The congregation I serve maintains a Lutheran School that teaches the trivia: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logic). Children learn the basic building blocks given in grammar, that is, mastery of language, both their own and the language of others. As this is happening they learn to take what they can say or write and mold it in such a way that it is persuasive to others. They are also learning how to construct logical arguments (dialectic) according to the canons of formal logic. This education will make them truly free persons because it will keep them from being enslaved by invalid arguments, such as pure appeals to emotion, ad hominems, etc. This is what the western tradition calls the first three of the "liberal arts." The trivia are sometimes understood to be stages in education, as though they could be impressed on young minds one discipline at a time. And while young minds are more susceptible to considering the validity of arguments starting in the early teen years, all three trivia are taught simultaneously. In fact, they may not be separated from one another. One without the other is useless, like a stool with only one leg.

This is one of the failings of modern, progressive education; that rhetoric and logic could be left to be taught at a much later developmental stage, such as in college. We have a faulty folksiness about our views of the relations between rhetoric and logic. We are perfectly happy to allow young people to express themselves incompetently as long as they are sincere: "So, um, like, I wanna tell you about this, uh, thing, and stuff." No matter how sincere they are, such speech is incoherent. Sincerity is only one small component for being persuasive to other truly free persons.

Unfortunately, this faulty folksiness has had damaging results in other areas of human endeavor, such as the widespread belief that form and substance are easily separated from each other. Of course, this is why some churches have adopted the forms of the world (or worse) to deliver the substance of the faith, as though substance and form are completely divorceable. This would be nonsense to our forebears and it is incoherent to those trained in a classical curriculum (or should be).

Form and substance, while distinguishable, are inseparable. This inter-penetrating community of ideas is indicative of the western perceptions of Christian theology; the two natures in Christ, the simul justus et peccator, the real presence of Christ's body under the bread in the Supper, the heavenly nature of the earthly church, and others. In other words, the unity of logic and rhetoric is a witness to a greater uniting pattern of thought which is divinely-given and impressed by God on the western world through the divine Word. Martin Luther argued from this interpenetrating union of logic and rhetoric in western patterns of thought as articulated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric 1.1. Aristotle knew that their unity was wired into the universe. He just didn't know exactly why. Luther knew why.