RHETORIC & OLD SCHOOL BAPTIST PREACHING

This book argues that Greek and Roman rhetoric is less a museum piece than the durable “engineering logic” of public persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos—developed through Greek democratic courts and assemblies, sharpened by the Sophists and critiqued by Plato, systematized by Aristotle, and then pragmatically refined by Rome through Cicero’s canons and Quintilian’s moral program for forming a speaker. It then traces how this rhetorical bloodstream flowed into Christian preaching—most directly in the Latin West through Cicero → Augustine → later homiletics, and in the Greek East through later style-and-issue theory (notably Hermogenes)—so that sermon practice inherited a recognizable classical architecture (exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio) and a repertoire of figures (anaphora, antithesis, chiasmus, paralipsis, rhetorical questions, irony, amplification), along with the enduring stylistic debate between Attic restraint, Asiatic ornament, and a moderated “middle” style.

Applied to Old School (Primitive) Baptist preaching—especially the Absoluter wing—the paper’s central judgment is paradoxical but persuasive: direct, self-conscious dependence on classical rhetorical “culture” was low because Old School Baptists distrusted professional eloquence, the prestige economy of clerical training, and “religious theater,” yet classical influence remained substantial at the level of structure and argument-moves simply because sustained doctrinal preaching must explain, prove, answer objections, and press application. On this reading, Beebe and Trott function as test cases: both explicitly denounce ornate eloquence and the “science of preaching,” yet they routinely deploy rigorous arrangement (thesis → proof → objections), aggressive refutation, and sharp stylistic tools—meaning their preaching is best described as rhetoric stripped of showmanship and pressed into service as a pastoral instrument for clarity, defense of doctrine, and conscience-addressing application.