| Many evangelical Christian readers forget that, when reading the Bible, they see only black marks on a white page that gain meaning in the process of socially constructed interpretation. Their perceptions of biblical meaning are affected by language-based persuasive devices, such as a system of sensory metaphors, that appeal to "what the Bible has to say" and "what we see clearly" in the text, thus masking human agency and decreasing room for disagreement in the act of interpretation.;Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, authors of the representative text of second wave biblical feminism, All We're Meant to Be, disagree with their counterparts Wayne Grudem and John Piper, authors of the representative text of complementarianism, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, about the role of women in the evangelical church and family. Both sides of the gender role debate use strategies such as the sensory metaphor system, the language of formal argument, personification, and dualisms to persuade their readers that their interpretations of the Bible, a polysemous text, is the one correct truth of Christianity. Evangelical audiences resonate with the biblical feminist and complementarian attempts to disambiguate the Bible into one literalized truth in their theological books because they share the hermeneutical assumptions of infallibility, plain reading, and unacknowledged human agency that add authority to their interpretations of the sacred text.;Kenneth Burke not only provides the rhetorical theory to explain the use of literalized linguistic systems in the process of inventing arguments that reify an interpretation into a terministic screen that influences evangelical Christian behavior; he also adds theoretical support for the productive critic to use this understanding of persuasive language to advocate for sexual equality by uncovering evangelical rhetoric as interpretive. |
