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Many people boil rhetoric down to simply the ability to deliver an engaging speech, but it is so much more than that. Douglas Jones, the author of the revolutionary textbook, A Rhetoric of Love, joins us to give a comprehensive explanation of what rhetoric is and how a Christian’s rhetoric ought to differ from the variety that Aristotle taught.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

This is Marlin Detweiler, and you've come to Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us a dear friend from a long time ago, many decades, Doug Jones. Doug, welcome.

Doug Jones:

Greetings, it's good to see you again, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:

Nice to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your family and that sort of thing. Before we get into the topic at hand, which is the fact that you wrote the first volume of Rhetoric of Love for us.

Doug Jones:

Yeah. I'm a Southern California native. I'm back here now. I lived all around. Married to Paula with five kids. Most of them are grown and some are doctors and so forth. And I've been long interested in Christian apologetics and Christian persuasion and then slowly moved into philosophy. So I've got a master's in philosophy from the University of Southern California.

And then as I became a little sort of skeptical of that whole process, I moved into creative writing and literature and was very fascinated with the persuasive ability. So I got a master's in creative writing, especially poetry. And so I've been teaching in those two areas over the past 20-30 years or so.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very good. Yeah. At one time you taught for Veritas Scholars Academy online for us. That was wonderful. We were very sorry when that came to an end, but if I remember correctly, it came to an end because of an international stint that you did. You want to tell us about that?

Doug Jones:

Yeah, that was quite eye opening. I loved my time at Veritas. I'm still in contact with some of my students. It's been terrific. But yeah, I had this opportunity as a kid. I lived in South Africa for a while and actually became a Christian down there. And then after that, it's sort of a Jones tradition. We get sort of tired of living in the United States and look overseas. My mother was Greek, and so we spent a lot of time in Greece, but I was looking for an opportunity in the Middle East. I'd never lived in the Middle East, and I was fascinated to be sort of in the center of that world for a while.

So I kept applying and applying and finally got hired at a college. HCT, it is called, in the Middle East. And this was a women's college, a Muslim women's college, and they wanted the English speakers to come and teach, in my case, critical thinking. And it was quite an eye opening, fascinating time. And it was during that time actually, that I wrote A Rhetoric of Love.

So being sort of an outsider in that culture and thinking through some of the issues, saying sort of Muslim culture imitates conservative Christian culture in some ways was fascinating to me and in a good way, a disruptor.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, you were there three years.

Doug Jones:

Yeah, three and a half years.

Marlin Detweiler:

Were you ready to get home?

Doug Jones:

Oh, very much so.

Marlin Detweiler:

Happy to go there. Happy to return.

Doug Jones:

Yes, and I met some great people and had some great students.

Marlin Detweiler:

We go back decades and I don't remember when or how we first met, but how. How did you develop an interest in classical Christian education? When did that first come about for you?

Doug Jones:

Well, I was in the OPC. I was an elder with Greg Balsam back in the eighties, and he was teaching at a Christian classical school in Newport Beach before it had become a movement, really. And it was sort of a school developed around the Dorothy Sayers Essay. So through Greg Balsam. And but I first got connected with these, and then later we moved to Idaho and I worked with Doug Wilson and New Saint Andrew's College and so forth. And then ultimately Veritas.

Marlin Detweiler:

I think where we first met was probably after you had moved to Idaho. Yeah. And got connected there and you ran Canon Press for some time. I know we had a lot of interaction there as Veritas was developing and that was a good business relationship in addition to the personal. And so we go way back. That is, that would be probably 1992 when we first met would be my guess. You were there then?

Doug Jones:

I was. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well and in laying out the introduction to this, I want to tell the audience a little something. And one of the things at Veritas that we look for before we go into a curriculum project has been we naturally need to have the funds available that it will require. And we need to have the people involved in it that are able to produce the work that we want produced.

But the biggest one that I really stumbled on for rhetoric, which went on honestly in our involvements in classical Christian education, was the idea of a better mousetrap. We always want to look at what's available in the marketplace and say, “How can we do something that's better otherwise not worth doing?” If we can't make it better, we might as well use what exists.

And rhetoric was one that I always knew was incredibly important. I was very uncomfortable and still am for that matter, with the fact that Aristotle's rhetoric is so commonly used in so many places and yet in some significant sense, in spite of the fact that it speaks against sophistry, is at some level the practice of sophistry. Would you agree with that?

Doug Jones:

Yeah, I think historically there's something to that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. And the other thing about it was it was primarily teaching people how to deliver speeches in a political context as a statesman. And rhetoric is more than that. So as you and I talked, I remember us having a conversation and I'm not sure why, but I asked you, would you be interested in helping us develop a rhetoric curriculum?

And I was surprised how quickly you expressed an interest in that. And then when you went in to talk about the idea that you'd been contemplating, which we have titled A Rhetoric of Love, it resonated with me as that's what we need for classical Christian schools from a teaching of rhetoric. But tell us how the idea came about for you and what you would say is what makes it a better mousetrap.

Doug Jones:

Probably two things that sort of motivated me in the early thinking of this. One idea that was always in my background was the notion of Christian antithesis. This right trying to develop a distinctively Christian approach to many subjects, and the other one had been percolating at that time. A lot of ideas such as trying to understand how the Trinity, which seems to me the most unique aspect of Christian theology, how that might affect a subject like rhetoric?

So those two ideas – a Christian antithesis and being uncomfortable, as you expressed with sort of the embrace of the Greek tradition. And again, there are many things they taught us, and in our book we've got quotes and so forth, and yet ultimately we know that we're approaching these questions from different universes. And so I was always uncomfortable just imitating the classical Greek and classical Roman tradition.

There must be something more. And that's we're thinking about the Trinity and the sort of the relations between the Trinity and how the Trinity persuades historically and so forth. So I started thinking, of course, at the center of the Trinity is love. God is love. So I started thinking, well, what would a triune rhetoric begin to look like?

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, you went on then to define a rhetoric of love in contrast to a rhetoric of domination. Unpack that, especially in the context of the resurgence of an interest in classical education and what it has used to teach rhetoric focused around Aristotle for the most part.

Doug Jones:

Yeah, that's another sort of antithetical difference in the whole Greek and Roman tradition, of course, is founded on non Trinitarian grounds, and so love can't be at the center of those worldviews. And what tends to be at the center of those worldviews are just ideas. I think of the Greek tradition, just ideas or sort of violence, right? I mean, you think of Polytheistic Universalists, you've got this constant of violence and those are fun stories to read and see how those shaped Western culture. But violence is really at the core of classical societies. And so it's that sort of antithetical difference that made me suspect there. There was another part of your question.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, you know, is the contrast and you developed a rhetoric of love as opposed to a rhetoric of domination. And maybe unpack those definitionally help us understand that contrast in specific categories.

Doug Jones:

Yeah. And many times there are overlaps and we can get into those. But yeah, it's it's started to stand out to me that, you know, a lot of ancient rhetoric and again, the great parts of ancient rhetoric, they're very much interested in developing virtue and so forth. And we can learn a lot there. At my own school where I teach now, this is a huge focus, I teach at the Cambridge School here in San Diego.

And the dominant tradition, if you think about the Greek and the Roman was often set in the in the courtroom. Right. And you're trying to win and crush the opponent and so forth. And so. Well, the Christian rhetoric can't start there, though that might be appropriate at times. We can't start there be driven by that. So this distinction between sort of this domination and destroying the other right, either intellectually or in war, that becomes, you know, a dominant motif in the whole classical and secular tradition, whereas in the Christian tradition, somehow, you know, Jesus has us focusing on loving the other, in fact, loving the enemy which puts an entirely different spin on things. So try to understand how that grows out of the Trinity and how that might shape a rhetoric was at the core of this.

The other thing that stood out recently in the past five, six years as I've been teaching literature and history and so forth, is that within the Christian tradition we get two major divides.

Sometimes we think of East and West Christianity or Protestant and Catholic, but there's a deeper divide, and I think that plays into today's culture wars, too. And that's the divide between the sort of the Konstantinian paradigm and what I like to call the Benedictine right, which was a monastic movement. But the constant tension versus the Benedictine, both had different approaches to the faith, right?

And the Konstantinian tended to embrace the domination side of things, destroying the enemy, loving your enemy wasn’t so important in that tradition. But that divide really shows up in all branches of the church, right? So it's not just a sort of a medieval thing. When you get into Protestantism, you have the magisterial reformers and you get the anabaptists. And that's sort of the Konstantinian versus Benedictine divide as well. In American history you get the North being more Benedictine and the South being more Konstantinian and right at the heart of sort of working out American contradictions is this great sort of religious contrast between two different ways of living the Christian faith. And so that distinction helped me sort of think through this issue as well. What would a Benedictine rhetoric or rhetoric centered on the Sermon on the Mount rather than on Mosaic Law look like?

Marlin Detweiler:

Now, just this is a bit parenthetical to the broader conversation, but I think it's important to realize there's a lot within Aristotle's rhetoric that is included in what you wrote. It was very important to get the five canons of rhetoric in there. What importance do they hold in A Rhetoric of Love?

Doug Jones:

In general, these are sort of common grace or common sense observations that people have understood about organizing material, presenting material over the centuries and tried and true ways of doing that. And so, yeah, we discuss gaps in there. We focus a bit more on story, narrative in it than in some classical ways of presenting things. The story seems a lot more central to the biblical vision than maybe sort of a bullet point approach, which sometimes characterizes speech and debate presentations.

Marlin Detweiler:

But its importance remains, even though it's showing up in a different form. What I would say about that kind of thing is how we present something. What you've just said is we have the same content. That story becomes a more effective way of presenting, maybe of learning, which I think is notable.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's worth commenting on that. Why is story more effective? Not only because it's a biblical model, but I think it's a biblical model because it's a more effective way to talk about that. A little bit, because I think that plays into the book quite well.

Doug Jones:

Yeah, here, here might be another difference between sort of a Trinitarian vision and the classical, the classical tradition for all its merits did tend to look down on emotion, did tend to sort of highlight the influence of Plato's system, where the most real things are these impersonal ideas. And so ideas and sort of the clash of ideas becomes prominent there.

Whereas in story, we're using our whole body right? Much more incarnational. We’re using our emotions and they aren't bad things, they're part of what it means to be human. And so even in places like the Enlightenment, again, where they're sort of reviving some classical aspects, the classical poetry and imagination are sort of downplayed for rationality. Rationality is important, but it's only one part of being a human. Story allows us to sort of engage the whole person when we do it well.

Marlin Detweiler:

And then that comes out in the breadth of the book and it's teaching too. It's not a speech class. It sometimes is it seems easy to tell people wanting to know, well, what is rhetoric. Well, you might think of as a speech class, but that really shortchanges it because rhetoric is a comprehensive means of communicating.

And you talked in the book a lot about a number of different topics. And then you also brought in the aspect in rhetoric of being an active listener. So talk to us about those things in terms of all categories of communication. I should quit giving you compound questions here. Let's leave it at that! Doug, tell us about the comprehensive aspect of communication within rhetoric, especially what you've written.

Doug Jones:

Yeah. Again, thinking of I mean, we wrote every chapter we started thinking about, well, how would love shape this? How would love shape this, looking at sort of the classical categories. And of course, if our rhetoric is driven by love, then we're primarily not concerned with ourselves, but with the audience. Now, of course, we've got to pay attention to what we're doing, but it's always sort of a servant attitude.

We're trying to win them over, persuade them, get them to join with us, but not destroy them so much. And so if you think about that, to be an effective speaker, you really have to listen well, right? You have to know sort of the other side ideally better than they know themselves. They should be sort of comfortable with the way that you summarize their position because you listened well, sympathetically, empathetically, whatever it might mean. So in order to sort of criticize another position, you certainly need to have listened well and know it better ideally than they could themselves. And that's just another application of love.

Marlin Detweiler:

What about physical attributes, appearance and that sort of thing? How do you think that plays in?

Doug Jones:

Yeah, I certainly don't want to downplay those things. That's part of the body and bodies are important in incarnational theology. So I think we have to pay attention to those sort of things. Yeah, nothing else that jumps to jumps to mind. Of course, we want to be driven not so much by personal beauty, but maybe sort of the beauty that categorizes the presentation, the categorizes the message.

Marlin Detweiler:

I didn't mean by my question of physical attributes as much as I did probably attention to detail and being thoughtful in that process, which I think is part of, you know, it's really a funny thing to know how to appropriately and properly fit into a given circumstance, going to a baseball game versus going to church to a wedding.

All have contexts for fitting in and there's a rhetorical aspect or an aspect of rhetoric that's about being appropriate in a communications setting, is there not?

Doug Jones:

Yeah, definitely. That involves the kind of submission, right? Looking pivoting attention to what setting you're in, what is effective, what is rude, things like that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Tell me about listening, how listening played in. That's one of the things that is most memorable to me as the publisher of the book and in the editorial process that I was part of as that came in the whole the value of what I call active listening. It was a challenge to me then, and it remains a challenge to me as I celebrate 42 years of marriage to understand the value of listening actively.

Yeah, that was well, well articulated. Talk to me about some of the things there and how they became important enough to you to teach them to others.

Doug Jones:

Yeah, I think part of that came from frustration in sort of Christian culture wars over the past few decades. I guess I don't think my tradition and again, like you said yourself, I'm writing this entire book to myself. These are not my basic instincts. You know, my instincts are to destroy. So I'll certainly be inconsistent at times, but I'm pointing to where I want to go, where I think we should go. And so I've been involved in, you know, sort of now seem to me childish forms of sarcasm and so and so forth. Brutal sort of taking down of enemies. And I guess over time it just didn't seem effective as other ways of interacting with people.

Some of this came, you know, living in the U.A.E. how do I speak in an entirely alien culture to me? How do you have a voice? And I guess I saw, you know, some good sincere Muslims doing the same sort of thing that conservative Christians did. And I found that disturbing. I was curious about why – how did we both end up in the same sort of rhetorical place there? Their apologetics looks very much like our apologetics. Their attempts to dominate conversation look like ours. And I guess part of it was I just got tired over decades, I never really saw any fruit come of this. And so fruit becomes a major topic in this book.

And at the same time, you had sort of the nightmare of Donald Trump arising as I was writing this book. And he certainly changed, you know, the entire level of conversation within the country. So and it seemed like one of the biggest things is in my past I was a poor listener and I think in conservative Christian circles, because we're so quick, we're so we tend to be sort of look at ourselves as victims.

And so we're so quick to defend. When we're backed against a corner. And when you're in that mode, you don't think carefully and slowly. You don't listen well. And I think that's where we've landed in the past 50 years or so. So listening is an odd thing. I think seculars sometimes do better than Christians. They can listen to a position. They don't see their identity tied so much either to their country. And so they're able to listen a little bit more carefully. And I wanted to see something like that should be definitely a part of what we do.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I think that's generally been true. I'm not sure how true that's been in the last couple of years. There's a lot of not listening going on. And I think it's secularists as well as Christians in spades at the moment. And it's I think it's one of the reasons why it's so important to consider what is the value of listening to people that we're trying to be influential with.

And I have no doubt that by the grace of God, I have been given a Christian faith that represents the truth of how God made things. And I want that for others. I understand its exclusivity and I understand its importance. And it's hard not to think in dominating categories there. Are there any thoughts or tips there since you're teaching yourself? Can you teach me at the same time?

Doug Jones:

Well, I really think it's hard to kick the Konstantinian instincts and I think that's what's behind a lot of our failure of rhetoric. And I think in some ways, maybe at least we should entertain the notion that our Konstantinian story of Christianity is what has provoked unbelievers to respond the way they have. I mean, we tend to be on the wrong side of history many, many times on issues of slavery and civil rights and so forth. And we tend not to be ever, you know, defenders of open mindedness and democracy. And those are key values in secular society. And so I think we've made ourselves suspicious. Right. Why is it that Christians are always opponents of democracy and equality and so forth? Those are two sort of valuable things.

I mean, within Trinitarian thinking equality is not a bad thing. Right. Father, Son, and Spirit, a radically equal. And they're also hierarchical. You've got to have both of them there. But we tend to follow more of the Konstantinain model, which really wasn't very Trinitarian. And so we tend to sort of respond in dominating ways.

So I guess my thought was, I wonder how much of our rhetoric has actually provoked a lot of the pushback that we're seeing now. We're seeing droves of people leave the church, young people, the next generation looks far more secular, you know, than ourselves. I tend to think of the current period in is sort of the last gasp of American conservatism.

We're going to live in a very different world in the next 15 to 20 years. And maybe part of that is that we need to learn how to be Christians where we're not the world religion right? I mean, that's built into the Konstantinian view. Would it be so bad if we sort of didn't act like a world religion, but maybe sort of followers of this first century man in more humble fashion, not expecting that our laws would shape the nation where we're a minority. And I think because we're afraid of losing that identity, that's been so much a part of us, we sort of lash out. And then I think secularists and those on the other side are lashing back. They're sort of fed up with our rhetoric in many ways.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, it's a very odd balance to consider that, especially when we believe all eternity is at stake. And so it creates a real challenging dilemma. Have you spent much time thinking through that? How do we address a dying world, I guess.

Doug Jones:

Yeah. Again, I mean, Jesus had the same issue, right? And he chose to approach it through the Sermon on the Mount. He for example, didn't sort of define himself as having absolutely correct beliefs. You know, for him, it was a way of living and a way of faithfulness, you know. And so maybe this is part of it because we see the stakes as so high.

But it's okay to be like Jesus, right? He knew the stakes were high, too, and yet he still embraced his enemies. And at times used sarcasm and so forth at a much higher level of wisdom. Most of his sarcasm and harsh language were directed at sort of the conservative Christians of his day. The Pharisees, right, he often didn't use that language with prostitutes and tax collectors.

We tend to use it everywhere, right? Everybody becomes a caricature or a cartoon, we don't have sort of the subtlety of the New Testament or Jesus that he's very focused. Yeah, maybe go after the self-righteous. And there are a lot of Christians that are self-righteous and we're appalled and offended that there could be people who believe differently than us and in “our” nation, in quotes.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, we have been involved with the idea that we can offer and enjoy a thoroughly what I call a thoroughly Christian approach to rhetoric. One that does take into consideration the whole man one that takes into consideration the essence and substance of the gospel and is not simply about dominating or convincing in ways that are through means of power rather than through means of love and effective relationship.

But it's been wonderful to be a part of that project with you and wonderful to see it have an impact. I'm very grateful for the work that you did. One last question. What might you do differently or what have you learned since the book became a “canon” – finished – that you went, “Oh, I wish this was in there!” Anything in that category?

Doug Jones:

Oh, that's a great, great question. You know, I think I'd be more interested in exploring, which I didn't at the time, is what sort of people what sort of disciples does sort of a domineering rhetoric produce? Right. And I've been in those circles for decades. And I was one of those people that it produced. And I think it tends to produce just speaking on the masculine side of things, a lot of “yes-men”. A lot of people that claim to be countercultural, but in the end they just like to be told what to do. So there seems to be an authoritarianism which is built into it.

I mean, if you can use rhetoric to bully someone, think about that person who was bullied. They have to have some sort of a weak psyche that they're sort of cowed by that bullying, a strong sort of independent, thoughtful Christian person wouldn’t be impressed with bullying.

They'd see it as childish. And so I am worried about the authoritarian aspect that this rhetoric of domination tends to produce. Think of – you know, and obviously it was the former president added to this tremendously – what sort of people showed up on the January sixth insurrection there there was this common sort of authoritarian and attitude there. So I'd love to explore more sort of the psychology of authoritarianism and the connections.

Marlin Detweiler:

Interesting. Well, folks, this has been Doug Jones, the author of A Rhetoric of Love Volume One, with us today at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education. Doug, thanks for joining us.

Doug Jones:

Thank you very much.

Marlin Detweiler:

Until next time, folks, Thank you.