Given that God uses the metaphor of a parent (father and mother) and child to illuminate His relationship with us, the PARENTING = BATTLE metaphor is one we should be particular skeptical of. As Christians, we are no longer at war with God. As Reformed believers, we believe our children are part of the covenant community. And given evidence that the metaphors we use not only reflect the way we see the world but even shape the way we act, it’s time we stopped talking about our children as enemy combatants.

My theolinguistics students and I are currently wrestling with a significant aspect of religious language: conceptual metaphor. A conceptual metaphor is a figurative comparison in which one idea is understood in terms of another. Metaphors are indispensible in religious language precisely because they are vague. They ‘allow us to refer to what really exists, while conceding that our knowledge of the relevant aspects of reality [like the nature of God] might be incomplete’ (source).

As part of this discussion, we have been looking in particular at what happens when a metaphor is decontextualized from a religious text and then recontextualized. In this process, the metaphor is detached from the context in which it occurred, then inserted into new contexts. Ana Deumert explains,

The replicated text might look the same, but it will not mean the same, and although it carries with it certain meanings from its earlier uses, it also acquires new meanings.

Take, for example, the metaphor of the CHRISTIAN LIFE = BATTLE. Our minds might immediately turn to Ephesians 6, but our language indicates that this metaphor has been recontextualized in numerous ways. As a mother, one such recontextualization I’ve become particularly sensitive to is  PARENTING = WAR. Consider the opening sentences in a post from CBMW from last year:

Parenting is war. There is, and we can’t say this with enough emphasis, nothing more war-like in the spiritual realm than parenting.

And this title from a post from the early 2000’s on another popular Christian site, Crosswalk: ‘The War Between Loving Mom and Teen Daughter‘. More recently, on the same site, readers were taught ‘How to end battles with a powerful child’. Focus on the Family puts it like this:

In one way or another, every child will fight this battle with his parent. The earlier you win that battle, the better, both for your sanity and your child’s. You can win it when your kids are toddlers, or you can wait and try to win it when they’re teenagers. Victory comes a lot easier when a child is two, and it’s more quickly accom­plished at that age when you use spanking, appropriately and lovingly applied, to enforce it.

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