The Construction of Chinese Rhetoric and the Legitimacy of Chinese Homiletics: A Preliminary Study Using the Concept of “Persuasion” as an Example

The Construction of Chinese Rhetoric and the Legitimacy of Chinese Homiletics: A Preliminary Study Using the Concept of “Persuasion” as an Example

Ken KS LUI

Western homiletics has been shaped since Augustine by a paradigm integrating classical Greco-Roman rhetoric with Christian preaching. This article asks whether Chinese churches should follow this paradigm to construct a distinctively “Chinese Homiletics”. It first establishes Chinese rhetoric as a legitimate academic discipline, independent of Western traditions, and then focuses on a comparative analysis of the concept of “persuasion” in Chinese and Western rhetoric. Western rhetoric, typified by Aristotle, is traditionally speaker-centered, emphasizing the technical means of persuasion—logos, ethos, and pathos. The Chinese rhetorical tradition, by contrast, centers on the concept of fu (service, “compliance/conviction”), privileging xinfu (心felt conviction) as the ideal rhetorical outcome, governed by the principle xiuci li qi cheng (rhetoric grounded in virtue and truth) and yi de fu ren ("winning hearts through virtue"). This article concludes that Chinese Homiletics should be grounded in the preacher's morality and spirituality rather than rhetorical technique.