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Mulling over the Ephesian metaphors
Author: Pauline Hoggarth
Date: 19.07.2010
Category: Ephesians Study, Scripture
Translations
The Ephesians Study Plan encouraged us last month to become aware of the images and metaphors in Paul’s letter. This might be one of the most important bits of ’marinating in Ephesians’ that we can do, because metaphors function at the level of our imagination and it’s in our imagination that the process of transformation begins. Our imagination engages the cogs of our will to bring about transformed behaviour and attitudes. Jesus loved metaphors and so did the Old Testament prophets. They knew their power to expand people’s limited imaginations or straighten out distorted understandings. They knew how metaphors enable people to glimpse another reality.
Eugene Peterson, in his memorable extended reflections on Ephesians (Practise Resurrection, Eerdmans 2010 - helpful reading in preparation for the Lausanne Bible reflections) warns us that, ’Literalists, maybe especially religious literalists, have a difficult time with metaphors. A metaphor is a word that makes an organic connection from what you can see to what you can’t see. In any conversation involving God, whom we can’t see, metaphors are invaluable for keeping language vivid and immediate. Without metaphors we are left with colourless abstractions and vague generalities.’
Elna Mouton, a South African biblical scholar, in her thought-provoking book on Ephesians, Reading a New Testament Document Ethically (Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), describes metaphors as ’important - albeit often hazy - windows through which the moral world of a document can be investigated...’ She refers to Paul Ricoeur’s work (perhaps the outstanding thinker on the role of the imagination in developing faith): ’the communicative, transformative power of a text lies in its ability to suggest, to open up, to redescribe, to facilitate, to mediate, to make possible, to produce a world in front of it - a "proposed world" which readers may adopt or inhabit...Metaphors, parables and models are...instruments for the redescription of reality of lived experiences, which break up inadequate interpretations of the world and open the way to new, more adequate interpretations... Metaphor permits people to see new connections in things, or as Ricoeur puts it, to "decode the traces of God’s presence in history".’
When we think about the Bible’s powerful ability to expand our imagination, few of us have the New Testament letters in mind! We tend to forget their nature as human, pastoral documents. We receive them as theological treatises, flat text on the page, forgetting that they were listened to as ’performances’, probably recited from memory by the person bringing them, in front of their intended audience. In such performances, Paul’s metaphors were crucial for communicating key ideas that he wanted people to remember.
So... the Ephesian metaphors - birth, dividing wall, body, growth, armour and so on - all offer opportunities to expand our imaginations and reject ’a world that is organised in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos’ (Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet, Augsburg Forttress 1989).
Keywords: metaphor, imagination
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South Africa
Thanks Pauline for your in depth reminder about the role of imagination. James Houston once said to a men’s group I belonged to at Regent College in Vancouver in 2000, that the "greatest distance in the world lies between the head and the heart." Your conversation starter suggests that imagination is one of the bridges that God has created to span these often inseparable poles. I’d like to hear more from your S.U. experience about this kind of "heart" reading. And I may venture a contribution myself if the conversation welcomes one.
22.07.2010
United Kingdom
@ allen-goddard:
Thanks for your comment Allen. And of course continue the conversation! One of the problems I’ve perceived with the classic inductive Bible study approach is that it’s usually low on imaginative engagement with Scripture and the crucial life-related dimension is left to the end of a very linear process as an ’application’. I was encouraged to see IVCF in the USA publish a paper a few years ago on ’Enhancements to inductive Bible study’ that actually states that...
22.07.2010
United States
@ PHoggarth:
Pauline and Allen,
So good to see a lively conversation about Ephesians, and specifically the metaphors of Ephesians. I especially love the quote "decode the traces of God’s presence in history." How wonderful to recognize His very presence among us both in history and in our daily lives. Our church is studying John Stott’s Ephesians study on Sunday mornings to follow Lausanne 2010.
As for your comments about inductive Bible study, Pauline, I agree that we can flatline on this and any one-dimensional Bible study method. I have thoroughly enjoyed leading studies of women in the Bible, followed by interpretion and application of women in Africa and Asia. The very first time I experienced this was in Thailand. While they were courteous with my teaching, they were clearly bored. So given a chance to liven things up, they took the stories of the Woman at the Well, Mary & Martha, and Ruth, and developed modern day dramas that depicted what these women’s lives and God’s glory revealed through them, meant to them. We laughed, cried and then danced in celebration of God’s word and its power to transform us. I’ll never experience Bible study the same again!
02.08.2010
United Kingdom
@ Kim_Kerr:
Kim, thanks for your honest response! It was interesting and helpful to read of how working in the context of another culture has helped you to appreciate other approaches to engaging with the Bible. I found Latin America to be the context that changed many of my understandings and approaches, especially the work of Carlos Mesters, a Catholic priest working in Brazil. He spent many years enabling people with little or no Bible background, and who often couldn’t read, to feel at ease swimming in the seas of Scripture! If you Google his name, you’ll be able to track down his work.
By the way, there are some more comments on this theme on a different page of the Lausanne website. Jon Hirst writes a blog and picked up on the transformation theme on http://www.lausanne.org/lausanne-blog and there are some interesting responses.
03.08.2010
South Africa
@ PHoggarth:
Thanks Kim and Pauline for the ongoing conversation. Your use of drama interested me Kim, and speaks of a solid threshold of trust that you had in this multi-cultural group. I’m sure that such a threshold can be found again, where you are now.
I have enjoyed using Bible narratives of God’s heroes in the wilderness, like Moses, David, Elijah and Jesus, with young adult youth leaders on A Rocha South Africa’s wilderness leadership course, out in the mountains of KZN and the Western Cape. It has been good to see these stories come alive to the young adults, partly because another part of the day on the course gives them skills to review their own personal narratives.
The link between encouraging personal life revision skills and these small group reflections on the narratives of God’s character building work in the wilderness, humbling heroes, has been a vital one in my experience.
04.08.2010
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