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The exhortations we find in the New Testament play an incredibly important role both in the church's life and in the structuring and organization of the NT books themselves. For our purposes here, ?exhortation? includes any call to action, which typically is signaled by a shift in mood from indicative verbs to imperative or subjunctive mood verbs that are not in dependent clauses (i.e., hortatory subjunctives). 


As we will see, it is also possible to exhort readers using indicative verbs like ????????? + infinitive (?I urge/exhort?). For this reason, I will use ?exhortation? as a coverall term instead of imperative or command, and will refer to the genre of literature that features exhortations as ?hortatory.? 


The goal here is to describe the grammatical characteristics that help determine the tone or directness of an exhortation. More importantly, the shift from indicative verbs to hortatory forms represents a shift in the writer?s goals. It represents a shift from just informing to bringing about a change of some kind generally resulting in action. And even more importantly, the exhortations generally are central to the all-important ?big idea? that preachers are looking for. 


Within biblical studies, discussions of exhortations generally center on morphological classification, like the use of the imperative versus the hortatory subjunctive without much attention to the actual discourse function of the verb in the context. Sometimes imperatives are simply attention-getters, like ???? (?Understand!?) in James 1:19, and not a call to action. After all, don?t we assume that James wants us to understand the entirety of his letter, not just this one bit? Attention-getting imperatives like this one serve a different purpose; they slow the flow of the discourse, and in doing so draw attention to the clause that follows?that everyone is to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. This imperative is better understood as a metacomment than as an actual command, based on how it attracts attention to what immediately follows rather than the understanding itself. 


The opposite can also hold true, where something that is not in the imperative mood is actually a call to action. Consider the use of an indicative-mood verb in James 3:10: ?From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so!? (LEB) Although there is technically no command or imperative here, James is nevertheless calling his readers to action regarding their speech. He describes a situation and then says it ought not to be that way, hence a less-direct call to action compared to ?Stop it!? but a call to action nevertheless. 


These examples illustrate some of the pitfalls of only attending to the morphological classification of verbs. Language is messy, but that does not mean that it cannot be described. Gaining an understanding of the key grammatical building blocks and the kinds of things they contribute will put us in a better position for analyzing and understanding the effects achieved by different combinations. 


In this seven-post series, we will look at the different factors that influence the tone and directness of exhortations in Greek, as well as how to map these Greek discourse features onto English in appropriate ways. 


What factors make some exhortations sound as though the writer?s veins were sticking out on their forehead from frustration as they wrote compared to others that seem much more like a friend?s gentle encouragement or redirection? In my experience, there are five primary factors that influence the tone of exhortations, with the directness toward the reader being the common thread that holds them together. The more direct the forms, the harsher the exhortation feels. 


Thus, directness and mitigation of these features form a continuum on what I call a harshness scale. The writer?s selection of a particular hortatory approach is informed by a whole host of sociocultural and interpersonal factors, many of which we will not be in a position to fully comprehend. However, there are basic principles that can help us better appreciate what may have guided their decisions in these matters. 


The four factors that we'll consider in this series are:


Although each of these factors uniquely contributes in largely predictable ways, we must humbly recognize that there are a veritable infinite number of combinations. Linguistics is a humanity and not a science, so there will be no formulaic way to add up the sum of the parts. Having said that, the different features do achieve rather predictable results, so understanding the contribution of each building block can add significant insight to your exegesis of hortatory passages.