If reigning models for theological truth — the objective scientificity of method rendered in conceptual clarity, internal coherence, and consistency, whether “correlational” or otherwise — do not sufficiently represent the way the truth of theological production works, how do we construe a model of truth for theology of culture?

To answer this question, I shall experiment with a kind of tactics for knowledge in theology of culture: “imperation,” in the sense of making an imperative, fashioning an urgency, styling a claim to attention, inciting an action. Imperation is a term and model inspired by Luke Anderson’s interpretation of the rhetoric of Bernard of Clairvaux in the book Bernardus Magister. Imperation is fundamentally “designed to foster the reader’s experience of God” (Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century, Crossroad, 1996; p. 198).

Anderson describes imperation as a “rhetorical epistemology.” It attempts to attune the reader to their loving desire for God, which it elicits by a “rhetorical theologizing” (see Anderson’s “The Rhetorical Epistemology in St. Bernard’s Super Cantica,” in Bernardus Magister, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt, Cistercian Publications, 1992; p. 99, see also 96, 104, 108).

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