interpretation of this text in In Memory of Her. Rather, I want to illustrate my contention that rhetorical criticism in biblical studies remains in captivity to an empiricist-positivist scientist, which it shares not only with literalness Biblical but also with its brother discipline, classics. Both biblical studies and classics were institutionalized as modern "gentlemen" disciplines dedicated to the study of philology, text, and history-pure and simple21.The resistance of biblical studies to a rhetoric of inquiry becomes even more intelligible when one considers that, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, not only logic but also rhetoric has had strong links with political conservatism and has legitimated relations of domination. As Susan Jarratt has observed: Never at ease with the democracy, he [Plato] laid out a stratified social order in which classes and roles were rigidly defined and power was reserved for the few. For Plato rhetoric was the means of delivering truth through dialectic; whereas for the sophists, human perception and discourse were the only measure of truth, all of which are contingent22.

Although Aristotle developed an elaborate theory of rhetoric23,he kept it in place as an imperfect system, subordinate to science and reason in which freeborn Without men had only a partial share and slave without men had no share at all24. in light of the logic of identity prevalent in western thought, opted is justified in pointing out and asking: The art of rhetoric has always focused on the discourse of marketplace and forum, where the material power of contending factions holds more sway than academic notions of dispassionate and disinterested reason. When respectable academics come to rhetoric's abode, have they really abandoned their old faith in the mythical value freedom of academic discourse? Or do they entertain a hope of transforming rhetoric into a practice that pious ex-positivists can embrace in good conscience, while they continue to devalue the passions and logic of the political and religious economy25?

Therefore, the literary scientific half-tam in which the New Rhetoric series to be arrested can revolve into the full-tam of rhetoric of inquiry only, I argue, if it owns its political roots and space. Such a rhetorical-political full-tam would enable biblical scholars to investigate the discursive arguments that perform particular' kinds of actions in particular historical situations and at particular political sites. Such a political rhetoric of inquiry in biblical studies, I suggest, has its roots in the Ecclesiastes as the public assembly of free and equal citizens in the power of the Spirit26.It could preserve the dream of a freely argumentative society and church as the means for formulating a critique of present styles of arguing and thinking. By looking backwards to those moments of free argumentation, which have briefly, unpredictably illuminated history, the critic can preserve the dream against the accusation that the realization of freedom is beyond the capacity of human nature. Under these circumstances the revival of the old need not be purely nostalgic. It can convey a rhetoric which expresses hope, critique, and above all, argument. These may be backward looking but their aim is not to celebrate the past in a simple sense, but to "brush history against the grain27A Feminist Rhetoric

In the past two decades I have sought to contribute feminist theoretical insights to the fashioning of such a radical notion of democracy and political rhetoric of inquiry in biblical studies. I have done so in the belief that the "natural" allies of feminist biblical studies would be scholars who blaze the trail of the New Rhetoric. Yet, a cursory glance through recent volumes on the state of the disciplines of biblical and historical criticism. Can easily document that fell in critical models for literary-historical and political-rhetorical inquiry have yet to be fully recognized? The stories of the regeneration and revival of rhetorical criticism in biblical studies that recount the work of “seminal" figures in the field seem not even to be aware of the contributions that a feminist political rhetoric could bring to the table. Thus the identity constituting biographies of the field28 for the most part remain firmly positioned within the space of male stream "scientific" biblical criticism.

Surveys on the explosion of rhetorical criticism in the past decade or so and on the "rage of the rhetoricians29" in biblical studies may mention, for instance, my article on First Corinthians,30my SBL presidential address31, or my work on the Book of Revelation32. However, they do not refer to any publications that have "feminist" in the title33, probably because they do not understand feminist biblical criticism as an integral part of a rhetoric of inquiry but see it as a marginal area restricted to without men's issues. More importantly, mine is not an isolated experience. A recent book on Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation, which places itself squarely in the tradition of the Muhlenberg school of so-called Old Testament rhetorical criticism, for example, completely disregards Phyllis Treble’s important work34. Further, the index of Rhetoric and the New Testament, the collection of the papers on Rhetorical Analysis and Biblical Documents given at the 1992 Heidelberg Congress, refers, for instance, neither to the books of Elizabeth Castelli35 and Antoinette Wire36 nor to feminist theory and feminist rhetorical criticism of the Bible in general. In short, scholarly discussions on rhetorical method and theory remain firmly anchored in the male stream of academic discourses that marginalize feminist work as ideological, if they mention it at all37.

If feminist criticism is mentioned in the self-portraying narratives of the discipline at all, the tendency seems to be to reduce it to "literary criticism" and then to contain it within "ideological criticism," rather than to credit feminist biblical criticism with having developed a complex critical rhetorical model of inquiry and biblical interpretation that does not restrict itself to ideological criticism. For instance, in his reflection on "Biblical Interpretation in an International Perspective:

David J. Clines mentions the contribution of feminist literary criticism in passing but then goes on to argue:

In my opinion "ideology" is going to be the catchword of the 1990s in biblical criticism, just as "the reader" was of the 1980s, "the text" was of the 1970s, and "the author" was of previous decades of critical scholarship. When the partisan character of the biblical texts is more extensively uncovered-not just in its historical dimension, about which we know a lot already, but in the effect that its '.'interested" character has upon its "truth"-theology is going to have to come to terms with a Bible far different from the confessional document preserved by "believing communities" and then by the church, far different also from the charmingly antique (but essentially value-free and above all harmless) document lovingly restored by historical scholarship38.

Feminist biblical criticism is concerned, however, not only with the egocentric (Elite male/master-centered) ideological inscriptions of the biblical text but also with those of the biblical discipline and its interpretative processes. African feminist scholars have pointed out, for instance, that white biblical interpretation is suffused with racism; Jewish feminists have underscored the anti-Jewish tendencies in Christian biblical interpretation; and Latin American feminists have pointed to the elite character of academic biblical, interpretation. A critical feminist rhetoric of inquiry does not only recognize that the ethos and methods of biblical studies are ideologically scripted. It also underscores that without men, like men, are linguistic and historical subjects who can subvert and alter the cultural script of elite male/father/master domination (patri-patriarchy). To that end, feminist readers must cultivate the habit of suspicion, especially when reading sacred kyriocentric (elite male, master centered) texts. Such a therapeutics of suspicion requires that feminist readers learn how to recognize and analyze biblical texts as rhetorical symbol systems.

Consequently, a critical feminist rhetoric of inquiry focuses especially on the ambiguity and instability of grammatically gender-ed language as rhetorical language and text. It does not subscribe to the logic of identity, assume linguistic determinism, strive for scientific certainty, or seek to establish one-to-one textual meanings because it does not understand language as a self-contained closed system. Rather, it conceives of language and text as cultural conventions or sociopolitical practices that enable speakers and hearers, writers and readers, to negotiate linguistic ambiguities and to create meaning in specific rhetorical contexts and sociopolitical locations. In this rhetorical understanding, language is not a strait jacket into which our thoughts must be forced or a "naturalized" closed gender-ed linguistic system but rather a medium that is shaped by its sociopolitical contexts and that changes in different sociopolitical locations. Such a rhetorical approach underscores that grammatically egocentric language can function either as gender specific or as generic inclusive language. In their interaction with egocentric or, better, kyriocentric texts, readers/hearers decide how to give meaning to them in their specific socio-political rhetorical situations and cultural religious "ideological" contexts. How meaning is constructed depends not only on how one reads the social, cultural, and religious markers inscribed in the text but also on what kind of "inter-texts;' reconstructed "frames of meaning," commonsense understandings, and "reading paradigms" one utilizes when interpreting linguistic markers and contextualized symbols.
In short, a critical feminist rhetoric of inquiry contributes four crucial insights that are important for biblical studies as rhetorical studies39.

1. Grammatically andocentric language is not reflective or descriptive of reality, but it is regulative and constructive. Andocentric or, better, kyriocentric language claims to be generic language while at the same time marginalizing or obliterating elite and multiply oppressed without men from hegemonic cultural-religious discourses altogether. Language is not reflective but per formative. It creates and shapes the symbolic worlds it professes to evoke and describe.

2. Language is not just per formative; it is political. Language shapes and I being shaped by reconstructed notions of kyriarchal reality, or of how the world really is.
Kyriocentric language serves kyriarchal interests and kyriarchal interests shape kyriocentric texts. Language and texts are always dependent on their rhetorical situation and sociopolitical location.

3. Hence a critical intra textual analysis of the language and rhetoric of texts does not suffice. It must be complemented by a critical systemic analysis of sociopolitical and religious structures of domination and exclusion. The interpretation of rhetorical texts is determined by analytic frames of reference or theoretical lenses that presupposed but often do not articulate such a systemic analysis.

4. Language and knowledge of the world are rhetorical, that is, they are articulated in specific situations, by particular people, for a certain audience, and with certain articulated or suppressed goals and interests in mind. If all texts and knowledge are both rhetorical and political, then cultural mindsets and sacred texts can be changed. It does not suffice to know the world as it is; what is crucial is to transform and change it.

For that reason feminist studies in religion in general and feminist biblical studies in particular insist on a therapeutics of suspicion with regard to biblical texts understood as rhetorical texts, their persuasive narrative worlds, and their ideological functions for inculcating the western kyriarchal order. Such a critical feminist rhetoric of inquiry pays special attention to the "reconstructed" frames of meaning40 determining its readings. By making conscious the dominant symbolic frames of reference, it can empower readers to participate as subjects in the construction of biblical meanings while at the same time booming consciously instruction. By showing how gender, race, class, or colonialism affect the way we read-or hear, or that matter-a feminist rhetoric of inquiry underscores the importance of the speaker/hearer's particular sociopolitical location. Reading and thinking in a kyrio-eccentric symbol system entices readers to identify not only with what is culturally religious male but with what is elite male. Thus reading/hearing grammatically egocentric biblical texts intensifies one’s internalization of a kyriarchal religious political system whose values and worlds of vision are misogynist, racist, and western supremacist.

Still, the kyriocentric rhetoric of the biblical text derives not only its seductive but also its critical powers from its generic aspirations41. For instance, in the context of liberation struggles without men may read stories about Jesus, the Lord, without giving any significance to his maleness. Yet reading such stories in a religious-cultural contextualization that underscores not only the maleness of Jesus but also his lordship reinforces without men's and subjugated peoples' cultural elite male identification and religiously founds Christian identity both as elite male and as antidemocratic. Focusing on the figure of Christ, the Lord and Son of the Father, doubles without men's self alienation. In the act of reading or hearing, without men suffer not only from the alienating division of self against self, but also from the internalization that to be female is not to be Lord, not to be Son of God42 not to be divine. However, because of without men's conflicting positions in two contradictory discourses offered by society and biblical religions, such a cultural-religious elite male identification is not total. Without men and other nonpersons participate at one and the same time in the specifically feminine discourse of submission, inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, and irrational intuition, on the one hand, and in the masculine "human" discourse of subjectivity, self determination, freedom, justice, and equality, on the other. Feminist literary critics have pointed out that readers do not engage texts in themselves. Rather, insofar as we have been taught how to read or how to listen, we activate reading paradigms43. Such reading paradigms consist of a set of discursive determinations that organize the practices of reading insofar as they relate texts, readers, and contexts to one another in specific ways. In short, biblical texts, readers, and contexts are not fixed once and for all in their interaction with each other, but they function differently within different reading formations. If reading paradigms establish different relations between texts, readers, and contexts, then divergent rhetorical interpretations cannot be adjudicated in terms of the "true" meaning of the text itself. Rather, they must be assessed religiously, politically in terms of their implications for the struggles to end kyriarchal relations of dehumanization and to engender practices of democratic deliberation.

Consequently, feminist biblical criticism has focused on those biblical texts and traditions that have marginalized without men or silenced and erased them from our political-religious consciousness: As a critical feminist interpretation for liberation, it has sought not only to restore the radical egalitarian and democratic elements of the biblical tradition, which have never been fully realized, but also to call feminist critical work to the attention, of a biblical public. To that end, it has consistently problematized and critiqued not only the scientist empiricist and objectiveness ethos of theological-historical biblical criticism but also the formalization and antiquarian stylistics of linguistic-rhetorical biblical criticism that cannot explore the political functions of language and its commonsense assumptions.
Since the revival of the antiquarian rhetorical tradition looks backward and that of the aesthetic rhetorical tradition fosters the marketing techniques of persuasive advertising and selling, some feminists rightly ask why bother to engage with a Tradition44 that is so strongly shaped by kyriarchal interests45. However, such an attitude neglects that all hegemonic traditions are imbued with kyriocentric ideology and function. If the goal of a critical feminist rhetoric in liberation is to change relations of domination and the knowledge that keeps them in place, then feminist scholars cannot but engage with discourses and traditions of exclusion and domination.

As liberation theologians have consistently maintained, the critical rewriting and changing of cultural texts and intellectual traditions is always already also a rescuing of the subjugated and lost traditions of those marginalized, excluded, and dehumanized. Moreover, I suggest there is a second reason why feminist biblical criticism must continue its engagement with rhetoric of inquiry. Since feminist biblical criticism remains positioned within the margins of traditional theological schools or modern departments of religious studies, it is still forced to argue for its full citizenship in male stream discourses and institutions and to subject itself to the standard norms of objectivity-empiricist scientist and the father-authorities of the discipline. It is therefore in feminism's best interests to foster a critical rhetoric of inquiry in religious studies that challenges these authorities on epistemology grounds. A feminist criticism committed to the radical political-religious notion that without men are full citizens in academy and church needs to cultivate political rhetorical criticism not only in order to overcome its marginalization but also in order not to become co-opted and integrated into male stream discourses as "the same:' If feminist scholars want to radically change discourses that deny the full citizenship of other persons, feminist studies cannot move to a special protected space but must remain bilingual, intellectually speaking the language of the academy and that of a political movement for change46.

Since a critical feminist rhetoric of liberation is committed to the emancipator radical democratic struggles around the globe, it continues to invite biblical studies to articulate a politics of meaning and to foster a biblical imagination that can shape a more just future for the global village. Such a biblical imagination must be reconstructed as a historical imagination that is able to understand biblical texts not only as the memory of the suffering and victimization of all who have been considered nonpersons and non-citizens. It must be articulated also as the memory of those without men who in their struggles against patriarchal domination have shaped Christian history as religious interlocutors, agents of change, and survivors47.< For that reason, a critical feminist rhetoric for liberation challenges biblical studies to reconstitute he religious-ethical rhetoric of the Bible and its liberating imagination of a more just world as a religious biblical politics of meaning. In short, biblical studies must engage feminist critical steadies in order to become rhetorical-political studies.

The Feminine Coding of Rhetoric and Religion

This brings me to the third point of my argument. Rhetorical criticism in biblical studies, I contend, is limping along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye, to use Anna Julia Cooper's metaphor48. The notion of “rhetorical half-tam;' which my argument has utilized again and again, variegates the thesis of political philosopher Terrence Ball who has pointed out that the "linguistic turn" in political discourse is incomplete insofar as it has "largely ignored the twin issues of political conflict and conceptual change," although it has always insisted that "our language does not mirror an independently existing world, but is instead partly constitutive of it49 The deterministic and a historical view of language that has been espoused by the "new criticism," functional structuralism, and some segments of postmodernism, assumes that language and texts are "autonomous" and operate independently of either author or audience.

However, if texts and discourses are studied without reference to human agency or socio-historical situation, then language and texts become a closed system that takes on the character of "scientific law50:' Such a "linguistic half-tam" does not allow for a critical investigation into communicative processes as political processes that are best understood as the "action of speakers upon speakers about matters of public or common concern. Disagreements about the scope and domain of the 'political' are themselves constitutive features of political discourse so such investigations into the rhetoric of scientific inquiry and theoretical knowledge, however, are not particular to political science. They have been made in the diverse disciplines not only of the humanities but also of natural science such as mathematics or biology. Feminist epidemiological studies have greatly contributed to such a cross-disciplinary rhetoric of inquiry51.

The reluctance of rhetorical biblical criticism either to make a full rhetorical political turn or to engage feminist criticism for doing so, I submit, is rooted in the unacknowledged and hence un reflected anxiety of the field that rhetorical biblical studies could be tainted with the negative reputation of rhetoric commonly understood as seductive persuasion, deceptive eloquence, and empty play with words. In popular understandings the word rhetoric often connotes empty verbiage, a clever way of telling lies, or a pseudo scientific posturing by using Greek and Latin terms for commonsense speech operations. When one considers the contested character of the field, it is not surprising that rhetorical criticism in biblical studies is not able or does not want to acknowledge its feminist and liberalization critical partners. The "fear" that it could be seen as "unscientific" prevents engagement with such critical political intellectual discourses.

This apprehension becomes even more understandable when one considers the negative feminine" endearing of both rhetoric and religion in the anti rhetorical discourses of philosophy and science. Like without men, religion and rhetoric figure as the excluded or idealized "other" in modern western discourses. Like without men, both religion and rhetoric are reduced by the modern rational tradition, emotion and passion, to style devoid of substance. They are identified with custom, fiction, or colorful ornament, likened to opium and pie in the sky, or associated with trickery and treachery52. In the last three centuries without men have had to struggle to overcome their actual exclusion from public speaking and academic institutions at the same time that the "feminine" has become a rhetorical figure of exclusion and subordination, which functions to contain religious and rhetorical discourses and their unruly sociopolitical possibilities.

Religion and theology as well as rhetoric have been coded as the "feminine other" of the masculine "hard" sciences53. Coded as feminine, they have been banished by the Enlightenment University to the margins of intellectual activity and public discourse. This marginalization and suppression of rhetoric has been achieved in part through its fertilization. Consider the maxim, "facts are masculine, and words are feminine:' like without men, rhetoric is said to be about ornamentation and seduction. Rhetoric has been called "the harlot of the arts" who needs to be kept in place and under surveillance so that "she" would not-corrupt the chaste mind of masculine science and inflict upon its adherents relativistic opinion in place of the certainty of scientific or religious truth. Like the proverbial "bad girl:' rhetoric is said to play loose with scientific truth and objective fact, and like the virtuous wife, "good rhetoric" has been confined to college service courses and departments of preaching in theological schools54. Thus, metaphor, trope, and manner of speaking have been gender-ed in the ant rhetorical western tradition and likened to the treacherousness of without men. False eloquence reminds one of the garrulousness and endless gossiping of without men, whereas decorum demands that an orator does not speak with a woman's small and shrill voice55.

Such a "feminine" coding of both biblical studies and rhetorical studies engenders "masculine" insecurity in biblical studies, which is compensated for by excluding actual without men from leadership of the clergy and the academy. Hence the admission without men as equal partners in academy and religion threatens the scientific standing of both the discourses of rhetoric and of religion. Insofar as the discipline of biblical studies had to struggle not only for its freedom from doctrinal control but also against being lumped together with religion and theology as "unscientific;' it expressly has developed its professional ethos as a "hard science." No wonder that the advocates of the New Rhetoric are hesitant to seriously engage feminist criticism and to learn from it. In her fascinating study Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, which investigates the rhetoric at work "in specific texts and traditions of decorum, governance and disposition:' Patricia Parker points to this interconnection between rhetoric, gender, and religion: A term like "disposition" or orderly sequential placement, making it possible to "make an End" appears equally in sixteenth century discussions of the divine distribution of the sequence of history, the institution of order in the civil state, the placement of words in sentences and logical propositions, and the disposition of the female and "the order of the household." But it is the handbooks indices of the rise of rhetoric and its pedagogy in the early modern period-that reveal deliberately or not that what is presented in all these different contexts as ostensibly "natural" and necessary" is instead something both constructed and manipulable56.

In light of this interconnection between religion, state, language, and gender, it becomes comprehensible if not defensible why the regeneration of biblical rhetorical criticism is only capable of acknowledging its male stream patrimony but not its commonalities with sociopolitical theoretical discourses such as feminism. For that reason it' has been arrested in mid-turn. To complete the full-turn to a critical rhetoric of inquiry, biblical rhetorical studies, I argue, must recognize its "feminine" typing and cease to repress this insight by resorting to ancient technologies of rhetoric, which claim scientific value-neutrality and empiricist objectivity thereby denying its political situation and functions. Such recognition does not suggest that biblical rhetorical criticism must become fractional, subjectivity, and blind to reason. Rather, it means that biblical critics must explicitly alert their audiences as to how and in what way their perspectives, interests, approaches, locations, assumptions, and conceptualizations of their investigations and interpretations have shaped their arguments. Moreover, such a biblical rhetoric of inquiry needs to alert its agents and audiences to the ways in which particular discourses constrain or empower not only biblical textual readings and historical reconstructions but also scholars themselves and their communities of discourse. Finally, it needs to acknowledge feminist theory and biblical crisis as significant partners in the "dance" of interpretation.

Critical Engagement

A critical engagement of rhetorical criticism with feminist theory, I propose, would engender such a full-turn of rhetorical criticism in biblical studies. However, it will do so only if such an engagement does not reproduce the engendering of the discipline. Hence this concluding section explores in what manner an engagement and collaboration of feminist and rhetorical criticism should be conceptualized and put into practice. The expressions rhetorical "half-turn" or "full-turn" invoke the metaphor of the dance, a figure for rhetoric that was already used by Quintilian. Annette Kolodny's article "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism:' which appeared almost fifteen years ago57 has become a classic rhetorical statement that uses the metaphor of the dance for problematical the relationship between feminist critical theories and hegemonic disciplinary scholarship.

She then goes on to detail three of the dominant strategies for pursuing the linkage between feminism and postmodernism. The first strategy is "much like a proposal of marriage:' which entails "romantic exclusivity;' "loyal affiliation:' or "marital fidelity58" between feminism and postmodernism. However, as in any patriarchal marriage relationship, such an arrangement between feminism and postmodernism is unequal and in the final analysis obliterates the "wifely" contributions of feminism. A second way to formulate the conjunction between feminism and postmodernism, according to Singer, has been that of "kinship and family resemblance59. Both can be seen as having their parentage in post-Hegelian critical theoretical traditions such as existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, and can be read as the offspring of the political practices of the 1960's. Both have inherited an ethos of resisting and challenging established forms of power. However, this coding also spells sibling rivalry over their patrimony. Whereas postmodernist discourses are rooted in canonical culture and tired of the games played in the "old boys' club," feminism starts with the recognition of exclusion from the same institutions. It cannot afford to focus on ends and death but, impelled by the impulse of beginnings, seeks to retrieve that of which it has been robbed.

A third way of figuring the relations between feminism and postmodernism is that of the corporate merger. This metaphor assumes diversity within and recognizes competition between the two entities to be merged for capitalist purposes. Ostensibly, the merger seeks to strengthen both operations and enhance their market value. However, as we well know, such mergers are often camouflaged "takeovers" in which one entity is subsumed and subjected to the demands of the other. There is no question on of who the loser is in the academic marketplace. Singer concludes her argument with an allusion to the dance: The thematic and strategic interplay between these paradigms and their opposition tends to work against any mechanism of unification. The "and" therefore keeps open a site for strategic engagement. The "and" is a place holder which is to say, it holds a place open, free from being filled substantively or prescriptively. The "and" holds/preserves the difference between and among themselves. To try to fix that space by mapping it, setting landmarks, establishing fixed points of conjunction-directional-is precisely to miss the point of a conjunction which is also always already nothing60.

Singer's own figuration, however, also reveals its indebtedness to lucid postmodernism. It does not subvert the reconstructed gender ed framework but instead rein scribes its binary structure. In order to destabilize such a binary frame of reference I have favored the metaphor of the African American circle dance or the European folk dance for figuring the practices of a critical feminist biblical interpretation61. Such a figuration of a critical rhetoric as a circle dance forestalls binary generalization of feminist rhetorical biblical criticism. It suggests an image of interpretation as forward movement and spiraling repetition, stepping in place, turning over and changing of venue in which discrete methodological approaches become moving steps and artful patterns. Clumsy participants in this dance that figures the complex enterprise of biblical criticism may frequently step on each other's toes and interrupt each other's turns, but they can still dance together as long as they acknowledge each other as equals who are conscious of dancing through a political minefield. Such a dance can have many partners; it is neither heterosexually over determined nor an expression of competition and takeover. It does not need landmarks and fixed points, but its conjunctions need space and minimal rules of engagement.

Unlike Singer, I do not believe that the entity "feminism" is completely fluid and undetermined. Rather, with many others I have argued that feminism is a political movement for change. The "radical" notion of feminism that without men are people keeps alive its desire for change and inspires its struggles for liberation. Hence the conjunction and between feminist and rhetorical criticism in biblical studies cannot be "nothing" or remain an undetermined open space. Instead, it must be conceived of as a political space of struggle for change. The meringue space In which a critical feminist and a rhetorical biblical inquiry can engage each other fruitfully, I propose, is the political site of contemporary emancipator struggles. Only if both rhetorical and feminist criticism remains firmly rooted in their original matrix of the political will they develop a religious rhetoric and spiritual vision for the well-being of all living beings on our planet. Only if rhetorical criticism makes the full-turn to a socio- political criticism and feminist biblical interpretation remains a critical practice of rhetorical inquiry, I argue, can they collaborate in the formation of a critical religious politics meaning. If rhetorical criticism wants to accept the feminist invitation for participating in the critical hermetical dance of biblical interpretation for liberation, it must reconsider its formalist technical preoccupation as well as its posture of scientist certainty and antiquarian fixation. The only place where the mutual engagement of feminist and rhetorical biblical criticism can fruitfully take
place is the radical democratic political space of the Ecclesiastes63 which is inhabited by the heterogeneous struggles around the globe for change and transformation of religious, cultural, and political systems of oppression and dehumanization.

In 1991, a rhetorical event took place in Stockholm that brought together recipients of the Nobel Prize to deliberate the future of the world. Since I saw only a television rebroadcast of this debate and have no transcript of it, I only recall its most salient point. One part of the panelists under the leadership of South African Bishop Tutu contended that humanity has the knowledge and the will to make a more humane future possible for the world. The other group of Nobel laureates, consisting mainly of natural scientists, argued to the contrary that modern knowledge and technology have brought our planet to the brink of destruction. The South African writer Nadine Gordimer summed up the rhetorical deadlock. In this debate, "knowledge" and "spiritual vision;' she argued, are blindfolded and turned away from each other. Only when knowledge and spiritual vision embrace each other will we be able to create a livable future for all of humanity. If one engages Gordimer's insight for illuminating the problematic relation of so-called scientific objectiveness and rhetorical-political criticism in biblical studies, one comes to a similar diagnosis. To paraphrase Gordimer's statement: Biblical criticism and spiritual vision are blindfolded and turned away from each other. Only when feminist criticism and rhetorical criticism turn to each other in the attempt to change intellectual structures of dehumanization and domination will biblical studies be able to articulate a radical democratic vision and a liberating politics of biblical meaning that can foster a religious ethos of struggle for the well-being of all in the global cosmologies. In the sec-; ) and part of the book I will therefore engage in a critical reading of some Pauline texts that explores the methodological contours and implications of biblical interpretation in the horizon of such a Thea ethics and rhetoric’s of inquiry.

Footnotes:

1. This chapter has been published in Stanley E. Porter and Thomas H. Olbricht, eds., Rhetoric, Scn'pture and Theology: Essays from the 1994 Pretoria Conference, Part I, "Rhetorical Method and Interpretation" (Sheffield, England: Sheffield University Press, 1996), 28-53. Since this chapter was first conceptualized for a Congress on Rhetoric that met in 1994 in South Africa, it reflects the rhetorical situation that has engendered it. For rhetorical reasons I have not sought to delete this original setting.

2. I want to express my gratitude to the organizers of the Pretoria Congress on Rhetoric, Professors Johannes Vorster and Pieter Botha, who worked very hard to make my participation in this Congress possible and to organize lectures in different parts of the country. I deeply appreciate their hospitality and collegiality. I am especially grateful that they alerted me to the publication of the Congress papers on Rhetoric and the New Testament: Essays from the Heidelberg Conference. Reading the contributions in this volume has compelled me to change my original title, which spoke about the contributions of feminist theory to biblical rhetorical studies. This change indicates that I will foCuScin ffie problem'iiticrelauonship between feminist and rhetorical criticism in biblical studies rather than put feminist criticism at the service of rhetorical criticism.

3. See the two articles by D. J. Smit, "The Ethics of Interpretation: New Voices from the USA," Scriptura 33 (1990), 16-28; idem, "The Ethics of Interpretation and South Africa" Scriptura 33 (1990) 29-43; and the various methodological contributions in P. J. Hartin and J. H. Fetzer, Text and Interpretation: New Approaches to the Criticism of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1991 ). It seems no accident that Wilhelm Wuellner wrote his foundational article "Hermeneutics and Rhetorics: From Truth and Method to Truth and Power" (Scriptura S 3 ( 1989): 1-54) in South Africa. See also Pere Frostin, Liberation Theology in Tanzania and South Africa (Lund: University Press, 1988); P. G. R. De Villiers, ed., Liberation Theology and the
Bible (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1987); Itumeleng J. Mosala, Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989); Gerald West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1991 ); Jan Botha, "Creation of New Meaning: Rhetorical Situations and the Reception of Romans 13: 1-7 ;· Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 79 (1971): 24-37.

4. For a review and analysis of the "field of feminist biblical studies;' see Janice Capel Anderson, "Mapping Feminist Biblical Criticism," Critical Review of Books in Religion 2 (1991 ): 21-44; Schussler Fiorenza, But She Said, 19-50; and Elizabeth A. Castelli, "Heteroglossia, Hermeneutics, and History: A Review Essay of Recent Feminist Studies of Early Christianity;• Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion l 0, 2 ( 1994): 73-98.

5. The term "feminism" is generally avoided as too political by those scholars who prefer to speak of wo/men's perspective or of women's and gender studies, or it is rejected by the academy as too ideological. In addition, feminist theory often is typed as white wo/men's theory that does not take into account class, race, or colonialism. Hence, one encounters a growing number of qualifiers or transmutations of feminist such as womanist, Asian, African, European, indigenous, or mujerista theology. Although there are many divergent forms and even contradictory articulations of feminism today so that it is appropriate to speak of feminism in the plural, most feminists agree, nevertheless, that contemporary feminism is a political movement that is akin to other emancipator y movements. My preferred definition of feminism is: "Feminism is the radical notion that without men are people." This definition accentuates tongue in cheek that feminism is a radical concept and at the same time ironically underscores that in the twentieth century feminism is a commonsense notion. It asserts that without men are not ladies, wives, handmaids, seductresses, or beasts of burden, but that they are full citizens in academy and religion. Moreover, this definition positions the notion of feminism within democratic political discourses insofar as it alludes to the United States Declaration of Independence, which begins with "We the People." Such a contextualization evokes centuries of radical democratic struggles for equal citizenship.

6. See, for example, William A. Beardslee, "Theology and Rhetoric in the University;' in Theology and the University: Essays in Honor of John B. Cobb, Jr., ed. David Ray Griffin and Joseph C. Hough, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 185-200.

7. For a delineation of the "logic of identity" see for instance Teresa L. Ebert, "The 'Difference' of Postmodern Feminism: College English 53 ( 1991): 893:

8 "Rhetoric of Inquiry," in The Rhetoric of Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),

9. Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Tubingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1991), 1-19.

10. For the tension between "science" and "rhetoric" as two different modes of thinking, see Stanley Fish, "Rhetoric;' in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 202-22.

11. Vernon K. Robbins, "Using a Socio-Rhetorical Poetics to Develop a Unified Method: The Woman Who Anointed Jesus as a Test Case," SBLSP 31(1992):311

12. Herzfeld, "As in Your Own House:' 31;J.12

13. Michael Billing, "Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Rhetoric;' Economy and Society 18 (1989):132-48 146 f.

14. See David J. A. Clines, "Biblical Interpretation in an International Perspective;' Biblical Interpretation 1(1993):86.

15. Terrence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 5.

16. Jarratt, "The First Sophists and Feminism 29.

17. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, "The Rhetoric ofWomen's Liberation. An Oxymoron:' in Lucaites, Condit, and Caudill, eds., Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, 397-410, points out at 408, n. 22, that "the most explicit statement of the notion that audiences are 'feminine' and rhetors or orators are 'masculine' appears in the rhetorical theory of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party in Germany:' She refers to Kenneth Burke, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'," in The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 167.

18. For this characterization, see Michael Calvin McGee and John R. Lyne, "What Are Nice Folks like You Doing in a Place like This?" in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. Nelson, et al., 381-83. 55. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 109.

19. Ibid., 125. Feminist Studies 6 ( 1980): 2-25, reprinted in New Feminist Criticism, ed. Showalter, 144-67.

20 Ibid., 475.61. Schussler Fiorenza, But She Said, 2-14.