• 대순사상과 동아시아종교
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• 제2권2호
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• pp.13-31
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• 2023

For centuries in the Christian era in the West, rhetoric was considered to be a pagan art, one unnecessary for, and detrimental to, religious propagation. As the Christian era gave way to a scientific one during the Enlightenment, both rhetoric and religion were considered irrational and outside the scope of Cartesian certainty. In recent decades, though, rhetorical studies have regained status in universities and rhetorical studies of religion have proliferated. Much work remains to be done, however. For example, Western rhetorical models do not typically consider religious tenets or creeds in terms of what this article will call rhetorical relationality, because creeds and tenets of Western Christianity tend to be purely exhortative. In the West, then, we lack a framework for such an analysis, but with the Four Tenets of Daesoon Jinrihoe, we are presented with Tenets that can, in fact, be analyzed relationally. In order to analyze them as such, this article draws upon philosophical, legal, and rhetorical frameworks developed by major twentieth- century rhetorician Chaim Perelman to understand the primary concern of mutuality expressed in contemporary rhetorical relationality.

• 대순사상과 동아시아종교
• /
• 제1권2호
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• pp.133-157
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• 2022

Applying the long and distinguished heritage of rhetorical theory to any sacred text, such The Canonical Scripture of Daesoon Jinrihoe, could fill many volumes of many books. This study, then, will provide some suggestive prolegomena for directions rhetorical criticism of the Scripture can take, now and in future research. This study will, further, make necessarily broad strokes in order to familiarize audiences and scholars of new Korean religions, and Eastern thought generally, with Western, both ancient and more modern, modes of rhetorical thought. As rhetorical criticism is increasingly embraced by Western religious scholarship, and as comparative religious studies remain an important dimension of textual scholarship, this article will contribute to both areas by presenting perhaps the first rhetorical-critical approach to the sacred scriptures of Daesoon Jinrihoe. When the new English translation of the Scriptures becomes available in the West, general and scholarly readers will be interested to find parallels and departures with religious and critical traditions with which they are already familiar (in this case, early American Protestant Calvinism). This study will make contributions, then, to the areas of rhetorical-religious criticism, comparative East-West presentations of nature within scriptural contexts, and establishment of grounds for further comparative investigations of Western traditions and Daesoon Jinrihoe.