Go forth and serve...some rhetoric!

In trying to motivate us to do something, Elder Bednar employs epideictic oratory talking about the virtues of communication. He breaks his message down into various parts and then uses testimony of others to highlight his points.

• He used the testimony of past prophets to give authority to his message.
• He used the examples of the church to show that this is not just something he is asking us to do, but to show that the church itself is getting involved.



Elder Bednar, leading the troops in the digital age.
(you know you thought the same as you watched)

• He used the ideas of church members to highlight that anyone of us can use social media; it need not be hard or time consuming.

Perhaps what impressed me the most was that even though I was watching this for an assignment, by the end of the video I was excited to get out there and start posting things online. He had the authority, he had the logic, then he plead for us to take it from a slow trickle to be a flood, if that didn’t get you excited for battle with the adversary, I don’t know what will.

Contrast this to Socrates who uses judicial oratory to show the injustice and wrongness of the study of persuasion. Socrates knows that he has an audience, and he wants to tear down rhetoric to show that it is not fit for the use of man. He works hard to use logical arguments to catch a master sophist off guard. He shows the crowd that Gorgias goes back and forth on the justice and injustice of rhetoric and thereby tries to show that it is not a techne and as such deserves no place.

I think Elder Bednar would disagree with Socrates about the goodness of rhetoric. From Elder Bednar’s perspective, Socrates is throwing out the baby with the bath water.