Jason Clark

Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling, by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins

I have been reading and discussing this book, the past few days with my doctoral cohort.. It has been an amazing book that unpacks the pyshcology and psycho dynamics of metaphors and how we use and process them.

Isomorphism

In particular I have found fascintating the idea of isomorphism, whereby we take an experience that we cannot ever explain to someone fully, and use a different experience with a metaphor, so that other people can experience our experience. We do this to convey the unconveyable, as our words are unable to translate an experience enough for others to enter into our experience, so we use the isomorphism of metaphors. For example:
- I feel angry, but a certain kind of anger, whereby something happened that caused me to lose control of myself, and give into to a response to my anger….
- now if I tried to explain myself that way with those words you’d be saying…’what do you mean?’
- But if I said, ‘when he said that, it was the straw that broke the camels back, I saw red, and felt incandescent’….we might reply with another metaphor, ‘oh I see what you mean!’

Atonement metaphors
Now over time we have tried to explain what happened on the cross, with atonement theories. For some people they are propostional fact, and statements about what took place, for others they are metaphors, isomorphic trying to understand the mystery which is Christ crucified.

Prescriptive: Now when we use these images, these metaphors prescriptively, we strip the metpahor of any isomorphism, and sanction, and strcture the meaning that is allowable and acceptable. For the modern evangelical church it has been to use penal substitution, as the definition of atoment, and to turn it into a formula. Many people have been writing for many years (long before Steve Chalke ;-) on how this process produces a spirituality that disconnects from postmoderns. Whilst I agree the image is not the most helpul (penal substituion) for our post modern culture to connect with, I think it has been ruined by the modernistic strip mining of the metpahor to make a theory (now see I’m suing metaphors to connect with you :-)

Descriptive: When we use the metpahor of penal substitution metpahorically, isomorphically, and descriptively, we allow the image to connect to us. Whilst I still think there are many problems of the image of penal substitution, I think we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water. If the idea of the gospel is to tell the christian story so that people now can experience something that began back then, and inhabit that story today, the irony is that the more we try to explain metaphors the less sense they make! The more prescriptive we are the more unhelpful we are. Our postmodern context means that people are highly sensitised to this abuse of metaphor. People don’t construct empistemic reality from a detailed list of accepted meanings of a metaphor/experience. Rather we enter into a shared experience through the metaphor itself.

Application
So we stop explaining our metaphors, and we use them believing that they can connect to people directly much more powerfully. Why are movies so conecting for so many of us, images, conveying more than a detailed explanation ever could. Why was the passion of christ so connecting to people, yet the detailed ‘gospel’ explanations so cold and unhelpful for those same people? We need to be aware of metaphors, speak in metaphors, tell stories, use images and let people digest them as they are and let people say ‘I see what you mean’.

Now if you have been reading my blog, you will know that I don’t like the redcuctionism of the modern evangelical church that took the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus and turned it into a ‘pray a prayer to go to heaven when you die’ formula. I know many people are in reaction to and against that. But we mustn’t throw away the metapahors, just because they were abused. Just because we abandon them doesn’t mean others untainted by our church reductionism, should miss out on them. Also when we allow ourselves to imagine them, experience them, free from the need to reduce ane prescribe, they come alive, and bring His life into ours. I think we do need some more metpahors for atonement and to use the others from church history. A good place to start to review these is ‘The Glory of the Atonenment’ which I blogged about here

Last sunday in our church community sunday service, we were worshipping with a our music team, and I was using that time to bring myself to God, offering up my fears, anxieties, struggles, worries, and despair. When we sang this song, this hymn, I was undone, and my soul, mind, body, spirit, were liberated into connection with the mystery which is christ crucified and his resurrection life.

In Christ alone
In Christ alone, my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song;
This cornerstone, this solid ground
Firm through the fiercest drought and storm
What heights of love, what depths of peace
When fears are stilled, when strivings cease
My comforter my all in all
Here in the love of Christ I stand

In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones He came to save
Till on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the of death Christ I live

There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain
Then bursting forth in glorious Day
Up from the grave he rose again
And as He stands in victory
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me
For I am His and He is mine
Bought with the precious blood of Christ

No guilt in life, no fear in death
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry, to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
No power of hell, no scheme of man
Can ever pluck me from His hand
Till He return or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand!