Let the Bible’s Metaphors Shape You

Christians live in metaphor. Every good and beautiful thing we inhabit in this life is but one way of grasping at God’s truth: marriage points to our ultimate union with Christ; childrearing to an experience of fatherly love; a delicious meal to a physical taste of goodness that points to the feast of our souls, Christ himself. Our temporal experience is both indicative of and antithetical to an eternal one that awaits us.

To live in metaphor doesn’t mean we know how to read it. Perhaps we gloss over metaphors like Jesus being the “bread of life” (John 6:35) or the righteous man being a “tree planted by streams of water” (Ps. 1:3) as Christian truisms, thinking they’re beautiful flourishes in language—and that they generally make sense. But to gloss over the poetic mastery of metaphor in God’s Word is hardly to understand its depths or God’s. If our life is, as God intends, a metaphor for what’s to come, we have an eternal purpose not only in living but also in reading—and reading well.

Joy Marie Clarkson’s You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer bestows on Christians a much-needed lesson in reading metaphor. At the heart of her luminous meditation on well-known (and therefore regularly overlooked) metaphors in the Bible is the implicit argument that Christians must attend to metaphors more closely.

Clarkson guides us through a close reading of several metaphors—the individual as a tree, wisdom as light, love as sickness, and creation as birth, to name a few. She makes much of what seems to be little, seeking the profound in the mundane: that a tree has roots reminds us how “deep slow growth may be happening where we cannot see” (46). The nourishment the tree receives from its surrounding kin models the communal way of life on which our flourishing as human beings depends.

To read biblical metaphors is to read the world or to “understand” it in the most literal sense, as she describes: to know the wonders we “stand under.” In You Are a Tree, to read is to behold; to learn is to worship.

To Read Is to Behold

Clarkson’s close reading of metaphors embraces sources beyond the Bible to help readers understand the Bible better. She opens a vast expanse of thought from philosophy, medieval devotion, pop culture, and literature. You Are a Tree is more than just an exegesis of biblical metaphors; it’s an education in Western thought.

To bring in the ideas of extrabiblical writers who make the holy text’s timeless truths more accessible for common readers is nothing new. If anything, it’s an explanatory method we take for granted. While Scripture doesn’t need anything outside itself for teaching and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16–17), preachers often weave in secular illustrations—from movies or news articles—into the interpretation of a biblical idea to aid understanding. But how, specifically, does secular art serve God’s all-sufficient, authoritative Word? And how does the Bible view the purpose of secular thought?

A key to her approach is recognizing that metaphors aren’t endlessly elastic. When we recognize their limits, she writes, “we are also forced to pay closer attention to why the thing isn’t?actually what we describe it to be. Metaphors are the fruit of attention, but they ought to also make us pay closer attention so we are not deceived or confused by them” (21).

Clarkson’s interpretive method begins with a dissociation from biblical context: she extracts a metaphor from the Scripture, illuminates it through the lens of other thinkers, and then reintegrates and returns its meaning to its biblical site. On?love as disease, she draws from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Plato teaches that love, if wrested from pleasure and passion, brings one closer to ideal embodiments of material things (or the forms, in Plato’s terms). Clarkson interprets this secular text with an intellectually gracious and spiritually attuned eye.

She writes, “There is something beautiful about the way love takes over; it is a madness, yes, a catching sickness. But it can draw us out of the safe circle of what we know” (109). The power of captivation in love can be redemptive because it can lead to death to self that makes room for new life. In her reading, Clarkson sees a shadow of God where the unbeliever merely sees the Good.

Metaphor’s Origin

This is the striving of metaphor: to grasp at something transcendent through the finitude of human language. Clarkson addresses this irony briefly at the outset of her book: “When we speak in metaphor, we are aware, on some level, that our words cannot contain the expansive and radiant nature of God, something that is less clear to us when we attempt to use ‘literal’ language” (29).

She explains this paradox with parentheses that indicate this implicit negation: to say that God is (not) a rock is to acknowledge that a rock as a material thing embodies a characteristic of God, even though God isn’t at all a rock. The figure of metaphor, then, dually captures the transcendence of God and makes plain that transcendence to the mortal mind.

God, after all, is the One from whom all metaphors flow. As Clarkson suggests, “all things are created from God and proceed from God” (29)—including the limited resources of language. Clarkson explains how metaphors point us to their origin, God himself: “Is God offering me a window into His excellencies by using a piece of His good creation [metaphor]?” (29). Secular explanations of metaphor, in other words, don’t result in mere secular ideas but in an echo of God. In bringing together the literary arts with biblical metaphor, You Are a Tree abounds with insights into both Christ and culture.

So in asking the question “What does secular thought offer the authoritative Word of God?” we can say much and little. It gives us an enlarged vocabulary. It grants us a way of thinking beyond our own Christian worldview—a way of thinking the Bible calls us to embrace (1 Cor. 9:19–23). It helps us better understand cultural narratives. Metaphorical thinking humbles our minds through the expanse of creation it brings into view. And only through humility can we learn more about the world—and about God.

Depths of Metaphor, Heights of God

Clarkson probes the depths of various images—the “journey” of life, the “fortress” of safety, the “tree-ness” of God-given personhood—with deep and wide insights into what these metaphors mean. She concludes each chapter with a curation of art and literature in which to linger further and offers a brief commentary on each.

And yet, by showing us all the knowledge about God and his creation a single metaphor can hold, You Are a Tree whispers a greater truth: there’s much more to know about God. As vast and deep as a metaphor can be, it still offers only a glimpse, a sliver, of his image and his excellencies.

Clarkson’s deep attention to biblical metaphors has profound implications for Christians and our study of the world—through literature and art. You Are a Tree calls us to tend to words and language in both a meditative and a rigorous manner, and in doing so, inspires us to care about the literary arts and to be concerned about their fading status in our larger world today.

If God is a writer, then we must be faithful readers and advocates for human creativity. For literature and the arts have always belonged to God. He wrote them into existence.

Trina Hyun is a wife, mother, and scholar of early modern English literature. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).