Social Conflict and Sacrificial Rhetoric
CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS Social Conflict and Sacrificial Rhetoric Luther’s Discursive Intervention and the Religious Division of Labor Introduction ‘Sacrifice’ is a religious term whose use extends far beyond the church door. People from all walks of life speak of ‘sacrifice’ when they want to evoke an irreducible conflict in the relations between self, family, and soci- ety. In America, hardly a speech goes by without political leaders insisting upon the necessity and virtue of sacrifice, but rarely will they clarify who is sacrificing what, and to whom. Indeed, this is not only an American phenomenon, as a number of recent texts examining ‘sacrifice’ as a term in various national discourses have shown.1 Such a political and economic deployment of a religious figure demands interpretation, for not only does the rhetoric of sacrifice span the globe,2 it constitutes a problem with a long genealogy. As a key moment in the Western segment of this genealogy, this article will examine the way that Luther’s exegetical work rhetoricalized sacrifice, and, in doing so, constructed a new discursive position, the pas- tor as anti-sophist, or parrhesiast, in the religious division of labor. The overarching question for this inquiry is how did a particular re- ligious ritual like sacrifice come to serve as such a widespread rhetorical figure? When faced with the immense historical distance between, first, the public destruction of wealth or butchering of an animal, and, last, a speech act describing non-ritual phenomena as a sacrifice, one measures the distance not only in years but also in religious and cultural transform- ation.
[Show full text]