I wrote this essay for a panel titled “Reconciling Christian Peace with a Rhetoric of War and Conflict” at the National Communication Association’s 101st Annual Convention, which was held in Las Vegas in 2015.
This essay is an example of my religious studies research that overlaps more expressly with my rhetorical theory research, which has been my academic focus since 2006. The rhetorical theorists and philosophers I reference most in this paper include Kenneth Burke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Aristotle. The scriptural focus of this paper is the Greek Bible–i.e. the New Testament–and I analyze uses of the Greek term telos and some of its variations throughout the New Testament, especially in a couple key teachings by Jesus. In classical Greek, telos originally meant “completion”—not “purpose.” Throughout his career as a philosopher of language, Kenneth Burke favored telos-as-completion via the term entelechy, one of Aristotle’s derivations of telos. This was part of Burke’s lifelong project to “purify” war by relying on humanity’s shared inclination toward purpose-completion (entelechy), which emerges from humanity’s more brutal inclination to be in a natural state of war. Initially relying on Nietzsche’s value of conflict, Burke’s own value of “pure war” sheds new light on the primitive Christian ethic to “love your enemies” and thereby be “perfect”—which in the original Greek is telios, another cognate of telos meaning “to be complete.” In the essay below, I argue that some primitive Christian ethics as articulated in the Greek Bible can be read as attempts to harness (not negate) conflict toward peaceful ends.