Religious Rhetorics

As you may have noticed, there is now a form that you can fill out, to submit questions on issues of religion, rhetoric, and politics. Our very first question comes from David:

So I’ve been wondering (and have never hassled a poor proselytizer to answer) how any interpretation of “god’s word” can be certain to be the right interpretation among countless others.  Claiming this certainty seems like an instant-fail argument.  If every true believer comes to my door with a different gospel of Truth, what sound defense do they have against the charge that competing fictions (i.e. one handy interpretation over the others) can only result in relative popularity, not ontological accuracy.  (yup, I’m assuming that every interpretation is a fiction [lest I learn how to definitely read a text's singular meaning]).

Hi David,

Thanks for your question! As a rhetorician, addressing the certainty of the rightness of an interpretation is out of my league. I can however offer an explanation as to the process by which believers (and non-believers alike) arrive at varying interpretations of a religious text. In short, it comes down to the rhetoricity of an interpretation, and how convincing an individual finds a particular interpretation to be.

From a rhetorical standpoint, virtually all interpretive enterprises come down to persuasion, and very few human enterprises do not require some interpretive act. But not all interpretations are created equal, at least in terms of their persuasive power. The inseparability of interpretation and persuasion has been described with vary concepts, including rhetorical hermeneutics coined by Steven Mallioux and the reverse, hermeneutical rhetoric, coined by Michael Leff in response to Mallioux. (A good book on this topic to check out, that includes essays by both Mallioux and Leff is Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time.)

But we needn’t get lost in rhetorical terminology to understand that our interpretation of a text is in part a result of the rhetorical strategies employed in that text. We also bring an interpretive frame (a hermeneutics) to every text we read. Further, texts, “religious” or “secular,” are rarely read and interpreted in isolation, but are usually read and interpreted among multiple individuals–in classes, book clubs, casual conversations, newspaper book reviews, etc. When we present an interpretation of a text to others, we use rhetoric to express and persuade them to our interpretation. In turn, we ourselves hear arguments for interpretations and our judgments concerning those interpretations are based on how convinced we are by the arguments made. To adopt a particular interpretation of anything–a text, a theory, the historicity of an event–we must be persuaded, that is convinced, that it is either true or more plausible than the other possibilities.

In many contexts, though certainly not all, a consensus of interpretation is desired among a group of individuals. We can refer to this group as an interpretive community (a term coined by Stanley Fish). In these instances, rhetors may try very hard to persuade each other to a particular interpretation. Sometimes there is an official body or select group of people who determine the official interpretation of a text. The ethos of such a group often plays a large role in the sense of authority that a interpretation has. An interpretation can also gain authority through popular consensus or its demonstrated ability to produce a certain result if applied.

I would be remiss not to mention the role an individual’s experience of the world plays in interpretation. We can imagine that if a reader adopts a particular interpretation, it probably aligns with his/her experience of the world (that interpretation in turn then helps shape the reader’s experience of the world). An interpretation that doesn’t fit, we can imagine, is ordinarily rejected. Of course whether a particular interpretation fits one’s experience is also a matter of rhetoric.

This is what makes interpretations so sticky, especially in regards to religious texts where the stakes are high, especially for believers. But this is also where we can begin to see the differences between interpretive practices in religion versus interpretive practices in science, particularly experimental science. Many of these differences stem from the issue of verifiability. An experimental scientist can test his/her interpretation of data through series of tests using various instruments, as well as his/her own senses, to measure the results. If the interpretation is to have any weight at all within the scientific community, the results must be duplicable by other scientists. Scientists can then compare tests and observations and draw conclusions from the results.

In the realm of religion, however, it is not so easy to measure and compare interpretations of texts. Methods of verifiability can lend interpretations the weight of authority, but absent them in the realm of religion, variability in interpretation ensues. Yes there is textual criticism, logic, etc. but the complexities of any text, especially when there are claims of ultimate truth involved, render definite interpretations very difficult if not impossible to obtain.

I offer, however, a caveat. The rhetorical nature of interpretation does not necessarily render all interpretations false. Science, after all is still an interpretive act, and even its interpretations can radically change. While the interpretation of a religious text is not verifiable in the same way that the interpretation of scientific data is, we must remember that religion ultimately does not attempt to tell us about the same things that science does, and these things cannot, for better or for worse, be submitted to the rigors of the scientific method.

Undoubtedly, rejecting certain interpretations of a text is a rhetorical-interpretive act. Rejecting all interpretations that assume a text contains ultimate truth is often characterized as unbelief. For “unbelievers,” these interpretations are unconvincing. This, however, is just one particular example of the inextricable relationship between rhetoric and interpretation.