The Real Function of Third Way Rhetoric

The person using third way rhetoric positions himself morally above the positions to his left and his right

“Third way” rhetoric that has been deployed by some evangelicals was once praised but is now often criticized. People are rejecting the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle of left and right, or is some hybrid thereof. Today, even the evangelical proponents of third way rhetoric have adopted new language like “diagonalizaton” to suggest that the Christian truth is not simply somewhere in the middle but something else entirely. (I believe Christopher Watkin came up with this formulation).

I actually think that a third way approach can be valid in a lot of circumstances in describing truth. For example, Aristotle said that virtue was a mean between two extremes. Not that perfect virtue always was at the midpoint of the two, but that it lies somewhere in the middle.

Similarly, in a theological context, we could say that it’s possible to over-emphasize Christ’s humanity and end up falling into Arianism, or over-emphasize his divinity and end up in Docetism.

Very often in life there actually are ditches on both sides of the road. So in terms of conveying truth, I think talking about a third way can often be accurate.

The real function of third way rhetoric is not conveying a truth claim, however. It is to elevate the status or moral position of the person using it - and often that of his audience as well.

Third way rhetoric is a pedimental structure. I first encountered the idea of pedimental language in reading Mary Douglas’ wonderful book Leviticus as Literature.

A pediment is an architectural feature that looks like this:

While this public domain image has four columns, you often see it with just two. The left and right corners of the triangle serve to emphasize the corner that is elevated in the center.

When used in rhetoric, pedimental rhetoric functions similar to a chiasm in emphasizing the central point. We see this structure in Leviticus. Douglas argues that chapters 18 and 20 have a pair of repeated sexual regulations that emphasize the social justice regulations in Leviticus 19 (which I believe she argues is actually the central focus of the book).

Let’s apply this to contemporary evangelical rhetoric with a simplified example. If I get into a pulpit and say, “Christianity is conservative because it cares about sin, but it’s also liberal because it cares about the poor,” what is the function of this?

Factually, it conveys that true Christianity cares about both sin and helping the poor, which is true. But it also suggests that I am better than both liberals or conservatives, because I have the complete truth in contrast to their partial truths. And because you, my parishioners, are in my church, you are probably better than all those people too.

Because we would probably classify most people as either conservative or liberal, this type of rhetoric elevates us as a sort of moral elite.

This really hit me about 5-7 years ago when I started hearing third way rhetoric with regards to abortion in the urban church world. This is very common today, but it was less so then. Here’s a portion of the text of the voiceover of an actual video that was a promo for a church training curriculum on abortion:

But instead of respecting God’s design, the political debate divides us into two camps, one focused on the needs of the woman, the other focused on the needs of the child. What we need is a third option, because somewhere in the middle of this debate is a woman and a child, with real emotions and real needs. And if those needs go unmet, she often feels that her only choice is between and abortion or overwhelming struggle as a mom….For many women, church is one of the last places they would turn to for help. But there is a way we can change this, if we are willing to look inside first. What if there was a third way for Christians to respond, a new way to think about this issue, aligning with God’s design of pregnancy, so that we value both the woman and the child equally?

This video was produced by an organization in a major city, and I saw it in an elite city context. What are some of the things it conveys to the hearers via its structure and third way form of argumentation?

• Both the secular pro-abortion advocates and the Christian abortion opponents are wrong - and equally wrong.

• Re-emphasizing: the church in general is wrong on how it handles abortion because it doesn’t properly love women, and as a result is failing women with unplanned pregnancies.

• Implicit: You, the watchers of this video and participants in our program, are morally superior to all those other anti-abortion Christians (which, in light of the point above, is most other Christians apart from you) because you obviously care about the mother as well as the baby, don’t you? Of course you do.

I consider this video highly manipulative because I think it’s been a very long time now that Right to Life has been running their “Love Them Both” campaign - I found references to it online from 2001 - and most hard core anti-abortion people I know are also involved in crisis pregnancy centers and other such things to help struggling young mothers. It plays into what urbanites want to think about those culture war rubes out there in the provinces.

This is an example of how urban church approaches often end up constructively being a type of theology of pride, as I noted in one of my early podcasts.

So much of the teachings of the urban church flatter the sensibilities of the people in the pews rather than fundamentally challenging them about the way they are living their lives.

Here’s another one you sometimes hear from the evangelical cultural engagement world. “I’m getting attacked from both the secular left and the Christian nationalist right.” Similar to the above, this implies both of those groups are equally bad, and that the person saying it is morally superior to both.

It’s important to recognize how various patterns of rhetoric like the third way function. There are often multiple things going on. There’s a factual claim, which may be true or at least directionally correct. But there’s often an implicit status or moral claim, which might also be true, but should certainly be critically evaluated separately from the factual claims.

The pedimental nature of third way rhetoric is very effective, and it’s easy to see why it appeals to the striver class people who populate evangelical urban churches.