{"id":694,"date":"2007-10-21T10:45:42","date_gmt":"2007-10-21T14:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/2007\/10\/21\/the-drama-of-grace-a-pentadic-analysis\/"},"modified":"2007-10-21T10:45:42","modified_gmt":"2007-10-21T14:45:42","slug":"the-drama-of-grace-a-pentadic-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/2007\/10\/21\/the-drama-of-grace-a-pentadic-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Drama of Grace: A Pentadic Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

I woke up with this on my mind this morning. I’m going to write it out. This is exactly what the dropped chapter of my book was about<\/strong>, if you’re ever curious, but this will be in normal talk (not weird geek-speak).<\/p>\n

Rhetorical Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\n

As with any academic discipline, rhetorical criticism has several “branches.” There’s the Neo-Aristotelian sort that reinterprets and reduces Aristotle to effectiveness and analyzes a given example of dead-white-guy talk against the five canon<\/a> (invention, style, delivery, organization . . . and what was that other one? Oh yes, memory!). Most Neo-Aristotelian stuff was a history lesson that diverted away from the text altogether. So Edwin Black came along in 1952 and said, “Hey! What happened to the speeches? And why are we only talking about the effective ones. Let’s find the ‘strange and moving’ ones.”<\/p>\n

And the discipline really blossomed from there. We still have the\u00a0historians who painfully and carefully reconstruct the context of particular rhetorical situations.\u00a0We’ve got close-textual guys who talk about the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text; they see speeches like literature — beautiful works to be unfolded and appreciated. We’ve got ideological critics (Marxists, feminists, etc.) who identify and judge the power discourse in all sorts of texts (buildings, ads, recipes) against a particular set of values. I’m, of course, being overly reductionistic about this, but it is<\/em> a blog post.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Burke<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

These are all my teachers. I had a Neo-Aristotelian. I had a Edwin Black sort. I had a bunch of historians. I had a close-textual guy. I had a a few ideological dudes. But I put most of my money on Burkean criticism.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Burke<\/a> looked at the drama of a given text. His pentad<\/a>\u00a0is rather familiar: agent (who?), act (what?), agency (how?), scene (where?), purpose (why?). But the answers to those questions are never as simple as the speaker, speaking, on TV, in America, to get votes. Burke wanted us to get behind those immediate details and see what drama the speaker is re-creating. What’s his story?<\/p>\n

And . . . there are basically two: tragedy and comedy. The purpose of tragedy is to purify a person or group through some kind of death (literal or figurative). Tragedy needs a scapegoat to take the guilt and punishment for everyone else to be pure. Burke argued that all human endeavor was bent toward tragedy. We want perfection, we fall short (Paul’s lingo<\/a>, not Burke’s), we look around for someone to blame (the Jews, the poor, the oddball, the dissident), we expunge\/punish\/kill that person, and we’re perfect again! Which, as you can guess, just reboots the whole process. If that sounds somewhat<\/em>\u00a0familiar to\u00a0Christian ears, it should. Burke had a bit of a morbid but agnostic\u00a0curiousity with Christian theology (to him, it was the best example of rhetoric in the West. To take an infinite God and explain Him to finite creatures!), and he saw Christ’s death as the archetype for tragedy (he was wrong, but I’ll get to that later).<\/p>\n

Burke was disappointed in tragedy. He saw it too much. Human beings too easily throw their own “under the bus.” Deeply disturbed by what he read in Mein Kampf<\/em>, he proposed comedy instead. In comedy, there is no expunging or punishing or killing; there’s correcting and critiquing and laughing at the flaws we all share. Rather than reach for perfection, poke fun at human foibles. Rather than point fingers at the weirdo in the corner, look inside at yourself and see your own problems in him. Rather than kill off the unsavory element, correct and educate. We’re all fools, Burke assumed, and we all need critique.<\/p>\n

Comedy isn’t ignorant or hypocritical or permissive or forced unity. It can get heated. It can get intense. But Burke urged us to see our “others” as adversaries, not enemies. You kill off your enemies because they are evil. But you argue with and correct your adversaries because they are simply mistaken. Grant<\/a> always reminds me of this when I get too intense: “Honey, they aren’t evil, just mistaken.” Ack — I hate it when he listens to me. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

A Christian View<\/strong><\/p>\n

Burke got it wrong when he concluded that Christianity originated tragedy. And that’s why I picked up Walter Wink<\/a> in the first place. In describing his “Myth of Redemptive Violence,” Wink finds tragedy’s pagan<\/em> roots. Pagan creation myths, for instance, describe our beginnings as starting with death and chaos and violence and\u00a0with life springing from that tragedy. God tells the story differently. His world began<\/em> as “very good,” and human beings messed it up.<\/p>\n

At the cross, however, Christ “finished” the story of tragedy. He turned us all into comedians. The debt was paid. Sacrifice was over. The law of love was restored. We believers were “very good” again in the eyes of God.<\/p>\n

In other words, God’s story of redemption is a comedy. Burke didn’t know it. He knew it was possible and assumed we could only get a glimpse of that comedy every so often. But in Christ, there’s no need to kill or expunge or punish. We are complete in Him. It is finished.<\/p>\n

So Grace is a totally different drama. It is Burkean comedy. The Gospel is the opposite of pagan tragedy in every way.<\/p>\n

The Drama of Grace<\/strong><\/p>\n

And when you look at the stories in Scripture, every one of them is a comedy. Every one is about Grace in Christ. Tragedy is a pagan perversion. It is all a human can imagine outside of God.<\/p>\n

Awhile back a friend brought over her favorite Bollywood<\/a> movie. I had never seen one before. The production values were impressive. Colorful costumes, lively music. She told me that all the Bollywood stories are the same:<\/p>\n