This discussion of the history of changes in our language, and in specific Christian uses of language, has brought us to a point where a redefinition of metaphor is in order. In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words “stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher present a new way of understanding metaphor. Since this site’s title–Education is Discipleship–is a metaphor, it’s worth thinking about how those two words interact.
The current connotations of discipleship and education are spiritual and secular respectively. The interaction between the two stresses the similarities between the two enterprises, that both discipleship and education produce growth through the act of learning. For Christ’s followers, the language of education–of students and teachers, disciples and rabbis–was the easiest way to understand the Messiah’s work. The great commission contains the word that means “teach” and commands us to go create more students.
A great deal of money and research over the past three decades has been spent figuring out we learn best. All of this material should be grist for our discipleship mill. No, education will never fully encompass the work of discipleship, but noticing the interaction between the two is a way of both understanding what Christ has called us to do and discovering new ways of learning more about him and the world.