The Rhetoric of the Divine

In class today, Professor Burton touched on the perspective of rhetoric among some of the first philosophers as being “amoral” and therefore “immoral.” As a Latter-day Saint I have seen the contrary to this statement because as a literary student, I have seen God use rhetoric and rhetorical devices such as kairos (“the contingencies of a give place and time”) and audience (“how an audience shapes the composition of a text or responds to it) to restore the Church of Jesus Christ as it exists today. Therefore, as silly as I feel writing it, rhetoric is divine and used even in the Lord’s communication with us.

With the invention of the printing press, communication, literature, etc. were mass produced and given to the public. This of itself is Kairos because it changed the way people thought and how were educated, especially with the mass production or the Bible. Their religious ideals were changed to accommodate the inevitable restoration of the Church that was going to occur a few centuries later.

Audience was important for the Lord as well leading up to the Restoration. The way He addressed Joseph Smith in the First Vision was most likely accomplished and successfully understood by the fourteen year old boy because the Lord new His audience and knew the audience that Joseph would first preach to after he was given instructions to restore the Church. This was all carefully planned, just as the rhetoric in a piece of literature is carefully planned according to the Kairos and audience of the situation.

Image: Joseph Smith's First Vision