Personal identity in the history of ideas: The born-again Christian as a case study

Abstract

The ‘born-again Christian’ is an idea that lies at the heart of early-modern Lutheranism as well as more recent evangelical Christianity of the sort famously practiced by George W. Bush. It is also, clearly, a way of being: the most unexceptional people can be born again. For scholars negotiating the boundary between intellectual history and cultural studies, the born-again Christian therefore provides a case study illuminating histories of personal identity generally, including identities of nation, location, race, class, gender, and religion. Immediately one notices that a strict history of ideas drawn from Christian doctrine will overstep the important domain of experience, while any cultural studies approach that ignores Christian doctrine will have a hard time explaining what counts as relevant experience and why. A history of identity categories must draw from both approaches. Despite recent efforts in the New dictionary of the history of ideas (2005) to advance a ‘cultural history of ideas,’ however, much work remains as we figure out how exactly this combination should look. When it comes to identity I argue, the missing element is a rhetorical theory of the subject that goes beyond tropology (White) and persuasion (Skinner) to account for horizons of possibility. Ultimately I use Reinhart Koselleck as a foil to advance a Heideggerian rhetorical methodology that situates allegories of the subject in horizons of possibility rather than in structures or traditions alone.